Abstract
Phil O’Keefe’s early work on soil erosion in Kenya is analyzed as foreshadowing his entire ouvre. More than a professional analysis, a personal appreciation of O'Keefe's friendship and a farewell is expressed.
An inauspicious beginning?
There was a time in the 1970s and early 1980s when young white men (and a few young women) spoke boldly of things there barely understood. They were expatriate graduate students and later lecturers and minor advisors. I remember one who would joke about wealthier farmers that he could ‘smell kulaks’. He shared this jest with a group of other white and latinx ‘overseas cooperators’ (cooperantes) who at the time were helping with a book about Mozambican men who migrated to work in South African mines to feed their families (First, 1983). We knew little about these lives or these families and had never been down a mine. We argued and we read. We ate grilled giant shrimp and drank beer at the beach on the weekends. Few if any of us knew the original meaning of the term kulak (a farmer who owned more than a few hectares and a couple of cows in late Czarist Russia); nor did we associate the term with Stalin's 1930s campaign to eliminate them (Conquest, 1986).
We were anxious to oppose a framing of history that praised ‘modernization’ of production, institutions and ways of thinking. We saw aggressive modernization as leading to the wars in Indochina and more subtle, stealth modernization as undermining local knowledge and indigenous technical self-confidence (Wisner, 2015). Yet our own work at the time sought to find patterns and show connections in an uncritically Western-modernizing way. We were eclectic in applying whatever bits of Marxism, systems analysis or even ordinary language philosophy seemed to bring order where we craved to see it. In our titles at the time, tell-tale words appear: ‘Kenyan Underdevelopment: a case study of proletarianization’ (O’Keefe et al., 1977), ‘African Drought: the state of the game’ (O’Keefe and Wisner, 1975) and ‘Words and Things: on using language and using land’ (O’Keefe and Wisner, 1977). And there were the explicitly Marxist titles: ‘Kenyan Underdevelopment: a case study of proletarianization’ (O’Keefe et al., 1977) and ‘Nutritional consequences of the articulation of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production in eastern Kenya’ (Wisner, 1980–81).
We were not wrong, but hasty with the impatience of youth. Just as we resorted to framings that promised to reveal order and pattern in suffering, we used maps, tables and figures to communicate the meaning we believed we had found. But my map of ‘expanded core’ and ‘expanded periphery’ (Wisner, 1977: 199, Map 4) does not communicate hunger and how it drives people: the desperation of a father seeking migrant wage labour or a mother leaving her baby in the charge of a toddler to harvest tea. Intoxicated with the pleasure of applying geographical theories of centre and periphery to a real landscape, I forgot that there were people with needs and emotions living in the spaces circumscribed as I swung my compass, and it swivelled around its point.
In looking back at Phil O’Keefe's PhD fieldwork and early works, I have to include him in my critique. I do so because in Zoom calls and on the phone several times in the weeks before he died, Phil and I discussed this youthful, rather slapdash and superficial use of Marxism in particular. We agreed we had not been wrong but too linear in our thought. Indeed, by the time Phil wrote ‘Geography, Marx and the concept of nature’ with Neil Smith (who, also regrettably is no longer with us), O’Keefe's thinking was fully dialectical and hence, non-linear (Smith and O’Keefe, 1980).
Tale of two doctoral students
Phil and I met at the University of Nairobi in 1972, literally bumping into each other under the main entrance archway. We were both in Kenya to conduct field research for our PhDs, he in the well-watered volcanic highlands and I in the dry lowlands to the East of Mount Kenya. We hit it off from the beginning. That every night we indulged in mind-altering buttered popcorn and watched the movie ‘Barbarella’ at the university film club (pace feminists: it was 1972). Inspired by Jane Fonda's take on sci-fi, we had a few beers and drove off that very night in my VW Beetle to tour each other's study sites. When we stopped at daybreak for chai and mandazi (Kenyan truck stop equivalent of coffee and doughnuts), we felt we had known each other forever and that our points of view as ‘radical’ geographers of development were fully aligned – better aligned certainly than the chassis of the VW after all the potholes and corrugations we’d traversed.
We both began our work with a conviction that what we would find in both sites were instances of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Gunder-Frank, 1966; Rodney, 1972). So enamoured of Gunder-Frank, I borrowed his buzzword for a paper I gave at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (Wisner, 1976). Like our contemporaries mentioned above, we were long on theory and short on the concrete experience of daily life in Africa. However, time and experience brought more introspection and more nuance. Also, we accumulated time spent in conversation with farmers, artisans and politicians in Kenya. We gradually began to listen to them.
