The gender of wealth: markets & power in Central Kenya

This paper investigates the social and political regulation of markets in Central Kenya, to understand the significance of two commodities to social transformation during the 20th Century. Through a comparative analysis of coffee and bananas, the paper explores the topography of the state, as an institution of control and regulation, an arbiter of market possibilities and an arena for the construction of social identities. In resisting the force of state-controlled relationships, men and women in rural Kenya construct alternative pathways (Appadurai, 1986), manifest in old and new markets largely outside the orbits of the state, new loci of identity and re-configured axes of social differentiation which invade the demarcations of state control, and diminish its discursive power over rural communities (Mackenzie, 1998).

Through the identification of specific social pathways this paper illuminates the multifaceted and dynamic nature of global processes and local identities (see also Guyer, 1987; Ferguson, 1999; Berman & Lonsdale, 1992). In their relationships and actions, individuals position themselves in relation to contemporary developments, not simply through an over-determined linearity or a formless plurality, but through socially embedded orientations, defined by contrasting ideas about ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, ‘global’ and ‘local’, male and female, youth and age (Ferguson, 1999, Holtzman, 2004). These orientations give collective force and direction to the agency of individuals, even as they are transformed. For example, in its analysis of coffee markets in central Kenya, the paper explores the way in which older landed men have constructed a distinct orientation to contemporary processes, understood in relation to metaphors such as ‘development’, through which they have successfully controlled the rural socio-economy since independence in 1963. After the 1980s however, their dominance has been challenged by younger men and women. Through the transaction of newly successful commodities such as bananas, younger men and women have activated alternative models of power and meaning to construct new pathways, through which they shift relationships between gender, wealth and power in their localities and beyond.

Coffee & community: the ‘Development’ of Gachocho

Gachocho lies about 5 kilometres above Muthithi market, and is particularly well known as a coffee growing area. Mama Mbugwa, a clothes seller in Muthithi market, remembers Gachocho when she was a little girl. At that time the area was covered in forest and bush and there were wild animals such as hyena and elephant at the bottom of the garden. But after the 1950s, the variegated forest of the highland country was cleared and replaced by the uniform dark green of coffee. It was christianity and the chiefs, ambivalent as they were, which set Gachocho on the road to prosperity. Gachocho has been highly influenced by Anglican christianity, which associated itself, in the words of Baba Simon, a farmer from Muthithi, with ethics of ‘cleanliness, prosperity and progress’, and pitted itself against what were portrayed as the regressive forces of ‘tradition’. The missions were responsible for education and the avenues this opened to employment; as Greet Kershaw writes (1997:133), ‘… as soon as they started to look for work all Nairobi men learned that education was capital.’ The state, in the form of colonial chiefs, played its part in the prosperity of the area. Gachocho was the home of Kambogo, a prominent early chief who was a contemporary and friend of Njiri, one of the most famous and ruthless of the colonial chiefs. Mwangi, a great grandson of Kambogo, told me how the chiefs of that time were despised; many of them took land and women by force and became immensely rich. No one dared to oppose them or they would be killed.

Its association with church and state paved the way for the present wealth of Gachocho, but it was the introduction of coffee in the 1950s by the colonial government that really set Gachocho on the road to prosperity. From its inception, coffee growing was associated with the state. The refusal of the colonial regime to let Africans grow coffee was one of the main issues behind the formation of the political movement which culminated in the Mau Mau rebellion of the early 1950s. Murang'a district was one of the strongholds of the guerilla army who fought the British, and coffee was first introduced in the area during the war as a ‘sweetener’ to stop people from joining the Mau Mau guerilla fighters. Those who grew coffee at this time were seen as the ‘home guard’, people who had betrayed the fighters and were siding with the colonial government.

Eliud wa Kabugwa was employed by the colonial government as an elder of the law courts in Muthithi well before the Emergency was declared in 1952. He started growing coffee in 1956, a few years after it came to the area. Mzee Kabugwa described how the whites were very strict about the planting of coffee; ‘you were only allowed to plant 100 plants in a year to prevent you from becoming rich too quickly and providing competition for Europeans’. He protested about this to the District Officer whereupon ‘five whites came with the D.O. and uprooted many of my plants just as they had uprooted Koinange's coffee.’

