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At the 1993 meeting of the UNWGIP and also at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, the MDA articulated the major problems that currently threaten Maasai culture and identity. The delegation presented testimony describing the ecological degradation of Maasailand, the lack of adequate educational facilities, Maasai displacement at the hands of competing peoples, and the misappropriation of funds earmarked for indigenous development projects. Foremost among the MDA's concerns is the desire to recover lands in Kenya's Rift Valley Province, which were lost through dispossession over the past century. Because Maasai culture is inextricably bound to the land, their concern is understandable; dispossession of territory threatens to obliterate their culture.
In addition to its fear of increasing landlessness, the MDA explains that the Maasai have also been unable to achieve compensation for lands already taken from them. In particular, a great part of Maasailand was set aside for game reserves and national parks to expand Kenya's tourist economy, but to date, the Maasai have not benefitted from that development. Instead, they now face losing more land, as non-indigenous people attempt to buy it (or otherwise take it) from them. And while encroachment disrupts the cultural integrity of the Maasai, unsound farming methods used by non-indigenous peoples further upset the delicate ecological balance of the Rift Valley. The MDA claims that the unrestrained use of the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers has polluted water sources in grazing areas.
The MDA emphasizes the need to educate the Maasai people about the violation of their rights and freedoms, and the priorities are clear: first, it wants to put an end to the dispossession of Maasai land. Second, the organization demands that the definition of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples be clarified in order to demonstrate that the Maasai fall within the scope of indigenous rights. Curiously, the Maasai and the Kenyan government seem to be in agreement on these questions. In fact, the government has appeared to support the MDA's presentations before international organizations.1 The reasons for this support are both interesting and unsettling; a full understanding requires explanation of some historical background.
The Maasai are pastoral semi-nomads indigenous to the fertile Rift Valley that runs north-south through eastern Africa. Maasai artifacts dating from the first millenium have been found in the region. Maasai tradition is based on leading cattle to seasonal pasture within the bounds of the extensive valley system. Other pastoral peoples, including the Turkana, Samburu, and the Kalenjin,2 also have occupied particular territories of the Rift Valley since time immemorial.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain and Germany divided East Africa, including Maasailand, between their two colonies which became known at independence as Kenya and Tanganyika. In 1904, the British compelled the Maasai of Kenya to relinquish rich grazing lands to accommodate new European settlers and the agricultural labor force of (primarily) Kikuyus whom they brought into the Rift Valley from their traditional homelands on the other side of Mount Kenya. The British also brought in Luhyas3 and Luos from their homelands west of the Rift Valley. The Kikuyu were farmers by tradition, which made them useful to the colonists, whose objectives were largely to develop an agriculture-based economy.
The British forced the Maasai onto two demarcated reserves, one in the Laikipiak district northwest of Mt. Kenya, and the other extending south from Mt. Suswa to the Tanganyika border. Maasai occupancy of those lands was guaranteed by an agreement which stated that their rights "shall be enduring so long as the Maasai as a race shall exist, and that Europeans or other settlers shall not be allowed to take up land in the [Maasai] settlements."4 Seven years later, in 1911, the British forced the Maasai to give up the lands of the northern reserve (in Laikipiak); the colonists were seeking to evict pastoralists of the Rift Valley who were in the way of agricultural development. The Maasai were crowded onto the lands of the southern reserve, which were semi-arid and less fertile than the Laikipiak territory. To pacify the Maasai, the colonists extended the southern reserve by a few square miles, creating the area known today as the Kajiado and Narok districts of the Rift Valley Province. The Maasai have been squeezed within that area to the point of crisis that exists for them today.
Realizing that their removal from Laikipiak was neither legitimate nor justifiable, the Maasai sued the colonial government in its municipal courts for breach of the 1904 agreement. The government argued (in its own courts) that its agreement with the Maasai had not been a contract, but rather a treaty, and that a treaty could not be negotiated in municipal court. When the Maasai went to the British Court of Appeals for Eastern Africa, the British argued that the Maasai indeed constituted a sovereign entity, but that their treaty had no validity under international law, because it had been made with the British Protectorate government.5 The colonial government thereby retained the land taken from the Maasai, who had no further recourse within the British colonial legal system. The Maasai landbase was dispossessed still more during the 1940s, with the creation of the Nairobi, Tsavo West, Amboseli and Maasai Mara National Parks. The Maasai were denied access to grazing lands in the parks to keep them separate from wildlife (with which their cattle never competed).
After independence, in 1963, the Maasai hoped to regain some if not all of their traditional lands, but the new independent government of Jomo Kenyatta had other plans. Kenyatta's administration was largely a project of Kikuyu elites who wanted to develop an agriculture-based economy, and they were not about to relinquish fertile lands to people deemed inferior by virtue of a "backward" tribal culture and semi-nomadic, pastoral lifeway. Kenya came under pressure from the World Bank, which offered extensive financial assistance for developing a commercial beef industry, but only under the condition that traditional communal land tenure systems be replaced with a system based on individual land ownership. However, the government refused to give individual title deeds to the Maasai, and instead, instituted a "group ranch" system that allowed groups (primarily clans) of pastoralists to register for large blocks of land with fixed boundaries.
The group ranch system hypothetically could have been consonant with communal land tenure, but the new institution upset the organization of traditional Maasai society, due to such constraints as: fixing ranch boundaries without regard to traditional use areas, replacing traditional authorities with elected officials, and requiring land titles as collateral on government loans. Currently, the government has turned its back on the whole idea of group ranches and is subdividing them into individual private parcels. The combined result of these impositions has been the increasingly severe loss of forage for livestock, the reduction and degradation of grazing areas, and the disintegration of Maasai society. As Maasai face the consequences of the lost viability of their pastoral economy, they also suffer the loss of land due to the influx of Kikuyu, Luo and Luhya immigrants into the Kajiado and Narok districts, where the Maasai were compelled to reside, and where they were already squeezed due to the expansion of the national parks. As the Maasai face ever-increasing obstacles to continuation of their lifeways, many young people leave the rural areas and migrate to the big cities, where they are assimilated into the mainstream culture and lose their Maasai identity.
The influx of non-Maasai people in the Narok and Kajiado districts is partly the result of subdividing the group ranches, which has permitted individuals (of any identity) to buy up grazing lands from the Maasai clans that formerly exercised communal tenure. However, more important to the issues of the moment, the squeeze also results from national policies that have violently driven Kikuyus, Luhyas and Luos out of the Western, Nyanza and Rift Valley provinces, areas that they have inhabited since the British established their presence there in the early 1900s, when the pastoralists were evicted. These removal policies have come to the critical attention of international human rights organizations, and among the controversial accusations that they provoke is that the Maasai are serving as accomplices of the Kenyan government in a national "ethnic cleansing" program organized in the name of indigenous rights.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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