Kenya blog: Decolonising the mind

Yesterday afternoon, James, Kiama Kaara from Kenya Debt Relief Network and I drove to Thika, a medium-sized town 40km north east of Nairobi along a bustling road lined with traders, construction workers and shops for a meeting with Zachary Makanya from the PELUM Association.

PELUM, which stands for Participatory Ecological Land Use Management, are a network of civil society organisations and NGOs working with small-scale farmers from East, Central and Southern Africa. Their vision is an inspiring and humbling one and what Zachary told us was very clear. Kenyans are still not seeing an improvement in their quality of life despite decades of aid money being poured into the country by mostly good-intentioned by often ill-informed and patronising donors and NGOs. The effects of aid dependency and the legacy of colonialism mean that the urgent process of ‘decolonising the mind’ must now start in earnest if African nations, Kenya included, are to resist the fierce and bullish march of globalisation and industrialisation, which is already wiping out traditional knowledge, languages, indigenous communities and the natural environment.

Zachary Makanya, PELUM Association, Kenya. Caroline Griffin/WDM

Like many who represent or work with small-scale farmers, Zachary spoke of the complex web of unfair global trading systems leading to subsidised goods from Europe and the US outcompeting local produce, tied aid, climate change and the commercialisation of agriculture. These pressures and injustices, brought on by the rich world, coupled with a government that is failing those who live below the poverty line (who make up nearly 50% of the country’s population), mean that half a century after independence, poverty is actually increasing in Kenya.

But for all this, Zachary’s message was a positive and inspiring one. He spoke of the need for small-scale farmers to be encouraged to view their environment and communities as resource-rich instead of a source of problems. This is the crux of the matter. At the centre of ‘aid’ and the notion of ‘development’ is the inference that Africa is in crisis and at the mercy of problems that are insurmountable without outside influence. If you turn this on its head and train small-scale farmers to work with what they’ve got, their world starts to looks like an entirely different place, full of opportunity and hope.

Our meeting took place in a tranquil compound which felt like the embodiment of this hope. Filled with varieties of indigenous trees, nursery beds and compost heaps atop with scavenging monkeys, it couldn’t have been more different from central Nairobi where you can’t walk far without seeing billboards advertising Orange, Barclays Bank and Nivea. This is where small-scale farmers come to learn how to grow indigenous staples such as cassava, share indigenous non commercialised seeds and control pests without chemical fertilisers.

Spinach growing in an agricultural test centre in Thika, Kenya. Spinach is a popular ingredient in Kenyan cooking. Caroline Griffin/WDM

Other experts we have spoken to such as Paul Gamba, an economist from the Tegemeo Institute, an agricultural research body in Kenya, point towards the need for small farmers to self-organise, for example in co-operatives, in order to move towards a situation where they are the processors as well as the growers. Farmers we have spoken to talk about the middlemen who don’t give them a fair price for their cash crops. By self-organising with the aim of doing the work of the middlemen themselves, Mr Gamba says this would also help stabilise prices and give back farmers control over their lives. As once-coffee farmer Justus Lavi, now Treasurer of the Kenya Small Scale Farmers’ Forum told us, coffee processing is not difficult, he used to do it as a child. All you need to do is “farm them, pick them, wash them, thresh them, wash them, grind them in the sand and the coffee is great.” And yet most coffee, which grows abundantly here, is processed overseas.

Scenarios like maize prices doubling in the space of a few days, which meant some people went without food for three days, must never happen again. We’ve been reminded by people we’ve spoken to that not being able to buy enough food to feed your family affects you psychologically not only physically. With local people and civil society in Kenya trying to build the self esteem of local communities and farmers, the last thing the country needs is another food crisis. But without legislation to curb the excesses of the financial markets, it is likely that another price spike will happen. It's the very least the UK government can do to put in place simple limits on commodity speculation to enable people to dust themselves off and start to rebuild and reinvent their lives.