Parijat Chakrabarti

1. Abdallah, formerly a field agent for Twiga (Kenya’s dominant retail platform), stands on a small bridge crossing a narrow irrigation canal on a farm near Kerugoya. Abdallah lives just two towns over in the same county, and when we met, he tells me he was married two weeks ago. He migrated from Uganda when he was young and has settled in Kirinyaga County since. He is Muslim, which is unusual in heavily Christian Kirinyaga County, but there is a mosque which he attends. He is not working at the moment, but the cost of living upcountry is low, so he is not worried.

He first started working for Twiga just after turning 20 in 2018. He would go from farm to farm to source bananas for Twiga. Being from the area helped him make connections easily and earn the trust of local farmers. He says he enjoyed his work, and he learned much about farming in the area. However, in 2019 Twiga started targeting larger farmers and wanted Abdallah to move to a different county and continue as a field agent there. Abdallah, wanting to stay closer to home, declined

2, 3. In the left frame, ants crawl on a banana flower in search of nectar while offering a natural source of protection against aphids. Catherine used to cultivate bananas on her small 2 acre farm in Kirinyaga County and sell to retail platforms, but in recent years, they have stopped buying from her. Moreover, the price of bananas has fallen, so even selling to the local market has proven a challenge. Catherine notes that having such a small piece of land means that she needs to diversify her crop cultivation. Otherwise if one crop fails, she asks, how will she eat? While bananas used to take up much of her land, she now has replaced them with maize. Maize is largely for her own consumption, but she sells to the local market when she has a surplus.

4. A farm manager examines the field at a five-hectare banana plantation near Baricho owned by a Gujarati family. While Kenyan Indians are well-known as an urban business community, many also own farmland upcountry. This rural land is typically purchased with the proceeds of urban business and is operated as a complementary source of income and a way to diversify and hold assets. For some, it also harks back to agricultural roots in Gujarat.

5. A little boy nibbles at a mango from his family’s farm. Historically, rural economies have relied less on cash-based market economies and more on subsistence and localized exchange based often on principles of reciprocity, obligation, and “entrustment” (Braudel 1982; Graeber 2011; Muldrew 1998; Shipton 1989, 2007). These forms of exchange unfold over time and are typically embedded in thick social relations. Direct barter and cash economies were the exception, not the rule, and were more commonly found in communities with strong links to empire and long-distance trade (Ali 2018). In rural Kenya, cash became an important commodity in its own right when the colonial government instituted the hut tax which could only be paid in the colonial currency (Mwangi 2001; Shipton 1989). Today, the search for cash in rural Kenya is often framed in terms of aspirations for education and the need to pay for rising school fees. Others, particularly older generations, link cash economies to the breakdown of communal morality and, amidst an ongoing HIV epidemic, to a breakdown of sexual morality (Mojola 2014:72-77).

6. James shows us green coffee berries on his shamba (farm). Furrows, cut into the soil, bring water from the nearby stream, and we walk along small paths winding through his shamba. James, like many other small farmers in the county, grows a huge variety of crops in strips of land running down the hill to a stream. Along these strips of land, different crops thrive at different elevations and with different levels of soil humidity and shade cover. On his shamba, I am shown guavas, Israel bananas, Kikuyu bananas, Kikuyu mangoes, passionfruit, sugarcane, maize (planted between the sugarcane), beans, horned melons, and, near the irrigation furrows, arrowroot and cassava. He is also experimenting with fish farming— pointing to an opaque green pool where he says there are hundreds of small fish—and keeps rabbits, goats, and chickens. He sells most of his produce to the local market. Coffee, however, he sells to a coffee processor. He plans to switch more of his land over to coffee production, as he finds there is good money in farming coffee. Moreover, the receipts that the coffee processor provides are accepted at the local bank as proof of a stable income which can be used to help secure loans. James has split his land amongst his three sons, so each has a significantly smaller plot of land than what James farmed in his youth. Inheritance customs alongside restrictions on available land is increasingly fragmenting farmland in parts of rural Kenya.

7, 8. While people commonly perceive small farmers as struggling to make ends meet, there is significant variation in small farmers upcountry. Above is the beautifully constructed two-story house of Titus, a retired state employee, who moved back “home,” as he sees it, to farm. Titus, like James, grows a huge variety of crops on his land, and also keeps turkeys, ducks, chickens, and cows. The fertile red soil for which the Mt Kenya region is famous can be seen in the foreground of each frame.

Links between city and country in Nairobi are still strong. Nairobi has historically been a city of migrants as people, in search of opportunity, would make their way to Nairobi from the countryside. In recent years, many, having made their fortunes, move back upcountry. Many Nairobians also regularly send money back to family upcountry, visit their family homes, and build houses on family land. Some have become “telephone farmers,” i.e. managing rural farmland while living in the city. New generations, many of whom are university-educated, also bring new ideas about farming and new market connections, for example experimenting with gourmet mushrooms and insect farming (as a substitute for animal feed).

9. Titus keeps a large number of chickens and maintains a fairly sophisticated egg and poultry operation. Unlike most small farmers, he has several employees to help him. His relatively large and well-managed operation (and local status as a “big man”) eases market connections, and he circulates this money back into the community.

10. A TV with a satellite connection sits prominently in the living room at an upcountry home with a yet-unfinished floor. The family gathers to watch national news in the evenings. As rural Kenya is electrified and as communications channels expand, national and global media makes its way into rural communities. These connections are uneven— far more content flows from national and global media centers to the countryside than in the other direction. Smartphones and mobile data connections may expand the range of options available and circulate media differently. For example, WhatsApp can enable greater peer-to-peer connections, and Instagram reels and TikTok do (algorithmically) circulate content from rural Kenyans among other rural Kenyans. On the other hand, they still mostly channel content from media accounts with national and global reach, albeit in more personalized ways.

11. A view of the main street in Kianyaga, a small market town and district headquarters for Kirinyaga East district. Kianyaga is a market hub with connections to Nairobi, and it also has a large market which distributes to the town and surrounding area. In the frame, Joackim, a local farmer, smokes a cigarette while speaking to another man. Joackim owns a motorbike which is a big deal for small farmers. It offers them a great deal of mobility within the county and a means of transport for goods (in small amounts). A common observation upcountry is that young men are less interested in farming and instead buy (or rent) motorbikes to become boda boda riders. Being a rider is less work than farming and payments for transporting goods and people are more regular. It is also a job that does not require the cultivation of land. Some youth have little access to land while others prefer not to be tied to it and may dream of moving to a bigger city. It also reflects the growing importance of cash economies in rural Kenya.

12. Eventually, produce, often aggregated or moved through towns such as Kianyaga, end up in wholesale markets in Nairobi. Here, a man arranges a fresh shipment of bananas in a wholesaler’s storage area in the old City Park Market.

13. Fieldwork. I speak with Joackim, as he shows me around his farm.

REFERENCES

Ali, Tariq Omar. 2018. A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1982. The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Volume 1. 1st U.S. ed edition. New York: Harper & Row.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, N.Y: Melville House.

Mojola, Sanyu A. 2014. Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS. First Edition, 1 edition. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Muldrew, C. 1998. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mwangi, Wambui. 2001. “Of Coins and Conquest: The East African Currency Board, the Rupee Crisis, and the Problem of Colonialism in the East African Protectorate.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4):763–87.

Shipton, Parker MacDonald. 1989. Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. 1St Edition edition. Washington, D.C: American Anthropological Association.

Shipton, Parker MacDonald. 2007. The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa. First Edition edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.