Wednesday, June 12th 2013, By Eunice KamaaraI remember growing up in the village in rural Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s with a lot of nostalgia. It was great fun. Yet, I didn’t have as much fun as was available, thanks to my disciplinarian parents. Ironically, I will forever be grateful to them.
I still recall my mother’s words as if they were spoken only
this morning: “If you don’t work hard in school,” she would say wagging
her index finger on my face “you will get married right here in this
village to some bicycle owner and together you will be going to Kwa Rono
every day. Will you really manage that?” Kwa Rono referred to one of
the big coffee plantations about ten kilometres from my mother’s house.
It was owned by one Mr Rono (Could this have been a Kalenjin farmer in
the middle of Central Province?) I wonder if this family still owns the
farm. No matter. There were other big farms like kwa Mwathi and kwa
Kanoru.
Suffice to give some historical background. You will recall that the great Kenya war of Independence, the Mau Mau, was an agitation for land and freedom. Yet, one of the conditions for the British to grant Kenya independence was that major British
interests had to be protected. One of the agreements between the
colonial government and the independent government was that any coffee
and tea farms that the British
had established during the colonial period would never be subdivided
and the coffee or tea crops never uprooted. You can understand why – to
date, Britain remains one of the major exporters of processed coffee and
tea! So the independent government came up with policies to protect
these farms. I don’t know if one specific policy is still in place, but
it was criminal to uproot a coffee tree throughout the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s. So when small-scale farmers who had planted coffee in their
farms found the crops unprofitable, they could not uproot what they had
planted in their own farms. The best they could do was plant other crops
like potatoes and beans in between the coffee trees and pray that the
Chief did not get to know about it. But it is not the small-scale
farmers that I am interested in here so let us focus on the big farms.While large scale maize and wheat farms all across the country were subdivided and often sold to ordinary Kenyans through land buying companies, all large farms that had tea or coffee crops were sold either to companies or to extremely rich individuals like Rono, Mwathi, and Kanoru. Fifty years after independence, these farms remain intact. It would be a tolerable story to tell if all there is are large coffee and tea farms. The worst story is that thousands of Kenyan children especially from poor families have laboured over the last fifty years and continue to labour in the farms together with their families. I remember the many children that I grew up with who did not see the inside of a classroom or dropped out at some point to go to these farms to offer cheap labour in exchange for a pittance. There was work to do round the year. Some of the children had to do this to make ends meet for their families. But other children thought it was fun. So they ran away from school and from teachers who wielded canes that they did not hesitate to use when necessary. And the canes had multiple uses: Some teachers used them to scrap out jiggers (biological warfare was part of the British rule) out of children’s toes. I can tell you what fun there was in the farms because on one or two occasions, I found my way to kwa Rono rather than to school. What was exciting was that in the farms, small entrepreneurs would sell mandazi to the labourers. I have never tasted anything sweeter than those mandazi. “Macio mandathi! “ (There goes mandazi) shouted the traders as they went round the farms seeking customers. You are right. Most of their customers were run-away-children from school because these are the ones who were without parental control. The trader would give the mandazi on credit and wait to be paid at the end of the day when the labourers gathered together to get the day’s pay. Payment was determined by work done. On the day(s) that I went, we were paid according to the number of marebe (standard tins filled with coffee) one had pruned. Many children took not even one coin home as all the money they made was used to pay for already-eaten mandazi.
For love of mandazi, many children continue to skip school to go and work at Kwa Rono. The end result is that they end up getting married by fellow labourers across their parent’s ridge to continue the cycle of poverty and exploitation. The White Highlands remain.
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