Coffee production expanded rapidly in Central Province when limits to production were relaxed after the Mau Mau at the end of the 1950s. This coincided with the build up to independence which saw an intense rivalry between two main political parties, one supported by the British, Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), and the other representing the main Kikuyu and Luo vote, Kenya African National Union (KANU), under which independence was eventually achieved. According to Baba Wangeci, a teacher from Gachocho, when coffee first began to establish itself in Gachocho at the end of the 1950s it was very unpopular because it was said to be a KADU crop and people who grew it were putting themselves at risk because of the strong KANU sympathies in the area. Baba Wangeci's grandfather, an assistant chief at the time of independence, forced his subjects to grow coffee because he saw that it would be very valuable in the future:

Although those few who grew coffee were initially associated with the colonial regime, after independence in 1963 under the Kikuyu presidency of Kenyatta, coffee growing became widespread. However, its capacity to transform land into wealth was still dependent on access to capital, cementing the power of a landed, male loyalist group, established in pre-independence years and supported by the political structures under which independence was achieved (MacKenzie, 1998; Kitching, 1980; Branch & Cheeseman, this vol.). Coffee was always the crop of men; it was their capital earned through employment which bought the seedlings and paid for the inputs that successful coffee farming required. Those who benefited most from coffee were those who had integrated themselves most into the colonial regime. In Gachocho, many of these were the mission educated ‘standard fivers’ of the 1940s who, I was told, were ‘our bosses’. Many of them became teachers, in those days relatively wealthy compared to others, who had the capital required for coffee farming. Men like Baba Warugoro used the capital from their teaching profession to develop coffee and then the capital from coffee to start a business. Baba Warugoro now has a successful retail shop in Nairobi as well as his coffee farm in Gachocho.

After Independence, coffee became the major metaphor for prosperity underpinned by the state and the ethic of Anglican christianity. Growing coffee was associated with the concept of maendeleo (development), which was linked to the notion of ‘progress’ and its associations with ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’ inspired by the colonial missions (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997). ‘Development’ was the flagship under which communities were re-constructed after the independence war, synonymous economically with government-controlled export crops, politically with the Kikuyu allegiance to Kenyatta's state and culturally with a construction of Kikuyu ethnicity as nationhood (Heyer, 2004). The re-building of communities under the ‘development’ umbrella also entailed a patriarchal construction of gender, where women as wives were firmly relegated to the realm of reproduction and guardianship of their husband's land and assets.

In the 1970s, the income from coffee brought unprecedented wealth to coffee farmers in places like Gachocho. I was told that when farmers would go to their banks to be informed how much money they had in their accounts, they would be furious with the bank manager because they thought that the ludicrously large sums were an insidious ploy to take away their land! The coffee boom of the 1970s did not last and in the 1980s prices began to fluctuate dramatically on the world market. This was exacerbated by political and bureaucratic procedures caused in part by the ineptitude of farmers who failed to take control of the marketing of coffee. The coffee board became riddled with loopholes, and coffee money was siphoned off by middlemen and by the machinations of politics and corruption.

Again, the fluctuations in coffee markets were conceived of in relation to the state. People blamed the downfall of coffee on President Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta in 1978 and hailed from the Kalenjin ethnic group. They say he ‘ate the coffee money’. Correspondingly, the upturn in coffee prices in the 1990s was attributed to the efforts of the Kikuyu politician Kenneth Matiba, who was a leader of the opposition which led the way to the multiparty era in 1992 and paved the way for the electoral victory of President Kibaki, another Kikuyu, in 2002. Despite the lessons of the previous decades, I was told that people are once again more hopeful about the future of coffee under Kibaki's presidency. Part myth and part fact, perceptions of the link between coffee, community and state is encouraged on all sides. For instance, the government-controlled coffee board legitimates itself at the local level in terms of one of the most deep-rooted standards against which community ethics are measured: that of famine: ‘cash crops are nice’ said Mama Mbugwa, ‘if there is drought the government will give maize.’ The coffee board will give coffee farmers maize on credit in times of hunger. In this way the allegiance of farmers can be commandeered even when coffee is not only unprofitable but actually entails loss.

