Age has represented in various ways a significant principle of social organization for the Mbeere of Kenya, one of the peoples of the North-eastern Bantu cluster, just as it has among numerous other peoples of East Africa. Traditionally a formal age organization comprised two groups: age-sets universally recruited from circumcised youth, and generation classes with constituent generation-sets. Informants' explanations of the age organization together with census and genealogical data clearly suggest that the recruitment principles and social processes within age-sets were independent of the recruitment principles and social processes characterizing generation classes and their generation-sets. The distinction between these two subsystems of the age organization is therefore more than an heuristic device.

The Mbeere of Central Kenya have recently been the focus of a programme of land adjudication and registration. Since the early 1960s when the Mbeere anticipated that they too would undergo the land reform process that had been applied elsewhere in Kenya, much of their attention has been riveted to the question of land tenure change. The new mode of holding land promises security of tenure through a registered title, significantly reduced land litigation, and rural development through agricultural loans for which titled land will stand as collateral. Ironically, the implementation of national land legislation has created great insecurity since it has set in motion an unprecedented amount of litigation.

The Mbeere live in the area east of Mount Kenya and south-west of the Tana River. Numbering just under 50,000 they are ethnographically much less well known than their related neighbours the Kikuyu, Embu, Meru, and Kamba. In this paper we first outline the social organization, then the system of land rights, continuing to describe the government's programme of land reform, concluding by assessing the probable consequences of changes in land tenure.