Miriam Badoux: A wind of change? Land and corruption as “national problems” in Kenya (online)

Mittwochskolloquium Ethnologie

Presentation by Miriam Badoux, PhD candidate in Anthropology, University of Basel

If you would like to join the Zoom session, please contact s.burri@clutterunibas.ch

In this presentation, I explore the rhythms of change and continuity in Kenya by looking at official and popular discourses around land and corruption, conceived here as two interrelated “national problems”. In doing so, I offer a broader reflection about the (trans)formation of social problems: When do people talk about or want change? When is continuity a problem? What makes a situation feel like stasis?

When I started my fieldwork in 2014, a wind of change seemed to blow through Kenya. The 2010 constitution had brought devolution reforms, a new National Land Policy had been drafted, and the National Land Commission had just been set up. Some of the people I talked to were enthusiastic, believing that many persistent problems would eventually be addressed. In contrast, other interlocutors warned me that “in Kenya it cannot change” because of the country’s “national amnesia”.

I argue in this presentation that this dichotomy between Kenya as a politically dynamic nation on the one hand, and Kenya as a forgetting nation caught in stasis on the other, is mirrored in discourses about land. While land has historically been portrayed as a symbol of heritage, freedom, and production, it has been increasingly associated to a stolen asset, revealing the greed and rot of Kenyan elites. In other words, land has become a metaphor for postcolonial disillusion through which Kenyan citizens articulate a popular critique of politics.

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