Journal of Development Studies
ISSN: 0022-0388 (Print) 1743-9140 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjds20
The 'Good Wife': Struggles over Resources in the
Kenyan Horticultural Sector
C. Dolan
To cite this article: C. Dolan (2001) The 'Good Wife': Struggles over Resources in
the Kenyan Horticultural Sector, Journal of Development Studies, 37:3, 39-70, DOI:
10.1080/00220380412331321961
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220380412331321961
Published online: 29 Mar 2010.
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The ‘Good Wife’: Struggles over Resources
in the Kenyan Horticultural Sector
C AT H E R IN E S. DOLAN
This article examines how the contracting of French beans has
engendered conflict over rights, obligations and resources in Meru
District, Kenya. In response to pressure for agricultural
diversification and the expanding European market for ‘gourmet’
vegetables, horticulture, the historical domain of women, has been
rapidly intensified, commoditised and in many cases, appropriated
by men. Women have responded to the erosion of their rights in
ways that appear paradoxical – some undergoing Christian
conversion while others poison their husbands – practices that
simultaneously affirm and contest the prevailing norms of the
‘good wife’. In Meru, gender relations are key to the negotiation of
household resources and the potential for capital accumulation in
the export horticultural sector.
I. INTRODUCTION
Throughout Africa, the decline in revenues from principal export crops
(coffee, cotton, tea and tobacco), coupled with the widespread adoption of
fiscal austerity measures has hastened the call for agricultural
diversification into high-value, labour-intensive commodities.1 Today many
countries are achieving higher rates of agricultural growth by diversifying
their export trade into non-traditional exports (NTEs) with auspicious
market trends.
The boom in non-traditional exports since the 1980s is best captured by
the expanding fresh fruit and vegetable industry, which has integrated both
transnational agribusiness firms and smallholder farmers [Little and Dolan,
in press]. The World Bank has promoted export horticulture as a labourCatherine S. Dolan, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4
7TJ; email: e.dolan@uea.ac.uk. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of
Fulbright, the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council, and the
National Science Foundation (grant #240-2873A), which made this research possible. She also
thanks Cecile Jackson of the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Peter
Little of the University of Kentucky, and an anonymous referee for assistance with this work.
The Journal of Development Studies, Vol.37, No.3, February 2001, pp.39–70
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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intensive engine for economic growth that promises to revive Africa’s
stagnant agrarian sector through exceptional opportunities for employment
and self-employment [World Bank, 1995]. It is this employment potential,
specifically the utilisation of smallholders and women (who have been
central to the World Bank’s platform on poverty reduction), which has
raised the profile of the industry in both policy and academic circles.
Nevertheless, research on non-traditional exports has been largely restricted
to wage employment in Latin America [Collins, 1995; Thrupp, 1995;
Barrientos, 1997], with scant attention accorded to smallholder farmers in
Africa, where NTEs account for a growing share of women’s economic
activity.
In this article I hope to contribute an anthropological perspective to one
part of this debate – the implications of non-traditional exports for
intrahousehold land and labour relations. Through an examination of
contract farming of French beans in Meru District, Kenya, I explore how
women negotiate their economic well-being as export horticulture
insinuates itself into the household, and discuss what constitutes female
resistance in a context of inequitable resource distribution.
In Meru, the global market for fresh horticultural produce has had
profound implications for female farmers. Prior to the advent of French
beans, women’s horticultural property, conventionally very small plots, was
earmarked for local vegetables grown for household consumption and sale
at local markets. In response to pressure for agricultural diversification and
the expanding European market for ‘gourmet’ vegetables, horticulture, the
historical domain of women, has been rapidly intensified, commoditised
and in many cases, appropriated by men. While there is widespread
documentation of men’s appropriation of cash crops, there has been little
evidence of men entering export spheres conventionally regarded as female.
Yet as French beans became increasingly lucrative, men began to usurp
either the land allocated for, or the income derived from, export
horticultural production. As a result, female control has eroded, as tensions
resonate over male and female property rights and the labour contributions
to household subsistence.2
Women have responded to the erosion of their rights in ways that appear
paradoxical – some undergoing Christian conversion while others bewitch
and poison their husbands – practices that simultaneously affirm and contest
the prevailing norms of the ‘good wife’. Yet it is French bean income, rather
than land and labour, which has become the terrain of overt conflict between
husband and wife. Women have openly challenged neither the intensification
of the labour process nor the appropriation of their usufruct property for
French bean production. It is men’s refusal to compensate women for the
labour used in French bean cultivation that women overtly contest.
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However, this article argues that women’s acceptance of material
inequities (unequal distribution of land and labour) does not represent
complicity in their own subordination. While women may appear to accept
the gender ideology circulated in Christian discourse, thus retaining a public
image of the ‘good wife’, they have also diverted their labour to church
groups, and appropriated Christian norms of femininity in court cases to
promote their own interests. In Meru, opposition to male authority can
engender social exclusion, landlessness, and destitution, and women’s longterm well-being depends upon the stability of the household. Hence,
compliance needs to be read as a strategic defence in a landscape where
women have more to lose from the deterioration of social relationships than
they have to gain from overt conflict [Kabeer, 1999].
II. INTRAHOUSEHOLD RELATIONS
Within the last decade a substantial body of literature has challenged
conventional neoclassical models of unitary decision making and examined
how cultural factors shape intrahousehold resource allocation.
Anthropologists have shown how assumptions of a common utility function
[Becker, 1965, 1981]3 and comparative advantage eclipse the potential for
unequal exchange between members and the gendered separability of rights
and responsibilities characteristic of many African households. In
particular, they have documented how gender and kinship relations shape
labour obligations and resource distribution [Moore, 1988; Guyer,
1980,1988; Whitehead, 1981]. In contrast, economists have challenged the
efficiency of intrahousehold labour allocation, showing how the neglect of
intrahousehold resource flows has resulted in significant policy failures.4
Both have moved away from altruism to collective models,5 arguing that the
household is best conceptualised as a collective rather than unitary entity,
where members embody divergent production and consumption
preferences.
In particular, both Sen [1983, 1985, 1990] and Carter and Katz [1997]
have furthered understanding of household decision making by
incorporating cultural dynamics and gender relations into models of
household economics. Sen’s model of ‘cooperative conflict’views the
household as a site of independent preferences that are articulated through
both cooperation and conflict. An individual’s bargaining power is
conditioned by several factors (including cultural norms regarding resource
distribution) but primarily rests in the strength of their fall-back position
(the options that are available if co-operation were to cease to exist and/or
individuals withdrew form the household). Carter and Katz push the
boundaries of household resource allocation further by integrating the
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concept of patriarchy, the ‘complex of attitudes, mores, and opportunities
exogenous to the household’ [1997: 103] into models of decision making.
They argue that intrahoushold resource flows are mediated through the
conjugal contract [Whitehead, 1981], which is shaped by voice (the degree
to which individuals can bargain over resource distribution) and exit (the
alternative options members have to participate in the household economy).
Hence, a strongly patriarchal structure is characterised by an absence of
voice or the socially acknowledged right to renegotiate the rules of the
conjugal contract.
The strength of both models lies in viewing gender asymmetry as a
product of structural constraint and in placing power relations central to
analyses of household decision making. Yet the absence of analytical space
awarded to agency and social identity inhibits a full understanding of
intrahousehold relationships. Both the conjugal contract and co-operativeconflict models fail to capture how extrahousehold relations implicate
resource flows and thus obscure how kinship, lineage, and social
institutions condition women’s rights to land, labour and income. As the
Meru case illustrates, women’s obligations are not only defined by their
husbands but also encompassed in, and reinforced through, the gender
ideologies promoted by Christianity and the State.
