Bamburi Cement fight raises the Kenya colonial land question

For part one of our investigation, please click here.

Forced land acquisitions by the British in Kenya during the colonial period affected tens of thousands of people, holding back the country’s productivity and economic growth.

Much of the reporting on this forcible colonial land expropriation has centred on the White Highlands (near Nairobi) and in Central Kenya, where most of the colonial officials were based. However, little has been reported on the land grabs in areas such as the coastal region in Kwale county.

Forcibly driven off their ancestral land

In Denyenye, a small village in Kwale county, villagers live near a 1,500-acre expanse that they claim is their ancestral land.

Yet Bamburi Cement, the Kenyan subsidiary of the Swiss building materials multinational LafargeHolcim, claims it is the rightful owner of that land. It traces its claim back to a colonial land dispute in the 1950s.

The Bamburi Farm land is guarded by G4S officers and the General Service Unit (GSU), a Kenyan paramilitary force, who stand accused of raping and torturing villagers found on the land, often to fetch firewood.

The people of Denyenye claim they were forcibly driven off their ancestral land in 1952 by the British colonial authorities. The popular claim is that the British seized the land and then gave it to a retired military officer who sold it to Bamburi Cement in 1954.

Ali Bakari Shambi is the chairman of Denyenye village. The lively 85-year-old is wearing a dark green suit and a Muslim skull cap when we meet him.

He sighs when we ask him about the evictions in 1952. That’s when the villagers found out their ancestral land, ‘Chikuyumtole’, was being claimed by the British colonisers.

“Before 1952, we lived on our land in peace, we used to farm, gather stones and wood and we went fishing.”

Colonial officers showed up one day in 1952 and gave the Denyenye families three months to relocate. If families refused to move, they were sent to prison and their mud huts would be demolished, says Shambi.

“My father and mother refused to relocate and they were jailed for a week at the Kwale police station.” Following the evictions, the local community moved into adjacent plots and that is what became their new home.

The Bamburi company appeared on the land in 1954, Shambi remembers. In the 1950s and 1960s a manager would patrol the grounds, armed with a gun, Shambi says.

Over the years, the company would allow the locals to gather firewood, graze their cattle, and go fishing.

Sometimes the villagers were accused of ‘trespassing’ on what had been their ancestors’ land. The Bamburi company’s claim to own the land was enforced often with extreme violence by Kenya’s paramilitary police.

Around 1997, the General Service Unit (GSU) was deployed to Denyenye to tackle the ethnic conflict that had erupted in the county, called Kaya Bombo in the local dialect.

The GSU stayed on after the conflict subsided. In 2007 they built a permanent camp on the Bamburi land. Together with the G4S security guards, hired by Bamburi in 2005, they have been patrolling the land and are accused of assaulting and raping villagers who stray onto the land over which they claim ownership.

Mr Mohamed (he does not use his real name for security reasons) has worked for Bamburi for nearly two decades. He told The Africa Report that the land ownership dispute has pitted Bamburi Cement and the villages who tried to take back their land several times.

He says  Bamburi first acquired 256 acres of the land as reserved areas for mining when their current areas, including Kikambala and Vipingo, were going to be exhausted.

He remembers company officials fencing off tracts of land and forcibly evicting villagers as the company expanded its claims on the land and seized it “piece by piece”.

“We had intended to build a police station near the village inside the Bamburi land but the villages resisted. In 2007, we had several meetings and decided to put a GSU camp there to maintain the property,” he says.

My father and mother refused to relocate and they were jailed for a week at the Kwale police station

Faced with strong local claims over the land,  Bamburi introduced a farming arrangement under which villagers were allowed to farm at a fee. The scheme was later converted into a tree-planting scheme. Mohamed claims the company planted trees and as they grew taller, the local farmers were moved to new areas.

Bamburi claims the land as a reserve area for its mining operations in Kwale county yet it has not developed any business in Denyenye for 70 years. Mohamed said that was part of a strategic plan, holding the land in reserve. Recently it announced plans to set up a clinker production facility.

“Denyeye was planned for mining for at least 70 years,” says Mohamed. “Now that Vipingo area is being exhausted, they will be moving to Denyenye which is Diani.”

There have been many attempts to verify who owns the land ownership – without much success.

