A "Juggernaut of Progress"? Irrigation and Statecraft in Late-Colonial Kenya.

This article explores colonial water development on the Tana River Irrigation Scheme in eastern Kenya, between 1948 and 1963. Using Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Water, and Prisons Department sources, the paper argues that this irrigation scheme acted as a tool of dispossession in opening up new landscapes for agricultural development, through the exclusion of local populations and their replacement with detained individuals from outside of the district. Despite being framed as a benevolent and forward thinking agricultural scheme, the project actually fulfilled long-term goals of population resettlement in the region. The large detainee population rounded up during the Mau Mau Emergency provided an unwilling settlement force for the project, dispossessing and disenfranchising local residents. These residents went on to resist their dispossession in a variety of ways, leading to their readmittance onto the scheme after 1959. The paper therefore argues that water management and irrigation were essential tools of political power that allowed the colonial state in Kenya to carry out long-term policy goals under the guise of economic or political expedience. This article thus provides an essential exploration of how political power was extended into the semi-arid landscapes of eastern Kenya during the postwar era, as the role of water management and access restrictions have generally been left out of narratives of postwar development in Kenya in favor of soil erosion and ranch management projects in more densely occupied areas of the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]