Women, men, property and change in Nandi District, Kenya

Abstract

This study examines the impact of colonialism and the cash economy on the Nandi, a patrilineal, semi-pastoral people of western Kenya, concentrating on changes in women's and men's economic roles and rights in property, and arguing that traditionally present sexual stratification increased due to colonial policy and commoditization of economic resources. In precolonial Nandi, land was plentiful and not permanently owned. The "house-property complex" dominated cattle inheritance. Each married woman's house held animals which could not be reallocated to the houses of her co-wives. Husbands and wives held joint rights in house-property cattle, husbands' rights of control predominating. Control of the most significant means of production by men was/is a Nandi tenet. Cattle a man acquired independently (e.g., by raiding) and did not allocate to a specific house were his personal property. Wives had greater rights in cattle given them at marriage by consanguineal kin than in those allocated by husbands as house-property, but could not control them autonomously. Wives and husbands jointly cultivated the staple crop and controlled separate shares. Three things, chickens, vegetables, and afternoon milk, are said to "belong ~ to" women. Commoditization means that husbands now control cash sufficient to acquire the means of production. Wives control small amounts for consumption only. Men therefore control cash-crops. Wives' maize and milk shares are for household consumption; husbands' are s~ld. Tea, the only pure commodity crop, belongs to men. Men frequently have non-farm income, which they alone control. Wives' workloads have increased to enable husbands to work for cash. Cattle purchased with a man's income are viewed as equivalent to raided cattle. Such cattle now make up a larger proportion of a herd. and sometimes replace house-property cattle. If a woman has a large personal income. her husband controls it. Some informants say a husband should control even chicken and'vegetable income, if it is significant. Y?ung men have begun to encroach on women's economic sphere. forming Vegetable Growing Cooperatives. Some young men denounce traditional gifts of ca t1e to brides during weddings. or holding of any separate property by wives, as un-Christian. Christian denominations also forbid brewing. the one lucrative enterprise of women. Land was partitioned and titles given to individual men under a colonial 1and-ref:> rmact. Women's economic position has thus deteriorated in a number of ways: the economic differential between the sexes has increased because men control vastly greater incomes than women; wives' rights in the bulk of the family herd have diminished; women's exclusive rights to traditionally female property have eroded; women have lost automatic access to land; women's workloads have increased more than men's. without an increase in t~e incomes thereby controlled. Women have (not fully consciously) perceived this deterioration and have reacted against it in w~ys documented in the dissertation. Chapter One provides an overview of these issues. Chapter Two eives historically focussed ethnographic background. Chapter Three is an ethnographic account of Nandi gender ro1es-. Ch~pter Four examines marriage and the husband/wife relationship, showing how widows, female husbands, and never-married women are free of many of wives' constraints. Chapter Five documents the hisotry of agricultural change in Kenya and Nandi during the colonial era, including processes by which profitable cash-crops became male-controlled, while female-controlled resources were not developed. Chapter Six focusses on the production process, including analysis of a nine-month study of time allocation. Chapter ~ Seven details'changes in women's and men's rights in property, including points outlined here. Chapter Eight sets Nandi sexual stratification in theoretical and cross-cultural perspective.