Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-68c7f8b79f-xc2tv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-12-25T17:02:42.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Contents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2025

Peter Lockwood
Affiliation:
University of Manchester

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Peasants to Paupers
Land, Class, and Kinship in Central Kenya
, pp. v - vii
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2026
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

Contents

  1. List of Figures

  2. Acknowledgements

  3. List of Key Persons

  4. Glossary of Keywords

  5. Introduction

    1. ‘I feel that I want to slap him’

    2. Land, Class, and Kinship in the Shadow of Nairobi

    3. Eroding the Moral Economy of Kinship

    4. A Labour Theory of Virtue

    5. A Neighbourhood Ethnography: Methodological and Conceptual Notes on Gender, Aspiration, Secrecy, and Distinction

    6. Chapter Outlines

  6. Ituura: A Neighbourhood beyond the Sprawl

  7. 1Ten Million Beggars: From Peasants to Paupers on the Edge of the City

    1. Ten Millionaires, Ten Million Beggars

    2. The Colonial Origins of Land Poverty

    3. Prosperity after Independence? The ‘Kenya Debate’

    4. New Ways to Prosperity?

    5. Cash-hunting at Land’s End

    6. A Labour Ethic

    7. Short-cuts to Consumption

    8. Conclusion

  8. 2Hopeless Consumptions: ‘Hanging on’ to the Future Amidst Destitution

    1. Stevoh on the Road

    2. Hopeless Consumptions

    3. Wayward Sons

    4. Anxieties of Continuity

    5. ‘We’re not going to last much longer’

    6. ‘Giving up on themselves’

    7. ‘Bold to make it’

    8. Claims of Distinction

    9. The End of ‘the takataka job’

    10. Conclusion

  9. 3Retaining Land, Claiming Morality: Debating Labour, Legacy, and Virtue

    1. Struggling for School Fees

    2. The Obligations of the Father and the Freedom to Do Otherwise

    3. To Leave a ‘Legacy’ Behind

    4. On Status and Control: Ways to Do Weekend Drinking

    5. Drinking the Land

    6. A Virtue of Necessity

    7. The Exhaustion of Patrilineal Virtue

    8. Conclusion

  10. 4Household Sustainers: Women’s Work in the Shadow of Male Poverty

    1. Mwaura’s Malaise

    2. Sociality in Ituura: First Impressions

    3. Catherine and Mama Nyambura: A Friendship

    4. Socio-economic Stratification and the Politics of Moral Obligation

    5. Envy, Avoidance, and Refusal

    6. Aspiration and the Atmosphere of Civility

    7. The Limits of Civility and the Life of a Hustler

    8. Conclusion

  11. 5‘Women Only Hustle for Themselves’: Men’s Mistrust and Women’s Lost Faith in Marriage

    1. Women’s Ambitions, Men’s Anxieties

    2. ‘Man, who is there to marry from around here? I mean, really?’

    3. Women’s Independence in the Early Twentieth Century

    4. ‘Kikuyu women’, ‘Kiambu women’

    5. Single with a Sponsor

    6. To Be Independent

    7. Conclusion

  12. 6Enclosing Property, Containing Envy: Inheritance, Gender, and Land Conflict in Urbanising Kiambu

    1. Land Disputes at Home

    2. Intimate Exclusions

    3. ‘A little investment’

    4. Gendered Jealousy

    5. Inheritance Denied

    6. Ugly Emotions and the Practice of Intimate Exclusion

    7. Reasons for Enclosure

    8. Anticipating Future Dispute

    9. Conclusion

  13. 7‘There is only starting at the bottom’: Downward Mobility and the Future

    1. Return to Ituura

    2. Struggling for ‘Stability’

    3. Broken Lines

    4. ‘No otherwise’

    5. Labour Theory and Downward Social Mobility

    6. Breaking the Patrilineal Contract

    7. Conclusion

  14. Conclusion

    1. Land, Class, Kinship, and the Future: Facing Downward Mobility in the ‘New Kenya’

    2. Kinship, Class, and Capital

    3. Labour Theory Revisited

    4. ‘A self-confused house’

  15. References

  16. Index

Accessibility standard: WCAG 2.2 AAA

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

The HTML of this book complies with version 2.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), offering more comprehensive accessibility measures for a broad range of users and attains the highest (AAA) level of WCAG compliance, optimising the user experience by meeting the most extensive accessibility guidelines.

Content Navigation

Table of contents navigation
Allows you to navigate directly to chapters, sections, or non‐text items through a linked table of contents, reducing the need for extensive scrolling.
Index navigation
Provides an interactive index, letting you go straight to where a term or subject appears in the text without manual searching.

Reading Order & Textual Equivalents

Single logical reading order
You will encounter all content (including footnotes, captions, etc.) in a clear, sequential flow, making it easier to follow with assistive tools like screen readers.
Short alternative textual descriptions
You get concise descriptions (for images, charts, or media clips), ensuring you do not miss crucial information when visual or audio elements are not accessible.
Full alternative textual descriptions
You get more than just short alt text: you have comprehensive text equivalents, transcripts, captions, or audio descriptions for substantial non‐text content, which is especially helpful for complex visuals or multimedia.
Visualised data also available as non-graphical data
You can access graphs or charts in a text or tabular format, so you are not excluded if you cannot process visual displays.

Visual Accessibility

Use of colour is not sole means of conveying information
You will still understand key ideas or prompts without relying solely on colour, which is especially helpful if you have colour vision deficiencies.
Use of high contrast between text and background colour
You benefit from high‐contrast text, which improves legibility if you have low vision or if you are reading in less‐than‐ideal lighting conditions.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Contents
  • Peter Lockwood, University of Manchester
  • Book: Peasants to Paupers
  • Online publication: 24 December 2025
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Contents
  • Peter Lockwood, University of Manchester
  • Book: Peasants to Paupers
  • Online publication: 24 December 2025
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Contents
  • Peter Lockwood, University of Manchester
  • Book: Peasants to Paupers
  • Online publication: 24 December 2025
Available formats
×