Holloway’s [1984] notion of ‘investment’ offers theoretical insights into
how the relationship between individual subjectivity and hegemonic
discourses can inform the contradictory practices engendered by the
introduction of French beans. She suggests that an individual’s incentive to
adopt a gender-specific position is embedded in the degree of ‘investment’
or payoff that a certain subject position promises, which may run contrary
to other feelings. In the Meru case this investment results from the tangible
social and economic rewards associated with the subject position of the
‘good wife’. Yet as both Moore [1994] and Kabeer [1999] argue, it is
misguided to interpret the process of adopting a particular subject position
as simply a matter of choice as some positions encompass considerable
reward while others can result in sanctions and even ostracism from the
community. Rohatynskyj [1988] has documented how wives who do not
obey the wishes of their husbands risk being labelled as witches. Similarly,
Schroeder [1996: 72] has shown how women who continue to work in their
own market gardens are ‘demonized … as bad wives’. Hence, while
economic factors condition women’s options, they do not wholly determine
them. In Meru, the dominant gender discourses of community, state and
church are pivotal in shaping the negotiation of household resources and the
potential for capital accumulation in the export horticultural sector.
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III. HORTICULTURAL EXPORTS AND CO N TRA C T FA R MI N G
In the last two decades the world has witnessed a global restructuring of
agriculture as western nations shift away from staple foods to high-income
commodities and African nations respond by developing increasingly
specialised food systems. Until the 1980s food consumption patterns of
Western populations were limited by the availability of fresh produce, yet
within the last decade horticultural exports have grown into one of the most
dynamic sectors in international trade. Developing countries account for
over one-third of high value food production, approximately twice the value
of Third World exports of coffee, cotton, cocoa, sugar, tea and tobacco.
Between 1976 and 1988, sub-Saharan Africa’s horticultural exports
doubled, and by the 1990s trailed only coffee and cocoa in aggregate export
earnings [Watts, 1994]. Kenya’s exports of vegetables have increased in
value by 78 per cent since the beginning of the decade, [Fresh Produce
Journal, 1999] and have surpassed coffee – historically Kenya’s most
prosperous export crop – as the nation’s second major source of foreign
exchange in the agricultural sector [Mulandi, 1998; Kenya Economic
Survey, 1994]. Current figures estimate that approximately two million
people are employed in the Kenyan export horticulture sector, with at least
half of the trade volume derived from over 15,000 small-scale farms
[Mulandi, 1998; World Bank, 1995].
Contract Farming
Kenya has been widely heralded as a model of smallholder farming in
Africa and smallholders have been pivotal to economic development in
Meru. One of the principal ways that smallholders have been integrated into
horticultural production is through the institution of contract farming.
Contract farming (analogous to flexible outsourcing in manufacturing) is a
form of vertical coordination between export firms and growers, who range
from smallholder farmers to large-scale farms. The institution has been a
feature of agricultural development since the mid twentieth century. The
Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), for example, was at the
forefront in the establishment of contracting schemes in Kenya, Malaysia
and Thailand during the 1950s, providing financing and management for
traditional export crops such as palm oil, rubber and cocoa [Little and Watts,
1994]. During the 1980s, contracting was forcefully promoted by the
USAID and World Bank as a strategy to resuscitate waning export sectors
through the ‘marriage’ of smallholder development and private sector
growth.6 It has been widely adopted for non-traditional exports, where
market uncertainty, land constraints and the vagaries of state policies
frequently inhibit vertical integration.
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Contract farming allows firms to exert control over the production
process without the burden of owning or operating farms [Key and
Rungsten, 1999]. Contractors do not have to invest in land, hire and manage
labour, or tolerate crop sabotage, common impediments of plantation
agriculture, and are thus able to transfer production risks and costs,
particularly for land and labour, on to farmers. In Kenya, most of the formal
contracting schemes have been undertaken for commodities that have
technical and economic characteristics (significant perishability, high value
per volume and heterogeneous in quality) that generate high levels of risk
for producers, such as French beans.7
Institutional Arrangements
Contract farming is expressed in myriad forms, integrating both individual
smallholders and large farmers in the production process. In Meru, the
contracting of horticultural exports has been undertaken by the larger firms
in the industry that possess the technical capacity and financial resources to
coalesce numbers of dispersed farmers.8 Three companies integrate over
600 small-scale farmers into contractual arrangements. Firms have
contracted for an array of horticultural commodities since the inception of
contracting in the area, although by the mid-1990s only French beans,
mangetout and bobby beans were purchased through contract arrangements.
As Table 1 indicates, the benefits of contracting for smallholders lie in
the opportunity to secure a price guarantee and the provision of inputs.
Growers are remunerated based on the unit of produce harvested, regardless
of labour input. Over 90 per cent of contracts in Meru are issued to male
household members, who control labour allocation and receive payment
from horticultural firms. In contrast to tea and tobacco,9 horticultural firms
do not contract with men because they believe that men are the farmers. In
fact, the opposite is true. Instead their preference for contracting with men
is driven by their need for security over land and labour. By awarding
contracts to landowners, firms protect themselves from the appropriation of
produce in struggles over land rights. This effectively excludes women,
whose rights to land are based on usufruct rather than statutory rights. In
addition, horticultural firms display a marked preference to contract with
households that have large endowments of household labour and depend
upon ideologies of patriarchal control to capitalise on the process of family
self-exploitation.10 By issuing contracts to male household heads, firms are
able to retain a footing in an industry that is characterised by both high
labour and land intensity [Collins, 1995]. As I will show, issuing contracts
to male heads of households has been one of the primary catalysts for
gender conflict.
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TABL E 1
NAT URE OF HORT I CULT URA L C O N TR A C TS
Type of Contract
Provision of inputs (seeds, fertiliser)
Pre-agreed price
Cash advance
Written contract
Per cent
35
32
29
4
Source: Baseline Household Survey, 1994.
Contract Farming and the Labour Process
While horticultural exports have been touted as a vehicle to resuscitate
agrarian economies, this recommendation ignores the labour hours required
for a household to realise profits. The aesthetic quality standards that most
horticultural commodities must meet – texture, fragrance, colour, weight,
and shape – render them resistant to mechanisation and are highly labour
intensive. Kenya’s most widely grown export crops – snow peas (mange
tout) and French beans – are among the most exigent, demanding 600 and
500 labour days per hectare respectively [Carter et al., 1996; Little, 1994].
Horticultural crops are fragile, necessitating careful husbandry and close
scrutiny of the timing of cultivation and post-harvest activities. This renders
them responsive to family labour, which is both low-cost and selfsupervising [Collins, 1995]. Research on contract farming has pointed to the
obstacles that large agricultural units confront when ‘interactive labour’ is
required. Contracting firms surmount these obstacles by harnessing the
labour of autonomous smallholders, consequently ‘deepening the division
of labour external to the firms’ while ‘reintegrating control’ [ibid., 1105;
Clapp, 1994; Watts, 1994].11 As a result, the contract harnesses the labour of
an entire family to global agroindustrial production, permeating the arena of
social reproduction through the appropriation of gender and filial
responsibility [Collins, 1991].
Contracting operates as a buffer for horticultural firms, enabling them to
accommodate vacillations in supply and demand by adjusting the numbers
of the workforce. Yet as Collins [1995] has pointed out in the case of Brazil,
while sectors of agriculture are experiencing pressure to increase the
flexibility of their labour supply, such pressures do not demand
homogenous workers. Instead flexibility depends on the attainment of
specific attributes of workers. Women are at the core of this trend for
flexibility. As transnational corporations reconstitute the production process
they often manipulate extant gender ideologies and in so doing create a new
division of labour in which women are situated in a subordinate position.
The feminisation of the horticultural work force is realised in the ascription
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of socially constructed gender traits to differentiate tasks and workers.
Much like the textile and electronic industries that promote the natural
fitness, dexterity, and docility of women as ideal characteristics of the
assembly line [Elson and Pearson, 1981], the discourse of agribusiness
imbues women with qualities sanguine to production goals, and correlates
certain crops to gender identity. As the chairman of Kenya Horticultural
Exporters claimed, ‘Women are better bean pickers. Their hands are smaller
and they have more patience for the work than the men’ (personal
communication). Horticultural firms ‘naturalise’ gender inequities by
legitimating certain characteristics as intrinsic to a woman’s gender identity,
and thus rationalise their preference for women workers.
