The Fluidity of Late Colonialism: Irrigation as a Form of State Expansion in Late Colonial Kenya

Late-colonial development in Kenya coalesced around the control and management of resources, and for much of the arid north of the country no resource was more critical than the limited water supplies that pockmarked the landscape. Despite the universal need for the fluid, the meanings and ideologies surrounding the precious entity were far from rooted, instead being mobilized by the colonial state for the benefit of social, political, or environmental engineering. This paper reveals that water resources in the Northern Frontier District of the colony were diverted or protected by the colonial state to benefit specific communities, becoming fundamental in the definition of who belonged within or outside the national community. Using geological studies and Ministry of Agriculture records from the Kenya National Archives, the paper explores how borehole and irrigation schemes in Northern Frontier District became politicized sites that were weaponized by the state.

Irrigation projects in the region were used to settle internal peripheries around static politicized sites, a form of spatial management that dispossessed any community that failed to satisfy the specific social structure prioritized by the state. The control of water resources contributed to a hierarchy of belonging and citizenship that benefited only those willing to acquiesce, deliberately excluding the livelihoods of transhumant and pastoral communities such as the Orma and the Somali. These groups relied upon riverine landscapes and boreholes to water their cattle yet were denied access on the basis of what the state perceived to be a destructive social and agricultural practice, redefining who water belonged to and the types of societies that could benefit from it. This paper shows how mobile communities came to be treated as second-class subjects, demonstrating the ways that the politics of water and the politics of interiority/exteriority were used in the process of colonial state formation.