1 Introduction
The shamba system is a forestry scheme first adopted in colonial Kenya in 19101 that allocates farmers small plots of cropland (in Swahili: shamba) among the seedlings of a forest plantation. The farmers are responsible for clearing the land, planting tree seedlings, and sowing their own crops, and then tending to both for one to five years (until tree cover makes crop cultivation untenable). After this period is over, the farmer will be allocated another plot of land of approximately half a hectare in a new plantation, and the process repeats itself.2 This system is fundamentally identical to the taungya system developed in British-controlled Burma in the 1850s3 but that most likely evolved from a 16th century plantation system developed in southern China.4 The name “taungya” is commonly applied to this system where it is used elsewhere in the world today. At its peak in the 1960s, approximately 8,500 families, representing between 42,000 and 50,000 individuals,5 were engaged in Kenya’s shamba system. Despite constituting less than one per cent of Kenya’s population, these farmers produced between six and ten per cent of the country’s maize in the 1960s.6 For farmers, the system gives access to very productive yet otherwise alienated land. For the forester, the system has been proven to benefit the establishment of commonly used cypress and pine tree plantations by reducing weed growth; moreover, in comparison to other trialled methods of plantation establishment and maintenance, such as ploughing and herbicides, taungya is extremely cheap.7
The productivity of the shamba system hints at its continued relevance today. Across the developing world, this agroforestry method is lauded for its combination of plantation forestry, whether this be for commercial timber production or for local fuelwood needs, and agriculture that can increase food security and raise the families involved above the subsistence level. Already recognised as a form of drought-resistant agriculture, taungya and agroforestry in general hold promise as robust adaptation strategies to the climatic changes that are predicted to affect sub-Saharan Africa particularly harshly.8 The rain-fed nature of the majority of agriculture in Africa marks it as particularly vulnerable to the variations in the amount of rainfall and the changes to rainfall patterns that are projected to occur over the next century. Concurrently, farmers in Kenya have indicated a willingness to engage with agroforestry because of its ability to enhance well-being through increased food security and the creation of additional sources of income.9 A recent survey conducted in Kenya found that 87 per cent of respondents viewed the shamba system as “very good” and 95 per cent supported its reintroduction.10 Within this context of increased interest in shamba, this chapter will explore the development and operation of the shamba system in colonial Kenya. I argue that, based on historical analysis, the celebration of taungya as a viable climate change-resistant farming and forestry strategy is warranted, but only to a limited extent. Successful forest management requires an adequate understanding of the historical development and management of those forests and their economic, social, and cultural roles in a given society, a point supported by recent research.11
In opposition to the current celebration of taungya is the assertion by Bryant, based on evidence from colonial Burma, that taungya contains a fundamental rift between forestry and farmer. While farmers are permitted to plant crops, Bryant argues that they remain disconnected from the benefits of the system that the government enjoys: the output of the trees that they also tend.12 Essentially, a conflict exists between the needs of the national economy and the local needs of the farmers employed within the system. In relation to this, the chapter will show how shamba in Kenya was dependent on its farmers also being able to access income sources that were not sanctioned by government, precisely because of this rift between the objectives of the government and those of the farmers.
Discussion will first focus on the rationale behind the establishment of shamba forestry in colonial Kenya and then move on to consider the social and economic effects on the farmers involved. The final section engages with the ongoing debate concerning taungya, highlighting the historical evidence both for the system’s effectiveness and for its negative consequences.
2 The Colonial Shamba System in Kenya
2.1 Establishment of the System
[…] this Department is only able to plant the large acreage that it does owing to the availability of Kikuyu squatters who clear, cultivate and maintain the land in which we plant […]. Without this system our cost would go up by 400% or 500% and acreages planted could decrease by a similar figure.17
Despite this colonial necessity, the wider forestry community was sceptical of the system. At the Second Empire Forestry Conference in 1923, heated debate developed over the issue of taungya or shamba because it attempted to control shifting cultivation, an agricultural practice demonised by foresters because of its apparent forest destruction. It was further feared that it would encourage “nomadic habits” in its practitioners and thus retard their agricultural development, required as they were periodically to move their farming plots. However, the economic arguments of the kfd representatives prevailed, and it was decreed that the shamba/taungya system would be used in those colonies where there was no alternative for the economic development of plantations.18 Such was its acceptance that the Empire Forestry Journal printed a short guide to using the system, written by a forester from Kenya Colony.19 Following this, the system was also used in Ghana, while in Nigeria trials began in 1927 after a kfd forester was transferred there.20 The success of shamba in Kenya can therefore be seen as directly leading to its uptake in other territories in the empire.
2.2 Opposition, Oppression, and Opportunity
At the heart of the shamba system was the contracting of so-called “squatters”,21 officially ‘resident labourers’, to reside within a forest reserve where a plantation was being established through conversion of native forest or the planting of trees on previously unforested land. In return for cultivation rights within the forest, farmers were expected to provide the kfd with 180 days of paid labour per year, largely used to tend to the plantation and fire prevention measures.22
The system faced significant settler opposition throughout the colonial period, largely because the kfd squatters had to reside in the forests. The settlers also employed their own squatters on their farms, although settler attitudes towards them and kfd squatters hardened after the 1920s. By the 1940s, many settlers believed that squatting in general led to “wastage of labour & from the wrong use of land, and should be abolished as soon as possible”.23
The settlers engaged in programmes to reduce the number of squatters on their land and to reduce or eliminate squatter livestock, which was competing with their own and was seen to carry disease. The settlers believed such policies should also be applied to kfd squatters who resided in the forests. The precarious finances of the settlers and support for their situation from other branches of government increased the anti-livestock pressure on the kfd. As early as 1918, farmers’ associations argued in letters to government officials that kfd squatter livestock were “practically under no control, and owing to the many diseases, they are a source of great danger to the cattle industry”.24 In the 1920s such pressure led the kfd to prohibit its farmers, except for those in Nairobi division who did not threaten settler livestock, from keeping cattle.
