2004: Partner NEWS Vol. 7 no. 3

The Maasai land dispossessions

According to an old Maasai saying “there are only two things that cannot be given away, a son and land”.

By Michael ole Tiampati

Before the advent of colonialism, the Maasai were considered among the wealthiest community in the region. According to 1906 colonial reports, the Ilaikipiak boasted 64,000 heads of cattle and 1,700,000 sheep. And two years later, livestock numbers in the same district were estimated at 80,000 cattle and 2 million sheep. The Maasais successfully asserted themselves against slave traders and took tribute from those who passed through their lands. In 1901, in course of a report, Sir Charles Eliot noted that he regarded the Maasai as the most important and dangerous of the communities with whom they had to deal in East Africa due to their arrogant attitude.

Early explorers who didn’t understand the nomadic lifestyle of Maasai “discovered” the cool highlands and extensive plains of grass with rolling hills teeming with wild game and assumed them to be unoccupied. Consequently in 1899, the British claimed ‘possession’ “of all forests, jungles, waste or uncultivated land or land not in actual occupation” and initiated the formation of native reserves aimed at confining Africans to designated areas.

According to veteran and radical Maasai politician John Keen, the British were absolutely unfair and unjust when they coerced the Maasai into the 1904 and 1911 agreements. “There was no monetary arrangement or consideration at all to a community that lost more than 10,000 square miles of their prime land”. Whereas, he argues, in the agreement between the Sultan of Zanzibar and the British, the Sultan was entitled to 16,000 pounds annually from the British government because of a mere 10 mile coastal strip.

Disrupted patterns of life

The greater portion of expropriated land was found in the highlands and plains where large scale commercial livestock and cereal production was feasible.

The land earmarked for white settlers included all important dry season grazing and watering zones. This led to a disorientation of the Maasai and consequently a disruption of their migratory patterns. By 1913, land occupied by the herders had been reduced through this annexation by more than 70 per cent within a span of nine years.

After cycles of tragedy, the Maasai realized that they were lowly regarded and taken advantage of by the settler community whose quest for more land brought about a second 1911 treaty. In 1913, the Maasais hired Morrison, a white lawyer, who successfully waged a legal battle against the crown over the violation of the 1904 treaty. Opposing the move from Ilaikipiak to the southern Maasai reserves, where 97,000 heads of cattle, and 30,000 sheep were lost following an outbreak of anthrax and tsetse fly attacks, they challenged the British abrogation of the 1904 treaty, which states that the community would never be moved again. Though the case was finally dismissed with costs, it marked the beginning of the weakened Maasai tussle with the British.

Later in 1962, the Maasai delegates to the Lancaster conference refused to sign the document, as  a protest against Her Majesty’s government’s abrogation of the 1904 treaty and prejudice in restitution of the lands fraudulently acquired from the Maasai.  “All we (the Maasai delegation) wanted was the restoration of our lands, nothing short of that. But the Maasai interests were “sold off” because, the KANU and British delegations did not care very much about Maasai lands and all the Maasai got from KANU side was lip service”, said John Keen, a Maasai delegate at Lancaster. 

Ancestral ownership

After the end of colonial rule in 1962, the British government promised a 77 Million £ grant to the Kenyatta regime to finance the African resettlement process. This was done in the high potential “white highlands” under the Resettlement and Land Transfer Programme. Land buying companies were set up comprising mainly the farming community of central Kenya from which President Kenyatta hailed.

One land buying company formed by a prominent Kenyatta era politician settled their kin on 51,539 acres of land in Laikipia, 21,050 acres in Njoro in Nakuru, 1,200 acres in Molo, more than 4,000 acres in Bahati area of Nakuru and 1,400 acres in Mau Narok – all parts of traditional Maasai territory.

By 1970, about 1.2 million hectares had been distributed ostensibly to the landless, unemployed and the “progressive” African farmers. Ironically, the initial Maasai owners of this land were left out of this exercise and many swear that they were never consulted. This meant that the government transferred land lost by the Maasai to non-Maasai with little consideration to ancestral ownership.

Symbol of tourism

Current efforts by Maasai to reclaim their ancestral lands are confronted by an extraordinary display of warped logic from their African rulers. The “infamous” Anglo-Maasai agreements have been described by the Lands Minister as binding for 999 years by which time, “the Maasai will be no more”. In addition the Maasai have been declared, “Non-existent”, by Lands Minister’s deputy who added “there are no genuine Maasai in Kenya”. And after the August countrywide Maasai demonstrations, The Minister for Lands dismissed it as a ploy to “sabotage” the tourism industry and identified the Maasai as the symbol of tourism in Kenya, thus unconsciously acknowledging the community’s existence. 

Due to the media, who has not hesitated to acknowledge the justification of the Maasai quest and the unjust claimed by the Maasai since 1912, the national problems of land ownership and distribution have been brought into the public domain. According to one mainstream daily the Kenyatta regime’s “million-acre-settlement-scheme” did not benefit the landless, but ended up in the hands of the power brokers of the time. The same paper catalogued the three successive post independence Kenya presidents as owners of huge tracts of land measuring 221, 600, 114,600 and 31,600 acres respectively.

A double tragedy

The Maasai have suffered the double tragedies of colonial and postcolonial land dispossessions condemning them to the rugged and harsh terrain disenfranchising them economically and socially. 

Without land, the opportunities and choices most basic to the Maasai way of life have been denied by regimes responsible for upholding their human rights. Today many Maasais can hardly provide for basic requirements like food, education and healthcare. Within a fair government system, the poverty and deprivation of lives confronting the Maasai could normally not have been allowed to manifest itself.

E-mail: tiampati@hotmail.com / santetotiamps@yahoo.com