IV. FIELD SITE: MERU DISTRICT, KEN YA
This study is based on fieldwork conducted in Meru District from 1994 to
1996 examining 113 male contract farmers and 94 spouses cultivating
French beans, and two supplementary visits to Kenya in 1998. The research
took place in Abothuguchi West, Central Imenti Division, one of Kenya’s
most productive agricultural areas and the most densely populated in Meru
District, with approximately 420 people per square kilometre Agrarian
development occurred much earlier in this area than in other parts of the
District due to its dynamic agricultural productivity; approximately 95 per
cent of the labour force are engaged in the agricultural sector on
smallholdings of less than one acre.
In Meru individuals pursue diverse livelihood strategies comprised of
various income generating activities. In general, men engage in wage labour
(30 per cent), sell agricultural commodities, including milk (38 per cent),
and own dukas (small shops) (32 per cent) in the Division. Women are
primarily involved in the local vegetable trade (53 per cent), chicken rearing
(11 per cent), managing a duka (11 per cent), working as a tailor or a
hairdresser (13 per cent), and performing agricultural wage labour (12 per
cent). The average household income of contract farmers was 25,021 Ksh,12
of which men earn 67 per cent and women 33 per cent. The gender disparity
in income generation emerges from the high percentage of women who had
no income outside the sale of agricultural products (including milk), which
constitutes 71 per cent of household income. Entrepreneurial activities and
remittances provide households with 29 per cent of this income, of which
men receive 5,080 Ksh in contrast to women’s 2,176. The bulk of women’s
non-farm income is derived from remittances received from family
members living outside the area, an income stream that is not as consistent
or as lucrative as business ventures. The principal sources of remuneration
for men – coffee, tea, French beans and the sale of livestock and milk – are
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47
far more profitable than the sale of food crops. Furthermore, whereas men
uniformly sell their total coffee and tea harvest, women only sell 8–14 per
cent of food crops as the bulk of food crops are consumed within the
household. Even where women receive income from French beans, the
consistency of these sales is far more volatile than the sale of coffee and tea
and is constrained by womenen’s responsibility for food production.
Each farm supports a diverse crop pattern. The principal food crops
grown in the District are maize, beans, bananas, millet and Irish potatoes;
maize, millet and beans are the staple food of the Meru people. The steep
terrain of the area necessitates intensive farming methods characterised by
slope terracing, close planting, careful weeding and an intricate system of
crop rotation. Rural families intensify their own labour rather than raise
their technological level and smallholders generally limit fertiliser and
pesticide use to cash crops. Most farmers utilise a hoe (jembe) and a long
knife shaped like a machete (panga) for all cultivation tasks.
While Meru was less strategically central to the colonial government
than other regions of Kenya, the penetration of international capital into
rural areas has been equally as profound. Coffee was the keystone of cashcrop development and Meru was the first district in Kenya where Africans
were permitted to cultivate coffee during the 1930s [Bernard, 1972]. By the
1960s the District was heralded as Kenya’s leading coffee producer. Tea was
introduced to Meru in 1960 and thrives in the high altitudes of the District.
While tea was initially far less significant than coffee, by the 1990s it was
bringing the highest incomes to farmers in the District.
Historically agriculture in Meru was characterised by a strict sex
segregation of task and crops. Men were responsible for land clearing and
ploughing and women were responsible for sowing, planting, weeding and
harvesting. The cultivation of yams, bananas, sugar cane, and tobacco was
the domain of the men and sorghum, sweet potatoes, beans and arrowroots
the domain of women [Laughton, 1938]. The introduction of commercial
farming during the colonial period disrupted this division of labour. By the
1960s women were significantly involved in the production of both coffee
and tea. In particular, the weeding, mulching and picking of coffee
dramatically increased women’s labour burden, and women were forced to
rely on reciprocal labour groups to fufill their labour obligations. Yet in
contrast to export horticulture, neither coffee nor tea were ever
conceptualised as female crops, despite women’s contribution to
production.
In the mid-1980s Nairobi-based companies introduced export
horticulture to the District, which initially replaced coffee and tea as the
principal form of agrarian intensification. By the 1990s, Meru District had
attracted over 25 horticultural export firms to contract with smallholder
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farmers on plots of less than one acre and became one of the most successful
areas in Kenya to secure both foreign and local capital.
V. D I V I S I O N O F L A B O U R I N H O RT I C U LT U R A L C O N T R A C T I N G
Since Esther Boserup’s [1970] pathbreaking study on women’s roles in
African farming systems, the sexual division of labour has been the focus of
significant academic scholarship.13 Recent studies have shown that the
gender dimension of the labour process is critical to the viability of agrarian
systems and a key factor determining access to resources and bargaining
power within households.14 How women’s labour power is controlled and
negotiated over within the household is essential for understanding the
dynamics of horticultural exporting and illuminates dimensions of the
contract farming process that are neglected by a narrow focus on
agricultural production.
Agricultural Labour
In Meru, the labour process operationalises gender ideologies and reflects
the culturally constructed tasks of men and women. In particular, women’s
participation in, and the benefits they derive from, agricultural production
are shaped by the agrarian decisions made by the household head (or in the
case of a deceased, a brother-in-law or son). The status of women in Meru
is intimately linked to their labour, which includes domestic labour but also
responsibility for the cultivation and preparation of food. Women consider
farming to be part of what makes them ‘a good woman’. The linkage
between the construction of ‘female’ and fruitful agricultural production is
overt in Meru society.
Cultural norms, combined with the seasonality of agricultural
production result in an asymmetrical division of labour, with the average
amount of time allocated to agricultural activities greater for women than
for men (see Table 2).15 Women spend over 300 days annually in agricultural
production with variation according to seasonal labour requirements.
Agricultural tasks performed by women are typically ongoing tasks that last
much of the year and require daily attention. A portion of a woman’s day is
consistently allocated to the cultivation and processing of food crops (for
which they are solely responsible), yet the amount of hours ebb and flow
depending on the demands of export crops.
Men’s labour is more difficult to measure than women’s because it
differs substantially with age and status and rarely reflects sustained task
performance throughout a month. Men also tend to perform farm labour
sporadically and in morning hours, freeing them for business transactions
and socialisation during the afternoon and evening hours. Following the
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TABL E 2
P E R C ENT OF TOTAL AGRI CULT URAL L A BO U R PER FO R MED B Y G EN D ER
Activity
Buying Seeds
Nursery management
Clearing/field prep
Planting
Pruning
Manure Application
Fertiliser Application
Pesticide Application1
Watering
Weeding
Tabling tea
Picking Coffee
Picking Tea
Picking French Beans
Harvesting Vegetables
Grading
Sorting
Packing
Propping Mangetout
Transport produce to market
Livestock Activities
Female
household
members
Male
household
members
Female
wage
labour
Male
wage
labour
17.2
60.0
20.3
82.3
28.2
71.4
55.3
70.0
55.8
88.4
43.5
45.0
46.0
62.1
70.0
48.2
47.7
47.2
72.2
43.9
45.2
82.8
33.3
76.2
17.7
71.8
23.8
39.6
30.0
37.5
15.8
52.2
53.9
49.5
33.4
25.0
47.6
50.9
49.4
27.8
52.6
48.8
0.0
6.7
1.2
2.4
0.0
0.0
1.4
0.0
2.3
2.3
4.3
0.5
0.9
2.1
0.0
1.8
0.0
1.7
0.0
0.9
0.0
0.0
0.0
2.3
3.6
0.0
4.8
3.6
0.0
4.5
3.5
0.0
0.5
3.6
2.4
5.0
2.4
1.4
1.7
0.0
2.7
6.0
Note: 1. Horticultural crops demand intensive spraying of fertilisers and pesticides. An
individual who has approximately three acres under horticultural crops (the average
within the Division) can spend nearly three to six hours spraying, which limits the
amount of time available for other agricultural activities.
Source: Bi-weekly Agricultural Production Survey, 1994–95.
initial land clearance and preparation phase, men do not allocate any labour
to food production and only small amounts to French bean cultivation
(primarily picking and grading). Land clearance can be accomplished in a
relatively short period of time in contrast to the continuous and exacting
tasks of planting, weeding, and the lion’s share of picking performed by
women.
