How Maasai lost their ancestral land to British in 1904

Maasai morans with their livestock, 1960s. [File, Standard]

Naboth’s vineyard. That is what the bewitching undulating grazing lands straddling Kenya and Tanzania, the home to the Maasai community, have been for over a century.

Today, the cries of an estimated 70,000 herders from this pastoral community echo around East Africa as they are hounded out of their homes in Ngorongoro.

The Tanzanian government has justified this uprooting of indigenous people from their ancestral land arguing that the number of livestock kept by the Maasai is a threat to wildlife and tourism from which “the government earns billions of shillings." 

This eviction mirrors another brutal evacuation of the Maasai in Kenya which started with the massacre of 100 morans in Kedong Valley by trader Andrew Dick in November 1895. It climaxed with a series of fraudulent agreements between 1904 and 1910 that ultimately rendered the community tenants in their own land.

When Lenana son of Mbatian and his council of 19 elders ratified an agreement on August 10, 1904, by affixing their thumbprints, they had no idea they were giving away their birthright to the Commissioner-General of the East African Protectorate, Donald Stewart.

Even after one of the signatories of the Maasai Agreement Ole Gilisho discovered the treachery and tried to undo the agreements in court, he was harassed by the government and the court.

When throwing away the case on May 26, 1913, the High Court in Mombasa ruled that since the two agreements were treaties signed by sovereign states, the dispute could not be handled by a local court. The Maasai agreements, the court concluded, were Acts of States which could not be challenged and the appellants could not enforce provisions of the treaty. As for compensation, none could be provided as the case had been dismissed on a technicality.

Earlier, Charles Eliot had warned Foreign Office in London that “if the Maasai were allowed to retain the best land along the railway line, the Europeans would very soon organise a raid to seize it.” As a result of the treaty, the Maasai were split into two, the Northern and Southern Reserves in Laikipia and Kajiado and Narok areas.

Just like what happened to their counterparts in Kajiado and Narok about 120 years ago, the Maasai of Ngorongoro in Tanzania have nowhere to go as their government has ignored an injunction from the East African Court of Justice not to evict them. Tanzania is no longer a member of the East African Court of Justice.