Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi
Abstract
This seminar will provide an overview of 18 months of Ph.D
dissertation research on the interplay of gender and horticultural
production in Meru District, Kenya. The significance of this project is
that horticulture "traditionally" the domain of women, has become
rapidly intensified and commercialized for export production. My
research examines the implications of horticultural exports for women's
rights to land and labor by focusing on the district's most important
horticultural export crop, French beans. While French beans remain
widely grown throughout the District, both production and sales have
dropped dramatically since 1993. Thus, this project explores how the
fluctuation of multinational capital is restructuring social life,
transforming domestic relations and precipitating new class
configurations.
My tentative findings include a host of social crises: a
staggering population growth rate (3.9 percent) that has incited acute
pressures on constricting land resources and catalyzed an escalation of
clan and court cases related to land disputes; an exacerbation of
domestic violence and deviant social behavior such as prostitution, rape
and incest; ubiquitous occurrences of alcohol abuse; and finally, the
transformation of French bean market centers into loci of corruption and
duplicity. These social dynamics underscore the tensions that emanate
in an atmosphere of financial disintegration that is coupled with an
absence of prospects for economic amelioration.
As the panacea of French bean wanes women have turned to Christ to cope
with the economic plights of their households. The omnipresence of
Christianity powerfully shapes all aspects of social change, as the
convictions of female submission and male dominance are propagated
through variant Christian ideologies and men face the backlash of such
indoctrination by women bewitching or poisoning them. Thus the material
and ideational reconstruction that has taken root invokes significant
queries on the gender dimensions of power and raises important questions
for the gen