Contesting coffee: ‘Male’ wealth & its reproduction

From the start, the accumulation of wealth in areas like Muthithi was dependent on female compliance in the combined role of wife and farmer. The development of land depended on investment of money, which was generally obtained through employment. Men depended on their wives to manage their land and to look after it while they themselves worked to earn money, often away from home. Michael Chanock describes how the withdrawal of women's labour for cash crops at key junctures could spell disaster, leading to an emphasis on marital ties (Chanock, 1985:14). Women's labour was commandeered through marriage and especially through male control over land. Male command over land was strengthened through a collusion between the state and Kikuyu elders in the earlier half of the century, cemented through the process of land registration in the 1950s, which eroded a complex series of rights and obligations through which women controlled land and its productivity (Mackenzie, 1988; Kitching, 1980). In effect, this collusion made it almost impossible for women to own land, except through purchase. This has been challenged in recent decades resulting in a government bill which stipulates that daughters must inherit land equally with sons. The bill is strongly contested however, and many women still do not push for their rights in land for fear of being ostracised by their families. Women have reclaimed some power for themselves by diverse strategies ranging from outright conflict to finding avenues of accumulation outside the orbits of state organisations (Mackenzie, 1998; Heyer, 2004; White, 1990). This is often resisted by men, making the household a powerful node of conflict (Heyer, 2004).

The regulation of export crop markets and of labour as instruments of political, gendered and ethnic power has always been judged against its capacity to deliver.

Whereas women's food crops are responsible for the reproduction of the household, export crops like coffee are supposed to provide the income through which men pay for large expenditures such as education and farming inputs, which render the household productive. Profligacy or failure on the part of older men is thus subject to challenge by women – and younger men – through recourse to the longstanding benchmark of household prosperity (Lonsdale, in Berman & Lonsdale, 1992). Currently, the increasing failure of coffee and employment to pay for expenses like school fees has undermined the social and economic position of men, intensifying gendered and generational conflicts over control of household economies. These are particularly acute in areas like Gachocho, which have been heavily influenced by state-centered models of society and wealth.

Njoki and her husband grow coffee on their farm above Muthithi. She told me that either she or her husband can go and collect the coffee money from the coffee board; this is generally the case ‘where there is love between the couple’. However, ‘love between the couple’ cannot be relied upon. Mama Mbugwa's neighbour has a husband who is a real drunkard. One day when she went to collect the coffee money, her husband came and demanded it from her; she refused and ran away for the night. Her husband broke down the door to their house and destroyed many things. The next day she gave the money to the school for the children's school fees. ‘She is very brave’ said Mama Mbugwa.

Mama Mbugwa told me that in the past a woman's work was only to cook and bear children but that now they must do everything. ‘I don’t know why’ she said ‘but men have refused their work; they have become proud but this is only foolishness’. Baba Mbugwa's version of the situation was that ‘women do all the work because they are inferior’.

The decline in men's sources of wealth has placed a heavy burden on their wives who not only continue to look after the coffee but must also look for other means of income. In the face of current hardships, it tends to be women not men who diversify their income generating activities while men fall into drinking and idleness. In areas like Gachocho however, the ideologies of Victorian and Kikuyu patriarchies have combined through interactions between the missions, the state and local communi-ties, to underpin a particular ideology of ‘male’ wealth which cannot allow for the re-deployment of ‘female’ wealth even in times of hardship.

In the early 1980s Mama Mbugwa decided that the combination of her husband's primary school teaching salary and coffee, both declining in value, would not be enough to support her family and educate her children. Despite the fact that in the Gachocho area, the heartland of ‘male’ wealth, business is frowned upon as the activity of ‘harlots’, she decided to start selling maize and beans in Nairobi's Gikomba market. By 1988 she was able to buy six lorry loads of stones and was well on her way to building a store on the plot which she and her husband owned in Gachocho. The family's success through Mama Mbugwa's business caused a lot of jealousy. People started telling Baba Mbugwa that his wife had become a ‘harlot’ and giving him bad reports of her behaviour. Even though she was clearly investing her profits back into her husband's land and assets, they warned that if she continued her business, she would surely run away and leave him.

Despite the success of her business, Mama Mbugwa's priorities always lay with her home. Her business trips often demanded that she leave at the crack of dawn:

Eventually Baba Mbugwa succumbed to the rumours that surrounded his wife's success. In 1988 he made her stop business. ‘I never want to remember that day!’ said Mama Mbugwa. Today the family's fortunes have plummeted, and they are now struggling to survive on their father's meager salary. Neither Baba Mbugwa's coffee, nor his teaching salary can mitigate the erosion of his household income, now catering to the demands of growing children. The situation for the family has become so bad that Baba Mbugwa has recently allowed his wife to resume her business activities. However, he will only allow her to do business locally selling clothes, a commodity which is considered respectable. It is too late for Mama Mbugwa to make it in the now-established clothes market where competition from young (unem-ployed) men is fierce. Thus the business does little to alleviate the family's present hardships, and the last time I spoke to the family in 1994 Mama Mbugwa had all but given up.

