Shifting Land Tenure Arrangements: Private land-buying companies and the shape of Naivasha's anthropogenic landscape

Naivasha’s landscape has been heavily influenced by human activities, not least after the land around the lake was divided into private parcels in the early colonial period. Land use changes in the post-colonial period were also extensive but have remained underexposed. This chapter focuses on the impact of a particular group of landowners that emerged after Kenya gained independence. In the 1960s and 1970s, several private land-buying companies purchased plots of impoverished European farmers, thus contributing to the informal “Africanization” of land tenure in the Kenyan part of the Rift Valley. The chapter discusses the history and development of two of these plots, Kihoto and Karagita, and the agency of the various stakeholders related to them, to show their decisive impact on Naivasha’s anthropogenic landscape. Whereas company members initially settled on these plots themselves, they started to rent out housing on these plots to migrant workers of the horticultural industry that was established at the lake in the 1980s and 1990s. The plots have thus turned into Naivasha’s infamous dense yet expansive urban sprawl.