Introduction: Land as exemplar

In the 1990s, the struggles of civil society for constitutional reforms and the demands of civil society for an end to kleptocratic land relations became deeply interconnected. Constitutional reform became at once a ‘struggle over the formulation of the norms, structures, and processes to govern the state’ (Mutua 2008: 117) and a struggle for ‘legal text and political culture’ (Modiri 2018: 295). In this chapter, I explore the part played by demands for land reform in the constitutional debate. I show how the constitutional debate and the land debate became intertwined and ran alongside one another. Part of the explanation is that as well as running alongside each other temporally (Harbeson 2012: 15), they also shared the same dramatis personae. Members of civil society campaigning on land issues were often also participants in wider anti-government and pro-democracy movements. They often had what Kenyans call ‘struggle credentials’ along more than one axis. For this reason, I think the place of the land struggle in the period of Kenya's new constitution-making was different to that occupied by ‘specialized cadres’ which Mutua (2008: 118) identified as ‘clusters of reformers … focused on single issues’. In the 1990s, as a result of the official reports and subaltern pressures that I describe in Chapter 3, those agitating for land reform succeeded in elevating land problems as typifying Kenya's national political culture and demonstrating the need for change. By trying to place land at the heart of demands for change, civil society offered it as an exemplar of the injustices that needed to be addressed.