[…] has always helped the Stock Industry by refusing to allow squatter cattle. No proof or evidence of any sort has been produced to show that the sheep and goats in the Forest Reserves have caused any harm or loss to the farms […].25
Due to the settlers’ influence in government, however, the kfd sought a compromise in 1932 by implementing a programme to “get rid of goats”, allow only sheep, and “obtain squatters with no stock or with sheep only”.26 Ridding the forests of goats was a goal with which many foresters agreed, arguing that, as browsers, goats had the potential to damage the saplings in plantations.27 One forester protested that this policy would limit the ability of forest farmers to adapt to changing environmental conditions, such as in years of drought, floods, crop failure, or locust plagues. Sheep were stated to be far more susceptible to environmental changes and more limited in their ecological range as they were dependent on good grazing land.28 As farmers in Kenya sold livestock during times of food shortage,29 the restrictions on the number of livestock that could be kept by families within the shamba system was likely to have decreased their food security. Moreover, sheep were less able to survive through periods of environmental stress and held a significantly lower monetary value than cattle.30 Squatters protested, arguing that the removal of goats was causing them great hardship and that “if our goats are removed from us what our [sic] children will be helped with?”31 Despite these appeals, by 1935 all the goats had been removed; no goats were legally kept by squatters in the forests thereafter.
By limiting the economic opportunities of the forest squatters, the kfd ensured that the shamba system prioritised departmental needs—the production of timber—rather than those of the squatters. Moreover, the inherent racial discrimination contained within the power dynamics of the colonial state meant that the kfd placed the needs of the white settlers ahead of those of its own workforce. The case of livestock regulation reflects more generally that the tension between the needs of the farmers within the shamba system and the interests of the department held considerable potential for conflict.
Livestock restrictions within the shamba system also had consequences for squatters that went beyond the nutritional into the social. For Kikuyu men—and the Kikuyu ethnic group represented the vast majority of those engaged in the system—possessing livestock was essential for social advancement. Forest squatters outside of Nairobi division were prohibited from owning cattle in the 1920s, a ban that was extended to all forest squatters after 1939. This ban constituted a serious constraint on the accumulation of wealth and prestige. While sheep and goat ownership was common among the Kikuyu, only a minority could afford to keep cattle and this ownership was a key symbol of their high social status.32
Wealth in the form of livestock was and is particularly important because of its use in bridewealth. While cash could constitute a part of the transfer to the bride’s family from the groom’s family, as it certainly does today, livestock, especially cattle, is valued highly as a part of bridewealth. The ability to pay bridewealth was essential to Kikuyu farmers because it allowed for the creation of a large labour pool through having multiple wives and children.33 Unless forest squatters could successfully keep cattle illegally in the forest, which based on conviction rates for illegal grazing many tried to do, the majority were hindered in terms of marriage and social advancement if they remained within the shamba system.
[…] some will prefer to leave rather than lose their goats, but there should be sufficient goatless Kikuyu about to fill their places. […] The new squatters taken on recently agree quite readily to the ban on goats. I propose, in future, to discharge any squatter, whose goats are caught in plantations or parts of the forest in which they are prohibited.34
The reference to “goatless Kikuyu” indicates a class of farmer who was willing to give up the right to possess the two most-valuable livestock species—cattle and goats—for the chance to cultivate in the forests. It seems likely that concurrent with the livestock eradication programme was a gradual shift in forest squatter demographics and social structure away from those with livestock savings to the growing class of young and landless Kikuyu. Comments made by foresters further support this theory; for example, the squatters inhabiting Ngong forest near Nairobi were described in 1934 as being “nearly all […] of a very poor class among the wakikuyu”.35 These poorer Kikuyu were most likely ahoi (singular form: muhoi, in Kikuyu), the term used to describe those who lived as tenants on the githaka (clan land) of others.
Prior to the establishment of British control over Kenya, landless ahoi were able to strike out into the forest. The creation of native reserves organised on ethnic lines as well as the alienation of land for forest reserves, settler estates, and national parks essentially prohibited the pre-colonial Kikuyu method of relieving land pressure.36 While wealthy Kikuyu laid claim to githaka within the native reserves, ahoi were often forced to leave, seeking work on settler farms and in the rapidly expanding capital of Nairobi or taking up squatter contracts offered by the kfd. Moreover, ahoi could also accept that trees grown on the land that they farmed were not their property, as this distinction also existed in relation to trees grown on githaka in the native reserves and had occurred before the arrival of colonialism.37
The system also opened up areas to Kikuyu cultivation that otherwise would have been used by other ethnic groups. In 1932, for example, squatters were introduced into the moorlands of Mount Elgon; yet, rather than being drawn from the local population of predominantly Ogiek peoples, the squatters were Kikuyu. As Mount Elgon lies far from the Kikuyu-inhabited areas of Kenya, the shamba system was their only way to access the area.38
The shamba system therefore allowed the temporal continuation and spatial extension of the pre-colonial pattern of Kikuyu expansion into forests, while livestock restrictions ensured that forest cultivation was attractive only to the poor. The imposed colonial shamba system usurped the pre-colonial power structures of which ahoi Kikuyu were part, establishing the kfd as landlord and patron to the squatters it employed. Such squatters had no control over where or for how long they farmed, and they could be summarily evicted for violation of kfd rules.39 The shamba system, then, provided no means for its African farmers to secure ownership of land, instead formalising their Kikuyu status of ahoi into that of a tenant under the colonial regime. While the presence of secure land tenure is a key reason why similar agroforestry regimes persisted for so long in China,40 its absence within Kenyan shamba is identified as a key structural weakness that would take effect in the 1970s (see Section 3). However, while creating a structural weakness, this usurpation also represented an opportunity for ahoi to farm in fertile forests, providing a means for them to escape land shortages in the native reserves.
