Kenya is facing one of the most acute droughts in its history. 3.5 million Kenyans are in food distress after three years of poor rains, forcing citizens to take desperate measures to survive in what could turn into a famine of catastrophic proportions. It would seem that the Kenyan government has failed to develop a coherent policy response to address the unfolding humanitarian crisis. Or perhaps it simply does not care as Kenya’s political class enters an electioneering season that is largely about nothing. But this story is not about the sad state of affairs in the country today; it is about silangas—sand dams.

Tuesday is market day in Wote, Makueni County. Marigiti—the main market in Wote Township—is abuzz with activity. Fresh farm produce, household products, second-hand clothing, and other goods are everywhere in display. I arrive on a Tuesday morning around 9 a.m.; the day dawned cloudy and a light rain has turned it chilly. In one of the stalls next to the market, a group of women is discussing the management and use of their sand dam.

I first came across water preservation and soil conservation using sand dams in my early twenties when I accompanied my father and his friends on an excursion into the rural backwaters of Machakos County. The novelty, brilliance and simplicity of an innovation that could conserve water to produce crops and change the lives of a community left me deeply impressed. To create sand dams, reinforced concrete walls are built across the dry riverbeds of seasonal rivers. They initially fill up with water but after one or two seasons, sand collects behind the dam while silt is taken further downstream. The sand filters the water stored beneath it and prevents evaporation and the proliferation of parasites. About 40 per cent of the volume retained by the dam is water; a typical silanga can hold an incredible two to ten million litres of water that is harvested from a pipe placed at the lower end of the dam or by digging holes in the sand.

Mary Kiloki, a member of the Nzangule Women’s Group, tells me that through the Kutwiikanya Kiwu programme—a strategy to enhance community and household water harvesting—the County Government of Makueni has built a sand dam for the women’s group that is providing water for domestic and commercial use.

“The sand dam is a real blessing,” she tells me. “Now, even during the dry season water is available, providing a year-round water supply to up to 1,200 people, their farms and their animals. Previously, we would walk two hours a day and up to eight hours during droughts to fetch water. We have more time and energy to invest in other activities in the home, the farm, and in the market.”

Mary grows French beans, tomatoes, red and green peppers, sukuma wiki (collard greens), maize and green grams on her farm. She tells me that she has customers who drive all the way from Nairobi to buy fresh vegetables. With access to water, Mary has been able to create an alternative source of income for her household. Moreover, access to water in sufficient quantities has created a local food market with local supply chains and networks.

I meet Albanus Muli, caretaker at Wote Water and Sewerage Company. Muli has overseen the operations at Kaiti river sand dam for the last eight years and tells me that although sand dams have now become more popular with the community, they were not immediately embraced when they were first re-introduced.

“The Kaiti sand dam was constructed by the British in 1956 initially to create a water source to attract wild animals during hunting expeditions as the dams created steady sources of drinking water for animals. The Africans who built the dam were forced under the repressive colonial ‘chief’s law’ to trek many days through the bush to a railhead for dam supplies. Understandably, Africans associated sand dams with imperial foreign rule.

However, during a drought in the 1970s, silangas were re-introduced and built by the communities themselves within the traditional system of mwethya, a mechanism of mutual community support and shared labour. Community self-help groups that grew out of mwethya now form the backbone for implementing food farming and water conservation using sand dams.”

According to Professor Jesse Mugambi, religious studies and philosophy professor at the University of Nairobi, the efficacy of sand dams is dependent on proper design and community ownership. Indeed, the overarching lesson from successful sand dam projects is that it is crucial to adapt technology to the local context and introduce it using indigenous knowledge systems and values. Only when the Kamba community was able to implement the silanga project within their mwethya tradition were the benefits of sand dams realized.

