The history of indigenous land struggles in Kenya

What is lost when indigenous people are evicted from their ancestral lands? This lecture will elaborate a theoretical framework for understanding what land signifies for indigenous people by joining property theory with feminist political economy. It provides a reconsideration of two landmark cases: the African Commission's 2009 Endorois judgment and the African Court's 2017 Ogiek judgment. Employing the methods of feminist judgment writing - which it seeks not just to apply mechanistically and unquestioningly but instead to shape to African concerns and epistemologies - it shows how the courts could have responded with different reasoning in these cases. The land claims of Kenya's indigenous people are instructive to property law theorists wishing to get away from abstract and 'dephysicalised' notions of property (Graham 2021) and instead reckon with the messy, enmeshed 'brute world of materiality' (Ahmed 2008). This lecture asks what the Endorois and Ogiek land struggles tell us about stewardship of land (Davies 2019), about non-ownership claims (Krog 2015) and generational place-based belonging (Okoth-Ogendo 1975), and about how we might rethink our narrow – and failing - conceptions of what constitutes credible knowledge (Musila 2024). ​