Mr. John Keen, one of the Maasai delegates to the conference, aptly described the treaties imposed on the Maasai:

"The law took from indigenous inhabitants any right to occupy their traditional land, exposed them to deprivation of the religious, cultural and economic sustenance which the land provides, vested the land effectively in the control of the Imperial authorities without any right to compensation, and made the indigenous inhabitants intruders in their own homes and mendicants for a place to live."

The Maasai leaders' request that their land claims be addressed was rejected.

From Independence to Now

Following independence, the country became more politically stable and attractive to development projects and tourism. The Maasai were continually left out of the processes of development, and their land claims continued to be ignored.

Finally, in 2007, there was a promising development. In response to pressure from a wide variety of groups, and recognizing that the country had lacked a codified land policy since independence, the Kenyan Ministry of Lands prepared a Draft National Land Policy. The Policy proposed something that the Maasai had never been able to achieve:

"The Government shall establish mechanisms to resolve historical land claims arising on or after 1895, the year when Kenya became a colony under the British with the power to enact laws which formed the genesis of the mass disinheritance of various Kenyan communities of their land. [The Government] shall establish a suitable legal framework to investigate the historical injustice and establish mechanisms for restitution, reparation and compensation."

EDLC and the Maa Civil Society Forum

In 2006, EDLC began to work with the Maa Civil Society Forum, an umbrella group of Maasai organizations that was formed to promote land rights claims. The decision was ultimately made to launch an effort, with the help of a major international law firm, to persuade the Kenyan Parliament and administration to enact legislation to redress the historical land injustices described in the Draft Land Policy of 2007.

At that same time, the Maasai anxiously awaited the results of the December 2007 national elections. The turbulent period following the hotly contested results of that election now appears to be coming to a close. Significantly, additional key actors, including former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the U.S. government, are taking a leading role in pushing the Kenyan government to resolve the host of critical land issues that lie at the heart of the country's recent political and social instability.

EDLC and the Maa Civil Society Forum are poised to work with these new actors, and pick up where they left off before the 2007 elections. The current situation may represent the best opportunity the Maasai have had in a century to resolve these issues in their favor. And EDLC is on the verge of engaging a highly respected international law firm to lead this renewed effort to finally obtain justice for the Maasai.

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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.