For Makueni County, a semi-arid region of high temperatures and low rainfall, silangas are pivotal to renewing the local water resource. They provide a permanent and reliable supply of clean water for communities, improving water availability for people, crops and livestock. Not only do silangas conserve water but they also rejuvenate the surrounding environment. This is significant in a county where agriculture remains a key driver of growth, contributing 50 per cent of the Gross County Product (GCP). Agriculture also accounts for 78 per cent of household incomes.

Only when the Kamba community was able to implement the silanga project within their mwethya tradition were the benefits of sand dams realized.

Rosemary Maundu, Minister for Water and Sanitation, explains that it is against this backdrop that the Makueni County Government has implemented a raft of policies and programmes to provide water for the people of the county.

“In the last 10 years since the current Prof. Kivutha Kibwana-led county administration took over office, the county has constructed 50 sand dams through the Makueni public participation framework and the community development projects to provide readily fresh water for its citizens. This has provided much relief to the people of Makueni and greatly increased agricultural productivity in the county,” says Maundu.

Kawive Wambua, former Devolution Minister at the County Government of Makueni, explains that because riverbeds must have sufficient sandy sediment for silangas to hold water, the county government has regulated sand harvesting in the county. Unregulated sand harvesting results in reduced water availability in riverbeds, the drying up of boreholes and increased soil erosion among other environmental impacts that, aggravated by the effects of climate change, lead to a reduction in agricultural productivity and to the loss of livelihoods. Indeed, emphasizes Kawive, “Because of water, sand is the most important resource in Makueni.”

In 2014, Governor Kivutha Kibwana appointed a task force to look into sand harvesting and how the sand resource could be harnessed for socio-economic development, and recommend policy and legislation to guide the management of sand in the county. The work of the task force resulted in the enactment of the Makueni County Sand Conservation and Utilization Act of 2015 that formed the Makueni County Sand Conservation and Utilization Authority.

The enactment and implementation of the Sand Conservation and Utilization Act has not been easy, explains Halinishi Yusuf, the Managing Director of the Makueni County Sand Conservation and Utilization Authority. “In Kenya, three factors make regulating the sand industry difficult: youth unemployment and easy access to cheap labour, a rapidly urbanizing landscape which requires large quantities of sand, and political corruption. The latter has been the hardest to deal with,” says Yusuf.

For the past several years, county authorities, sand miners and “sand mafias” have been in conflict over the new regulations governing the sand industry. In August 2015, more than 40 men attacked a dozen county officers on the highway to Nairobi, beating them and setting their vehicles on fire. In December of the same year, two men were shot with arrows and four others were attacked with machetes, allegedly by sand miners. And in 2016, a Makueni County police officer was hacked to death by suspected sand miners. Makueni governor Kivutha Kibwana has directly accused local police officers and provincial administrators of involvement in the illegal sand trade.

“Because of water, sand is the most important resource in Makueni.”

Still, Halinishi is confident that the Sand Regulations are making a difference. “Order is brought to the sand industry, and because of the law in place, illegal crime is being curbed.” “Importantly,” she adds, “through the sand authority, Makueni County has managed to sensitize the community on issues related to sand governance, and construct more silangas which will go a long way in restoring the environment and providing water for crops, animals and domestic use.”

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In Kenya, as in much of the developing world, cities are growing at a frenzied pace. In 2020, 28 per cent of Kenya’s total population lived in cities and urban areas and estimates indicate that by 2030 the figure will be 50 per cent. Nairobi’s population has increased tenfold in the past 60 years, and is now fast approaching five million. Prodigious quantities of sand will be required to sustain the rapid urbanization. However, urbanization comes at a high environmental cost to the communities where sand harvesting takes place.

In his book The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Walter Mignolo argues that Western civilization is supported by two pillars: modernity and coloniality. He notes that the European narrative of progress, enlightenment and civilization conceals a dark underbelly—coloniality. That is to say that, contrary to popular belief, the unprecedented increases in the opulence and “freedoms” enjoyed in the West over the last 500 years have come about through the oppression and subjugation of the peoples at the “periphery” and the forceful extraction of their resources.

