1
be paid when the land was cleared. Such transactions were in fact
rarely completed for a variety of reasons, for example the Athi migrating. The nature of these transactions, moreover, did not anticipate such a quick finalization of the sale; it envisaged an active and continuous personal relationship, the Athi seeking help as and when they needed it. It was this feature that led the relationship to be compared to marriage transactions. Other Kikuyu acquired their land as compensa tion for a variety of alleged crimes committed by the Athi such as murder, trapping of livestock by their traps or theft. One person is
even alleged to have demanded compensation when a tree hit his house! But sharp practices were limited to a comparatively few people both Athi and Kikuyu, and the fate of Bera is a good illustration of this. What is overlooked quite often is that there were many Athi who peace
ably settled among the Kikuyu through adoption and intermarriage.
Having acquired land, an individual was normally followed by his relatives or alternatively encouraged warriors to settle on the land as ahoi to help with defence against possible attacks by the other mbari or the Maasai as well as helping him to clear the virgin forest, which was not an easy task in those days • Indeed many of them needed no persuasion as the rutere, frontier, was regarded as the land of oppor tunity where any industrious individual - expected sooner or later to acquire wealth of his own to enable him to buy his own land. The
i i in mm 11 ,nM m rnn n niir»i min i ■- ni -1 t r ~ > r v r i mrmi n-nfr- m\ < nania i«wif i r mn—>ri>iw m i ^niii >' *** r■* *
1,. Routledge, op cit., pp 5; Kikuvu Historical Texts, op cit., ppU4i, 15>8 2. See evidence to the Land Commission in KLC, Vol. 7 (original evidence)
by A.. Muthuri, and Lewis Kaberere| Kikuyu Historical Texts, op cit., PP 160-2, 191-2.
frontiersman consequently built large ihingo capable of accommodating hundreds of people, some of whom were warriors under his patronage. It was the existence of this motley collection of diverse elements which led Ainsworth to the conclusion that the Kikuyu, had no clans on the eve of the arrival of the British as these were in the process of
1
evolution. The halting of this expansion by the British Government at a time when waves of immigrants were still coming in even after 1900, together with the alienation of some of their land for the settlement of the white settlers, meant that it did not talce long before a serious shortage of land had become a reality. In fact the problem had become noticeable as early as 1910, and particularly the problem of the status of the ahoi was brought into sharp focus. This triggered off a re examination of the traditional land tenure in an attempt to alleviate the deteriorating situation which was only reduced, in part, by their
p trickling into the farms, owned by the white settlers, to become squatters. Under these circumstances, a section of the Kikuyu, fearful of the demands of the ahoi, as much as of the white settlers, sought ways to consolidate their hold on land by demanding that their rights to their land should be entrenched by the granting of land titles to individual land holders. This would in effect have entailed the recognition 011 the part of the government that the existing land tenure was based on individual tenure. This the government was reluctant to do because for one thing it would have had adverse effects on the white settlement policy, and secondly there was a genuine concern by the administrators over the fate of the
1* J?or example see AinsworthT s memorandum, in the file on Land Tenure in the Barlow Papers, following a series of meetings with the ICikuyu chiefs and the interested parties. Barlow and Arthur acted a.s interpreters on
July 6 and 20, 1920.
-9k-
ahoi should such a scheme be embarked upon. It was no secrete among the Kabete that their sense of the value of land had been whetted, and they were therefore anxious to throw out the ahoi irrespective of the rights that they had under the. traditional land tenure. The ahoi were thus supported by the administrators who did not cherish the idea of the emergence of a small landed aristocracy at the expense of hordes of landless people who were bound to present serious administrative problems. The missionaries, useful allies of the Kikuyu at this time, fully supported them and pressed for the granting of titles, hoping thereby to forestall the ever threatening sword of land alienation dangling over the heads of the Kikuyu.
The problem of the ahoi, together with the threat posed by the alienation of land for white settlement, culminated in the theory which was christened the !githaka system1 in an attempt to safeguard Kikuyu land from further alienation.**' The early enquirers such as Tate and Beech accepted that the principle of individual tenure operated before the coming of the British, but what was in doubt was whether under
customary law land was ever sold in perpetuity. The theory of irredeem able sales was supported by the missionaries who, in good faith, wished to safeguard their up-and-coming missionary adherents, who were in many ways handicapped by the redemption of land; this applied in particular to their newly-acquired land which they could not develop for fear of being bought out at a future date. Ere-eminent among those who were