Cash-Crop Design: Architectures of Land, Knowledge, and Alienation in Twentieth-Century Kenya

Abstract

In late-colonial Kenya, the architectures and landscapes of cash-crop production were entangled in certain contradictions inherent to colonial agricultural knowledge. Abandoning the former model of the botanical greenhouse as the container of colonial agricultural sciences, new modes of spatial organisation superseded the greenhouse, attempting to reconcile the generality of scientific theory with the fact of infinitely varied agricultural conditions. The conflict between the universalising thrust of British-colonial science and the need to account for local variation was especially instantiated in the problem posed by the native agricultural labourer who was at once an indispensable transmitter of agricultural knowledge and a person for whom scientific knowledge was deemed an impossibility. Architectures of agricultural science, military villagisation, and progressive farming thus tended to pull in contradictory directions—working to integrate African agriculturalists into the science of cash-crop production while, at the same time, instating an architecture of landlessness intended to sever agricultural practice from agricultural theory.