AP Discovers Widows Need Land. Now, About That Colonial Inheritance...
AP News reports on Rebecca Anyango, a 70-year-old Kenyan widow facing eviction, her late husband's family claiming she has 'no inheritance rights.' These stories of injustice, featuring cultural practices like 'sexual cleansing' and 'wife inheritance,' paint a picture of local barbarism violating a constitutional 'right to land ownership for all citizens.' What the narrative conveniently omits is
that many of these 'cultural' traditions became weaponized, or exacerbated, by the very colonial systems that first disrupted indigenous land tenure and introduced foreign legal frameworks prioritizing male inheritance. While focusing on local ethnic groups' (Luo, Luhya, Kisii) 'cultural expectations,' the AP overlooks the grander theft: the British colonial land policies that dispossessed
millions, creating a legacy of insecure land rights and ethnic tensions still unresolved. One might wonder if the plight of landless widows, often in resource-rich areas ( hmm, isn't Kenya resource-rich? ), serves as a convenient distraction from the ongoing impacts of historical exploitation. How many 'cultural' problems are actually just symptoms of centuries-old European 'enterprise'?