Why Land Matters

The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.

— Leviticus 25:23

Land is the stage upon which all human drama unfolds. It is where we are born, where we build, where we bury our dead, and where we invest our deepest hopes for the future. Yet in our increasingly digital and urbanized world, we risk losing sight of land’s fundamental role in shaping human civilization, economic prosperity, and spiritual understanding. This chapter explores why land remains central to human flourishing — not merely as a commodity to be traded, but as a sacred trust that carries profound implications for justice, identity, and stewardship.

Historical and Cultural Significance of Land

The Foundation of Civilization

Land has always been more than soil and stone — it represents the intersection of geography, history, and human aspiration. The great civilizations of antiquity understood this intuitively. The fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, the Nile Delta, the Indus Valley — these were not just agricultural zones but crucibles where humanity learned to organize society, develop law, and create culture.

Consider the profound difference between the Hebrew concept of eretz (land) and the modern Western notion of “real estate.” For the ancient Israelites, land was inseparable from covenant, identity, and divine promise. When Abraham received the promise of land in Genesis 12, he was not simply being offered property — he was being invited into a relationship that would define his descendants for millennia.

In traditional African societies, this understanding persisted well into the colonial period. Land was not owned individually but held communally, with elders serving as custodians rather than proprietors. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, for instance, the concept of githaka (estate) encompassed not just physical territory but the entire web of relationships, responsibilities, and spiritual connections that bound families to their ancestral grounds.

The Colonial Disruption: A Case Study in Systematic Dispossession

The violence of colonialism was not merely political or economic — it was fundamentally about redefining humanity’s relationship with land. Consider the case of Kenya’s Central Province in the early 20th century. The British colonial administration’s Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902 treated vast territories as “waste and unoccupied” Crown land despite thriving indigenous communities and fallow or customary use that colonial officers often refused to recognize as occupation. That legal fiction enabled a systematic transfer of the most fertile highlands to European settlers.

The human cost became visible first in southern Kikuyu country. After 1902, settler grants around Kiambu and Dagoretti cut through established mbari estates; ridges that families had cultivated for generations were redefined as Crown land, and households were pushed toward overcrowded “native reserves” or into squatter labour on European farms. Historian Tabitha Kanogo has traced how this dispossession fed the later squatter crisis in the White Highlands — a social seedbed of Mau Mau. Even disputes among Kikuyu themselves were remade under colonial adjudication: the case of Kimani wa Kanoto and Kitosho wa Kanoto v. Kioi wa Nagi (c. 1920) turned on competing githaka claims, evidence that customary family estates were being forced into alien legal categories even as settler alienation accelerated.

This pattern repeated across continents. In South Africa, the 1913 Natives Land Act restricted African land ownership to just 7% of the country’s total area. In Australia, the doctrine of terra nullius declared Aboriginal lands “empty” despite 65,000 years of continuous habitation. In each case, the dispossession was not merely material but spiritual, severing indigenous peoples from their foundational understanding of place and identity.

Excerpt from Land, Legacy & Faith: A Biblical View of Property, Wealth, and Stewardship by David N. Kuria. © 2025 David N. Kuria. All rights reserved. Questions: geo@fayvad.com