The politics of a changing society: Mumias

The Mumias sugar scheme provides us with a historical example of the interactions between capital and peasant agriculture. The ideological argument advanced to justify the nucleus estate/peasant outgrower symbiosis is that peasant production is preserved at levels of high technology (hence modernity in methods of work) and greatly improved productivity (hence opportunities for better incomes). The second sections examine the class struggles (politics) that have been going on in Mumias. This essay seeks to find out the real character of this changing society. Is the peasantry being preserved, with their pre‐capitalist cultures intact, as argued by promoters of such projects? Or is the peasantry actually being liquidated? If so, what resistance do they mount? Or is the peasantry being differentiated in the classical sense? What class alliances emerge and how do they manifest themselves politically?