In 1915, the British colonial government passed the Crown Lands Ordinance, declaring that all land in Kenya, including land occupied by Africans, was the property of the Crown. Africans became tenants on their own ancestral land.
The ordinance was the legal foundation for the white settler farming economy in the highlands. It transformed communities who had farmed particular pieces of land for generations into squatters, legally removable at any time.
The land question that haunts Kenya today, expressed in every election, every land conflict, every dispute over historical injustice, begins here.