Making a Living

Changing Livelihoods in Rural Africa

Elizabeth Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415144964
• eBook ISBN: 9781134686216
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Livelihoods in rural Africa are changing in response to disappearing job prospects, falling agricultural output and collapsing infrastructure. This book explains why the responses to these challenges are so different in different parts of Africa. Making a Living uses case studies from commercial farming regions in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe and from much poorer areas within eastern and southern Africa.to give a broad comparative study of rural livelihoods. These case studies reveal how household relations, poverty and gender all play a part in the changing political economy of rural Africa.

1
Changing livelihoods in Eastern and Southern Africa

1 Making a living

Commercial farming

All agricultural areas in Southern and Eastern Africa have been touched by commercialisation. Farmers often sell some of their crops, buy agricultural inputs or even grow crops specifically for sale. However, there are some regions where farmers are intensively involved in agricultural markets. In the highlands of Central and Western Kenya, on the slopes of the Rift Valley and in Tanzania’s North Eastern highlands, farmers grow export crops like coffee, tea and tobacco. These crops need a cool, wet climate. They demand a great deal of labour for weeding and harvesting, but they also bring a relatively high return. In KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga in South Africa, and in lower-lying parts of Kisumu District in Western Kenya, farmers produce sugar cane, often on a contract basis. Coffee, tea, tobacco and sugar cane are all crops that must be sold for farmers to reap a return. Some post-colonial states have also encouraged dryland production of food crops, particularly maize, on land redistributed from white settlers in Kenya and Zimbabwe, in the white farming sector of South Africa and in the former migrant-labour reserves of Northern Zambia.

In this chapter and the next, we see how differences between African rural economies have been shaped by the actions of states, by the operation of markets and by strategies followed at the local level. States have sometimes attempted to stimulate commercial farming by exhortation and force, by trying to create a class of commercial smallholders from above, or by improving farmers’ access to markets and inputs. At other times farmers have themselves responded to new market opportunities and become involved in commercial agriculture (Williams 1994). Local strategies of accumulation have influenced rural households’ responses to market opportunities and the use they have made of agricultural surpluses. Conflict and bargaining over household divisions of labour have affected agricultural productivity as well as household members’ access to food and money.

Kenya: colonialism, resettlement and the smallholder boom

Kenyan experiences with commercial farming illustrate all of these processes as well as bringing out some wider issues about African states and farmers. The Kenyan case shows that the conditions under which smallholder farming could expand were particular to one time and place. It does not provide a model to be applied mechanically to other countries. Until the 1980s, Kenya was widely seen as the success story for smallholder farming in Africa. However, the reasons for the spread of commercial farming and the policy implications of this experience were not always understood (Francis and Williams 1993). Kenya’s image has since been tarnished by political repression and ethnic conflict. But this image of successful agricultural development was always rather misleading, because a very large number of smallholders were passed over by the expansion of high-value commodities.¹ The smallholder boom took place in areas that were suited, in terms of altitude and rainfall, to the cash crops introduced. Other smallholder areas lost out, as few resources went to raising productivity in the lower-value staples, such as maize and pulses, which could be grown in these areas. Central Kenya was the most favoured beneficiary of the smallholder boom. One reason for this was the fact that it is the home area of the ethnic group that dominated the Kenyan state until the 1980s. It is also the region lying closest to the country’s main labour and product markets in Nairobi. Many smallholder households expanded commodity production using earnings from migrant labour (Kitching 1980; Stichter 1982).

Figure 1.1 Kenya

Kenya’s smallholder boom began in the 1950s. The colonial state did not intend it to happen. In a classic example of late colonial social engineering, the state had hoped to create a rural world of yeomen farmers and landless labourers that would provide it with a bedrock of political support. This blueprint was subverted by smallholder farmers, who took advantage of the relaxation of growing restrictions to move into commercial production. From 1954 to 1963, the annual rate of growth of marketed output from small farms was 7.3 per cent, and from 1964 to 1970 it was 12.6 per cent (Heyer and Waweru 1976).

Until the 1950s, the priority of the colonial state in Kenya had been to protect European farmers from competition from African producers and to secure labour for the European farming sector. The state restricted African cultivation of the most valuable export crops. These restrictions did not succeed in preventing Africans in the reserves from expanding their production of commodities, but it did exclude them from the more lucrative ones. Instead, they expanded their production of maize, cotton and wattle (Cowen 1975). Labour migrancy was also a critically important component of livelihoods in colonial highland Kenya (Kitching 1980).