Nevertheless, the dichotomy between men’s cash-crops/women’s
subsistence crops fails to capture the sequencing of activities and
oversimplifies the sexual division of labour in Abothuguchi West. In this
area the household economy depends upon the integration of male and
female labour [Guyer, 1995; Whitehead, 1985]. While men may clear fields
for women’s food crops, women are also intricately engaged in tasks such
as weeding, watering and harvesting men’s crops. Some of these tasks
(particularly planting, weeding and picking) are sex-typed in a relatively
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inflexible manner, whereas others (fertilising, watering) exhibit a cross
gender complementarity of tasks. In general, sex specificity of tasks is far
more fixed for men than for women. Despite this, gender-segregated
patterns are waning and young men can be seen harvesting and grading
French beans, activities that until recently were typically associated with
women.
The introduction of French beans has restructured the household
economy, altering women’s time allocation and reshaping the form of their
productive activities. As noted, the viability of contract horticulture rests on
the application of women’s unpaid labour to French bean production. This
intensification of the labour process has been internalised within the farm
household, spawning new work regimens and production schedules. The
labour utilised for French bean production is predominantly female (see
Table 2), with women overridingly responsible for the labour-intensive
tasks of planting, weeding and picking. These tasks demand long hours and
labour intense segregation (see Table 3). While over 27 per cent of men
participate in French bean labour, for the most part they are engaged in
activities with shorter labour intervals such as field clearing and fertiliser
application, which hold less significance for the quality of the final product.
TABL E 3
AV E R A G E A M O U N T O F L A B O U R H O U R S R E Q U I R E D P E R M O N T H
– F RE NCH BEA N S
Field Planting Fertiliser/ Watering Weeding Picking Grading/ Staying Total
prep
pesticide
Packing
at
applicaDelivery
tion
Centre
Oct.–94
male
female
Nov.–94 male
female
Dec.–94 male
female
Jan.–95 male
female
Feb.–95 male
female
Mar–95 male
female
April–95 male
female
30.0
10.0
12.4
Season
Average
16.4
12.2
male
female
6.4
24.4
17.2
6.6
9.0
10.4
22.4
4.1
6.7
5.8
18.5
7.4
17.7
4.9
8.3
17.2
10.3
25.2
7.2
12.1
14.0
8.4
19.4
6.2
20.3
30.4
6.4
9.3
7.3
12.4
18.6
39.2
5.3
12.8
10.7
20.1
8.6
6.1
7.4
16.2
6.9
12.7
Source: Bi-weekly Agricultural Production Survey, 1994–95.
8.6
12.8
23.2
37.6
16.1
26.3
5.4
11.7
24.8
35.6
18.8
29.3
4.4
7.2
15.5
23.7
9.2
14.4
3.1
5.6
12.3
29.2
11.4
17.2
12.6
4.3
18.6
11.4
15.3
9.3
9.2
4.9
19.2
11.8
12.2
8.6
16.2
25.6
9.3
16.2
14.5
8.4
43.0
49.6
48.4
114.6
71.7
109.1
80.0
114.8
37.2
114.9
64.9
107.9
42.4
61.2
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Seasonality
In Meru, the sensitivity of agricultural production to climatic variation means
that struggles over land, labour, and income are invariably embodied in
seasonality.16 The regimen, timing and labour intensity of French beans
conflicts with the labour requirements of both food and cash crops. Women,
who had developed strategies to accommodate the pattern of seasonality
associated with coffee and tea production, have had to readjust labour utilisation
with the expansion of export horticulture. As a result, their labour contributions
have intensified and become vital during periods of seasonal stress.
The seasonal cycles of coffee and French beans interface in ways that
leave both men and women’s labour constrained. While coffee engenders
fewer labour fluctuations then either tea or export horticulture, it is marked
by two salient labour peaks. These occur during the semi-annual coffee
harvests (the first season extending from May through August and the
second from the culmination of the short rains in December through
February). It is the latter coffee harvest that exerts pressure on male labour
since it overlaps with the period required for French bean land clearing and
field preparation. French beans are planted from the end of August until 15
March, and require male labour during August and January, the months in
which men need to harvest coffee for sale on the world market. This conflict
is particularly salient for young unmarried men (without land of their own),
who are significantly involved in French bean harvesting during December,
the onset of the European winter market, and face time constraints due to
coffee harvesting.17 Tea, the other ‘male’ export crop,18 does not impinge
upon male labour requirements for French beans, since tea is harvested year
round and is tabled during the months of September and October.
Yet it is women who have been most affected by the exigencies of
French bean production. The convergence of the production cycles of
French beans, coffee and tea have had a profound effect on the rhythm of
women’s food crop cultivation, which has become increasingly secondary
in both land and labour allocation. The diversion of female labour from food
to French bean production occurs for two reasons. First, the amount of
labour that women allocate to food crops directly affects the amount that is
available for French beans. Because men receive the majority of French
bean income (through their appropriation), they resent the withdrawal of
female labour from export horticulture. While they view food crops as
necessary for subsistence, they consider the sale of food crops on the local
market as secondary to export horticulture.19 Second, in households where
women are able to retain some income from French beans, they have a
greater incentive to divert their labour from food to export crop production.
Both situations foster tensions over the boundaries of men’s and women’s
contribution to household subsistence.
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Women experience severe labour shortages during the European off
season (December until March) due to the intersection of the production
cycles of coffee, tea and French beans, all of which are vital to the well being
of the household economy. Tea tabling directly conflicts with the two months
– October and November – that are critical to the sustainability of the French
bean crop. During this period women must devote careful attention to the
weeding, watering and fertilisation of the young crop, which also means that
they decrease the labour directed to food crops. The principal food crops –
millet, sorghum, maize and peas as – are planted at the onset of the second
rainy season during October. Moreover, the overlap between the cropping
cycles of coffee and French beans is particularly onerous for women. The
second coffee harvest crosscuts the important French bean harvest in
December, which is vital for the holiday season in Europe.
Women from poor households have greater difficulty coping with the
convergence of inter-crop seasonal demands due to the absence of economic
resources to hire labour during intervals of high labour requirements or to
borrow funds to withstand emergencies. Because poorer households receive
a greater proportion of their income from labour rather than capital, they are
more vulnerable to the seasonal conflicts between export horticulture and
other crops.
Labour Shortages
In Meru, labour shortages are not the outcome of male out-migration but
rather the pressure of these interlocking crop systems. As Table 4 indicates,
the activities with the greatest labour shortages correspond with tasks that
are predominantly female-dominated such as planting, weeding, picking
and grading of French beans. Over 57 per cent of interviewees’ experience
chronic labour shortages of which 67 per cent are women and 33 per cent
are men. The months in which women experience the greatest labour
shortages (September–March) are those of French bean production.
Despite the labour requirements of French beans, there has been no
adjustment of labour obligations between husband and wife. In fact, men
have contributed less labour to their wives’ plots and women have been
compelled to hire labour to perform tasks that were formerly performed by
their husbands. In contrast to other parts of Kenya, women’s groups are not
widely hired to perform agricultural labour in Abothuguchi West.20
However, women do work in reciprocal labour groups (ranging from 5 to 15
members) during peak labour periods, which are essential for mitigating
seasonal bottlenecks.
Nevertheless, because constraints on female labour can undermine both
food and export crop production, labour is often hired to mitigate seasonal
shortfalls. The majority of labour is hired between November and January
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TABL E 4
A G R I CULT URAL TAS KS WI T H T HE GR EATEST LA BO U R SH O RTA G ES
Agricultural Tasks
Picking French Beans
Picking Tea
Pruning
Clearing/Field Preparation
Picking Coffee
Tabling Tea
Grading
Weeding
Planting
Other
Men
Women
27
25
12
16
12
3
1
3
1
3
31
13
3
2
5
3
5
19
10
6
Source: Bi-weekly Agricultural Production Survey, 1994–95.
as a result of the conflicts between coffee and French bean production.