In the case of Mama Mbugwa's household, an upward spiral of accumulation is now reversed by the very discourse through which it was generated. Gachocho's development through a model of prosperity based on state-controlled markets and mission-inspired ideologies, cemented the power of a landed male wealthy class, which could not adapt to new conditions demanding alternative outlooks, including the deployment of ‘female’ wealth.

Beyond coffee: new spaces of communal identification

By the early 1990s coffee farmers were profoundly disillusioned with coffee as they watched their hard won fortunes slip away with no visible alternatives in sight. This coincided with decreasing employment opportunities on which men relied for sources of investment. The two together have been responsible for the general decline in male sources of wealth, particularly in the coffee producing areas of districts like Murang'a. As a result of the decline in export crops and employment, some men are beginning to diversify into other sources of income, independent of state-controlled export crop markets, and geared rather to local food markets and internationally controlled export markets.

Baba Mwangi is from Kwamiano about the same distance below Muthithi market as Gachocho is above it. Unlike Gachocho, which is given over almost wholly to coffee, Kwamiano is characterised by the mixed farming of coffee and foodcrops. In contrast to the area around Muthithi market, the farms of Kwamiano are relatively large. Kwamiano did not used to be as wealthy as Gachocho, but by the end of the millennium, things were beginning to change.

Baba Mwangi has recently retired from his profession as a mechanic and is now concentrating on ‘developing’ his land, and I was told that he is rapidly becoming one of the three richest men in the area. These days Baba Mwangi can earn more from his few macadamia trees than he can from his coffee – which in addition requires much more input and hard work. He has also started pig farming. But it is bananas which really earn him money; five times as much annually as coffee, according to him. Bananas are not the crop of men, nor do they depend on large amounts of capital which must be generated through formal employment. Bananas are the crop of women; not only are they the main source of nourishment for weaning babies, they were also given to the mother of the bride at her wedding as an acknowledgement of the bride's virginity. The growing importance of bananas is potentially shifting the relationship between gender and wealth in the rural areas.

Men's attempts to preserve their economic centrality to rural communities through sourcing new markets independent of the state, is paralleled by new constructions of community through the rejuvenation of the clans (mihiriga). In recent times, the clans have begun to form themselves into self-help groups, which are formally registered with the government and geared to ‘development’ projects. Husbands and wives may join separately, and each new member must pay a small registration fee. These formalised clan self-help groups have nothing to do with the broader framework of the clan, which is still called together at times such as funerals or for sorting out disputes. Membership of the new ‘mihiriga’ is dependent on residence rather than kinship, reflecting new understandings of community based on landed rather than moveable wealth (Heyer, 1998). In their new incarnation, the clans are not simply remnants of a bygone era, but contemporary models for the economic and social re-construction of community.

The concept of ‘development’ is key to clan identities in the present, invoking ideologies of wealth underpinned by the missions. In contrast to the harambee groups (rotating savings groups) which are normally associated with women, the clan self-help groups are often initiated by men although women also play a prominent role. In the formation of clan self-help groups, ‘male’ wealth is thus constituted into a new expression of community now independent of the state itself.

New routes, old paths: the ‘Banana’ wives of Kwamiano

In the past, there was no main road in Muthithi. Instead, the area was crisscrossed by a myriad of pathways and small thoroughfares, which connected not only the neighbouring farmsteads but also the territories of peoples as far away as the Wakamba and Maasai. These routes connected the clans through the movement of women, which was creative of clan wealth through marriage and trade (Heyer, 2004; Leakey, 1977). In the case of the Kikuyu particularly, the disappearance of these myriad routes has paralleled the development of the state as a central focus for social, economic and political identification. Since the 1980s when Kikuyu identification with the state began to weaken, the old ‘routes’ which were creative of wealth and community in the past, now converge on the Nairobi-Murang'a highway, however, this time through the agency of women not men, to subvert the influence of the state over the rural socio-economy.

