We don't have to, and it probably isn't our place to, settle the issue either way. What's interesting is the common assumption, one shared by both Mamdani and his critics that Kenya's post-colonial land reform is an exemplar. Gavin Kitching, for example, cites the Kenyan experience approvingly:

Mahmood Mamdani skates over a number of issues. First, why did Mugabe and the nationalists not opt for a much bigger ‘Kenya-style' land reform package at their independence negotiations? Several civil servants involved in the process have said they could have got it. Why did they accept the ‘willing buyer, willing seller' clause at all?

Second, Mamdani is silent about the very poor economic performance that got Zimbabwe into the hands of the ‘structural adjusters' in the first place.

Third, land reform programmes that put large farms into the hands of peasants always lead to reductions in marketed surpluses at first (they did in Kenya), because small farmers' first priority is to feed their families. Reforms need to be enacted gradually, with as much help as possible to the new smaller-scale producers.

Mamdani himself, insofar as he argues that a central part of the solution to the conflict is the transfer of land to black Zimbabweans, must be taken to be at least broadly in sympathy with that part of Kenya's postcolonial experience. But if that's correct, and if it's assumed - as it ought to be, given that it is the case - that land reform in Kenya (pace recent revisionist arguments) put land in the hands of rural small-scale farmers, then explanations of recent conflict in Kenya that revolve around land distribution seem to lose some of their support.

The point can be made like this. Both Kenya and Zimbabwe were colonies of settlement; African land was taken over for commercial farming. Suppose the key problem, the likeliest cause of serious conflict, for states with that sort of recent history is this:  how to return sufficient land to African hands? Then, Kenya's relatively good solution - a point conceded by all sides to the debate - to that problem should remove that source of potential conflict. But Kenya's very recent history includes mass ethnic violence. Either that was caused, as many have supposed, by land disputes or it wasn't. If it was, then Mamdani is in trouble, given his implicit assumption that Kenya's redistribution went fairly well. If it wasn't, then he's still in trouble because it would follow that land redistribution - even on a scale which empowers rural workers - isn't sufficient to preserve states like Kenya and Zimbabwe from disorder.

Thoughts, anyone?