Modernity and coloniality, Mignolo argues, “are supported by a complex and diverse structure of knowledge, basically, Christian theology and secular sciences and philosophy. That edifice is at its turn supported by specific institutions created in tandem with the structure of knowledge: Knowledge requires actors and institutions, and actors and institutions conserve, expand, change the structure of knowledge but within the same matrix: the colonial matrix of power.”

Mignolo concludes that delinking from the colonial matrix of power that underpins Western modernity in order to imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited in the relentless quest for wealth accumulation would require a decolonial pathway, that is, engaging in an epistemic reconstitution to create new pathways to ways of thinking, language, ways of life and of being in a future world where the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are disavowed.

The European narrative of progress, enlightenment and civilization conceals a dark underbelly—coloniality.

The food farming models in these sand dam initiatives provide one such pathway. By putting scientific tools at the service of the people, incorporating traditional knowledge systems, and centring the project around the community that is taking its destiny into its own hands, sand dams stand out as an example of “decolonial doing”.

Indeed, the adoption of sand dams and the food production model that accompanies them is upending the logic of modernity—urbanization, capitalism and primitive wealth accumulation, and environmental degradation—and ushering in a future in which the residents of Makueni can live in harmony with their natural world.

The adoption of silangas has revived lost or stifled traditions and helped to create new forms of community building. It has placed local knowledges and their carriers—the women of the community—at the centre in contesting the logic of modernity; indeed, rural womenfolk are a significant pillar in the epistemic reconstitution now taking place in Makueni. Importantly, it has put food production back in the hands of the community, returning to the community the right to define its own agricultural, labour, food and land policies that are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

In the last pages of her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (2022, New), journalist Jori Lewis breaks the fourth wall to bring readers into the present and share a story from her reporting process. The archives she had mined were rich with stories of a village called Kerbala—an outpost of French control on the westernmost coast of Africa which thrived at a time when France controlled all of what is now Senegal and much of West Africa. Kerbala had been a haven for freed slaves who had escaped bondage further inland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But more than a century after its heyday, the village had very nearly disappeared into the landscape.

Still, the journalist writes, she wanted to see whatever was left of it for herself, so she took a cab inland from her base in Senegal’s coastal capital of Dakar before riding a horse-drawn cart to a remote village. There, she met an old man who, she was told, might know where the village once stood. The mood was a bit desperate, and the author tempered her optimism: there was no reason to suspect that even the area’s oldest resident would remember the stories of people who “weren’t warriors or princes or learned clerics.” And in fact, after some careful thought, the man said he had no recollection of it. Instead, he said a prayer for the author: that Allah would help her find what she was searching for. Lewis thanked him in two languages, and then, she writes in the last words of the book, “I continued along my way.” It’s a fitting end to a story about a people who, beyond being forgotten, were scarcely remembered in the first place.

Slaves For Peanuts is a story about a crop and the people who grew it at the margins of an empire. The slaves in this case were not in the southeastern United States, but in West Africa—specifically, in the humid, inland pastures which, in the 1840s, were the most abundant source of the world’s most important oilseed. Like many (if not most) imperial forays of the day, the peanut’s importance came down to a coincidence of taste, industry, and geography: Europe needed oil—to cook and grease machines, but especially to manufacture soap with. Olive oil was well suited to the purpose, but olive trees were vulnerable to frost and tended to grow in areas prone to conflict, making the supply unreliable. Palm oil made perfectly good soap and was popular in England, but its yellow hue was unappealing to French consumers. In the 1840s, French industrialists turned to peanut oil—and soon realized it could be used in a variety of ways, from cooking to fueling lamps.

