Contested Ground

Colonial Narratives and the Kenyan Environment, 1920-1945

Bibliographic Data

ID4604544
AuthorsA Fiona, Derek Mackenzie
Year2000
Volume26
Issue4
Pages697-718
Publication date2000-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/713683602
OpenAlexW2139616370
LanguageEN
Citations received17

This article focuses on the relationship between the creation of colonial agricultural and environmental knowledge and the exercise of state power in Kenya during a 25 year period that saw growing state dependence on African agriculture and evidence of the environmental costs of policies to expand such production. First, in the context of the political crisis in Kenya, which centred on the alienation of land to white settler farmers, it argues that the language of 'betterment' and 'environmentalism' became part of a bureaucratic apparatus. This, to follow James Ferguson,1 both extended state control more deeply into the Kikuyu Reserves and attempted to depoliticise the issue of land and its distribution. Second, in order to expose the political interests embedded in this construction of state knowledge, the article presents evidence to demonstrate that such knowledge was contested by some scientists within the colonial service. Third, it extends arguments about the reconfiguration of power between coloniser and colonised through the extension of state science by analysing the gendered dimensions of colonial agricultural discourses

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Alienation · Archaeology · Bureaucracy · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Environmental ethics · Kenya · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

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