As you drive toward Mombasa Island from Kisauni heading to the Nyali Bridge and thus to the island itself, to the left there is a large historical bell that gives its name to the location: Kengeleni.
This “kengele” (bell) was allegedly set up by Christian converts to sound the alarm whenever slave-trading dhows from Zanzibar were seen on the horizon. And the automatic response to this bell ringing was to immediately flee into the hinterland, carrying any young children or babies with you, and to not return until reports reached you that the slave traders had left Mombasa.
These were not circumstances likely to lead to any long-term settlement in any specific location by the indigenous communities, the Mijikenda. So though not in any way nomadic herdsmen as the ethnic Somali of Northern Kenya, or the Maasai communities of Narok and Kajiado counties, the indigenous coastal communities were likely to move around quite a bit, as a defence against the marauding slave-raiding militias from Zanzibar.
It should also be borne in mind here that for much of its pre-Independence history, the coastal strip was not part of Kenya at all. It was, politically, a part of Zanzibar. And Zanzibar itself was part of the Sultanate of Oman, a faraway land, in much the same way that both Alaska and Hawaii are part of the USA, even though geographically remote from the American mainland.
Thus, for centuries, and even after 1890 when Zanzibar became a British Protectorate, it was at the Sultan’s court in Zanzibar that matters of land ownership in the Kenyan coastal strip were determined.
A tyrannical sultanate that considered a trade in slaves as a valuable economic activity was not likely to concern itself unduly with the land rights of the indigenous communities over whom it ruled. Land would be allocated – quite legally – to the favoured few, and the indigenous communities doomed to remain as squatters on their historical tribal lands.
Since Independence then, there have been vast tracts of coastal land long settled by various Mijikenda communities, to which some “absentee landlord” with family roots in Zanzibar, actually held legally valid title deeds.
The “squatter problem” at the Coast is therefore one that has a centuries-long history. This makes land rights at the Coast completely different from any land problems elsewhere in the country.
Compounding this problem further is the explosive growth of Kenya’s population over recent decades. There were only about nine million of us at Independence in 1963. Now, just some 60 years later, we are no less than 56 million Kenyans.
This has necessarily led to immense pressure on land resources that did not exist just a few decades ago. The demand for land has increased astronomically – the supply remains the same as it was at Independence.
Such then is the historic and demographic context within which the “squatter problem” at the Coast must be addressed.
At the present time, just about every presidential aspirant who travels to the Coast to campaign, claims to be sensitive to longstanding pleas for restitution and reparations by the indigenous coastal communities. And vows to resolve once and for all the lingering issue of the “historical land-related injustices” in that region.
But such promises, even where well-intended, actually do not get to the root of the problem. The country we live in today is a very different place from the one in which those Mijikendas who lived near Mombasa were accustomed to fleeing from slave traders every so often.
Secure tenure over ancestral lands is a universal aspiration in Kenya. But land ownership alone does not lead to the kind of economic progress that the coastal communities – along with the rest of Kenyans – really seek.
At best, such secure tenure would be a springboard for the creation of a thriving agrarian economy. The small-scale farmers at the Coast who might, at last, be granted undisputable ownership of their ancestral land, would have to be supported and guided towards a viable cash crop economy.
Without that, title deeds would only facilitate the easy selling of family land holdings to help pay school fees or to meet medical emergencies.
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