Contested ground: Colonial narratives and the Kenyan environment, 1920-1945

This article focuses on the relationship between the creation of colonial agricultural and environmental knowledge and the exercise of state power in Kenya during a 25 year period that saw growing state dependence on African agriculture and evidence of the environmental costs of policies to expand such production. First, in the context of the political crisis in Kenya, which centred on the alienation of land to white settler farmers, it argues that the language of 'betterment' and 'environmentalism' became parr of a bureaucratic apparatus. This, to follow James Ferguson,(1) both extended state control more deeply into the Kikuyu Reserves and attempted to depoliticise the issue of land and its distribution. Second, in order to expose the political interests embedded in this construction of stare knowledge, the article presents evidence to demonstrate that such knowledge was contested by some scientists within the colonial service. Third, it extends arguments about the reconfiguration of power between coloniser and colonised through the extension of state science by analysing the gendered dimensions of colonial agricultural discourses.