2.3 Mau Mau and Villagisation
The Mau Mau period in the 1950s and its aftermath marked the completion of the colonial development of shamba, exposing the latent oppression within the system and bringing in changes that would continue to characterise it until its structural overhaul in 1976.
The numbers to be discharged would be a percentage of the total squatter force […] The percentage is 20% to 25% and the individuals to go would be the less satisfactory workers and those upon whom any suspicion has fallen.42
Rather than simply a measure to get rid of potential Mau Mau fighters and supporters, many squatters were removed for failing to meet the kfd’s expectations of labour productivity. Powers of martial law in force during the Mau Mau emergency were used to circumvent the legal rights of forest squatters. The livestock of these squatters, which amounted to their life savings and most-prized possessions, were forfeited and sold to the Kenya Meat Commission.43 In pursuing this policy of evictions, the kfd was undermining a central pillar of the shamba system: the security of having a written contract that provided signatories with the right to farm forest plots for a defined period of time and that protected them from the intense competition for land within the native reserves from which they came.44 This would be a key issue in the eventual collapse of the shamba system after the end of colonialism, which is explored in more detail below.
Mau Mau laid bare the priority of the shamba system: the maintenance of the forest always trumped the needs of its workers. With all Kikuyu deemed suspect, the kfd quickly began to search for potential squatters among “Kipsigis, Jaluo and South Nyanza tribes, Wanderobo, Tugen, Elgeyo, and North Nyanza tribes”.45 Most of these other ethnic groups, however, did not possess a ready-made landless class eager to take up forest squatting. In a bid to make the system more attractive, the kfd backed down on its cattle restrictions for non-Kikuyu squatters, allowing approximately five cattle per squatting family. The results, however, were reported to “have been disappointing”. Apart from two groups of Elgeyo and Tiriki “of appreciable size resident labourers of non-Kikuyu tribes still number a few handfuls only”.46
By 1957, many Kikuyu squatters who had been ‘displaced’ by the events of Mau Mau were being accepted back onto the plantations, albeit with the cattle restrictions back in place, signalling the failure of the kfd to attract non-Kikuyu into the system. However, these returnees now found themselves within a system that had been altered through the process of villagisation.
Prior to Mau Mau, forest squatter villages were dispersed, with the location of huts chosen according to their proximity to the primary cultivation area. The farmers could keep close watch over their crops, livestock, and allocated tree saplings, curbing wildlife and fire damage, while journey times for farming or firewood collection were short. This arrangement was, however, difficult to administer and police. The role of the forests in the Mau Mau struggle meant that dispersed villages would not be tolerated; in as early as December 1952 the kfd had plans in place to begin a process of villagisation, whereby the squatters would be concentrated into dense villages that would greatly ease their supervision.47
Prior to Mau Mau, the kfd regarded its squatters as a source of pride, yet the rapid drafting and enacting of villagisation plans exposed the latent mistrust that the kfd had for Africans as well as its underlying conflict of interest. For the forest squatters, villagisation meant longer journeys to cropland and trees alike; thus, while supervision of the squatters increased, supervision of the plantations decreased, thereby reducing the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the shamba system. The emphasis on security meant that “little thought was given to such essential factors as water supplies, health, sanitation, range from fire, and so on”.48 The consequence was a greater input, and associated expense, for the kfd into matters of people’s welfare.
2.4 Popularity and Success
Research on the development of taungya forestry in Burma, the progenitor of the shamba system, mirrors the analysis hitherto presented: this was a system that usurped the needs of the local population. Protest in Burma occurred on a large scale: forest fires were deliberately set, and seedlings were often destroyed.49 By contrast, in Kenya the kfd maintained throughout the whole colonial period that “[t]his form of employment is very popular with the labourers”,50 a statement that is indeed supported by evidence.
While for the majority of squatters the restrictions imposed by the shamba system curtailed social advancement, for a minority the system also represented an avenue into government service. Squatter workgroups were led by African headmen drawn from their ranks, and headmen who showed exceptional ability could be promoted into the kfd itself to become forest guards, rangers, seedsmen, or assistant foresters, of which there were a combined total of about 130 until the late 1940s when recruitment doubled. Those who sought work in the kfd but were not part of the shamba system were advised to first become squatters, where their practical abilities could be evaluated. Some African employees had spent their childhoods within the shamba system, increasing their affinity to it and having the monetary and prestige benefits of working in the kfd impressed upon them. Until the 1950s this was the only way for an African to join the kfd, which was dominated by European personnel in its higher ranks and Indian staff in lower positions.51
For those Africans who did attain kfd employment, the shamba system represented a transformative process. Lacking the means to establish their own wealth and prestige in native reserves already dominated by powerful African landowners, poorer farmers profited from the opportunity not only to cultivate land but also to obtain reliable employment. Furthermore, this work would have compensated for their lack of livestock by providing a cash income to supplement farming in times of environmental stress.
By the 1950s, the kfd was also implementing social policies for its squatters and those living near forests that increased the attractiveness of the system and heightened its support among existing squatters. Forest officers were specifically assigned to the task of overseeing African welfare, and the department began building and operating facilities as diverse as community halls (10 in operation), hide-drying sheds, dispensaries (12 in operation), schools (32 in operation), and water systems by 1953. Squatter children were not required to work within the shamba system and could attend schools built by the kfd, which made the system more attractive than squatting on settler farms, where access to education was more limited.52 While the shamba system restricted the ability of its squatters to accrue wealth in terms of livestock accumulation, it did offer new opportunities in accordance with the interests of the colonial regime.
