Inventing ground rules: inheritance of land among the Digo of Southern Kenya

Abstract

This paper will focus on the importance of inheritance of land among the Digo who live on the southern coast of Kenya. The Muslim Digo, one of nine peoples who make up the Mijikenda, express social continuity through concepts of matrilineal kinship and the continuation over time of matri-clans. Affirming and contesting kin relations through access to land, inheritance has been crucial in Digo society as an expression of this continuity. However, conversion to Islam, colonialism, and the independent state have affected this access to land, as well as power and authority in other aspects of Digo society, disrupting notions of kinship, law and identity with gendered implications. Inheritance of land remains especially important in rural Kenya, today because of an inability for most rural people to economically compete in land markets. Through the process of negotiations, settlements and practice of inheritance the Digo set out to challenge not only the authority of the colonial government, religious structures and the independent state, but what it means and has meant, within Digo society, to be Digo and Muslim. Thus, inheritance provides a site for 'symbolic as well as material struggles over land. As such, conflicts in inheritance can be read as attempts to co-opt legal structures in fights within and Without a community over defining community and belonging.