Introduction

According to Kenya's Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) (2012), historical injustice means those harms and wrongs committed by individuals, groups, and institutions, including rulers and regime elite, against other individuals and groups who may be dead but whose descendants are alive. The descendants could be individuals or groups of all kinds deserving of recognition or acknowledgment for their suffering and should as such be compensated. The CRA goes further to state that the historical injustice narrative speaks of a society's deviation from or distortion of the normal living of a people. The idea of recognition of the suffering of victims of historical injustices is important in the process of redressing the wrongs. The recognition of the minority and marginalized in Kenya's Constitution is significant because it underscores the basic humanity and subjectivity of the victims denied by the perpetuation of inhumanity against them. Recognition is, of course, built into the act of restoring or compensating someone for the harm suffered (CRA 2012). This chapter focuses on this question of historical injustices with particular emphasis on the land question, which is perhaps the most controversial and most emotive issue in the country given how skewed land is distributed and considering its significance to the livelihoods of the majority of Kenyans and to the national political economy, from precolonial to contemporary times.

The notion of historical injustices in Kenya is rooted in the country's experience with colonialism and imperialism but extends into postcolonial governments. Different communities in Kenya had varied encounters with Arab imperialism and colonial occupation. At the Coast, for instance, Arabs alienated the Indigenous people from their land. For its part, the colonial government equally dispossessed Kenyans of their land in the process of creating the “White Highlands” as detailed in Chapter 2. During the colonial period, expropriation of land was achieved through various laws, ordinances, and promulgations, including the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 on land ownership and the Native Trust Bill of 1926 restricting Africans to Native Reserves (see Chapter 2). These realities raised the profile of land ownership and inequalities of the same. Historical injustices related to land continue to linger and continue to be a source of conflict.