The attractiveness of these opportunities is reflected in the number of squatter families engaged in the shamba system, a figure that showed an upward trend across the colonial period. The earliest records, from 1910, indicate that the system immediately attracted 1,000 families. Twenty-two years later, the squatter population reached a pre-Second World War high of 2,466 families. That number continued to rise during the war, and by the time of Kenya’s independence the shamba system was engaging 8,474 families.53 However, this rise was not steady, with dips in the squatter population in the mid-1930s due to the kfd’s financial constraints caused by the Great Depression as well as during the Mau Mau rebellion.54 The expulsion of squatters during Mau Mau was rapidly reversed as soon as the threat of rebellion in the forests was considered to be over, and by 1958 the number of squatters exceeded the pre-Mau Mau figure by almost one thousand. These statistics show that as long as the kfd was open to it, more squatters would be forthcoming to join the system.
Normally, on the fresh forest soil they obtain better crops than they would elsewhere and though during the year locust damage was serious in many districts, the squatters were certainly as well or better off than they would have been anywhere else.58
Farms in the forests appear to have been at least as productive as those outside the forests and, crucially, were able to maintain production levels through periods of drought when crops in native reserves were failing. Alternatively, crop yields remained high enough to produce a surplus that allowed farmers to subsist on stored grain or sell this for food. This lends credence to the argument that shamba and taungya-like systems may have utility in a future Africa beset by the increased occurrence of drought.59 Caution should be taken with this claim, however, as shamba can be overwhelmed. The drought of 1934 was so severe that many crops failed in the forest plantations, and with the kfd’s inability to supply more work squatter numbers remained lower than they had been in 1932. Yet, the kfd still reported that: “The squatters were contented and gave no trouble, although their crops were in many districts sadly damaged by drought.”60 An explanation for this apparent contentment can perhaps be found in the crimes reported to have occurred in the forests during that time. The limits placed on sheep numbers and the total ban on goats and cattle combined with the drought and economic slump of the 1930s to severely limit the forest squatters’ food security. In response, as kfd statistics suggest, squatters employed natural resource utilisation strategies that were prohibited under colonial law to secure extra income or food.
Between 1929 and 1939, the squatter population increased by 18 per cent, while “illegal grazing” in the forests increased by 185 per cent, and “theft of forest produce” (mainly fuelwood) rose by 119 per cent. These huge surges in the number of acts deemed “criminal” by the kfd can be partly attributed to increased policing efforts by forest guards and partly to the activities of those residing outside of the forests. In particular, the Kikuyu Forest Division bordered several native reserves and in 1938, theft of fuelwood from those forests constituted half of the total recorded crimes.61 Yet a significant proportion of the remaining crimes must have been committed by those who resided permanently in the forests: the squatters. The taking of wood, which could be sold, and the grazing of animals within forest reserves represented vital survival strategies at a time when the colonial economy could not supply sufficient work and crops were failing. This informal African economy existing outside of the colonial economic infrastructure was fully established by and utilised during the Second World War to offset crop failures.62 Frequent cases of squatters accommodating and supporting Africans with no legal right to be in the forests highlight the role of the former in this economy.
Forest guards, who were direct kfd employees, were also implicated in such activities, with several being convicted for bribery, corruption, and aiding criminals during the 1940s.63 During the 1950s, European kfd officers were routinely and frequently transferred between forest stations out of fear that remaining at the same station for too long would see them foster “corrupt” relationships with local Africans.64 Such a tactic suggests that the kfd had experienced this challenge before, although official records are silent on the topic. One of the main attractions of the shamba system beyond its usual provision of fertile land may have been the opportunities it presented to successfully engage in economic activities that were not sanctioned by the government.
The forest crime statistics also reveal another significant aspect of the shamba system: the absence of large-scale resistance to it. In 19th-century Burma, fire was used as a form of protest against the imposed taungya system,65 but colonial records in Kenya do not reveal any such use until reports of arson in 1960 and 1961. No official explanation is given for these cases, but the falling conviction rates for illicit grazing and theft of forest produce in those years indicate a more effective crime prevention strategy was being employed by the kfd. These were years of severe drought when squatters may well have also been prevented from turning to their usual fall-back strategies.
The kfd laid blame for the arson attacks on the “[Kenya] Land Freedom Army” (klfa),66 a militant group that continued the Mau Mau struggle for Kikuyu land until 1965. While the klfa did operate in the forests, there is no evidence besides the kfd accusation to suggest that it was responsible for arson.67 This accusation may also have been an attempt to disguise discontent at kfd policy and exploit the continued fear of Mau Mau. In saying that “without the co-operation of the local population no fire protection programme, no matter how costly, is likely to be effective”,68 the kfd was suggesting it had lost the cooperation of some of its squatters. This comment is in marked contrast to the kfd’s lauding of the squatters’ involvement in firefighting activities across the rest of the colonial period. Indeed, apart from these instances and excluding arson used as a tactic during the Mau Mau conflict, there are no obvious connections between forest fires and protest in colonial Kenya.
3 The Future of Shamba in Kenya
The shamba agroforestry system is also in use in Kenya today. The Forest Act of 2005 rebranded shamba as the Plantation Establishment and Livelihood Improvement Scheme (pelis) and made it a fundamental part of the policy of the Kenya Forest Service, the successor to the kfd, in response to declining tree cover and in an effort to mitigate rural poverty. This commitment represents an about-turn from the government position of the 1980s and 1990s.
