The Plantations

Observations · RootedNomad · October 7, 2026

In 2011 in Uganda, a young man assigned to serve me taught me to ask who owns the land. On plantations, small farms, and what development should mean.

The first time I went to Uganda, in 2011, I was a graduate student there to study beans. The person who taught me the most was assigned to wait on me.

The guest house

I stayed at a guest house in Kamuli District, in eastern Uganda. On arrival, I was given a house boy. That was the title. He was about twenty-three.

He cleaned my room and washed my clothes. He served my meals. When I left the property, he came with me.

It was extremely uncomfortable. I didn't know what to do with a grown man assigned to look after me. I also knew that turning him away wasn't a kindness. It was his job.

So we talked. Over my stay, he stopped being the person assigned to me and became a friend.

What he told me

He talked about the land.

As he told it, small family farms in the region were being consolidated into large plantations. Sugarcane, and maize. Land that had fed families for generations was now growing crops to be sold somewhere else, and the money went somewhere else too.

He had a word for it: neocolonialism. Not soldiers or flags. Land, and who gets to decide what grows on it, and who profits when it's sold.

I had read a lot about African agriculture by then. I had read very little about who owned it.

The land itself

A plantation and a family farm can sit on the same soil and be entirely different places.

The farms I would later work alongside grew many things at once: local beans, maize and other crops, together in the same field. They had fallow ground, and a swamp field if the family was lucky. That mix is how a household eats through a bad season. It's also how a field stays alive.

A plantation grows one thing, over and over, as far as you can see. It's built to sell, and to sell somewhere else.

When I later heard that African soils were worn out, I thought of those fields. Some of that damage was real. But it wasn't the families with two acres and a swamp who had done it.

Who gets to say

This is his account, and my view. I'm not an economist, and I didn't investigate the companies or the land deals.

Some people in Uganda welcome the plantations, for the jobs and the steady wage. That's real too, and it isn't my place to tell them they're wrong.

What I can say is what it did to me. The young man who washed my clothes understood the economics of his own land better than most of what I had read. Almost nobody had asked him. I only did because he was standing next to me.

Doing it right

There was a lesson in how we met, too. I had come to help, and from the moment I arrived, I was the one being served. The arrangement was built long before either of us showed up, and neither of us chose it.

Those conversations changed the direction of my work. I stopped thinking of development as something you bring. I started thinking of it as a question of justice: whose land, whose decision, whose benefit. If the people who farm a place aren't the ones deciding its future, it isn't development. It's just a newer way of taking.

When I came back to Uganda two years later, I didn't stay in a guest house. I farmed.

What it taught me

I went to Uganda to study what grows in the soil. He taught me to ask who owns it.

That question has followed me to every place I've lived since. A landscape isn't only an ecology. It's also a ledger, and someone is keeping it.

Wander Deeply. Live Rooted.

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