How Nairobi’s expansion is swallowing up rural land, straining families A study reveals how Nairobi’s growth is reshaping land, families and fortunes. Nairobi 16 min ago

A new book, Peasants to Paupers: Land, Class and Kinship in Central Kenya, examines how the city’s expansion conceals profound social upheavals.

In many ways, my book is about the encounter between skyrocketing land prices caused by Nairobi’s expansion and a terrain of land poverty that has its roots in British colonial rule, something that was never rectified after independence.

The book looks at how young men live with this “bootstraps” ideology while managing the hopelessness that comes from being land-poor and underemployed.