Phil O’Keefe was the first of the two of us to listen carefully to the people he met. Despite the haste, ambition, superficiality and naivete of much work on Africa in the 1970s by the young friends of ‘African socialism’ in Tanzania and later of ‘Marxism–Leninism’ in Mozambique, Phil's work on soil erosion in Kenya was an exception. Beginning in the place where he did his doctoral research, he returned several times to the subject (and the place), dissatisfied and working to get it right. Phil's guitar came along on fieldwork. Just as he would return to a lyric or composition about life in the Northeast of England or the Central Highlands of Kenya, he came back several times to soil erosion, and each time he understood it as more complex. Therefore, I shall discuss the development of his account of soil erosion in a series of ‘takes’, using the recording industry term.
Phil O’Keefe's musical materialism: soil and song in the Kenyan highlands
Soil erosion: take one
A brief, four-page essay called ‘The process of soil erosion’ is a good starting point (O’Keefe, 1975). Phil wrote this around a full-page figure he entitled ‘Equilibrium in the physical system’ (p. 62). There are four boxes: Geological structure, Climatic factors, Pedology and Flora and Fauna. The boxes are the origins and destinations of 17 arrows. Solar energy is labelled as an exogenous input to this physical system. Phil traces energy flow among these boxes and then introduces human beings as ‘the major geomorphic agency’ because people's ‘influence on the vegetational complex has repercussions throughout the total ecological system’ (p. 64). He then proceeds to demonstrate human (and domestic animal) influence on vegetation, soil and erosion in semi-arid and humid zones of Africa. He hints at specific political and economic drivers of people's land use, farming and herding behaviour by mentioning colonial limitations on the free movement of grazing stock once (p. 64) and later by a reference to ‘the drift to urban labour’ that has ‘removed many males from the manpower pool’ required to control erosion on steep slopes with terraces (p. 65). This early paper is a concise gem, and in retrospect sizzles with the full potential of a political–ecological understanding of soil erosion of the kind Piers Blaikie provided a decade later (Blaikie, 1985).
Soil erosion: take two
A distinction is often made between complicated systems and complex ones. In complicated systems, all of the components interact with each other in reliably predictable ways. Phil's account of soil erosion as a ‘physical system’ expounded earlier treats soil erosion as a complicated system for two pages (O’Keefe, 1975: 62–63). In a complex system, there are a number of independent actors each of them pursuing their own goals albeit in the context of complicated systems (Burgess and Burgess, 2016). So, in the case of soil erosion, in his 1975 account, O’Keefe introduced individual actors in a generalized way and hinted at the role of state actors (by reference to ‘integrated planning’, p. 64). However, it was not until a publication two years later that human actors were fully integrated, and the systems concerned became complex.
This second account of soil erosion begins much as the first with a discussion of soil and geomorphology (O’Keefe et al., 1977: 216). However, the paper turns rapidly to a survey of the population of one highland Kenyan village called Gakarara, where O’Keefe did his PhD fieldwork, as well as migration, land ownership and land use (pp. 217–219). Complexity arises and is described in what he and his co-authors term first and second approximations of a vicious cycle (pp. 219–220 & 225–228).
They characterize the vicious cycle as follows.
High population density. Small acreage of landholdings. Land accumulation by a few and inheritance-related fragmentation of remaining holdings. Outward migration by men in search of wage employment. Women's resort to piece-rate employment in a nearby coffee estate. A resulting lack of labour for maintenance of existing soil conservation works.
Next comes a detailed account of local politics as inflected by the then near-historical memory of the colonial freedom struggle (Mau Mau) made possible by O’Keefe's interviews with elderly key informants and a section on community nutrition provided by Wisner as a visitor to O’Keefe's study site, using assessment methods he had been using in the adjacent lowlands (Wisner, 1977, 1980–81). A second approximation of the vicious cycle is then provided and represented as a diagram (p. 227).
This same year O’Keefe was a part of a three-day consultation that gave rise to a co-authored paper called ‘Theses on Peasantry’ (Blaut et al., 1977). 1 That emphasized the role of women in production and total social reproduction and called attention to both a lack of precision when many people write about rural people as well as a tendency to impose artificial labels on them and juxtapose such constructs (e.g. ‘peasant’ vs. ‘proletarian’). O’Keefe brought to that consultation his growing in-depth knowledge of the daily life of women and men in highland Kenya.
