Description
There have never been as many fences across the globe as there are today, with wide-scale enclosure of rangelands, croplands, conservation land, parks and urban quarters. Fences are not only raised to protect soils, crops, biodiversity, people and animals, they often also carry complex underlying histories of enclosure as well as symbolic executions of power. Consequently, forces of resistance towards such powers often attempt trespass, resisting or unmaking the very physicality of these material gestures. This phenomenon of boundary making, and unmaking, is highly pertinent in present day East Africa. Here, fences have proliferated in a myriad of contexts, including veterinary fences, private land enclosures, group ranches and national borders, as well as national parks or conservation areas. Many of these structures are embedded in histories in which power differentiation has been reinforced through enclosure. Two case studies from Kenya’s Rift Valley region, the Laikipia Plateau and the Greater Mara, will be used to illustrate how historical and material boundaries came into being with the construction of fencing. These cases allow us to focus on the relationship between colonial boundary-making and material practices of fencing grasslands. In pastoralist areas, such actions reinforce the rhetoric of violence, inequality, and marginalization. In the Laikipia case, fencing began from the 1950s when colonial settlers sought to protect their ranches against encroachment by wild animals and pastoralists: today there is a renewed phase of historical protest actions against fencing efforts. The Greater Mara remained largely unenclosed until a decade ago, but fencing is currently being constructed at an unprecedented pace, a process that is partly driven by Mara pastoralists themselves as a way of anticipating and protecting themselves against the negative effects of exclusion. The cases reflect two fundamental strategies of resisting enclosure and its associated forms of violence: one by physically opposing its very materiality, another by using it to create a space for empowerment. In the latter case, pastoralists use practices of binding and fencing land as a liberation in itself; a defense against increasing yet unpredictable pressures from tourist industries, farming initiatives, state interests, and imminent economic investments. In the former, pastoralists consider fencing as instruments of exclusion and dominance brought on by white farmers. Here, they gain political empowerment through practices of physically unbinding and de-fencing land.| Period | 23 Jun 2021 |
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| Event title | Global History Africa @ Warwick: Work-in-progress webinars convened by Professors David Anderson and Dan Branch |
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |