The Maasai of Kenya

Few visitors to Kenya today realize that the area inhabited by the vast majority of the 400,000-strong Maasai people is one to which the Maasai's parents and grandparents were driven against their will a century ago. And the increasing impoverishment and marginalization of the Maasai is now widely seen as part of a process that began with the Maasai's loss of the Maasai's lands in the infamous 1904 and 1911 treaties with the British.

The Maasai people

The Maasai people lived for hundreds of years in an area that stretched from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean. The Maasai are pastoralists, moving their herds of cattle, sheep, and goats to give the land a chance to regenerate, and in order to find fresh water. Although the image of the Maasai- tall and red-robed- is iconic, the Maasai and their culture are at risk today, struggling to find ways to preserve their traditions while balancing the needs of their children in the modern world.

The British come to East Africa

In 1895, the British established a Protectorate over the territory that is now Kenya. At that time, the Maasai occupied much of the fertile grasslands of the Rift Valley, an area of great interest to the newly arrived settlers. It thus became necessary for the British to find ways to relocate the Maasai from these prime lands (the "Northern Preserve") to the more arid South Rift Valley. To do this, the Protectorate decided to enter into "agreements" with the Maasai, rather than attempt outright conquest.

Under these so-called "treaties" of 1904 and 1911, the Maasai "of their own free will" agreed that "their removal to definite and final reserves was for the undoubted good of the Maasai race." In other words, the Maasai supposedly concluded that it was in their own best interest to give up the best-watered and most productive lands and move to lands they knew to be arid, unproductive, and unfavorable to their way of life. All told, the British took roughly sixty per cent of the land the Maasai had once used.

The Maasai's sense of loss and betrayal has never gone away. Efforts to remedy the loss of their land and its consequences have been pursued repeatedly over the years, but the first real glimmer of hope did not appear until 1962.

The Lancaster conference

The goal of the 1962 Lancaster House conference was to establish the terms of self-governance for Kenya. It was thought that the British, in relinquishing the colony of Kenya, might be ready to correct some of their past wrongs. Not wishing to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity, the Maasai sent a delegation to London to make their case.

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The Maasai treaties and the usurping of Maasailand by British settlers constitutes the greatest injustice done to any single African tribe by the so-called civilizing powers of Europe.

- John Keen, representative of the Maasai at the Lancaster House independence conference of 1962.