Since the late 1980s, to make up for the shortfall in their husbands’ incomes, the women of Muthithi have once more begun to ‘take to the road’ in trade. Women's trade routes to Nairobi are not a new thing. Rather, they have responded to the cyclical rise and fall of ‘male wealth’ particularly in the latter half of the century. Trade became big in the 1950s, a time when men's earnings were disrupted by armed conflicts and the emergency measures imposed by the colonial state during the struggle for independence. At the same time, the roads to the capital were being reopened, making business between Murang'a and Nairobi both profitable and relatively easy. The subsequent success of coffee and the returns from men's employment stemmed the growth of women's independent business activities. Their husbands’ incomes could now support women's households and pay for the education of their children. This continued to be the case throughout the 1960s and 1970s when the coffee market was booming. Nowadays, said Cucu wa Marigu, a banana trader from the Muthithi area, ‘there are many problems not like in the past and so women have to do business.’

Just as in the mid- and early half of the century, it was bananas that gave women the capital to sustain their households and pay for education, so today it is bananas once more that are rescuing a flagging rural economy. Today, the squeeze on the economy faced by the households of Muthithi and its environs is counterposed by the profitability of bananas in the growing consumer markets of Nairobi, replicating the creative tension between ‘problems’ and opportunities that paved the way for the business activities of wives after the end of Mau Mau. It is mainly widows who start in the banana business – 40 per cent of the banana sellers in Mukuyu market outside Murang'a town are widows. Cucu wa Chomba is from Muthithi. After her husband died in the 1960s, she decided to guthii barabara (take to the road) trading bananas to Nairobi. In the current decade, newcomers to the trade whose husbands bring in little or no income may as well be widows with only their husbands’ land to show for the assets of marriage.

Mama Murigu started business in 1978 ‘because of hunger’. Her husband, who worked as a mechanic in Nairobi, about 80kms from Muthithi, stopped sending remittances. She told me that she didn’t know how she was able to start but ‘God gave me the money to start and showed me how.’

The recent engagement of local farming wives in the export of bananas is a response to the decline in ‘male’ wealth. In lieu of their husbands’ financial contributions, these women take on the responsibility for the larger cash expenditures of the household, geared not just to its reproduction, but also to productive investments such as education and farm in-puts, conventionally the domain of men. Today, when men are no longer capable of providing education for their children, their wives, like their own mothers before them, will take to the road to ‘educate their children with their backs’. This exposes the plasticity of the so-called gendered division of labour which has structured capitalist relations over the course of the century.

A major centre for the banana-trader-wives is Kwamiano bus stop, about five kilometres below Muthithi, where the traders congregate from neighbouring farms and wait for a matatu (minibus) to take them to Nairobi. The area is known for its large farms and is good for both coffee and food crops. Today, Kwamiano has another reputation; it is becoming known for the high number of businesswomen (banana traders) from the area. The unusual number of businesswomen from Kwamiano and its environs has to do not just with the depletion of men's incomes from the downfall of coffee and employment; it is also connected with the influence of the Presbyterian mission in the area and the presence of a large secondary school which has been there since colonial times.

Just as the Anglican mission led to a high premium placed on education in the Gachocho area above Muthithi market, so too with the Presbyterian mission in Kwamiano below. The distinctive feature of Kwamiano as opposed to Muthithi market has been the interplay between the shortfall in male incomes and the incentives of education generated by the Presbyterian mission. This is what differentiates the banana traders of Kwamiano from the Catholic wives who live around Muthithi market, many of whom remain caught in a subsistence trap which does not impel them to branch out into full-time business. Wangeci, who teaches in the Presbyterian secondary school in Kwamiano, told me that the children of the area are exceptionally unruly because of their businesswomen-mothers who neglect their homes for their trading activities. Ironically, it is the education of their children which has prompted these women to start larger-scale businesses in the first place.

As wives and businesswomen, the Kwamiano banana traders re-enact the old ‘routes’ through which women engendered wealth in the past: they re-invest their profits in the homes and assets of their husbands’ clans. In this way, the Kwamiano banana trader-wives are different from the full-time businesswomen who come from Kiambu and forgo both marriage and land. They are also different from those rural wives who simply act as sustainers of their households and guardians of the land and wealth of their husbands, women who are known to take the view that if they travel frequently for business their children will get jiggers. In their trading activities, the banana trader-wives call on an older model of social construction, whereby the movement of women as traders and brides was not only generative of clan wealth, but also of relationships between clans on which collective identification was based (Heyer, 2004). In this respect, they indicate the ways in which capitalist processes are still thinly veined by the routes through which wealth and society were engendered before the colonial encounter.