Following Kenya’s independence from British rule, the shamba system was maintained in much the same way it had been in the 1950s until 1976, when the resident labourers engaged within the system were made full-time employees of the forest department, which effectively turned them into civil servants, and cultivation rights in the forest were offered to any willing to pay the rent. This separated forest workers and cultivators, meaning that there was no longer any compulsion for workers to farm the forest. The cost of plantation establishment and maintenance increased dramatically as cultivators often ignored less fertile or remote areas while illicitly obtaining rights to cultivate over protected areas, and many plots were subleased. This disconnection of the roles of forest worker and forest farmer caused the virtual collapse of the shamba system and the plantation system it supported.69 Initially designed to engage shamba farmers in forestry, this scheme of separating them from the land further highlighted the competing objectives of the kfd and its farmers.
The current director of the Kenya Forest Service, David Mbugua, has argued that what he identifies as corruption within the old Forest Department and among the shamba squatters developed after 1962 and led to the collapse of the system.70 However, as seen above, actions in opposition to government regulations were very much a part of the shamba system during the colonial era. As such, post-1962 ‘corruption’ was not new, but a continuation of practices begun in response to a colonial framework that denied the shamba farmer any say in the system or the ability to subsist during times of acute environmental stress (as in the mid-1930s).
In the mid-1980s, the shamba system—by then completely ineffective—officially came to an end. Following this, cases of land grabbing by elites, apparently with the complicity of government employees, increased tremendously and forced shamba farmers out of the forests.71 When shamba was partially reintroduced in 1994, the system was still structurally weak and marked by the claiming of forested areas for cultivation by elites without tree establishment. Environmental groups became concerned over the level of forest exploitation occurring at the time, particularly in the form of charcoal production, without any attempt to re-establish tree plantations, and brought pressure to bear on the government, which resulted in shamba again being banned in 2002.72 In 2005, the successor programme to shamba, pelis, was officially launched. It began operating in 2008 with the aim of re-establishing government control of shamba forests and reintroducing forest cultivation. By 2012, pelis had made 2,049.6 hectares of land available to previously landless people across five counties, producing approximately three million bags of maize. This is heralded as a great success by the Kenya Forest Service, which now hopes that pelis will continue to develop into an integral part of its forestry strategy while remaining free of the problems that plagued shamba after the 1970s.73
Understanding the failure of the shamba system is vital to ensuring the continuation of pelis in the future. The breakdown of shamba represented a usurpation of a system that had favoured the poor throughout the colonial period. It also suggests that the livestock restrictions in place from the late 1920s onwards were a key feature in sustaining the success of the system, since they made forest cultivation less attractive to wealthier farmers with large herds. At the same time, shamba became a target for acquisition by elites as it developed to a state where it was extremely successful, as the high maize production levels recorded in the 1960s indicate it was. From this perspective, the future success of pelis largely falls on the ability of the Kenya Forest Service to protect it from these dynamics.
In providing such protection during the colonial period, the kfd was ensuring that the right of its squatters to farm assigned plots was guaranteed by law. Even though this security was undermined during the kfd’s purging of ‘undesirables’ in the 1950s, the importance of protection against land grabbing by African or settler elites is highlighted here. Similarly, Mbow et al. argue that farmers will only fully commit to agroforestry systems when they themselves, and not their successors, will reap the rewards.74 Menzies’ analysis of three hundred years of taungya in China also emphasises maintaining land security for the farmer as the key factor in the longevity of the system there.75 Evictions that sow mistrust between farmers and the governing authority, such as those during the 1950s, must therefore be avoided if pelis is to be a success.
Furthermore, Witcomb and Dorward present “two main factors” accounting for the failure of shamba: “poor and often corrupt management of the system and high levels of poverty in forest adjacent communities which compelled locals to exploit the system”.76
As the historical analysis has shown, the deterioration in the management of shamba began during the colonial period. This ‘corruption’ stemmed from the wider trend, clearly evident by the 1950s, of a growing wealth gap between rich and poor Africans. This situation was fostered by a colonial regime that restricted African enterprise and economic development to those locked into a patronage relationship with the government.77 While the effects of the corruption of the shamba system only became evident during the land grabs of the 1970s and beyond, they were born in the colonial era. Avoiding a similar breakdown of the system in the future is, again, dependent on ensuring that it is adequately insulated from forces more powerful than those that can be mustered by the shamba farmers.
Witcomb and Dorward’s second factor concerning the high levels of poverty in forest communities adjacent to the shamba system can also be related back to the system’s colonial foundations. While shamba proved effective in maintaining harvest yields in times of mild to moderate drought, forest-cultivated crops did fail in the mid-1930s, and the resistance of the kfd to livestock in its forests meant that it is extremely likely that shamba farmers turned to survival strategies that included generating income by means not sanctioned by the government. Colonial regulations meant that such survival strategies became categorised as ‘illegal’. Grazing livestock in areas prohibited by the government and the taking of forest produce to sell via the informal market represented effective ways to generate cash and purchase food from areas less affected by famine, thereby compensating for failing crops. If shamba farmers had maintained a tree crop of value to them, for example fruit trees, and if they had the necessary utilisation rights to support themselves through periods of drought and engage in trade with neighbouring communities, this would have alleviated the pressures pushing these adjacent communities to ‘exploit the system’.