In France, many consumers—already accustomed to white olive oil bars—likely didn’t even notice they were buying something new when soap manufacturers switched to peanut oil. But in Africa, the shift was nothing short of transformational. At the start of the peanut boom, France’s presence in Africa was limited to a few outposts on the westernmost edge of the continent: “more a hodgepodge of settlements than a cohesive colony, with an ever-rotating population of temporary agents for trading companies.” The largest, on an island called Saint Louis at the juncture of the Senegal River and the Atlantic coast, was a gateway through which the region’s wealth passed on its way to Europe. The rest of Africa lay just beyond it: “a whole continent—one where the French were guests, not hosts,” as foreboding as it was vast, and where practices which were illegal in French territory—including slavery—were widespread. While the French occasionally played the role of white interlocutor, the Africans of the interior were content to keep them at arm’s length.

Peanuts changed all of that. After France banned slavery in all its colonies in 1848, French colonialists began to see themselves as being part of a “civilizing”—not just a mercantilist—cause in Africa. But rising demand for peanuts had spurred demand for farm labor—and thus for slaves. As the French followed their commercial interests ever deeper into the African countryside, freeing more and more people from bondage as they went, the contradiction between their dual missions became harder to ignore. “The trading period has begun; it is said that there will be many peanuts this year,” one commander reported to the local governor in the late 1870s, eyeing the inevitable shift towards French control. “There is, however, one small dark cloud. It is the upcoming liberation of the slaves.”

The geopolitical game Lewis describes in Slaves for Peanuts is an old one, and one essential to the formation of the modern world: one side declares itself “modern,” “civilized,” or otherwise “advanced”—not just technologically, but morally as well—all the while depending on an influx of goods at a cost that’s only possible in the “heathen,” “barbaric,” or “underdeveloped” areas outside its control. As Lewis shows, division and denial allowed European soap buyers to stake a position of ethical supremacy without having to pay a great deal for the high standard of living they craved.

Readers will recognize parallel arrangements that make the comforts of our own world possible: think of how cheap agricultural goods like avocados (and workers) pass across the US-Mexican border, or how retailers in the US, Europe, Japan, and other countries source goods from China—where labor and environmental regulations are lacking—all while crowing about the “green” commitments they’ve made at home. For all of France’s proclamations of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, slavery was essential to both the moral and material architecture of French imperialism in Africa. But legitimizing moral hypocrisy has always been essential to making capitalism work.

One thing that has changed is our perception of those travesties. Modern technology makes it possible for rich nations to exploit poorer ones from a distance, allowing a degree of psychological dissonance. But in the 19th century, exploiting Africa’s lands—and the human hands that worked them—still required maintaining a nearby territorial presence. At least a few proponents of France’s “civilizing mission” had to live in close contact with the people who suffered under it, making the hypocrisy of the whole thing all but impossible to deny.

Lewis sifted the details of 19th-century Senegal mostly from yellowed letters, account books, and dispatches from archives in six countries. That alone is an astonishing achievement. What is more remarkable is that she was able to depict not just the early colonizers, but the Africans as well, including a few former slaves who either fled for French domains like Saint Louis—and rose to prominence in the tumultuous atmosphere of the colonies—or started their own communities nearby, like Kerbala.

Nonetheless, most of Slaves for Peanuts is necessarily limited to the stories of people whose lives history managed to record—namely, the missionaries and inland power brokers who dealt and corresponded with the French regularly. At times, the plot can be hard to follow, as their priorities shift and new people cycle in from Europe. The slaves are a constant presence, but they typically exist in the background, recognizable as a collective more than as individuals.

Where the story becomes most vivid, however, is in Lewis’s descriptions of landscapes, which she often renders more clearly than the characters who populated them. One can see how areas separated by the hard lines of colonial decree were brought together by the bonds of human connection. “Saint Louis prospered despite all the odds,” she writes, introducing the emergent destination for the liberated. She goes on: “It went from a sandy island with a small, fortified post to a proper city as traders and dealers imported stone from the Canary Islands to build houses, and people from the kingdoms up the river or across the dunes staked their tents or built houses of mud and reeds. Eventually, the city filled the whole island and had to expand. … Soon, bridges from island to island were built, to link the major points of the archipelago and provide for communication and commerce with the people up the river and across the dunes. Still, going to Saint Louis took fortitude and determination.”