Soil erosion: take three
Six years later O’Keefe produced a third account of soil erosion in Kenya (O’Keefe, 1983). As I noted earlier, even as early as his 1980 co-publication with Neil Smith of ‘Geography, Marx and the concept of nature’, O’Keefe was thinking in distinctly non-linear, dialectical terms. He begins his third account of soil erosion again with the physical system, this time with more detailed attention to the important role of organic matter in the soil and its moisture-holding capacity, the importance of tree cover, and attention to the intensity of rainfall. He had led a major study of wood energy production and consumption in Kenya, so his third account factors in the harvest of woody biomass (p. 303). Turning to ‘the social context of soil erosion’ (p. 303) he notes that charcoal making was second only to wage migration as a source of off-farm income. All these elements go into another version of the ‘spiral’-shaped diagram seen in earlier publications. This version is labelled ‘the impoverishment of farm holdings sets off a vicious cycle of male migration to the urban centers’ (p. 304).
At this point, O’Keefe departs from his earlier treatments of soil erosion and devotes nearly half of the Ambio paper to technical solutions. In view of the pivotal role labour shortage has in the vicious cycles he had documented, the key to O’Keefe's newfound optimism is a system of terracing that requires less labour and zero-tillage planting.
O’Keefe returned to his PhD study site 10 years after his original fieldwork. He wrote (O’Keefe, 1982: 58): I went back to the site of my doctoral field work. I never arrived. I found the site, but the village no longer existed. Another casualty to the transition to capitalism.
His analysis here of what had occurred and how it led to the literal disappearance of the village still pivots on the vicious cycle he has been documenting with ever more detail. This time he highlights the specific timing of labour shortage, and how a ‘labor drought’ could reduce the germination of seeds, an observation that certainly hints at the dissolution of the society–nature binary discussed in Smith and O’Keefe (1980). The 1982 account of the vicious cycle was also written more from the point of view of women overloaded with productive and reproductive labour in a cycle perpetuated by patriarchal power (p. 59).
O’Keefe suggested that this complex vicious cycle could result in such massive urban migration that Nairobi's population would reach four million by 2000. His guess was off, but Nairobi's population did hit 2.2 million in 2000 and rose to nearly five million in 2021 (Macrotrends, 2021). The vicious cycles described by O’Keefe had worked more slowly but inexorably. What had slowed his predicted decline of the rural household and the rate of rural–urban migration was the use of land as collateral for bank loans that enabled intensification of farming if successful or, if the debt could not be repaid, accumulation of land by more prosperous farmers. He documents an increase in the number of land transactions. Thus, O’Keefe shared a glimpse of what more than a decade later others would document in a book with the title More People, Less Erosion (Tiffen et al., 1994).
O’Keefe ends his 1982 retrospective on a sombre note (O’Keefe, 1982): And Gakaraka? Gakarara disappeared under a three-lane highway designed to bring tea, coffee and other produce rapidly to market, and, by jumbo jet, to Europe. This transition was signaled by an event in which ‘four youngsters’ were ravaged by guard dogs on the new pineapple plantation, a fenced farm run by a multinational within which the dogs ran free.
Phil did not write a song about this incident, but I can imagine him doing so.
Conclusion
Throughout Phil O’Keefe's early work it is possible to glimpse his understanding of human potential. In the first paragraph of his early cameo on soil erosion (O’Keefe, 1975: 63), he wrote: The path of human development is best defined as an ecological process in which society has increased its capacity for controlling and utilizing environmental resources. This capacity for controlling and utilizing resources is dependent on the manner in which society is organized (the socio-economic and political considerations), upon the extent to which people understand the laws of nature (science) and upon the extent to which they put that understanding into practice (technology).
Time and again, his research uncovered tricks and traps that stifled human potential. The series of vicious cycles discussed in his early work on soil erosion proved to have been the workshop in which O’Keefe hardened the steel of his analytical tools that he would use for nearly 40 years more in defence of that human potential, in works such as Disaster and Development (Middleton and O’Keefe, 1998), Redefining Sustainable Development (Middleton and O’Keefe, 2001) and Managing Adaptation to Climate Risk (O’Brien and O’Keefe, 2013). We will all miss his professional voice. I will also miss his mandolin, guitar, singing voice and friendship.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.