Sons of Soil Under Siege. Violence Fatigue and Property Rights Outcome in Kenya.

What has been settlement and property rights outcomes from the problem of political violence in Kenya? This article considers how recurrent violence has been brought to bear on understandings of citizenship and belonging among the Kikuyu settlers in Burnt Forest area in Uasin Gishu County in Kenya. Violence, displacement and dispossession of the Burnt Forest Kikuyu and their restricted admission into their ancestral homelands in Central Kenya, is found to have engineered a reconsideration of identity and belonging among the Kikuyu outsiders inducing a sons of the village discourse, as an organic configuration that draws on the models of territorialisation of identity and belonging enabling the historically marginalised Kikuyu in Burnt Forest to reassert their belonging and legitimise their claims over their property. The article reports that the iteration between the collapse of the democratic Kenyan state commitment to protect Kikuyu land rights in their settled areas and the partisan character of neo-customary tenure system that restricts admission of in- group outsiders, has induced spontaneous resistance by the Kikuyu in Burnt Forest to their spatial political confinement.