During the Depression and again in the Second World War, the state, with a pressing need to earn foreign exchange, paid more attention to promoting commodity production by African farmers. However, this goal was constrained by an official ideology of conservationism that spread across British colonial Africa and South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s (Beinart 1984; Leach and Mearns 1996; Mackenzie 1998). The state imposed soil-conservation regulations and restricted commercial maize growing. These policies also legitimated a fear and dislike of accumulation by Africans in the reserves and the wish to secure an adequate supply of labour for European farms. These restrictions and regulations, together with the expulsion of labour tenants from European farms, fuelled the explosive growth of African nationalism and the Mau Mau rebellion in the early 1950s (Throup 1987; Kanogo 1987; Furedi 1989; Berman and Lonsdale 1992).

The colonial state first responded to Mau Mau with a volte-face in its policies towards the African reserves. From paternalistic and authoritarian attempts to slow down economic change, the state moved rapidly to embrace it, hoping to pull apart the Mau Mau alliance of smallholders and the landless by creating a class of accumulating ‘yeoman farmers’. This policy involved an attempt to expand African commodity production while keeping a lid on accumulation and maintaining a labour supply for European farming. The twin pillars of the Swynnerton Plan, published in 1954, were the institution of freehold land tenure and the selective loosening of restrictions on African cultivation of high-value commodities, such as coffee, tea, pyrethrum and dairy products. It was also planned to provide credit and a greatly enlarged extension service to ‘progressive’ (master) farmers, who were considered the keys to successful smallholder farming. The introduction of freehold tenure by a massive and costly programme of land consolidation and registration was supposed to give farmers an incentive to reduce soil erosion and invest in their farms. By promoting a land market, freehold would facilitate accumulation, while rules against subdivision would prevent renewed fragmentation of holdings.

By the late 1950s, however, the maintenance of a heavily subsidised European farming sector was not considered vital either by the British state or by the political representatives of international capital in Kenya. Both were more concerned to negotiate a peaceful transfer of political power and promote continuity in the basic structure of the economy. They were able to come to terms with nationalist politicians in negotiations for the Independence settlement (Wasserman 1976).

The most important elements of the Independence settlement were the transfer intact of a large proportion of the European mixed farm land to a group of African accumulators and the division of the remainder among smallholders in settlement schemes, as a means of reducing conflict over the distribution of land. At this time, the orthodoxy among governments and international agencies was still that these were more efficient than smallholdings. The chief concern of officials dealing with land transfers was, therefore, the maintenance intact of the bulk of the large farm sector, which was habitually described as the ‘backbone’ of the economy (Wasserman 1976; Leo 1984).

In 1960, a plan leading to Independence was announced. In order to prevent the run-down of European farms in anticipation of political change, the colonial state announced plans to purchase land for settlement schemes and to assist the buyers of large farms. Land would be pegged at 1959 prices. Loans from a Land Bank would fund the orderly purchase of European farms intact by Africans.

In order to satisfy the demand of Africans for redistribution of land, some farms would be purchased by the state and subdivided into smaller holdings. Two types of scheme were planned. The first would consist of ‘yeoman’ farms of around twenty hectares, with a target net income of £250, integrated into the large farm sector. ‘Peasant’ schemes, with farms of around six hectares and a target income of £100 would be established on land contiguous with the African reserves. The state aimed to settle 1800 ‘yeomen’ and 6000 ‘peasants’ by September 1963. Together, the new African owners of the large farms and the ‘yeomen’ of the settlement schemes would maintain output and stability in the rural areas (Leo 1984). These distinctions were reproduced in later high-and low-density settlement schemes.

Rights to land transferred from Europeans to Africans in the former ‘White Highlands’ were not based on the historical claims of communities to have occupied the land, cultivated it or used it for grazing in the past. It was sold as private property to people whose purchases were usually financed by government loans. These were rarely repaid in full. The land reforms, like the land registration programme, established property rights as the basic principle of land tenure in independent Kenya (Leys 1975: 66–9).

The ‘yeoman’ scheme met with a poor response from its target population. Africans were keen to buy up intact the large European farms, either as individuals or as shareholders in land companies and co-operatives. But the kinds of people who had the capital necessary to purchase land subdivided into ‘yeoman’ plots probably saw more profitable opportunities elsewhere in the economy. The ‘peasant’ schemes, however, were wholly inadequate in the face of the massive demand for land in the Central Highlands. In response to this pressure, the settlement schemes were extended considerably over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, some ‘schemes’ merely ratifying existing take overs by ‘squatters’. By the end of 1982, the Department of Settlement estimated that 64,000 families had settled on 670,000 hectares. The proportion of land in the hands of smallholders was thus much larger than initially proposed. This happened partly because many of the large farms bought by land companies and cooperatives were quickly subdivided among their shareholders. But the policy makers administering the schemes also realised that many small farmers were drawn from the urban middle class, using farming as a support for their primary pursuits (Leo 1984).