The CBO

Mfaume Hassan chairs the Community Based Organisation (CBO) in Denyenye. He has written countless letters to government bodies, requesting proof of ownership of the land they consider their own. In 2018, Hassan visited the Lands ministry to request copies of the lease certificates for blocks one, two, three and four of the contested land. The ministry could only produce the lease certificate for block two.  “We were not allowed to make a copy,” Mfaume says.

Then the ministry of lands confirmed in a letter to the CBO (we have a copy of that letter) that Bamburi owns block one. The ministry claimed in the letter that block one is of the same size as block two: 162 hectares.

Between 2018 and 2021, the CBO wrote to the chief registrar at the ministry of lands in Nairobi; the chief registrar of lands in Kwale county; the chairperson of the National Land Commission, the director-general of the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), the Kwale county attorney general and the Kwale county government, the Parliamentary Taskforce on Historical Land Injustices, as well as the Senate Committee on Land.

In 2021, the CBO even filed a public petition with the National Assembly. None of these government bodies has produced all the legal ownership papers for the land. The Africa Report has a copy of all the CBO’s communications.

The villagers paid a surveyor to produce maps of the four blocks of the contested land. On this map, block one is not 162 hectares, as the ministry of land claims, but 392ha.

Responding to our questions about the ownership of the land, we received this response: “Bamburi Cement Plc owns and has full legal title to the land at the Matuga site [Denyenye].”

Because of the irregularities around the land, The Africa Report insisted on seeing the documents. Bamburi finally agreed to show us the lease certificates for the four blocks of land on 8 October.

Private viewing … in a private club

The company organised a viewing at a private club in Nairobi. We were instructed to not “discuss or ask any questions” and told sternly that “no photographs will be allowed”.

When asked about the conditions of the viewing, Bamburi spokesman Brian Mungatana-Jibbo responded: “The decision to view the land titles at the Capital Club is well informed given the sensitivity surrounding land matters in our jurisdiction.”

He said photographs were forbidden for “security reasons”. Bamburi said they would allow us only to look at the documents and if we wanted further information about the holdings we would have to go to the land registry.

However, the data held by the land registry contradicts the claims of Bamburi about the extent of the company’s land holdings.

The land registry wrote to us that block one is 162ha, but according to the lease Bamburi produced at the viewing, block one is more than double that size: 392ha.

At the Capital Club, Bamburi projected the four lease certificates on a screen and did not produce the original documents.

Alongside the variations in the size of block one, another discrepancy became apparent. The lease certificate for block two, provided by the ministry of land, commenced in 2001 for 50 years. Bamburi’s lease certificate for block two starts in 2016 for 50 years. Bamburi couldn’t explain these two key discrepancies, and neither was it able to provide the 1954 title deed which is meant to record when the company bought the land from the colonial government.

As with the claims of human rights abuses by its security guards working with the GSU, LafargeHolcim in Zug, Switzerland, stands by the assertions of its local affiliate, Bamburi Cement.

It insists that Bamburi Cement has full legal title to all four blocks of the land at the Matuga site/Diani, where it has a permit to build a clinker factory.

“The National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) granted Bamburi the licence for the plant development.”

Extensive consultations denied

Most contentiously, LafargeHolcim claims that Bamburi held extensive community consultations on its plans. These were, it said, attended by community leaders and the public with support from national and county governments.

All the community leaders and villagers in Denyenye that we spoke to said they were unaware of these claimed consultations. “We have been saying it for decades. Bamburi stole the land,” says Hassan of the Community Based Organisation in Denyenye.

Now the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA), a network of NGOs advocating for land reform, is investigating the conflicting claims of ownership over the land in Denyenye. Chief executive of the KLA, Faith Alubbe, led a delegation to Denyenye in July for the first phase of a land audit.

“The very act of denying locals reliable information on the ownership of land that they consider their ancestral land is an act of defeating justice. It is a historical injustice,” said Alubbe.

So far the National Land Commission, the supervisory body for the Kenyan police, IPOA, and the Kenyan security regulator have failed to respond to our repeated requests for information and land ownership and security practices in Denyenye.

This series was supported by the Pulitzer Centre.

This publication was made possible with the support of the Fund for Special Journalistic Projects in the Netherlands.

Ruth Hopkins works for onderzoekscollectief Spit