Banana republic? the in-roads of female wealth

In the recent referendum on 20 November 2005, which rejected the government's new constitutional proposals, the banana was appropriated as the mascot of the government faction where it symbolised the agenda of a Kikuyu ethnic constituency led by Kenya's current president, Mwai Kibaki. The recent invocation of a feminised version of Kikuyu identity in the realm of state politics is reminiscent of Kenyatta's call to the mbari ya Mumbi, the creator-mother of the Kikuyu, which underwrote the construction of the state as an enclave of landed Kikuyu male wealth and power in the 1960s and 70s (Heyer, 2004). At the same time, bananas signify a series of connections which are directly threatening to social, economic and political interests of the contemporary state. This is apparent in the state's relationship to the banana markets of central Kenya, which contrasts starkly to history of the state's involvement with coffee.

Bananas do not have the same importance as tea and coffee for the national economy, because they do not provide a large proportion of Kenya's exports abroad. However, they are increasingly important economically within Kenya itself, especially in places like Murang'a where they are now a major local product,¹ and thus, like coffee, they are subject to political interference. This was evident from the 1980s during the government of Daniel Arap Moi. Farmers reacted to the downturn in coffee prices by planting bananas and other crops between the coffee bushes. Apparently, Moi's rejoinder in 1988 was to ban bananas from crossing the Chania river which separates Murang'a from Nairobi. The ban was short-lived, and today bananas cross the Chania in their thousands. More recently, the government of the Kikuyu president Kibaki has demonstrated its own lack of support for ‘post-coffee’ commodity markets and their constituencies. In an article on the Murang'a banana trade (Taifa Leo, 6 December 2005), farmers complain that the roads are in poor condition, hiking up transport costs and lowering profits; there are no banks in the area to handle the surplus from the banana trade (coffee surpluses were handled through the infrastructure of coffee cooperatives); last but not least, farmers urge the government to get rid of brokers (many of them unemployed younger men) who diminish the profits of wealthy elders.

If farmers who now plant bananas instead of coffee are neglected by the state, traders, many of whom are farmers themselves, are penalised more actively. In a recent attempt to bring under state control an emergent ‘informal’ entrepreneurial elite and their clients, often from the urban underclass, the government enacted a new set of legislation. One such law established tighter controls on matatus (mini-bus taxis that provide the main source of transport in Kenya), which has limited the transportation of goods. This has resulted in increased opportunities for extortion at police check points so that it is now much more expensive for small and medium level traders to transport commodities such as bananas. Equally serious for farmers and traders has been the recent demolition of almost all roadside kiosks in the main areas of Nairobi. This has not only cut the number of retail outlets for Murang'a bananas; it has also removed an important source of investment for ‘banana’ income.

John Mwangi Wanderi, a trader from Murang'a, brings a couple of bunches of bananas to sell everyday in Nairobi. With the profits from the trade, he built a kiosk in the wealthy suburb of Westlands, which has now been demolished. He told me that many kiosk owners have now gone back to the rural areas, trying to scrape together a livelihood in a sphere of declining opportunity. There have even been cases of suicide.

In neglecting the infrastructure in banana growing areas, failing to control the trade in favour of landowning producers as well as curbing the investment arenas, retail points and transport of this ‘independent’ commodity, the state is alienating wealthy farmers and entrepreneurs. This may be seen as a result of the timing of banana markets, during a period a period of political disfavour for the Kikuyu but this cannot explain the attitudes of the current government, who can little afford to lose the central Kenyan vote. As a food crop, sold through local markets, bananas undermine the state's organisational control of agricultural produce. Income from bananas is invested in urban enterprises that are only loosely controlled by the state. Bananas are associated with women who tend to operate largely outside the formal arenas of the state and with rural women, who are supposed to stay at home to sustain their households and safeguard their husbands’ land and assets and not to engage in independent entrepreneurial activities.