One of the most striking aspects of the economic development of the former European areas has been the difference in productivity between different types of farms and farmers. By the mid 1960s, it was clear that many of the large farms taken over intact were badly managed and their owners seriously in arrears over repayments to the Land Bank of the money they had borrowed to buy the farms. This was in spite of the fact that the bulk of agricultural research, extension and credit was directed at them (Hinga and Heyer 1976). In the 1970s, productivity was much higher on smallholdings than on large farms and, within the large farm sector, it was generally higher on the smaller farms. An important reason for this was the tendency for smaller farms to have a larger proportion of land under crops. Smaller farms also employed more workers and sold more crops per acre than larger farms (Livingstone 1986). In the mid 1970s, the state had to confront these problems. It introduced schemes to rehabilitate selected large farms, while a number of large farms were eventually allowed to subdivide into smallholdings. Some under-used farms have also been taken over by squatters. But subdivision of the rest of the large farms will not be politically possible The owners are too powerful (Heyer 1981). The expansion in the proportion of marketed output coming from small farms has not risen above the 1967 high of 50 per cent.

An important part of the explanation of productivity differences between small and large farms lies in the strategies followed by different types of farm owners. What seems to have been happening is that many of the large farms transferred intact, together with a large proportion of farms in the low-density (larger plot) settlement schemes, were purchased by members of an emergent class of African accumulators whose interest lay in the urban economy. In a study of high and low-density settlement schemes in Nyandarua in the early 1970s, Leo found that many settlers in the low-density scheme were absentees, or were involved in other, full-time activities off the farm (Leo 1984: 158–68). Many people with resources to buy into the low-density schemes regarded their farms as one investment among others, rather than as their chief source of livelihood. They were also launching themselves into many other activities in the post-Independence economy, particularly white-collar employment and business. In consequence, a significant number were neglecting their farms. ‘Telephone farmers’ were often reluctant to give the managers of their farms sufficient authority to allow them to farm properly.

In the high-density scheme, the few settlers with economic interests off the farm were the handful of people who had held white-collar jobs before joining the scheme. The rest were wholly involved in farming. Leo quotes an agricultural official in another scheme who thought that the best farmers were those in the low-density scheme who concentrated on agriculture, while the next best were the more enterprising high-density farmers. Among the worst were the low-density owners (Leo 1984: 168). What is not clear from Leo’s analysis is the extent to which the more enterprising high-density farmers were those with access to off-farm resources. This is the case in the former African reserves, where off farm income, particularly from employment, is the chief source of finance for agricultural investment. Nor does Leo indicate how productive farms on the high-density scheme actually were. Settlement schemes in general remained relatively undeveloped, with large amounts of land under-used (Hinga and Heyer 1976).

There was, indeed, a dramatic increase in smallholder commodity production which underlay the expansion of the Kenyan economy in the 1960s and 1970s. This was partly due to the extension of the small farm areas in the 1960s, which was a result of the subdivision of European farms in the years following Independence. However, this expansion was due at least as much to very rapid rates of growth of marketed output in the small farm areas which, by 1967, accounted for 50 per cent of marketed output (Heyer 1981: 106).

In summary, the transfer intact of many large farms and the resettlement programmes proved costly and not particularly successful. Large-scale agriculture ran into serious difficulties in the 1960s, while the most important factor behind the spectacular increases in smallholder production was not the extension of smallholder farming through the settlement schemes, but the expansion of production in the former reserves. So the story is one of unintended outcomes – the subversion of blueprints. The Independence settlement of the land question aimed to preserve most large farms intact while defusing conflicts over land. The large farms transferred intact and the low-density schemes were expected to provide the backbone of the country’s agricultural production. In the event, the backbone of the Kenyan ‘success story’ was smallholder farming. Many of the large farms and the low-density scheme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Southern and Eastern Africa
• Introduction
• Part 1 Changing livelihoods in Eastern and Southern Africa
• Part 2 Poverty and livelihoods in Western Kenya
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Research methods used in the Koguta case study
• Appendix B: Luo segmentary lineages
• Bibliography
• Index