Fencing and de-fencing East Africa’s grasslands

Across East Africa, fencing is expanding on a remarkable scale applying a grid across thousands of hectares of rangelands. In its midst, landscapes and land tenure dynamics are reconfigured and conflicts over access and control of the lands escalate. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will it lead to in the years to come?

Archaeologist Mette Løvschal and anthropologist Marie Gravesen set out to explore the deeper im/material dimension of boundaries; and how they can bind people and landscapes to pathways of escalating social, ecological or political violence. They noticed that when immaterial boundaries started to materialise into fences, they tended to intensify and spread rather than to turn immaterial again. So in this article, Løvschal and Gravesen explore why it is so difficult to get rid of boundaries once they have been “marked” onto the landscape as physical fences and walls and how the fences’ gradual expansion across the landscape is fuelled by histories of marginalization and dominance, as well as carrying self-preservation intentions.

In two case studies from pastoralist grazing lands in Kenya’s Rift Valley region, Løvschal and Gravesen explore two strategies of resisting enclosure and its associated forms of violence: in Laikipia, pastoralists physically oppose the fences erected by ranchers and smallholder farmers (i.e. de-fencing). They regard fencing as an instrument of exclusion and dominance employed by white farmers. So, they seek to very concretely unbind and de-fence land. And in the Mara, pastoralists erect fences themselves to create a space for emancipation and protection from state appropriation of their lands. They use the binding and fencing of land as a form of unbinding from the past - a form of defence against pressures from different forms of external economic investment interests. This way, their use of fencing as well as de-fencing are ways of reacting to long-standing and enduring land tenure uncertainties.

Løvschal and Gravesen argue that fencing is embedded in a landscape logic that favours exclusive rights and conditioned access – a logic that holds a colonial footing. As such, the fences are bound to a mode of separation, to a strategy for exclusion, and to hierarchical structures that are conjured and perpetuated when boundaries go from immaterial to material. As anthropologist Ann Stoler argues in her 2008 book ‘Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination’, those colonial logics and the histories of marginalization that they have uprooted, cannot simply be undone through efforts of decolonization - because the hierarchies stay behind and continue to be reproduced with and by these acts of boundary making.

This way, the conflicts we see escalate around fences in these years are not only a contemporary phenomenon connected to resource scarcity. Instead, the fences also represent layers of political pasts - a gradual violence, embedded in unsettled imperial debris. This is how, for pastoralists, the fences can manifest as acts of both autonomy and struggle that continuously shape the landscape, as well as the future potentialities of all land users.