Fifteen Eighty Four

Beyond the northern, leafy outskirts of Nairobi lies the peri-urban terrain of Kiambu County – a dormitory suburb of Nairobi, home to impoverished towns where unemployed youth gather, and where smallholders living on meagre patches of land struggle to make ends meet. This region is now being transformed by Nairobi’s rapid urban expansion, and not always for the better.

In Peasants to Paupers: Land, Class and Kinship in Central Kenya, I tell the human stories behind Kenya’s rapid urban expansion and the rural families being left behind in its wake. Based on years of living and working alongside residents in Kiambu County, the book captures a quiet but profound social upheaval. It reveals how fathers from Kiambu’s smallholder families, once proud guardians of their way of living, are selling off ancestral plots of land, leaving their sons landless and adrift in an economy of joblessness and uncertainty.

Land in Kiambu has become unimaginably valuable, vastly outstripping the meagre wages that smallholder families earn in the informal economy. For some families, rising land values are a ticket out of hardship, and some do construct rental buildings on their land, becoming new landlords of a dormitory suburb. For others, selling land is tantamount to a disaster, material and existential. It forces a reliance upon wages while signalling to everyone that the moral economy of smallholding is at its end.

Nairobi’s urban frontier is encroaching into Kiambu precisely at a moment when the economy of smallholders is most vulnerable. Low wages have left its young men deeply hopeless about their futures, and the book documents their journeys and challenges as they try to live up to principles of ‘working hard for yourself’ and ‘making it’ to middle-class ‘stability’ – powerful ideas of economic independence that govern economic aspirations in a post-peasant landscape.

Through ethnographic portraits of everyday lives – male labour migrants, young jobseekers, mothers struggling to make ends meet – Peasants to Paupers explores what happens when the dream of a stable, middle-class future collides with the harsh realities of unemployment, soaring land prices and changing family values. The book opens with Mwaura, a young man watching his father sell their family’s land to a private developer. What follows is both a personal tragedy and a reflection of a wider trend: as land becomes a commodity, generations of Kenyans are being cut off from the security that once defined rural life.

Kiambu’s story is not just about Kenya – it is about how global cities expand into their rural surroundings, and how markets, speculation and inequality reshape communities everywhere from Nairobi to Lagos to London. At its core, the book tells a deeply human story amidst this changing terrain of an urbanising frontier. It shows how moral ideas about family, work and responsibility are being tested as young people face shrinking opportunities and elders grapple with impossible choices between survival and legacy.