Book on Maasai tribe fuels debate on lost lands

NAIROBI - Kenya's Maasai lost their best land through British colonial swindling and their own political intrigues, a historian has written in a new account of the struggle by one of Africa's most emblematic tribes.

A century on, the Maasai still suffer from a colonial hangover they say was aggravated by post-independence government policies that keep them estranged from ancestral lands.

But slim knowledge about the signing of 1904 and 1911 treaties between Britain and illiterate Maasai tribesmen, and a 1913 lawsuit, have led to confusion about how the disastrous moves came about, author Lotte Hughes said.

"It is not a black and white issue, and I do not mean racially," Hughes, a historian at Britain's Open University, told Reuters at this week's launch in Kenya of her book.

"Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure" has already given new fodder to Maasai activists seeking to sue Kenya and Britain for the return of their lands.

Among Kenya's smallest but best-known tribes, Maasai, with their spears, bright red clothes and beads, represent an almost mythic image of Africa.

Many Maasai now serve as tourist guides at game parks that used to be their grazing turf, or roam southern Kenya and northern Tanzania with their herds of cattle.

The Maasai say they are still kept out of their own land, and two years ago raided white-owned ranches in protest. They are now at loggerheads with the Kenya Wildlife Service over whether they can graze inside game parks.

Hughes said she never aimed to re-open debate or take sides, just dig into a fascinating tale about which little was known.

"Kenyans were already debating these things. I hope I am contributing positively with hard facts, by trying to weave archival evidence with oral evidence," Hughes said.

"African voices tend to get lost in these things."

Few dispute that Britain in 1904 signed a pact with illiterate Maasai leaders to make way for white settlers who coveted their favorite grazing land in the Rift Valley.

The tribe agreed to go to two reserves, one in the central highlands in Laikipia and another south of Nairobi, which were to be theirs "as long as the Maasai as a race shall exist".

Seven years later, the colonial government produced another treaty that moved the Maasai out of lush Laikipia into a single larger reserve south of Nairobi - arid and full of disease that killed many of the cows by which the Maasai count their wealth.

Maasai oral accounts say many people and cattle died in the move, carried out at gunpoint, the book says.

No clear figure could be given because of a Maasai superstition against counting people or animals, Hughes writes.

When it was all done, the Maasai had lost an estimated 50-70 per cent of their land, the book says.

White settlers had pressed colonial governor Percy Girouard to clear the Maasai out of Laikipia, and he turned to a Maasai medicine man who was already in the southern reserve. "He had struck a private deal with Olonana, recognizing him alone as paramount chief in return for his cooperation," the book says.

Girouard told superiors Olonana - who wanted to tighten his grip over Maasai clans in Laikipia - requested the move, one of several deceptions which cost the governor his job, Hughes writes.

Olonana died before he could sign the treaty, and his 13-year-old son and heir Seggi put his thumbprint on it.

Not all colonial administrators were in favor of the move, Hughes writes, and some campaigned to stop what they feared would become a disaster.

One helped Maasai leaders file a 1913 lawsuit in Kenya over the second move which was "a landmark legal action, apparently the first of its kind brought by indigenous people against colonial rulers in east Africa," the book says.

The Maasai lost on a technicality that said they were essentially foreigners who had no standing to bring a case. They hope to fare better next time.

- REUTERS