Fifty-two per cent of men in contrast to 39 per cent of women hired people
to work on horticultural crops.21 In both cases the hired labour was highly
gendered with women constituting over 75 per cent of those employed to
plant, weed, pick and grade (primarily female-defined tasks). Wage labour
is hired on a daily basis and tends to be comprised of land-poor or landless
people, who lack alternative income generating opportunities. While wages
paid for hired labour were consistent across genders (90 Ksh per day with
lunch provided), men were chiefly recruited for land clearing and field
preparation, which is less labour-intensive than the tasks performed by
women. More significantly, the hired male labour was generally employed
by men, who had the financial resources to hire labour for tasks that would
otherwise be their responsibility.
Domestic Labour
Besides meeting the demands of export crop production, women in Meru
are also expected to meet subsistence needs and augment household income
through the sale of local crops. In Meru, the foremost constraint on women’s
productivity is the amount of time that they invest in daily maintenance
tasks, which averages eight hours per day.22 In contrast, men spend an
average of two hours on household maintenance, which liberates
considerable time for leisure and nonfarm income generating activities.
Women’s household work is exceptionally time consuming – cooking alone
involves hours of preparation each day. Maize must be ground and sifted,
millet pounded, rice sifted for small stones and beans soaked and cooked for
several hours. By the time a man wakes at 7:30 his wife has spent two hours
chopping firewood for cooking, preparing chai for breakfast, washing the
dinner dishes and sending the children off to school.
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While the presence of older children, especially daughters, relieves
women of some household work, a large proportion of children is sent to
school outside the area. This reduces the labour pool available to women,
who often draw on their children to ease the burden of their domestic duties.
The result is that women experience severe time conflicts between
agricultural production and domestic reproduction. And, in contrast to men
who are able to intensify their labour, women have an absence of surplus
labour to direct to supplementary productive activities.
In conclusion, the introduction of French beans has invariably
intensified women’s work, resulting in longer working hours, lower
economic returns and ultimately lower-quality crop production. By 1998,
four of the largest exporters in Kenya decreased the proportion of product
sourced from smallholder to 18 per cent, and none of that came from Meru.
While quality is only one of several factors that has led to the withdrawal
from smallholder production, it is by far the most significant.23 The
deterioration in quality is linked to women’s lack of incentives to apply
adequate inputs (both chemicals and labour) to a crop from which they will
receive few rewards. As other studies of contract agriculture have shown
[von Bülow and Sørensen, 1988; Carney and Watts, 1990], as long as
women’s labour is the fundamental labour source utilised for production
then the precondition for success rests on sound cooperation between
husband and wife.
In the next section I examine another vitally contested resource in Meru
– land – which is key to understanding how women and men negotiate
labour obligations and resource allocation within the household [Whitehead,
1984]. I highlight how land has become insinuated into the conjugal arena,
and challenge the notion of female compliance in an inequitous division of
labour.
VI. LAND AND SOCIAL NORMS
In Meru, as in other parts of Kenya, the introduction of land demarcation
under the Swynnerton Plan radically altered the indigenous system of
property rights.24 Prior to the Sywnnerton Plan, the clan (mwiriga) allocated
land to male household heads, who were responsible for distributing a
portion to their wives and dependant sons for farming and livestock grazing
[Meru District, 1956]. The Swynnerton Plan initiated a process of
adjudicating clan and individual rights, consolidating landholdings, and
titling property.
This adjudication was conducted on the grounds that power to control
was equivalent to ‘ownership’ as conceived in Western legal systems, an
interpretation that has resulted in the transfer of land almost exclusively to
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men. Despite laws that technically permit women to own land, nearly all
land remains registered in the names of men.25 Land titling typically favours
senior rights holders, discriminating against subordinate rights-holders such
as women and children. Furthermore, while the current legal system
provides for the formal possibility of land inheritance by widows, the
historical record suggests that women do not inherit land, and actual legal
judgements defer to ‘traditional’ customs that deny a woman’s right to land
[Nzomo, 1993]. As one Kenyan man claimed,
A man who allows his title deed to be in the name of his wife is
putting a rope around his neck … [such a man] will risk his piece of
land being auctioned … you will have no security, nothing you can
call yours and the wife will now be the man in the family … Women
don’t have a strong heart and all that a man needs to do is to flatter
them and all their thinking goes out of their heads together with the
title deeds [Kabira and Njau, 1985: 90].
Women’s rights are either enveloped within rights legally imputed to
male relatives or they are part of an evolving body of uncoded, customary
law, both of which elide provisions for women’s security [Mackenzie,
1993]. While women possess rights of usufruct, these rights are based on
their status as wives, mothers, and daughters. Women inherit neither land
nor livestock from their fathers but instead attain use rights in garden plots
from their husbands upon marriage [Aspaas, 1998]. Prior to the introduction
of French beans, these gardens were earmarked for local vegetables grown
for household consumption and sale at local markets. Most importantly,
women had the right to dispose of income from crops grown on these fields.
It is these fields that have become a vitally contested resource since the
inception of export horticultural production.
As Table 5 shows, the development of private land markets has remained
relatively immature in Meru, with more people inheriting, rather than
purchasing, land on the open market. While Meru is a region of exceptional
agricultural commoditisation (surpassing even the Kikuyu areas in early
coffee production), the population has not responded to land adjudication
measures in the manner in which the Swynnerton Plan intended. As a result,
access to land is still defined less by title deed than by relations of descent,
affinity and patronage. In particular, customary law remains a key
determinant to women’s rights to property. Yet in contrast to regions in
western Kenya, the system of codifying customary law in Meru has
crystallised space for men, not women, to manoeuvre cultural channels
[Mutongi 1995]. By invoking and reinterpreting ‘custom’ men are
essentially using the notion of ‘tradition’ to exercise control over women’s
property and manipulate land tenure distinctions to their advantage.26
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TABL E 5
H O W A C C E S S TO L A N D I S A C Q U I R E D B Y G E N D E R
Means of Access/Ownership
Men (%)
Women (%)
Inherited from Father
Purchased by Self
Rented from Private Individual
Access from Father-in-law
Access from Spouse
Access from Brother-in-law
Access from Son
85
5
10
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
62
26
7
5
Source: Baseline Household Survey, 1994–95.
The following narrative culled from a debate on the Law of Succession27
[Kenya, 1972) brings into relief how ‘custom’ undermines women’s rights
to property.
Attorney General: ‘Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, if I might use the
honourable Member as an example – if he was married and he died
and left his wife and he was living comfortably in a house with
electricity and as soon as he dies his brothers from Homa Bay come
and demand that the house belongs to them and not the wife and
whether the wife wants it or not she will have to go to Homa Bay lock,
stock and barrel. I would, therefore, encourage honourable Members
to make wills because you ought to know, during your life time, how
your property is going to be distributed when you are dead.’
Because agriculture is the backbone of the Meru economy, land rights
are critical to the well being of the household. In this mixed economy food
crops, cash-crops and farm animals all compete for the same land and a
primary impediment to French bean production is the shortage of suitable
land in the District. Fragmentation of district land has become increasingly
prevalent, buttressed by high population growth and normative inheritance
practices that compel each man to divide his property among his sons. As
the birth rate continues to soar, there is no longer space available for
continued subdivision and fathers have been searching for land in other
areas, which are less agriculturally productive, to ensure the existence of
property for their sons. Land scarcity has crucial implications for women,
especially for those who never marry or have children, as well as for those
who have lost their usufruct rights due to their husband’s or male kin’s
appropriation. As one male interviewee claimed, ‘The biggest problem is
with girls. My daughter has three fatherless kids. So I have no land for any
of them to inherit. So this is the worst problem.’ The social crises that erupt
in such a scenario are evident; there is not only interfamilial contestation
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over inheritance rights but social tension between neighbours as most
people vie to encroach on land bordering theirs.
Between 1983 and 1994 the number of land disputes in Meru District
escalated from 460 to 946 [Meru District Country Court Records,
1983–1994]. Over 69 per cent of people in this study felt that land disputes
have become more severe over the last decade and 48 per cent of people had
experienced land or boundary disputes themselves. The most common cases
of land disputes include: a father dying before willing land to his sons; a son
refusing to allocate land to his mother upon this father’s death; sons
contesting their father’s will; neighbours contesting fencing lines and trees
shading their property; and co-wives quarrelling over rights of their
deceased husbands’ land for their children and themselves. The latter
becomes particularly inflamed when one co-wife has only borne daughters
and thus has no viable vehicle for economic security.
