THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

ural livelihoods, it became the focus of intense struggles between and among women and
men. But we must also note that struggles over land are experienced differently by women
and men, depending upon the complex interactions of gender, class, age, marital status, and
life-cycle positioning.
Men negotiate, access, and maintain control over land as a productive and material resource
and inequitably achieve this within local institutional setting. In the study it was established
that 96.35% agreed that men were the greatest owners of cash crops as opposed to 3.65% of
women who were the controllers of cash crop production. Respondents were asked what
framed the division of labour among the Luhya. It was established that: because men owned
the land as an important symbolic resource, cash crops were a preserve of the men who also
doubled as the managers of the means of production as well as the financial resources in the
home. This fact was also cross checked in a focus group interview held among the tribal heads
of Tirirki sub-tribe. They defended this based on the fact that the land among the Luhya is
customary land and therefore all the work done on the land belongs to the men who controlled
that same piece of land. A focus on women's and men's struggles over land must also consider
the symbolic and discursive contestations that constitute those struggles as postulated by
Meinzen et al., 632 and Beneria. 633
It is further imperative to observe that as a symbolic resource, land holds important meanings
within Luhya cultural discourse, defining gender relations and women's and men's rights to
access and use. These multiple meanings are constantly being contested and transformed
within a situation of legal plurality in Kenya. These, in addition to the dual importance of land
as both a material and an institutional symbolic resource, illustrate the diverse ways in which
women and men struggle over long-term access to and security of land, as rights to land are
gendered.
Among Maragoli, Kisa, Idhoha and Wanyore, there is a critical connection between key
gendered aspects of security in tenure and sustainable soil management and farming.
Although women carry out the day-to-day work and decision-making in farming and soil
management, the planting of trees, cash crops and other restricted crops is a symbolic gesture
of power invoked by men within these societies.
632
Meinzen, R.D, et al. 1997. Gender, Property Rights and Natural Resources. Washington D.C: IFPRI
Publication.
633
Beneria, L. 1992. Accounting for women’s work: The progress of Two Decades. World Development 20
(11):1547-1560.
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