Cultivating Their Own in Kenya: A Social History of Maragoli Farmers and Development, 1955-1978

This dissertation demonstrates the different ways in which practitioners, policy-makers, and locals, especially peasant farmers from the Maragoli region, interpreted and complicated development in late-colonial and early-independent Kenya. This social historical bottom-up analysis stands in contrast to recent development literature that prioritizes the histories of donor institutions and problematizes current debates amongst social scientists and practitioners about the utility of development and aid in the global South. In 1955, the British late-colonial regime implemented the Swynnerton Plan to kick-start an agrarian revolution in Kenya. Seeking to create as well as raise the social-economic standing of rural progressive African farmers, this plan encouraged select Kenyan cultivators to practice small-scale commercial agriculture on privately owned consolidated and planned farming units. An ambitious state-sponsored initiative, the Swynnerton Plan was a dramatic break from earlier colonial policies that treated all African land as the collective property of the tribe and that limited cash crop cultivation to European settlers and a few rich local farmers. Continued after colonial independence in 1963, the plan\u27s objective was to grow Kenya\u27s agricultural-based economy while addressing rural Kenyans\u27 grievances over the lack of land and employment opportunities. However, by 1978, the planners of the agrarian revolution largely considered it to be a failure. Many scholars and practitioners of African development generally consider the ineffectiveness of agricultural development to be the product of shortsighted policy-makers who believed in a self-evident benefit or who imposed an unwanted modernity. Drawing on a wide range of materials--state and missionary archives as well as oral interviews with Kenyan farmers, former government officials, and retired missionaries--I show, instead, that development in rural Kenya did not fail so much as it was complicated by ordinary people making their own decisions about what was best for them as they experienced the euphoric climate of decolonization and independence. Peasant farmers in Maragoli participated in development projects when they were of practical benefit to the household economy, often in contrast to the expectations of their neighbors as well as outside experts and nationalists in Nairobi. Absent alignment of their local interests with or within the agendas of nation builders and foreign developers, developing agriculture on the ground never got off the ground