In the context of the banana trade, ‘banana-trader-wives’ challenge the state's control of production and markets. This is a factor behind the problems faced by the Muthithi banana-trader-wives who sell at Githurai market on the outskirts of Nairobi. According to Mama Nyambura, Githurai was good initially, because there were many buyers and not many people selling. However, the traders who live in Githurai started complaining about these ‘country women’ who undercut their business. The council supported the full-time traders of Githurai against the ‘country women’ who straddle the frontiers that the state has so clearly tried to demarcate. In 1994 the council opened a new twice-weekly market for ‘country women’ which was not nearly as profitable as the main market, because they were limited to selling on particular days on which they faced much greater competition, and which did not coincide with the best days for buying. The state-derived hardships of the Muthithi banana traders have been greatly increased by the attitudes of the matatu touts in the early 1990s. According to one trader, the matatu touts overcharge and will often make women, like the banana trader-wives of Kwamiano, wait for days before they will transport them and their goods to Nairobi. On the other hand, matatu touts say that ‘these “country women” don’t know how to pay.’ Due to the problems with the matatus, many of the banana traders have stopped going to Nairobi altogether. The tension between the touts and the banana traders is an aspect of the general competition between young men and businesswomen, where the lack of jobs has prompted men to enter a world of entrepreneurship once dominated by women. This alone cannot explain the attitudes of the touts to the Muthithi banana traders, who are often literally their mothers:

Bananas and Murang'a women threaten both the rural/urban divide and state-sanctioned male control over the rural economy because they are given priority over coffee and threaten the revenues of the state. Furthermore, the banana trader-wives of Muthithi, now generators of wealth in their own right, threaten to shift the relationship between gender and wealth in rural communities. In this they present a visible challenge to men and their arenas of wealth and power. As landowners and farmers, men have attempted to capture the profits now generated by bananas through re-defining these as a ‘cash-crop’ and therefore within the legitimate sphere of male control. However, the cultural pathways of bananas mitigate against their capture by a wealthy male elite. As the crop of women, bananas are primarily associated with the well-being and sustenance of the home, especially of the young. Thus, men cannot ‘drink’ banana money as they did with coffee. In addition, I was told, brokers cannot buy more than one or two bananas from the man of the house without making sure that the woman is also involved. With bananas as the new ‘cash-crop’, it appears that women have much greater control over household economies – so much so, that it is now women who give men ‘pocket money’ for leisure pursuits such as drinking. In contrast to coffee, women's control over the income from bananas is aided by the fact that it is not channeled via state-controlled institutions into the bank accounts of men: instead, and in common with other ‘new’ cash-crops, bananas are paid for directly in cash.

In their relationships with husbands, matatu touts and the state, the banana trader-wives confront an ‘anxious virility’ (Mbembe quoted by Rowlands, 1995:39). From the turn of the new millennium, this has been resolving itself into new entrepre-neurial and conjugal partnerships between men and women. John Mwangi Wanderi, for example, does business jointly with his wife. She buys the bananas from the farmsteads and he takes them to Nairobi. This business partnership is increasingly common among the younger generation, lending a new significance to marriage which now reconciles a gendered division of wealth initiated in the colonial period. Despite the promise of new commodity markets and new forms of cooperation, 27 per cent of the population of Maragua still rely for part of their income on periodic famine relief and casual labour, testimony to the overall decline in the area's economy (Taifa Leo, 6 December 2005). The new strategies employed by men and women to mitigate the pressures they now face, cannot altogether reverse this scenario, worsened by declining profits due to competition resulting from the success of the Central Kenyan banana ‘boom’.

Alternative spaces of communal identification

A high proportion of the banana traders in the Muthithi area are Catholics, and many attend the large and old Catholic church next to Nairobi's Gikomba market. This enables the traders who trek back and forth from Nairobi to go to church daily, knitting together their rural and urban lives. The values of the Catholic Church in relation to gender, state and wealth are more in harmony with the position of the banana trader-wives than those of the Protestant churches. In the Protestant churches, conservative models of gender with man as the breadwinner and head of the household, do not accord well with the realities of these businesswomen-wives, whose husbands and their ‘wealth’ fall far short of the current expectations of rural households. The moral vision advanced by Protestant churches, which imprisons women in a model of virtue based on rural wifehood, makes it hard for the banana traders to uphold the flexibility they require to straddle successfully the boundaries that their wealth-generating activities entail. The importance of the Catholic church for banana trader-wives is especially striking in Kwamiano, where the Presbyterian church is dominant. The fact that so many of the banana traders are Catholics, has led traders from this area like Mama Nyambura, to convert to Catholicism.

