Documentary exposes Kenya's colonial land theft, ongoing corporate occupation

In the early 1900s, British colonial administrators drew a line across central Kenya and called the fertile highlands on one side the "White Highlands"—territory reserved for European settlers alone. The communities who had lived and farmed there for generations were forced out, relocated to marginal scrubland called "native reserves" where the soil was poor and space was cramped. Their ancestral land became tea plantations and other corporate farms. More than a century later, their descendants are still fighting to get it back.

A new documentary called Kikuyu Land, directed by Kenyan filmmaker Bea Wangondu and American filmmaker Andrew H Brown, traces this dispossession and the ongoing struggle for restitution. The film releases in the UK on Friday. It began as a personal inquiry. Wangondu grew up curious about why her grandfather owned so much more land than his neighbors. When her family offered no answers, she decided to investigate the colonial history that had shaped her own inheritance. "It's time for us to tell our stories in our own voices and in our own understanding," she said.

The legal machinery of dispossession was straightforward. In 1902, Sir Charles Eliot, commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate (what is now Kenya), passed a law declaring vast tracts of fertile ancestral land "Crown land." The government could now sell and lease this land to white settlers, effectively erasing African communal ownership systems. The policy worked as intended: settlers arrived, and local communities were violently pushed into crowded, less-productive reserves.

In 1962, a year before Kenya's independence, the colonial administration launched a redistribution program. The idea was to buy farms in the highlands from departing white settlers and resell them to landless Kenyans on credit. By the time the program ended in 1971, roughly 1.15 million acres had been purchased from 780 white farmers and distributed to approximately 35,000 Kenyan families. But much of the land never left the hands of the powerful. Political elites and foreign corporations—including multinational tea companies—held onto vast plantations. The dispossession continued under a different flag.

The documentary follows Wangondu's personal search alongside the story of a man named Mungai, who has spent years trying to reclaim his family's ancestral land, now inside the fence of a tea farm. In one scene, Mungai crouches beneath a tree and grieves after his aunt shows him the spot where his family's patriarch was buried—ground that now belongs to the corporation. "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.

Kenya was under British rule from 1895 to 1963, first as a protectorate, then as a colony. The period was marked by racial discrimination, forced displacement, coerced labor, and violent suppression of resistance. The Kipsigis and Talai communities, whose ancestors were evicted from the Rift Valley to make room for tea plantations, have called for redress in recent years. In 2021, UN special rapporteurs expressed concern that the British government had failed to provide "effective remedies and reparations" to these communities.

Wangondu and Brown met in 2021 while working on a National Geographic production and decided to pursue the film together. The project has already screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and at Sheffield DocFest in June. It will show at the NBO Film Festival in Nairobi in October. Joseph Njenga, one of the film's producers, said that hearing the stories of people who suffered under colonial rule—the pain inflicted for no reason—had left an emotional mark on him. "My head could not contextualise and process the pain that was brought upon us," he said. The documentary does not offer easy answers about how to undo a century of theft, but it insists that the theft itself be named and remembered.