The following cases, culled from the Meru County Court [Meru District
Country Court Records, 1983–1994], portray how land is a key sphere of
intrahousehold discord, one in which rights, obligations and meanings are
crosscut along gender and generational lines.
Sara Kiera28 (the plaintiff) is the wife of the Japhet Kiera (the
defendant) with whom she has nine children. The defendant is
registered proprietor of land parcel #414. Sara has her house erected
on the said piece of land on which she has been living with her
children since she got married to the defendant in 1949. In March
1990 the defendant began threatening to evict his wife from the land
and threatened to destroy her house. Sara seeks a permanent
injunction to restrain her husband from evicting her. The court ruled
that each of them were responsible to meet his or her cost of the case
and that the court could not become involved in this marital dispute.
The case was referred back to the clan (Case # 364/90).
M’Raiburi Kimutua (the defendant) is the sole proprietor of parcel
#2011. In 1984 the defendant subdivided a section of his parcel
(#1536) among three of his sons but has refused to award a share to
his son through marriage to Rebecca Naitore (the plaintiff). The
defendant, who is married to three wives, has allocated parcels to the
sons of his first and third wives, but has neglected Rebecca and her
son. The plaintiff requests that the court order the defendant to award
a share of parcel #2011 to her son (Case # 443/87).
Studies [Bryceson, 1995; Asamba and Thomas-Slayter, 1995] have
shown how agricultural specialisation can lead to male encroachment on
female property, either undermining women’s ability to fulfil subsistence
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needs or to produce cash crops over which they might have control. In
Meru, the nature of property rights circumscribes the benefits that women
derive from French bean production in two ways. First, contracts are
awarded to the holders of land titles, which excludes the vast majority of
women from securing contracts in their name. Because payment is given to
the landowner, women are wholly dependent on their husbands for
receiving compensation for their labour.
Second, the grave land scarcity in Meru means that women can not
expand horticultural production without reverberations occurring
throughout the agrarian system. There is an inverse relationship between the
land allocated to cash and subsistence crops: as fields devoted to French
beans expand, those apportioned to food production contract. As one
woman explained: ‘This big export market has brought a lot of income but
because lands are too small, there is no room for food crops anymore.’
Because tea remains highly lucrative and coffee cannot be legally
extirpated, the only reserve of land to appropriate is that which supports
subsistence cultivation. Over 33 per cent of the female interviewees claimed
that their husbands had either compelled them to grow French beans on their
usufruct plots or retracted their rights to them entirely. This violates
conjugal norms because not only are French beans cash-crops but they are
also a vegetable crop (for which women have rights to income encased in
customary law). Today, both men and women acknowledge that export
horticulture has changed from being a predominantly female sphere to a
mixed-gendered one, revealing not only a shift in material relations but also
a reconstitution in the meanings of male and female property.
Women claim that conflicts over usufruct property have become
particularly salient since the introduction of export horticulture. These
conflicts have evolved into struggles over the authenticity of meanings and
various discursive domains (Christianity, ‘indigenous’ custom and the state)
are elicited to make claims and counter claims for land. While dispute
resolution is intended to be processual (family, clan and ultimately the
courts), in reality individuals often select one vehicle through which to
arbitrate their claims. For instance, 100 per cent of men believe that the clan
is the most effective channel for dispute resolution in contrast to only 34 per
cent of women. Men’s belief in the body of the clan underscores their ability
to negotiate custom and legitimate their claims on the basis of ‘tradition’
[Mackenzie, 1990]. In contrast, statutory law, which is founded on the
principal of equality irrespective of race, ethnicity and sex, ensures certain
fundamental rights for women. Women feel that their interests are better
served through statutory law and they invoke Christian precepts, on which
statutory law is erected, to contest cultural prescriptions that keep them
subordinated. They solicit male sympathy by playing into the Christian duty
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of men to take care of women, accentuating their roles as wives and
mothers. In doing so, women capitalise on the model of gender relations
espoused by Christianity and the post-colonial state to oppose the
appropriation of their usufruct property.
VII. INCOME DISTRIBUTION
In contrast to parts of West Africa [Guyer, 1988; Hill, 1975] where there are
distinct male/female axes in domestic budgets, income in Meru is intended
to collectively insure the well being of the household. While women are
generally permitted to retain income from the sale of local food crops, this
money is expected to fulfil the subsistence needs of the household.
Furthermore, while in theory women comply with cultural prescriptions
regarding income control, most women are careful to shield their earnings
from their spouse lest they be compelled to pay for school fees, medical
expenses or for household items that are normatively their husband’s
responsibility. This is particularly true for households where women have
been successful in retaining French bean income and often face the
withdrawal of their husbands’ contribution to the household budget.
While French bean production can increase aggregate household incomes,
there is a wide disparity in the distribution of that income between men and
women. Women perform 72 per cent of the labour for French beans, and
obtain 38 per cent of the income. Despite the facts that women perform the
bulk of the labour, men still claim rights over French bean income.
Male appropriation of the income garnered from commercial crops is not
new and similar occurrences have been documented in other parts of Kenya.
For example, Davison [1988] found that men controlled the income derived
from coffee production in Central Kenya despite women’s greater labour
input. Francis [1988] argues that the justification for male income control is
rooted in their rights to land, which grant them social legitimacy for
decisions regarding allocation, use and income control. Similarly in Meru,
women’s greater labour input is relatively meaningless as men can claim
that land, and its products, are ultimately theirs, regardless of women’s
customary rights to usufruct property.
Even where women receive returns from their labour, they are often
compelled to contribute this cash to household expenditures that would
have typically been their husband’s responsibility. While some men
appreciate their wives contributions, the majority feels threatened by their
exclusion from a profitable income stream. To a large extent, this stems
from men’s weakening position as the ‘breadwinner’ of the family due to
the declining incomes from coffee, coupled with limited opportunities for
wage employment.
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Women consistently accuse their husbands and brothers of squandering
French bean profits on alcohol and miraa29 and abandoning their family to
the desires of their body. One woman cursed men on market day
proclaiming ‘You speak this afternoon but tonight when you sleep the devil
will come.’ Another woman passing the market proclaimed, ‘Money of the
people taken in the wrong way will always be misused but the one who is
using his own sweat will eventually reap the fruits.’ Conflicts between
husbands and wives over the allocation of income from French beans are
commonplace and often escalate into household violence. As one female
interviewee claimed:
The crops that result in wife-beating today is coffee and tea, because
they are termed as a man’s crop. Many husbands misuse money from
these crops and when asked they beat their wives. Michiri (French
beans) are also cause for beating. When we try to keep our money, our
husband asks where it is. If we don’t give it to him we are beaten.
These crops cause us many problems.
Another woman said, ‘if a woman goes and sells the crops without her
husband’s permission, the husband will insist on where they went, so this
will bring a collision and result in a big beating. This will start talk of even
a divorce so you don’t take any bits.’ Many husbands had even begun to
escort their wives to the market centre in order to verify the prices paid for
French beans.
In essence, the introduction of French beans has challenged the
meanings associated with women’s roles, which have been historically
encoded in vegetable production. As long as men have not jeopardised
access to resources in the female domain, women have largely subscribed to
the fiction of male dominance and allowed power to remain in the hands of
men. But as men have encroached upon the income derived from French
beans, a crop culturally coded as female, women have engaged in both
clandestine and overt strategies to recoup their autonomy. The latter
includes taking French beans to the weighing centre and claiming an
absence of buyers, a lower market price, or the rejection of produce for
failing to meet quality standards. The former includes various forms of
witchcraft (both sorcery and bewitching), that are increasingly used to assert
claims for income within marriages [Dolan, forthcoming b]. In this
situation, women’s resistance cannot be overlooked since the viability of
men’s livelihood is contingent upon women’s agricultural production and
social complicity.
