DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2021.v09i06.005

Pages: 231-239

Historically, in most African countries settlement schemes have always been established with the aim to settle displaced persons or to provide landless families and squatters with land. Conventionally, these schemes have been regarded as a means to increase agricultural production and to further rural development through optimal utilisation of physical and human resources. In Kenya, the transfer of expatriate-owned farms began a few years before Independence. In retrospect, the most important characteristic of the process was not the transfer from European to African ownership but the break-up of many large farms in smallholder units, although there was considerable variety in types of settlement. From the very beginning, the settlement policy of the government of Kenya had to serve political as well as development objectives. By 1930s squatter labour had become the main source of labour on settler farms and estates and as such servicing the colonial economy. As such, squatting was a response on the part of ordinary people to the changing structure of the colonial economy, when Africans became a subordinate part of a system of capitalist production. The administrative framework of ordinances and policies that structured rural-urban migration first impelled men to seek wage labor and gradually brought whole families to the cities. This study looks at theoretical and conceptual issues on land settlements in relations to squatter problem in Nzans-Nzoia.