Ultimately, depending on forced labor for such a basic commodity became untenable for a power that considered itself the vanguard of civilization in Africa. By the 1880s, after having indirectly encouraged slavery for decades, France (along with several other European powers of the day) declared an ambitious plan for conquering the rest of the continent and cited slavery’s persistence as a justification for it—marking the start of what the British called the “Scramble for Africa.”

Hundreds of miles from the coast, at the groundbreaking for a new garrison in Bamako, Mali—one of the last stops of a future rail line which would connect West Africa’s interior to its coast and sustain French dominance in the region for generations—one French colonel told the crowd that slavery was “an integral part” of African morality, and one that Europeans alone had the responsibility to end. Having already spent hundreds of millions of francs attempting to abolish the practice, he said, “Republican France can spend a few million to modify, little by little, with wisdom and prudence, the vicious, unproductive, immoral system which is so beloved of all these peoples.”

By then, whatever memory French colonialists retained of having encouraged that “immoral system” had already faded. In time, the memory of the slaves themselves would pass as well.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

In the last years of President Daniel arap Moi’s Kanu rule, the central business district of the capital city Nairobi, become a bad, dangerous and ugly town. Nairobians were being mugged left, right and centre. It didn’t matter what time of day, one was being robbed, so long as the opportunity availed itself.

During the day the town was unpoliced, or let me put it this way, the police (both plain clothes and uniformed) become part of the problem. They watched as people got hassled and those who didn’t watch, participated in the hassling.  The alleyways were unkempt and unpassable. Few street lights worked, so once dusk set in, the town was thrown into an abyss of darkness. From then on, anything went.

Hordes of marauding hoodlums and muggers prowled the CBD unfettered, searching for their victims. It was a horrendous time to be a Nairobian.

The expatriate community was weary of venturing out and if it did, it moved in groups and certain specified areas. It created its own security arrangements, whereby, it collected data for everyone who was in its circuit, hence easy to keep track of its members.

Recently, I spoke to some of my expatriate friends who live in the Westlands suburbs of Nairobi, and they told me the “Nairoberry” days are back, where after a very long while, they are now having to rethink about their safety and security, especially in the evenings.

Then, police disguised in civilian clothes, were mugging people openly. In 2001, a professional journalist colleague one evening was going to catch a matatu as he headed home. It was just about past 7pm. On crossing the famous Kenya Cinema on the other side of Moi Avenue, he was met by a mob of men who stripped him of nearly every valuable item, including his belt and spectacles and a feature mobile phone which was in vogue then.

The “Nairoberry” days are back, where after a very long while, [people] are now having to rethink about their safety and security, especially in the evenings

In a split of a second, he was on the ground, shorn off everything. Describing the efficiency with which he had been robbed, we suspected it must have been the work of trained hands. For the next three months, we investigated the incident and true to our fears, it was a group of criminally-inclined policemen who were robbing people in the CBD.

Those times are back: Between January and April, 2022, mugging incidents from people that I know alone, have been staggering – from a university don being robbed by uniformed police right in the middle of the CBD late in the evening, to boda boda riders mobbing a man to rob him off his personal effects, including the prized mobile phone in broad daylight, to hoodlums snatching ladies’ handbags and just slithering away, unperturbed that they could apprehended.

In January, an international news agency that has offices in Nairobi and that had just employed a new foreign correspondent was warned that Nairobi is full of “pickpockets and street-smart hoodlums” and therefore he was being warned to be extra careful. Hardly would a news agency that itself deals in reporting newsworthy information, miss to report on an aspect that it considers to be of concern to its employees.

Of course, the CBD has mutated from those terrible Moi days of dangerous boulevards and streets, where it was not uncommon to have potholes in the middle of avenues that no one could remember the last time they had fresh tarmac.

