PLAAS Academic Seminar: Generation access to and contestation over land in Mount Kenya Region

PLAAS ACADEMIC SEMINAR – “If necessary, I will give my children land”: Generation access to and contestation over land in Mount Kenya Region.

Presented by Cyriaque Hakizimana
A researcher and PhD candidate in the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of Western Cape in South Africa.
Youth land scarcity identified in this paper is generationally manufactured, and largely benefits the patriarchs that control land. At the core of this generational “manufacture” are the narrative of “Kukomaa akili” (matured mind) coupled with the persistent perceptions of youth empowerment through formal education as represented by the patriarchs, politicians and mainstream economic development actors.

I argue that the patriarchs use these narratives to keep young people in a prolonged “socially attenuated form of adulthood” (Honwana 2012: 20) which constrain young people to acquire the agrarian resources from their parents. Youth land scarcity, I argue, is not a consequence of normal agrarian structural transformation, but rather a direct outcome of the tensions and rigidities in the inter-generational transfer of agrarian resources, particularly access to farmland for rural youth.

Seminar details:
Date held: 21 November 2023