It Was Those Who Were Among Me, But It Wasn't Me: Gendered Citizenship and Development in Postcolonial Kenya

Mary Kitur, a 75-year old rural Kenyan, recounted, “For anyone to have been a true citizen, they should not have been a squatter anywhere or lacking behind in development.” While there is a growing interest in how Africans thought about postcolonial citizenship through development, the scholarship has yet to fully examine this relationship through a gendered lens. Citizenship in decolonizing Kenya was built through the promise of state resources at independence, but these promises were not delivered universally or equitably. Thus, as conceptions of citizenship coalesced, they reflected the unequal distribution of development. Most notably, when the colonial government began land resettlement in the early 1960s, women were not eligible to purchase land. After independence, the Kenyan government reversed the policy of disqualifying women from land settlement, but little changed on the ground, as gendered discrimination remained embedded in the selection process. This paper argues that, as inequalities were (re)mapped onto gender, class, and ethnicity, the excluded began seeking new channels for development, and they also began expressing distinct ideas about citizenship, belonging, and rights to resources in the new nation-state. Women often articulated their exclusion in their definitions of postcolonial citizenship. Eunice Tele Maiyo said, for example, “It was those who were among me, but it wasn’t me.” Unequal access to land ownership shaped vastly different notions of early postcolonial citizenship, then. This paper explores how those excluded from land ownership and development programs came to believe that those exclusions were tantamount to exclusion from citizenship.