Indigenous Gendered Spaces: An Examination of Kenya

Abstract

Look at this shamba (farm). I had coffee trees from the top of the hill to the river. Every year the coffee co-operative told us the same story. There is no market for your coffee. The competition is high and prices are low. We could not uproot the trees for crop rotation. The government agents told us growing coffee was the way to progress. We were not allowed to plant maize or beans in between the coffee trees. After many years of no money and no food, we decided to cut down all the coffee trees and leave a few for our use… The women were the first ones to cut the coffee trees. Somehow everybody in our community followed our example…it is like we knew we had to do something to save ourselves and also the soil. Many women and men got sick from the pesticide sprays and those fertilizers we had to buy from the coffee board…I guess we had to do what we thought was best for our community (Muthoni, 1998, as told to Wane).