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VIII. THE ‘GOOD WIFE’: CHRISTIANI TY, C O N F L I CT A N D
COMPLIANCE
Moore [1994] has argued that the meanings of gender roles and
responsibilities are embodied within the wider discourses of social and
political institutions, which possess the power to define the characteristics of
an identity. In Kenya, the church has become a principal vehicle through
which discourses about hierarchy, morality and patriarchy are circulated in
village life. The postcolonial Kenyan State has fused ‘traditional’ gender
roles30 with the conception of gender propagated by Christianity to consign
women to household production and create a family in step with the labour
demands of ‘western-style’ development. Young girls are socialised from a
very early age to be obedient, submissive and accommodating, lest they fail
to attract a suitable man for marriage. Cultural understandings of what it
means to be female are encoded in the Kimeru term mwekuru umwega or
good woman. One interviewee told me that such a woman ‘obeys her husband
and does not speak rudely to him. She welcomes the guests and does all the
work her husband asks her to do.’ Her sentiments are widely echoed by other
women in Meru who agree that a mwekuru umwega ‘does not quarrel with her
husband, does not speak badly about her husband and obeys him always’. In
fact, some women claim that they deserve punishment for failing to meet the
standards of a ‘good’ wife. Good wives are expected to extend the hospitality
of the compound at all times; a woman who is generous in sharing food is
known as nkirote and highly respected [M’inoti, 1941: F98]. The connection
between Christian work ethics and virtue is reinforced by the Kimeru term
kimatha, which connotes a bad woman who neglects her shamba, husband
and children. The combination of patrilineal norms, coupled with Christian
precepts, has led ‘to the overemphasis on hard work and obedience as the
basis of women’s virtue’ [Rohatynskyj, 1988: 538].
From village leaders to national politicians, Christianity is employed to
reinforce the cultural hierarchy of gender relations, as well as to assuage
male paranoia of women’s potential subversion. In Meru, the politicisation
of Christianity and concomitant narratives of female submission are
characterised by the plethora of baraza (public assemblies) called to lecture
women in the name of Christ.31 During my fieldwork a baraza was
summoned by the Chief and village politicians of Githongo Location to
mitigate male anxiety regarding women’s increased utilisation of witchcraft,
and to lecture women on norms of female obedience. This was in direct
reaction to a recent poisoning of a village man, who’s wife claimed that he
refused to allocate any French bean income to her [Dolan, forthcoming b].
Throngs of women descended the fertile slopes of Mt. Kenya to convene
at the Chief’s camp. By the time the meeting started over 200 women and 50
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men sat in the shade of the trees in sex-segregated fashion with men on one
side and women on the other. As the women nursed their babies and graded
French beans for export to Europe, the Chief quoted biblical texts to
emphasise the importance of female submission. The women remained silent
through the sermons exalting motherhood, domesticity and Christianity.
The second speaker, Zipporah Gatobu, a teacher, emphasised the
importance of proper female behaviour: ‘The bell at the top of your wedding
invitation should always remind you of your wedding vows, which you
must maintain until you die.’ She asked the women ‘what is women’s
work?’ The women responded, ‘obey your husband, cook, clean and
welcome guests.’ She said:
You must never say that you will not do something because it is a
man’s job … Women can do all work … you must take care of what
God has given you – your husband and children … Always serve your
husband first … In some homes women have more power than men
and that is very bad and a sign of terrible management … If a woman
is a poor household manager, she tries to kill her husband or make him
crazy by feeding him medicines or poisons.
A series of speakers reiterated themes of proper female behaviour but
this example demonstrates how the nation state uses Christianity to sustain
the dominant discourse of female subordination and wife obedience. Yet
what is striking is that for many women, for whom direct challenges to male
authority entail too high a cost, the church is not the site of hegemony, but
rather the site of resistance. It has become the primary outlet through which
women escape the confines of their marriage. As Ciekawy [1999: 225]
notes, ‘because women often engage in resistance and wage their struggles
through cultural or religious mediums that appear to be mundane and less
political … researchers have often ignored the empowering aspects of these
expressive practices’.
There are currently over 25 distinct Christian denominations in Central
Imenti, 43 churches, and unrelenting construction of new churches each
month. Women participate in church groups32 that meet during the week to
practice singing, organise church events and discuss both personal and
religious matters. On Sundays women spend an additional five hours on
church duties. While women generally perform duties that replicate their
responsibilities in the domestic sphere such as cooking and cleaning, most
women claim that they would rather clean the church than their own home,
asserting that ‘they are doing it for God, not for my husband’. These groups
serve social and psychological functions for women. They offer women the
opportunity to move from the monotony of their home, socialise and glean
support from fellow women. They look forward to their weekly gatherings
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as a time of freedom and an opportunity to gossip, laugh and seek respite
from the routine of daily labour and the problems of their household. While
women claim that the time spent on Church activities does not interrupt
their household obligations, men are less convinced. They feel that women
use the pretence of Christian duty to escape from their responsibilities in
agricultural production. As one interviewee said, ‘My husband used to
complain that the church meetings are really just used as meeting places for
gossip. So I had to stop attending for a awhile.’ This resonates with the work
of other scholars who have shown how women’s involvement in religious
activities often threatens men and subjects their activities to greater scrutiny
[Ciekawy, 1999; Minh-ha, 1989]. Yet in contrast to women’s organisations,
which many men perceive as bastions of subterfuge, men are unable to
contest women’s participation in religious activities, as Christian precepts
are embraced and reinforced in public discourse.
Yet most women are not only active group members but are increasingly
becoming ‘saved’ into a life of Christ. In Meru, becoming ‘saved’ involves
witnessing to Christ, confessing past sins and acknowledging Jesus Christ
as a personal saviour. The crusade toward being ‘born again’ has become
increasingly widespread through Meru during the last decade.33 My sample
of 207 individuals included 95 per cent ‘saved’ women in comparison to 35
per cent ‘saved’ men.
Being ‘saved’ is extremely important to women: most could recount the
moment that they turned over their lives to God. One interviewee described
her conversion: ‘I got saved in 1993 during a rally they held in my church.
The preacher was really touching and this made me feel that it would be good
to be saved. Salvation has been my guidance. My life is ever successful … in
bearing and bringing up my children. I am ever free now. I give God all my
burdens.’ Robins [1979] has shown how female conversion among the Kiga
was precipitated by personal life crises, which women attempted to resolve
through the salvation experience in Bakokole. Similarly, most women in
Meru claim that they have turned to God to bear with the perpetual marital
and intrahousehold struggles they experience, and a principal marital problem
cited is contestation over French beans. ‘This violence in our homes is really
going away because most of us women have joined salvation and would
hardly feel a weight from any small or big thing.’ Many say that being ‘saved’
enabled them to handle the difficulties of their marriage; one said that it was
‘the only solution’ to the powerlessness she experienced in daily life. As one
interviewee said, ‘More of us women are saved because we are the ones who
have faced all the problems of life and would like to avoid even thinking of
them. We prepare for eternal life.’ The transformative power of becoming
‘saved’ is a significant part of women’s identity, and offers them a means of
coping with the exacting burdens of export horticulture.
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As Agarwal [1994] points out, whether women overtly resist gender
inequalities depends on their social, economic and political position. In
Meru becoming ‘saved’ is most prevalent among women who have a high
stake in the stability of the household system, and few alternatives for
autonomy. Women who do not conform to the ‘patriarchal bargain’
[Kandiyoti, 1988] are vulnerable to insecurity, poverty and landlessness.
This is particularly true for women who have no male sons to provide them
with land, and thus have no source of protection outside of their marriage.
IX. CONCLUSION
This article has examined how the contracting of French beans has
engendered conflict over rights, obligations and resources in Meru District,
Kenya. Contract farming, which is predicated on the intensification of
labour to realise production objectives, has precipitated a disproportionate
increase in women’s work and weakened female control over horticultural
production. While horticulture for the local market is still regarded as the
domain of women, export horticulture is increasingly regarded as a mixedgender activity, reflecting men’s appropriation of female land, labour and
income. The division of labour and income has shifted and female
autonomy, rather than being enhanced, has eroded, as conflicts arise over
male and female property rights and the labour contributions to household
subsistence.