In its explicit relationship with ‘tradition’ and identification with the poor, the Catholic church has been counter-posed to the ideologies of ‘progress’, ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and ‘civilisation’, through which the Protestant missions cemented a relationship between male landed wealth and the contemporary state. Instead, the Catholic church has a specific policy of ‘enculturation’ which was described to me as the integration of Christianity with traditional culture. Within the space provided by the Catholic church, the banana trader-wives are evolving a new ethos behind wealth and productivity where the invocation of ‘tradition’ resonates with memory of a period when women's active agency was creative of wealth. This new model of rural wealth contrasts with state-centered discourses of ‘prosperity’ and ‘progress’. Instead, the concept of ‘enculturation’ allows banana trader-wives to weave together ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, rural and urban, enabling them to ride the waves of opportunity and crisis, which have characterised their experiences of capitalism and state.

Conclusion

In its analysis of two commodity markets in central Kenya, this paper looks at the way in which the construction of masculinity through a specific set of relationships to state and capital has been counter-posed to a feminised ‘underbelly’ (Heyer, 2004). This has given rise to contrasting pathways, articulated through concepts such as ‘develop-ment’ and ‘enculturation’, which define engagements with agricultural commodity markets, access to assets, and relationships to the state. The relations between Gachocho, Muthithi, and Kwamiano illustrate the way in which these pathways have also contoured the geography of central Kenya, such that the ridges which demarcated the territories of the old mbari (subclans) are now differentiated by their contrasting relationships to capital and state. In their productive and entrepreneurial endeavours, actors demonstrate the force of these orientations in the transformation of local as well as national social and political dynamics.

Coffee was always controlled by the state, and was fundamental to the creation of a ‘viri local bourgeoisie’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997). In the post-independence years, the productive potential of coffee for local farmers has been eroded through the contradictions inherent in state-controlled capital, geared to the interests of local and metropolitan elites (Berman & Lonsdale, 1992; Branch & Cheeseman, this vol.). The state's regulation of coffee markets opened ‘unofficial’ avenues of accumulation which undermined the coffee economy, imploding the foundations for a discourse of (male) wealth and progress that has characterised rural societies in central Kenya since independence (Mackenzie, 1998). This has resulted in the recent exploration of diverse market possibilities and new spaces of communal identification through which older landowning men attempt to retain their powers, as their capacity to define a prosperous collectivity is challenged by the recent entrepreneurship of younger men and women.

In the banana trade, a new reliance on local food markets is now catering to the sustenance and productive capacities of rural communities, enabling them to ride the crises of wealth and power consequent on changes in national and global political economies. This new ‘cash crop’ is channelled through distinct commodity pathways which differentiate bananas from coffee, shaping the dynamics of production and trade and their capacity to transform relationships of gender and power. In rural households, women as farmers now have greater control over household economies, even where land is still owned by men As traders, women now generate the capital required to invest in household productivity as well as sustenance, thus linking the present socio-economy with older, pre-colonial models of female agency and power. Income from bananas is frequently invested in the burgeoning urban ‘parallel’ economy largely outside the spheres of state organisation and thus presents a major challenge to the state as a gendered sphere of power and control. The increasing involvement of young men as brokers, transporters and traders of bananas threatens the dominance of landed male elders. Lastly, bananas as a food crop do not require large amounts of investment, which previously necessitated urban migration and a gendered division of labour. They have thus opened a space for young men and women to operate in tandem through business partnerships, and engender new pathways through which to negotiate the vicissitudes of their contemporary realities.

The fluctuating gender of wealth in Central Kenya, mirrored in a versatile agro-ecology, reflects the unpredictable nature of state and market processes (Guyer, 1987). During the 20th century, the volatility of markets and the inherent weaknesses of the state have combined in many parts of Africa to destroy hopes of a stable prosperity to which many might have aspired (Ferguson, 1999). In an overall context of declining prospects, this paper examines the recent strategies employed by men and women to negotiate periods of opportunity and crisis that have tempered the history of rural communities across time and space. In their present form, these strategies expose the diverse ways through which actors have engaged globalised processes such as capitalist development and state formation, counteracting a linear view of social change in which the power of agency is diminished.