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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Gender, Power and Protest in African Farming: Recalcitrant Women and Usurping Men in Colonial Kenya, 1930-1950
Author:Buswell, ClareISNI
Year:2003
Periodical:Australasian Review of African Studies
Volume:25
Issue:2
Period:December
Pages:23-35
Language:English
Geographic terms:Kenya
Great Britain
Subjects:gender relations
women farmers
colonialism
colonial policy
land
agricultural policy
Women's Issues
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
Development and Technology
History and Exploration
Historical/Biographical
agriculture
Labor and Employment
Sex Roles
Abstract:This paper looks at the impact of colonial agricultural development policy on Kenyan women's agricultural practices and land use for the period 1930-1950. African agricultural production systems in precolonial Kenya had produced a diversity of foods, but importantly they were underpinned by complex systems of labour relations and gender power structures. The colonial interventions of the 1930s combined with earlier land alienations had significant negative implications for gender relations in relation especially to women's access to land and to the use of their labour, leading women to protest their grievances in the public sphere in different forms of resistance in the 1940s. This paper first looks at women's agricultural practice and production systems amongst Nandi, Kikuyu, Kipsigis and Luo women in precolonial Kenya and, second, at the changes in agricultural practice introduced through these colonial years. It establishes the changes that Kenyan farming women faced over those years and the resulting erosion of the basis of women's wealth creation and power that was at the heart of their grievances. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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