AT the start of the colonial period in Kenya, British settlers were offered large areas of land.
When the response from Europe was less than adequate, the colonial administration in Kenya, looked to South Africa.
The Dutch Boers in particular, who had been defeated by the British in the Anglo-Boer war in the Transvaal, were attracted by the ‘settler-friendly’ land policy and legislation.
As a consequence, Maasai pastoralists lost their potential grazing areas to the Dutch Boers and other white settlers.
The area finally came to be known as Kenya’s ‘White Highlands’.
The central highlands were home to a million or more Kikuyu.
Many of those displaced moved west into the Rift Valley.
Later, the settlers also moved west and expropriated their land; the Kikuyu as well as many Maasai were reduced to tenants.
Settlers with 1 000 British pounds sterling in assets could receive 1 000 acres of land for free.
Many settlers established coffee plantations, which required expensive machinery, a stable labour force and a wait-time of four years before the crops began producing.
Other settlers established large-scale tea plantations. 
Settler agriculture entailed the dispossession of Africans, mainly Kikuyu, Maasai, and Kalenjin across the Rift Valley and Nyanza, Western and Central provinces.
In 1897, the British declared all ‘waste and unoccupied land’ in the East African colony to be ‘Crown Land’ vested in the imperial power.
The British Government considered Africans to be ‘tenants at the will of the Crown.’
By declaring all land to be Crown Land, the land rights of Africans became highly tenuous.
Land was easily alienated from customary systems, usually without compensation.
At the end of the 19th Century, the Kenyan Maasai districts of Kajiado, Narok and Trans Mara, covered between 50 000 to 60 000 km2; compared to only 39 000 km2 today.
They lost approximately 35 percent of their former best pastures and were given ‘native reserves’ of their own in return, under the 1904 and 1911 Treaties.
Beginning in 1941, the British embarked on a series of resettlement schemes involving forceful evictions and repatriations of Kikuyu, Maasai, Kalenjin and other tribes back-and-forth between the central highlands and Rift Valley.
Land losses by the Kikuyu and other ethnic groups were exacerbated by the commercialisation of the local economy, which led to the emergence of a wealthy land-owning class of Kikuyu.
Commercialisation was spurred by the British who, along with the settlers, criticised African farming methods as backward and sought to modernise local agricultural practices, especially from 1920 to 1945.
As in Zimbabwe, the British also imposed a number of changes in crop production and agrarian techniques, claiming to promote conservation and improved farming in the native reserves.
While many areas were commercialised, many African farmers throughout the regions engaged in widespread resistance to colonial agricultural reforms.
During colonial rule, every ethnic group in the Kenyan colony experienced land losses, although some lost more land than others.
By 1934, 30 000 white settlers (less than 0,25 percent of the total population in the colony), controlled about one-third of all the arable land.
Dispossessed of their land, the indigenous African people were confined to ‘native reserves.’
These formed the basis of ethnically defined administrative units; the precursors of today’s districts and locations.
In Kenya, high potential agricultural land is limited to approximately
20 percent of the territory. Moreover, as a legacy of the colonial period, it has inherited a distorted land ownership structure whereby the high-potential arable and good pasture land, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, was reserved exclusively for white settlers.
No tangible improvements to land ownership were implemented during the immediate post-colonial period. By the late-1970s, roughly 2,4 percent of Kenyan holdings accounted for nearly 32 percent of Kenya’s total arable land.
In 1990, landlessness in Kenya was estimated to affect approximately 10 percent of the total population. This figure was increasing by at least 1,5 percent annually.
In the late-1960s, in order to deal with the problem of lessening availability of land in Kenya, the World Bank (WB) urged the authorities to break away from the traditional community-based land systems which ensured security of ownership to certain groups.
The WB advocated, instead, the creation of a free land market system in order to enable more people to relocate from the most densely populated areas to the less densely populated regions.
Besides the transfer of land formerly held by Europeans to African farmers and the creation of settlement schemes, the Kenyan land use policy was mainly directed at the adjudication and registration of land in the ‘non-scheduled’ areas.
The rationale for this replacement of customary land rights by individual tenure arrangements was to create a collateral for loans and the encouragement of long-term investments.
A negative consequence of this policy, however, resulted in the creation of a growing group of landless people, as land became progressively concentrated in the hands of a newly emerging class of elite African farmers, constituted chiefly of businessmen, politicians and civil servants.
This has resulted in political constraints for a real land reform policy within Kenya; in line with experiences in Latin America, where the outcome of most land reform programmes have proved disappointing.
Kenya has endured a long history of land conflicts, dating back to its colonial period when first the Germans, and then the British, promulgated policies and practices that alienated people from their customary land and pitted one ethnic group against another.
These policies were extended after independence. Ethnic divisions, especially over traditional land, were exploited for short-term political ends. Kenya’s new Constitution of 2010, however, provides hope that some historical injustices will be addressed.
Land reforms have been introduced in a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the last couple of decades to streamline land administration and land dispute settlement.
Prior to reform, countries have typically displayed a confusing mix of land law regimes, including pre-colonial customary practices, colonial land policies promoting large-scale farming and post-colonial, state-led redistribution and land nationalisation programmes.
This mix often undermines tenure security. Reforms seek to address the competing legal frameworks by simplifying and harmonising land legislation.
The term ‘new wave land reform’ has been used to describe these reforms, but it is rarely properly defined.
An important feature of a new wave land reform is its immediate recognition of existing rights, including customary rights to land.
The recognition of existing rights represents a break with the past, when colonial and post-colonial authorities seized land for development purposes, often without compensation.
This reduced poor people, whose rights were rarely formally recognised and documented, to the status of second-class citizens as compared to the wealthy who could access the formal system and secure land title deeds.
The recognition of customary rights is important because it is applied from the day a reform is enacted. With enactment, existing rights are valid in land court cases and should colour land administration and land dispute settlement practices.
It may still be difficult to prove customary ownership rights in practice, but de jure, the recognition is important.
Dr Michelina Rudo Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant lecturer and specialist hospitality interior decorator. She is a published author in her field. For comments e-mail: linamanucci@gmail.com