Land tenure and biodiversity: An exploration in the political ecology of Murang'a District, Kenya

Human Organization, Fall 2003 by Mackenzie, A Fiona D

Women's response to the lack of remuneration for their labor, in a situation where they generally held sole responsibility for meeting daily household needs, was to withdraw their labor. This withdrawal became more acute as the effects of structural adjustment programs undertaken by the state following agreements with the World Bank were felt at the local level. With an increased emphasis on export earnings from coffee, costs were shifted from the paid to the unpaid economy, and social relations became increasingly polarized (Elson 1994; also, Elabor-Idemudia 1991; Meena 1991; Onimode 1991; Wagao 1990). Women from resource-poor households who did not receive adequate compensation for their labor on coffee were particularly vulnerable. Resistance was both individual and collective. At the individual level, or as families, women and children could be seen boarding trucks in great numbers during the picking season for the short journey to coffee estates in Kandara and Makuyu Divisions of Murang'a or to Kiambu District. By working for wages on the estates, they were able to secure remuneration for their labor.

Women also renegotiated the conjugal contract by invoking the customary idiom of ngwatio, a practice that, in the past, had centered on reciprocal labor arrangements; for example, working as a group in turn on each others' farms during peak labor periods. But now the groups sold their labor power for a wage, able to command a higher wage by picking coffee collectively than would otherwise have been possible. In more formal mabati (literally, metal roof) groups, which had begun as rotating savings and loans societies in the late 1960s, women in the 1980s also turned increasingly to activities designed to earn an income that they, as individuals, could control (Mackenzie 1987).

The response of the MDFCU to the decline in coffee quality in the early 1980s was to encourage members to change from individual (male) accounts to joint (spousal) accounts at the four savings and credit sections (SCS) of the union. The success of this initiative may be gauged from the fact that, between 1982 and 1984, 40.8 percent of the accounts at the one SCS where research was conducted, Maragua SCS, had changed from individual (male) accounts to joint accounts. The senior savings clerk explained the wide discrepancy in the percentage of joint accounts among the six coffee societies belonging to this SCS-from 17.1 percent in the case of Njora to 55.4 percent and 79.2 percent, respectively, for Irati and Thanga-ini-on the grounds of far higher rates of male out-migration in the latter two areas. Although these figures do not in themselves guarantee that women will be able to exercise the control they need over the proceeds of their labor, they do suggest at least a degree of success in reconstituting gender relations in their favor through negotiating the politics of coffee production.

Together with such research as that of Alison Evans (1989) in Zambia, Judith Carney and Michael Watts (1990) and Richard Schroeder (1999) in The Gambia, and Catherine Dolan (2001) in Meru, Kenya, the Murang'a study demonstrates the complexity and negotiability of rights and responsibilities where economic survival is at stake. Yet none of this research explores the implications of intensified conflict over local resources for issues concerning sustainability of the resource base, soil, or biodiversity. It is not difficult to draw out the possible implications of intensified crop production for the market-a deepening of intrahousehold struggle that accompanies this action, frequently accompanied by the growing casualization of women's labor, and the increased demands on women's labor time under structural adjustment programs-for issues of ecological significance.