For British colonialists, the fertile, cool uplands of central Kenya were the "White Highlands" - a name that sounds like a boutique wine label but was actually a legal designation reserving the best land exclusively for European settlers. Local communities were forced off, and the land became plantations for tea and other crops, because nothing says "civilisation" like stealing someone's farm and calling it agriculture.
In recent decades, descendants of the displaced have fought to reclaim their ancestral land, some of which is now occupied by multinational tea companies and other large corporations - because why should colonialism ever actually end when it can just rebrand as a quarterly earnings report?
This fight for restitution is the subject of *Kikuyu Land*, a documentary directed by Kenyan filmmaker Bea Wangondu and American filmmaker Andrew H Brown, released in the UK on Friday. "Colonial structures didn't just shape land and labour in Kenya. They created patterns of power that thrive today globally," Brown said. "This isn't just a Kenyan story. This could be told sadly in almost every part of the world." A sentence that manages to be both profound and deeply depressing, which is basically the mission statement of colonialism.
In 1902, under Sir Charles Eliot, then commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate (present-day Kenya), a law was passed making vast tracts of fertile ancestral land "Crown land." This allowed the government to sell and lease land to white settlers to encourage their settlement and farming, while entirely ignoring African communal land ownership systems - a legal manoeuvre roughly equivalent to declaring your neighbour's house yours because you have a nicer lawnmower.
The policy attracted settlers and led to the violent displacement of local communities to marginalised, crowded, and less-productive "native reserves." Because nothing says "efficient land management" like ethnically cleansing the people who already live there.
In 1962, a year before independence, the colonial administration initiated a redistribution programme to transfer farms in the highlands from departing white settlers to landless Kenyans. The programme aimed to purchase land in the highlands from willing white settlers and resell it to Kenyans on credit - a system that sounds generous until you realise it's basically a subprime mortgage scheme with extra steps.
By the time it ended in 1971, about 1.15 million acres of land had been bought from 780 white farmers and sold to approximately 35,000 Kenyan families. But much of the land remained with the political elite and foreign corporate interests, including companies that held huge plantations. So the colonialists left, but the colonial structure stayed, like a houseguest who never got the hint.
The idea for the film was inspired by Wangondu's childhood curiosity about why her grandfather had disproportionately vast land compared with his neighbours. With answers unforthcoming from her family - because nothing says "happy family reunion" like asking about the land question - she decided to dig deep into colonial history.
Having worked for international film companies and news organisations for years, Wangondu wanted to tell her own story, asking questions that have shaped her perception of herself and her family. "It's time for us to tell our stories in our own voices and in our own understanding," she said. A radical concept: letting people from the country actually narrate what happened to their country.
She discussed the idea with Brown in 2021 after they met while working on a National Geographic production, and they pursued it.
*Kikuyu Land* follows Wangondu's search for answers about her family's land, interspersed with a wider investigation into tea plantations and the story of one man, Mungai, pursuing his family's ancestral land. "They raped our country, they displaced us, they took our land and they did the unfairness they did to us," Mungai tells Wangondu in the film, in a quote that makes you want to sit down and stare at a wall for a while.
Wangondu and Mungai's journeys expose colonial legacies, buried histories, and family pains that the two struggle to face. In one scene, Mungai crouches under a tree and grieves after his aunt shows him a spot - now inside the fence of the tea farm whose land his family is claiming - where their patriarch was buried. It's the kind of scene that makes you want to boycott tea, or at least think about it for a moment before your next cup.
Kenya was under British rule from 1895 to 1963, first as a protectorate then as a colony. The period was characterised by racial discrimination, forced displacement and labour, and brutal suppression of resistance - a phrase that could describe roughly 90% of British colonial history, but who's counting.
Members of the Kipsigis and Talai communities have made calls for redress in recent years over the violent eviction of their ancestors from their lands in the Rift Valley to make way for tea plantations owned by white settlers. In 2021, UN special rapporteurs expressed concern about the British government's failure to provide "effective remedies and reparations" to the two communities. The British government, presumably, is still thinking about it.
*Kikuyu Land* premiered at the Sundance film festival in the US in January and had its UK festival premiere in June at the Sheffield DocFest. It will screen at the NBO film festival in Nairobi in October. Joseph Njenga, one of its producers, said hearing stories while making the film of people who suffered pain and atrocities caused by the colonial administration had left an emotional imprint. "My head could not contextualise and process the pain that was brought upon us - and for no reason," he said. A sentence that sums up colonialism better than most history books.