Yet women have not remained passive in the face of inequitable resource
distribution and apparent ideological oppression. In Meru, women’s
embodiment of practices that appear subordinate cannot necessarily be read
as their acquiescence to an ‘unequal order’ [Kabeer, 1999; Agarwal, 1994].
Rather this article argues that religious practices are strategies that
restructure women’s experience and promote their self-interest in a context
of patriarchal constraint. In order to avoid sanctions from men and the wider
community, women act within the parameters of prevailing norms and
discourse. Hence, while women appear to accept the gender ideologies of
Christianity, thus retaining a public image of the ‘good wife’, they have also
diverted their labour to church groups, become saved, and appropriated
Christian norms of femininity in court cases to promote their own interests.
As the Comaroffs [1993: xxiii] suggest, religious practices reflect
ambiguous motives that simultaneously ‘contest and affirm aspects of the
dominant order’. In Meru, maintaining the reputation of a good wife is
intimately linked to the benefits that women derive from the household
system where loss of social standing has significant repercussions for
women’s well being. Social norms are a potent factor circumscribing
women’s economic options and only those who can endure the disruption of
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the household system can resist with more aggressive actions such as
witchcraft and poisoning [Dolan, forthcoming b]. Thus, instead of viewing
Christian conversion as capitulation, I read it as a conscious strategy that
women use to fulfil their own part of the patriarchal bargain, and hence
fortify their claim on male responsibility. As Kandiyoti notes, ‘forms of
patriarchy present women with distinct ‘rules of the game’ and call for
different strategies to maximise security and optimise life options with
varying potential for active and passive resistance in the face of oppression’
[1988: 274].
Hence, the Meru case clearly demonstrates that agricultural
diversification initiatives based on unitary models of household decisionmaking can undermine the purported objectives of gender equity. Women’s
bargaining power is not simply a product of economic variables but also
influenced by cultural norms and dominant gender discourses promoted by
Christianity and the State.
While these norms and values may only be one part of the story, they are
nevertheless highly significant in areas where social identity shapes access
to, and control over resources. Ideological constructions of gender norms
are intricately woven into struggles over export horticulture, struggles that
both shape and subvert the potential for gender equity and capital
accumulation in the sector.
final version received February 2000
NOTES
1. The World Bank and international donors allocate substantial funding to export
diversification projects. USAID alone supports over 25 agricultural diversification (nontraditional exports) programs throughout the world [Little and Dolan, 2000]. In 1996 the
IMF loaned Kenya 12 billion shillings, equivalent to approximately US$218 million, in
support of agricultural commercialisation through export crop promotion [Kimenia, 1996:
15].
2. While I recognise that there are important intra-gender differences and social divisions that
condition women’s access to resources such as class, lineage, seniority, marital status, etc.,
this article focuses exclusively on married women and resource constraints between husband
and wife.
3. Unitary models (also known as the common preferences, altruism, or benevolent dictator
models) were originally put forth by Becker [1965, 1981], who expanded Chayanov’s
formulation of the household as a production unit. His approach posits that household
members pool all household resources (labour, land and capital) in order to maximise their
common welfare.
4. See Agarwal [1994], Folbre [1986], Hart [1995], Doss [1996]; Quisumbing [1996], and
Haddad, Hoddinott, and Alderman [1997].
5. See Haddad, Hoddinott and Alderman [1997] for a critique of bargaining models.
6. There is a wide body of literature that touts the benefits of contracting for rural economies
[Ayako et al., 1989; Kennedy, 1989; Glover and Kusterer, 1990; Williams and Karen, 1985]
as well as those who critique its social costs [Mbilinyi, 1988; Little and Watts, 1994].
7. The heart of Kenya’s contract production lay in sugar and tea, where contract farming
accounted for 40 and 50 per cent of production, respectively [Ayako et al., 1989].
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8. See Dolan [forthcoming a].
9. See Heald [1991] and von Bülow and Sørensen [1988] for data on contracted tobacco and
tea, respectively.
10. I am employing Whatmore’s definition of patriarchy as ‘an active social process by which
women are subordinated to men through a range of social practices and institutions’ [1991: 42].
11. Several studies have examined how contract farming affects the social organisation of
production and redefines labour allocation within the household [Mbilinyi, 1988; Carney,
1988; Carney and Watts, 1990; Mackintosh, 1989; Heald, 1991; von Bülow and Sørensen,
1988].
12. This is extrapolated from the eight-month period in which the household survey was
conducted. At that time the exchange rate averaged US$1=70Ksh.
13. See McCormack and Strathern [1980]; Burton [1985]; Harris and Young [1981]; Ortner
[1974]; Molyneux [1977]; Etienne and Leacock [1980]; Young et al. [1981]; Hafkin and Bay
[1976]; Nash and Fernandez Kelly [1983]; and Leacock and Safa [1986].
14. See Francis [1998]; Jones [1986]; Carney and Watts [1990]; Mackintosh [1989]; Heald
[1991]; and von Bülow and Sørensen [1988].
15. Deere [1982], Ellis [1993], and Overfield [1998] have documented similar patterns of
inequitable labour burdens.
16. Several geographers, anthropologists, and economists – Carney and Watts [1990]; Jackson
and Palmer-Jones [1999]; Schroeder [1996]; Mackintosh [1989]; Heald [1991]; Guyer
[1988]; and Whitehead [1985] – studying processes of agrarian intensification have
advanced understanding of women’s labour through analyses of seasonality and work
rhythms.
17. Married men rarely engage in the more labour-intensive activities of French bean production
such as picking, planting and weeding.
18. While coffee and tea are culturally perceived as male crops, the male labour invested in them
generally consists of dependants who are not attending, have finished school or are
unemployed. Household heads and male elders are exempted from the more burdensome
agricultural labour.
19. Those women who allocate greater labour to food production, despite their husbands’
objections, are overtly de-privileging men’s right to female income.
20. The recasting of customary social structures (e.g. female work groups) as mechanisms for
income generation has been widely documented in Kenya [Mackenzie, 1990; ThomasSlayter, 1992, von Bülow and Sørensen, 1988].
21. All farmers who hired labour had access to nonfarm income and were situated in the upper
two income quartiles of the sample.
22. Sundays, due to the adoption of Christian norms in the area, are women’s only day of rest,
and are an exception to the normal routine of domestic and agricultural labour.
23. The European market is now restricted to suppliers that can deliver consistently high-quality
products. This is excluding large numbers of smallholders from the export horticulture
business.
24. While Kenya was not the first country in Africa to institute land reform measures, it was the
first to implement a tenure system of nation-wide scope. In 1954 the colonial state introduced
the Swynnerton Plan, which institutionalised freehold tenure.
25. In other parts of Kenya there have been cases of men selling land registered in their names,
leaving their mothers and wives destitute [Davison, 1988].
26. A substantial body of literature [Berry, 1992; Glazier, 1985; Moore, 1986] indicates that
customary law was not a relic of precolonial jurisprudence but rather a new system of
adjudication rooted in colonial inventions and interpretations of African ‘tradition’.
27. The Law of Succession Act was designed to guarantee the property rights of all children of
a deceased, regardless of gender.
28. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the anonymity of individuals.
29. Miraa is a stimulant grown in the area.
30. As the Attorney General of Kenya noted, ‘Male domination on the one hand and the
subjugation of women on the other are traditionally-accepted norms’ [The Nation, 24 April
1994].
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31. Haugerud and Njoguu [1991:1] have described a baraza as a ‘staged political event … where
the symbolic arsenal of the nation state confronts citizens in the countryside’. A baraza
varies in size from dramatic rallies of several thousand people to small gatherings of village
men and women and are commonly used to legitimate state control and foster national unity.
32. In Meru, women’s role in church groups stems from a long history of working together in a
distinct female sphere. In the pre-colonial period Meru was one of the few East African
societies with women’s age institutions [Thomas, 1995].
33. The phenomenon of saved individuals originated among the Methodists and the East African
Revivalists in 1947–48. In Abothuguchi West the majority of ‘saved’ individuals have been
saved through faith rather than baptism.
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