“The land is our mother, and to take it from us is to take away our very breath” – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The small-scale village farmers are not farmers by choice. They did not wake up one day and decide to till the land because it promised riches or prestige. No, they were born into it; bound by the soil, just as their ancestors before them. When colonial education arrived, they started teaching us the ways of the white man and whispering in our ears that farming was for the backward and the uneducated, but our parents remained on the land. And when ‘we’, the children, armed with certificates from these colonial institutions wandered the streets in search of jobs, the factories and institutions did not open their gates – and our parents still remained on the land. When ‘we’, the children, weary of hunger and humiliation, returned home with nothing but despair in our eyes, these parents welcomed us back, not with scorn, but with a hoe and a seedling. For farming was in our blood, and so we farmed.

Through back-breaking toil, we farmed on lands fragmented by corporate greed, poisoned by industrial waste, and drowned by floods. We farmed through the punishing sun and the relentless rains, through pest infestations and the cruel hands of climate change. Still, we practiced every form of agriculture known to man; fishing, crop cultivation, snail farming, poultry, dairy, other livestock, and agroforestry. Despite all odds, the farmers continued to feed the world. Yet, they received no recognition for this. The world took their labor, their sweat, their very lives, and offered nothing in return. “When the missionaries came,” Jomo Kenyatta wrote, “we had the land, and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

But the theft did not stop with the missionaries, or the colonial empire. The thieves today wear new suits, carrying documents stamped with government seals. “For development”, they say. “For progress”, they reiterate. In that scheme of things, our farmlands are seized and transformed into endless fields of monocrops controlled by foreign  corporations. “In the capitalist system, the land is not just land, it is capital”, wrote Samir Amin. And so it is seized, fenced off, and stripped from the hands of smallholder farmers who have worked it for generations. The rivers, once teeming with fish, become dumping grounds for chemical waste. Industrial agriculture, with its cold machinery and capitalist efficiency, erases our old ways.

Memory

Those who were once the backbone of their communities are pushed to the margins, living in poverty on the very land that once sustained them. Irony drips from this situation like the sweat of a laborer under the noonday sun – for the very hands that grow the food of the world are the hungriest. Three-quarters of those who live with chronic hunger are smallholder farmers, landless peasants, and indigenous communities.

Walter Rodney reminds us in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that “the question is not whether agriculture is productive, but whether it is organized to benefit the people who actually do the work”. Under capitalism, it is not organised to benefit those who do the actual work. The system is rigged, the markets manipulated, and profits hoarded. “The struggle of man against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And so they remember. They remember that their ancestors once owned the land. They remember that their grandfathers and grandmothers stood against colonialism and oppression. And today, they prepare to resist once again and take back their lands.

Yet, history reminds us that resistance alone isn’t enough. There have been peasant uprisings before, countless revolts against both internal and external forces of oppression. But Thomas Sankara warned us that, “you cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness”. Our resistance must lead to revolution. It must dismantle the very foundations of capitalism, tearing down the structures that uphold this system of exploitation. Our farmers must take back their land, not just in defiance, but in victory. Anything less is a betrayal of those who came before and those yet to come.

For too long, the world has been silent whilst farmers suffer. Their voices must now be heard, their rage must now be felt, and their struggle must now be won. As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it”. The mission of this generation is clear – it is to reclaim the land, to dismantle the chains of capitalist exploitation, and to build new worlds where the farmer is not a servant of capital but the master of his or her own destiny.

This is not just about land; this is about dignity, about survival, about justice. “The master’s tools,” Audre Lorde warned, “will never dismantle the master’s house’. And so, our farmers must forge their own tools for a future where food sovereignty, not corporate greed, dictates who eats and who starves.

Our farmers do not need sympathy; they need solidarity. They do not need empty words; they need action. They do not need reform; they need revolution. For as long as the land is owned by capitalists, the farmer will remain in chains. The question is not whether he will fight back, but when.