The idea that certain highland areas of the East Africa Protectorate should be reserved for European settlement dates effectively from the appointment of Sir Charles Eliot as Commissioner in 1901. Although a number of European settlers had arrived in the Protectorate in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was generally felt in official circles that the co...

As the land adjudication and consolidation programme made progress in the Kikuyu Land Unit in the middle of the nineteen-fifties, it became clear that the traditional system of land tenure would have to be replaced by a system based on the registration of individual titles. Customary law was seen as an obstacle to agricultural development. Customary rules of inheri...