MUGA: Coast historical land problem continues to defy resolution

On a visit to Lamu Island many years ago, I was shown a magnificent building, filled with museum-quality furniture, which is locally known as the “Liwali House”.

It was once the official residence of “the Liwali” – the representative of the Sultan of Zanzibar in what was effectively a colony of Zanzibar at that time.

Many of the great mansions currently occupied by our county governors cannot bear comparison to the Liwali House. But at least those governors were elected, whereas the Liwali – a governor in his own right – was appointed by the Sultan of Zanzibar, who had taken over the island by force of arms, and not through a democratic process.

And not just Lamu. A “10-mile-wide strip” along the Kenyan coast was very much a part of Zanzibar even in colonial times, with large coconut plantations to be found in various locations along that strip.

This history explains the genesis of the Kenya coast land ownership problem, which has thus far defied all attempts to resolve it.

In many parts of the coast, ownership is contested, first and foremost, by members of the indigenous communities whose ancestors lived on these lands before the Zanzibaris came and chased them into the interior.

They had every reason to flee. The Zanzibaris had guns and cannon,  while the locals only had bows and arrows. And most significantly, the Zanzibaris were active in the slave trade in Eastern Africa, with the Zanzibar slave market being a key hub for this trade.

Then, in addition to those whose ancestors had lived on such land for generations before the Zanzibaris came, there were those who got ownership documents for large tracts of coastal land from the government of Zanzibar.

Finally, when what we now call Kenya was demarcated by the British in the late 19th century as a “protectorate” and then in the early 20th century as a colony (with the “10-mile strip” remaining a protectorate, as was Zanzibar), yet more confusion was added to the question of land ownership in the coastal region.

That is what makes the coastal land problem so complex. In no other part of the country was the land at some point owned (and parcelled out) by the rulers of Zanzibar.

And so it is more or less unheard of for the residents of most of rural Kenya to have an experience that some years back was quite common at the coast – the arrival at some rural village of bulldozers backed by policemen or “goons”, led by the new “owner” of the land the villagers had lived on for decades.

This new owner, incidentally, would usually be seen waving a copy of the title deed for that land, which he had somehow obtained from the Nairobi land registry.

From this arise factors that have greatly limited the economic development of the coastal zone: In the coast, as in much of Kenya, we have witnessed the gradual transformation of what was once peri-urban low-value farmland into high-value residential plots.

This, in many cases, has provided a huge financial windfall for families that had up to then been struggling to somehow eke a living on exhausted farmland.

Whether they then made good use of that windfall is a different matter.

For any coastal land purchase, however, the golden rule applies: Buyer beware. For yours may be just one of any number of so-called “title deeds” for that land.

And yet demand for land at the coast has never been higher.

One factor behind this is that we are now seeing more and more younger Kenyans who grew up in middle-class suburban homes and did not visit their “ancestral villages” all that often, and do not even speak their mother tongue fluently.

These are not people who wish to retire to their ancestral villages: they would very much rather invest in some land at the coast if they can afford it.

But there, problems abound.

Even if the title deed for your proposed retirement home turns out to be perfectly valid, you risk retiring to a location where you are surrounded by hostile locals, who consider your presence there as evidence of the dispossession of their ancestors.