This is a point that is particularly pertinent to the future of shamba within Kenya in the context of increasing incidences of extreme weather events. Some projections indicate that sub-Sahelian Africa may experience a twenty per cent reduction in the production of staple crops by 2050 as a result of climate change and associated increases in the frequency of drought and flooding, highlighting the urgent need to develop responses that can safeguard agricultural production. Agroforestry has been championed in this regard because of the multiple benefits that trees and forests can bring to farmers, including protection of water catchments, shade and shelter, diversification of income and crops where fuel or fruit trees are used, protection of soil, and the enhancement of soil fertility and crop yields by the planting of fertiliser tree species.78
If current and future shamba systems are to be a success under conditions of climate change, there must be a realisation that farmers need additional revenue sources, which have often been deemed illegal in the past, especially in times of economic stress. Trees-on-farms-based agroforestry embraces this approach to multiple revenue sources, for example by growing trees for timber and fruit. Agroforestry involving fruit trees in western Kenya has shown that farmers were able to subsist on fruit from those trees when floods had wiped out all other crops.79 However, the primary purpose of the shamba system, which is a farms-in-forest approach to agroforestry, throughout the colonial period and beyond was the production of timber and fuelwood through fast-growing eucalypts and pines. Integrating tree species that are of more use to the farmers and giving farmers rights over these trees is thus a radical alteration to the system. Considering the fact that over 75 per cent of the energy utilised in Kenya is derived from wood,80 on which the country seems dependent for the foreseeable future, the central question remains whom the shamba system is really designed to benefit. Whether the interests of the farmers are subordinate to those of the state, as they were during the colonial period, remains a key issue to be resolved if shamba is to be successful as an adaptation strategy to climate change.
The response within the international forestry community to this question has been the steady development of community-based forest schemes since the 1980s. In Kenya, these take the form of Community Forest Associations (cfas), an initiative that has been described by the UN Development Programme as “the only true hope for transforming the management of forests and embrac[ing] democratisation of forest management”.81 Within pelis, the role of cfas is to allocate half-acre plots within plantation developments, with local people, specifically elders, playing a very active role in this process.82 pelis has so far proved successful,83 but it remains to be seen whether cfas are sufficient to bridge the gap between the traditional institutions of forestry and the people engaged in the shamba system, and thus avoid the conflict between these actors that was inherent in the historical precedent.
4 Conclusion
The title of this chapter asked whether the shamba system as practised in colonial Kenya presented the colony’s African population with opportunities or whether it was an example of colonial domination. The answer, of course, is both. The conflict in aims between the forest authority and the farmers employed in shamba is evident from the system’s inception to its collapse. Shamba was established not to provide land and employment to African farmers but to meet the timber and fuel needs of the colony. At each stage, this overriding of local interests was evident. At the expense of their adaptability to extreme weather events, the kfd banned its farmers from keeping livestock. When security needs required it, contracts with Kikuyu squatters were torn up and replacement farmers from other ethnic groups were sought, although never found. Yet, the Kikuyu readily took up contracts to be shamba farmers throughout the period. The system allowed poorer ahoi Kikuyu the chance to farm and gain access to colonial education and employment that they otherwise might not have had, while also legally protecting their right to farm from the land competition that existed in the native reserves.
The dichotomy within the shamba system is particularly exposed when it is examined as a response to climate change. Various agroforestry approaches have been heralded as viable responses to mitigate reductions in agricultural production induced by climate change.84 In the colonial period, however, the capacity of shamba to increase food security was overwhelmed, providing only unsanctioned means to secure additional income. The central characteristic of the historical system—the provision of tree products to the benefit of the state economy and not to that of the farmers who tended the trees—continues to undermine the modern successor to that system, but does not completely negate its usefulness as a response to climate change. Unless shamba, now pelis, is changed to provide tree products that can be exploited by the system’s farmers, it too faces the possibility of being weakened by corruption, the unsanctioned taking of forest products, and pressure from wealthier farmers outside the system seeking to acquire forest land, all threats that are exacerbated during years of drought, floods, and locust plagues. Government control of the forests also represents the withholding of control from direct forest users, especially shamba farmers, and risks a replication of the colonial patronage system. The Mau Mau period is an extreme example of how this form of environmental management translated into an extension of state power and control. In view of the slide into corruption that has marred the system almost since its inception, the success of shamba as a way to mitigate climate change-induced drought and flooding will depend on its ability to engage with its users on an equal footing.
Kenya Forest Department, “Taungya in Kenya: The ‘Shamba System’” (paper presented at the “World Symposium on Man-Made Forests and their Industrial Importance,” Canberra: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, April 14–25, 1967), 2.
Oduol, Peter A., “The Shamba System: An Indigenous System of Food Production from Forest Areas in Kenya,” Agroforestry Systems 4.4 (1986): 365, accessed October 10, 2014. doi:10.1007/BF00048108; Holman, Dennis, Inside Safari Hunting, with Eric Rundgren (London: W.H. Allen, 1969), 61–62; Kenya Forest Department, Plantation Management Costs & Practical Hints, Bulletin No. 34 (September 28, 1939), 9. The length of food crop cultivation was also dependent on tree species, with a shorter cultivation period for crops planted among fast-growing trees.
Bryant, R.L., “The Rise and Fall of Taungya Forestry: Social Forestry in Defence of the Empire,” The Ecologist 24.1 (1994): 21–26; Evans, Julian, Plantation Forestry in the Tropics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 290–292.
Menzies, Nicholas, “Three Hundred Years of Taungya: A Sustainable System of Forestry in South China,” Human Ecology 16.4 (1988): 361–376.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1963” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1963), The National Archives of the UK (tna), CO 544/106; Oduol, “The Shamba System,” 367. Official sources only indicate the number of families employed; therefore, the total population figures come from an estimation of family size at between five and six individuals, which is based on figures from Odoul and estimates presented in the Annual Reports of the Kenya Forest Department (1920–1963).
Kenya Forest Department, “Taungya in Kenya,” 4.
Imo, Moses, “Interactions amongst Trees and Crops in Taungya Systems of Western Kenya,” Agroforestry Systems 76.2 (2009): 265–273, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.1007/s10457-008-9164-z.