Today, many of the thoroughfares are in better conditions, the street lights, by and large are operational and on the face of it, well, the CBD is a wee cleaner. The CBD is apparently manned by CCTV cameras, but guess what, the mugging instead of decreasing, has actually gone up. What was the point of installing those cameras?

But beneath the cabro works, which are mostly to be found in the uptown, the entire CBD is not a safe place to be, uptown or otherwise. Chatting with a friend outside the Stanley Hotel, next to the newspapers and magazines kiosk, which is at the junction of Kimathi Street and Kenyatta Avenue, a boda boda passenger brazenly nicked a man’s mobile phone as he was making a call and rode away, onto Kenyatta Avenue. It was a 1pm, a hot, sunny day. It must have been a team effort, some boda boda riders move around, pretending to ferry passengers, but in real sense are they are just muggers.

The CBD is manned by CCTV cameras, but the muggings instead of decreasing, have actually gone up

The hotel’s security guards told us the area around the five-star was no longer safe, rogue boda boda riders had become a menace to unsuspecting passers-by exposing their mobile phones as they wait to cross the zebra-crossing, either on Kimathis Street, or Kenyatta Avenue. The Stanley Hotel environs should be one of the safest areas in the CBD, but not anymore. I asked the hotel’s security detail what happened to the plainclothes police that are always a whistle-stop away. “It looks like it’s a free-for-all nowadays,” said one of them.

A university lecturer on his way home was recently accosted by regular police on Muindi Bingu Street, near Jevanjee Gardens. It was about 7.30pm. At gun point, they forced him to go a Mpesa (mobile phone money banking) agent and withdraw all the money he had on his mobile phone. He lost KSh30,000 in total. The street wasn’t dark like Moi days, in fact, at the point where he was mugged by the police, there are CCTV camera, at the junction of Muindi Bingu and Moktar Dada Streets, but just like in Moi days, the rogue police are back. They were most probably from Central Police Station, because the station covers that area of the CBD.

Accompanying a friend to the station to report about his stolen items, which included credit cards and of course his mobile phone, all forcibly snatched by boda boda riders’ in broad daylight, one of the officers, a burly policeman, manning the crime desk, laughed uproariously and said; “hahahaha, welcome to Nairobi. Hii Nairobi iko na wenyewe,” this Nairobi has its owners. unabahati haukunyoroshwa sana, you’re lucky you got off lightly, it could have been worse.”

The Kenya police become very sensitive when the media reports of its iniquities, against the very people they are supposed to protect. But on the streets of Nairobi, they are known to abet crime and collude with CBD thugs. If you want to know, just talk to the multitude of the downtown street hawkers. “Pickpockets, bag-snatchers and petty thieves are always roaming these streets, we know them, the police know them, they are always going about their business unrestricted, how come the police don’t arrest them?” Poses a hawker on Tom Mboya St.

The Stanley Hotel environs should be one of the safest areas in the CBD, but not anymore

“It is because the police and the thugs work together, in partnership, in a fellowship of some kind, where the thugs share their stolen loot with the police afterwards. Many of the police patrolling Tom Mboya St for example, are always in plainclothes, we see them, also walking up and down, just like the pickpockets, oftentimes crisscrossing each other, but no arrests are made. It is what it is. On these streets, everybody minds their own businesses, that way you don’t cross anybody’s path.”

At the tail end of his regime, Moi was sucked up by succession politics more than possibly the security concerns of a big city like Nairobi. Already a lame duck President, even the police could afford to be rogue and not fear the consequences. In any case the police always seem to have a leeway, especially the Kenya Police, who are known to be involved criminal activities.

Less than 100 days to the much-awaited succession presidential elections, the Jubilee government has all its guns trained on the forthcoming tumultuous polls. The Nairobi city crime incidents have always been with us, but with an economic meltdown, an agitated police service that is aggrieved because of its unfulfilled remunerations’ promises, the election fever, it’s a free-for-all, which has seen the city’s crimes soar to the detriment of its habitats.