Overview

On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city's expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Peter Lockwood examines how Kiambu's 'workers with patches of land' struggle to sustain their households as the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions within families. The sale of ancestral land by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. Peasants to Paupers illuminates how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Caught between joblessness, land poverty and the breakdown of kinship, the book shows how Kiambu's young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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9781009643474

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Reviews

'Detailed in its ethnography, this engaging and timely book lifts the lid on how available land and economic opportunities have failed to keep pace with population growth in Kenya, leading to youth unemployment, alcoholism and dislocated masculinity. It is an essential resource for Africanist scholars and policy makers.' Fred N. Ikanda, Maseno University 'Land ownership, access and utilization are socioeconomic and political activities in Kenya that generate much emotion and anxiety. In Peasants and Paupers, Peter Lockwood, manages to dissect such a complex matter in an accessible and relatable way that leaves the reader both knowledgeable and empathetic.' Mwenda Ntarangwi, USIU-Africa

'Detailed in its ethnography, this engaging and timely book lifts the lid on how available land and economic opportunities have failed to keep pace with population growth in Kenya, leading to youth unemployment, alcoholism and dislocated masculinity. It is an essential resource for Africanist scholars and policy makers.' Fred N. Ikanda, Maseno University 'Land ownership, access and utilization are socioeconomic and political activities in Kenya that generate much emotion and anxiety. In Peasants and Paupers, Peter Lockwood, manages to dissect such a complex matter in an accessible and relatable way that leaves the reader both knowledgeable and empathetic.' Mwenda Ntarangwi, USIU-Africa 'Historical perspective informs close (footballing) participant observation to portray the classical tragedy of a dying patrilineal moral economy, its gendered suspicions, moral fortitudes, and alcoholic wastage of young lives when their disciplined labour no longer produces futures.' John Lonsdale, Trinity College, Cambridge

Author Information

Peter Lockwood is a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester. His current research studies land speculation, finance and fraud on Nairobi's urban frontier. He is the co-curator of Nairobi Becoming (2024), a multi-authored ethnographic portrait of the city. He has been published in Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Africa.

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