Mbow, Cheikh et al., “Agroforestry Solutions to Address Food Security and Climate Change Challenges in Africa,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Sustainability Challenges 6 (February 2014): 61–67, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2013.10.014; Lasco, Rodel D. et al., “Climate Risk Adaptation by Smallholder Farmers: The Roles of Trees and Agroforestry,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 6 (2014): 83–88; Kalame, Fobissie B. et al., “Modified Taungya System in Ghana: A Win–Win Practice for Forestry and Adaptation to Climate Change?” Environmental Science & Policy 14.5 (2011): 519–530, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2011.03.011.
Thorlakson, Tannis, Henry Neufeldt, and François Collart Dutilleul, “Reducing Subsistence Farmers’ Vulnerability to Climate Change: Evaluating the Potential Contributions of Agroforestry in Western Kenya,” Agric Food Security 1.15 (2012): 6–7.
Witcomb, Mark, and Peter Dorward, “An Assessment of the Benefits and Limitations of the Shamba Agroforestry System in Kenya and of Management and Policy Requirements for Its Successful and Sustainable Reintroduction,” Agroforestry Systems 75.3 (2009): 264, 267, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.1007/s10457-008-9200-z.
Imo, Moses et al., “Professional and Societal Mismatch in Kenyan Forestry: Is There a Right Way to Manage Our Forests?” in Forest Landscape and Kenya’s Vision 2030: Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Forestry Society of Kenya (fsk) Conference and Annual General Meeting Held at the Sunset Hotel, Kisumu. 30th September–3rd October, 2008, ed. D.O. Ogweno, P.S. Opanga, and A.O. Obara (Kisumu: Forestry Society of Kenya, 2009), 74.
Bryant, “The Rise and Fall of Taungya Forestry,” 25.
Logie, J.P. and W.G. Dyson, Forestry in Kenya: A Historical Account of the Development of Forest Management in the Colony (Nairobi: Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1962), 8.
Ibid., 2.
East Africa Protectorate, Report on the Forests of British East Africa by D. E. Hutchins. With a map and 25 photographs, published 1909, Cd. 4723. LX. 1, 77.
Kennedy, Dane K., Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 44.
Senior Assistant Conservator of Forests, Londiani, to Secretary, Molo Farmers’ Association, Molo, March 10, 1930, Kenya National Archives (kna), FOR/1/210.
Rajan, S. Ravi, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 171–178.
Gardner, H.M., “Re-Afforestation in Kenya Colony by Means of Shifting Cultivation,” Empire Forestry Journal 2.1 (1923): 61–64.
Kalame et al., “Modified Taungya System in Ghana,” 520; von Hellermann, Pauline, “Things Fall Apart? Management, Environment and Taungya Farming in Edo State, Southern Nigeria,” Africa 77.03 (2007): 375, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.3366/afr.2007.0052.
Although used in the pejorative and well-known sense of “illegal occupier of property” in modern Kenya, “squatter” was a neutral term during the colonial period used to describe Africans who legally resided and laboured on settler or crown land. Official documents from the period also use the descriptive term “resident labourer”.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1954–1955” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1955), tna, CO 544/80, 31–32. Forestry in colonial Kenya also depended on squatters employed by private sawmilling companies. While these sawmill squatters also cultivated in the forests, they were not a part of the shamba system and were under only very limited control of the kfd. This study is thus concerned only with the squatters engaged in shamba itself.
Extract from a letter from Mr H.G. Prettijohn, quoted in Conservator of Forests to the Chief Secretary, Nairobi, April 4, 1944, kna, VF/1/11.
Roberts, Arthur, Secretary of the Southern Uasin Gishu Farmers’ Association, to Director of Agriculture, July 20, 1918, kna, QB/1/209.
Gardner, H.M., Conservator of Forests to Senior Assistant Conservator of Forests, Londiani, April 11, 1930, kna, FOR/1/210.
Gardner, H.M., Conservator of Forests to the District Commissioner, Kiambu, January 5, 1934, kna, FOR/1/210 (quotation); Cooper, A.M., Forester Elburgon, to the Assistant Conservator of Forests, Londiani, February 9, 1932, kna, FOR/1/210.
Eliot, C.F., Assistant Conservator of Forests, Nyeri, to the Conservator of Forests, March 1, 1932, kna, FOR/1/210.
Graham, R.M., Assistant Conservator of Forests to the Conservator of Forests, January 27, 1932, kna, FOR/1/210.
Thorlakson, Neufeldt, and Dutilleul, “Reducing Subsistence Farmers’ Vulnerability to Climate Change,” 4. “Food shortage” is defined as difficulty in feeding every member of the family.
Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), 64–66.
Samuel Ngichu, representing the Mbari ya Mwenda Achera clan, to District Commissioner, Kiambu, care of the Kikuyu Land Hoard Association (translated), December 25, 1933, kna, FOR/1/210.
Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 64; Stitcher, Sharon, Migrant Labour in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response 1895–1975 (Harlow: Longman, 1982), 32–38; Ambler, Charles H., Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism: The Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 25–29.
Adams, Bert N., and Edward Mburugu, “Kikuyu Bridewealth and Polygyny Today,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25.2 (1994): 159–166.
Cooper, A.M., Forester Elburgon, to the Assistant Conservator of Forests, Londiani, February 9, 1932. kna.
Forester, Assistant, Ngong Forest Station, to Assistant Conservator of Forests, Nairobi, July 20, 1934.
Middleton, John, The Central Tribes of the North-Eastern Bantu: The Kikuyu, Including Embu, Meru, Mbere, Chuka, Mwimbi, Tharaka, and the Kamba of Kenya, Ethnographic Survey of Africa—East Central Africa 5 (London: International African Institute, 1953), 52–53; Muriuki, Godfrey, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 74–81.
