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Introduction
In June 1966, the Kenyan government adopted a policy of forced villagization in the former Northern Frontier District (NFD), a region that covered an area of approximately 102,000 square miles, about half of Kenya's total landmass. In 1962, the region had an estimated population of 200,000, which was made up almost entirely by the pastoral Somali, and ethnically related Boran, Rendille, and Gabra groups.1 During the colonial period the NFD was comprised of the districts of Garissa, Isiolo, Mandera, Marsabit, Moyale, Wajir and Samburu, although the British separately administered the latter.2 In 2008/9, when the research for this paper was conducted, the NFD area was divided between Eastern Region and North Eastern Region (NER), with Isiolo, and Marsabit belonging to the former and Garissa, Mandera, Moyale, and Wajir to the latter. The Kenyan government's villagization program required all people living within these NFD areas to reside within designated government villages under security guard. The evidence suggests that by September 1967, only about half of the total population of the NFD were successfully villagized. The Kenyan government argued that this would facilitate security force operations against shifta (bandit or rebel) insurgents, who were engaged in a campaign of militant secessionism, while winning over the hearts and minds of northern Kenyans through village development projects.3 In this sense, villagization served two purposes. It was at once a counter- insurgency measure, used as a means to gain state control over the NFD region during a period of armed insurrection, and a mechanism for implementing social reform.
The fundamental idea behind villagization in northern Kenya was not novel. As a counter-insurgency measure, the use of population re-concentration has many colonial precedents. The Spanish in Cuba, the British in Malaya and Kenya, and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique all experimented with fortified villages.4 Villagization also has a long history of being used as a tool for development. After the end of the Second World War, when economic development became a major concern for colonial governments, the concept of settlement and villagization was thought to be key to the "progress" of the African population.5 Likewise, villagization programs were also common to postcolonial nation building projects, which often had a strong developmental focus. For instance in 1960s Tanzania, national development...