Dewees, Peter A., “Trees and Farm Boundaries: Farm Forestry, Land Tenure and Reform in Kenya,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 65.2 (1995): 19, accessed October 3, 2014. doi:10.2307/1161191; Leakey, L.S.B., Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1952), 12.
Mason, District Commissioner, Kitale, to PC Rift Valley Province, December 10, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18; Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1932” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1932), 20, tna, CO 544/38.
Kenya Forest Department, Squatter and Shamba Management, Bulletin No. 33, published May 20, 1932.
Menzies, “Three Hundred Years of Taungya,” 371–374.
Honoré, E.J., Conservator of Forests, West of Rift, to Provincial Commissioner, Rift Valley Province, December 16, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18.
Johnston, C.M., Provincial Commissioner, Rift Valley Province, to Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, December 23, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18.
C.M. Johnston, Provincial Commissioner Rift Valley Province to Chief Native Commissioner, December 23, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18.
In the predominantly Kikuyu district of Kiambu, for example, there was a 313 per cent increase in population density per square mile between 1921 and 1951 (from 52 to 215 inhabitants per square mile); Mosley, Paul, The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 78.
Honoré, E.J., Conservator of Forest, West of Rift, to Provincial Commissioner, Rift Valley Province, December 15, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1951–1953” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1953), tna, CO 544/78.
Johnston, C.M., Provincial Commissioner Rift Valley Province to District Commissioners Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, & Thompson’s Falls, District Officer Naivasha, December 5, 1952, kna, NK/2/17/18.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1954–1955.”
Bryant, “The Rise and Fall of Taungya Forestry,” 21–23.
Kenya Forest Department, “KFD Annual Report,” published 1955.
Rammell, J.C., Acting Conservator of Forests, to the Director of Education, Nairobi, December 17, 1931, kna, FOR/1/166; Senior Assistant Conservator of Forests to the Forester, Kerita, December 15, 1938, kna, FOR/1/166; Kicheru, Willis K. to Forest Department, July 26, 1938, kna, FOR/1/166; Graham, R.M., for Acting Conservator of Forests, to Paul K. Ngugi, February 11, 1928, kna, FOR/1/166.
Kenya Forest Department, “KFD Annual Report,” published 1953, 40–43; Kanogo, Tabitha, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–63 (London: James Currey, 1987), 83–89.
Kenya Forest Department, “Taungya in Kenya”; Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Reports of the Forest Department, 1920–1963” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1920–1963), tna, CO 544/12–CO 544/106.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1933” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1933), 26, tna, CO 544/40.
Furedi, “Kikuyu Squatters,” 181.
Kitching, Gavin, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie 1905–1970 (London: Yale University Press, 1980), 34, 59; Stitcher, Sharon, Migrant Labour in Kenya, 75–79.
Anderson, David, Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890s–1963 (London: James Currey, 2002); Anderson, David, and David Throup, “Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed,” The Journal of African History 26.4 (1985): 327–345.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1932” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1932), tna, CO 544/38, 20.
Kalame, Fobissie B., “Modified Taungya System in Ghana.”
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1934” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1934), tna, CO 544/44, 26.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1938” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1938), tna, CO 544/55, 13.
Berman, Bruce, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990), 267.
Assistant Conservator of Forests, Nyeri, to Conservator of Forests, January 2, 1941, kna, FOR/1/244; R.M. Graham, Assistant Conservator of Forests, to Conservator of Forests, November 25, 1940, kna, FOR/1/244.
Anonymous, family member of a kfd officer, email message to author, July 4, 2014.
Bryant, “The Rise and Fall of Taungya Forestry,” 23.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1960” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1960), tna, CO 544/97, 6; Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1961” (Nairobi Government Printer, 1961), tna, CO 544/100, 6; Kenya Forest Department, “KFD Annual Report,” published 1963, 6.
Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 162–175.
Kenya Forest Department, “Annual Report of the Forest Department, 1960,” 6.
Kiriinya, C.K., “The Rise and Fall of Taungya: Lessons from Kenya,” Agroforestry Today (ICRAF) 6.3 (1994): 3–4; Oduol, “The Shamba System,” 365.
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Geteria, Wamugunda, “Management of the Mau Ecosystem,” in Forest Landscape and Kenya’s Vision 2030: Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Forestry Society of Kenya (FSK) Conference and Annual General Meeting Held at the Sunset Hotel, Kisumu. 30th September–3rd October, 2008, ed. D.O. Ogweno, P.S. Opanga, and A.O. Obara (Kisumu: Forestry Society of Kenya, 2009), 57.
Witcomb, and Dorward, “An Assessment of the Benefits and Limitations of Shamba,” 262.
Odwori, Paul Okelo, Philip M. Nyangweso, and Mark O. Odhiambo, “Alleviating Food Insecurity and Landlessness Through Pelis in Kenya” (paper presented at the “4th International Conference of the African Association of Agricultural Economists,” Hammamet, Tunisia, September 22–25, 2013), 1–3.
Mbow et al., “Agroforestry Solutions,” 63.
Menzies, “Three Hundred Years of Taungya.”
Ibid., 263.
Kitching, Gavin, Class and Economic Change in Kenya, 315–316, 372.
Lasco et al., “Climate Risk Adaptation by Smallholder Farmers,” 83–86.
Thorlakson, Neufeldt, and Dutilleul, “Reducing Subsistence Farmers’ Vulnerability to Climate Change,” 7.
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Mbow et al., “Agroforestry Solutions to Address Food Security and Climate Change Challenges in Africa”; Kalame et al., “Modified Taungya System in Ghana.”