In the Grip of the Vampire State: Maasai Land Struggles in Kenyan Politics

Abstract

At the point of colonial conquest, Kenya's Maasai entered into a treaty with the British that signed away their land rights to seasonal grazing lands in the Rift Valley. A second treaty, replacing the first, then moved them from the prized pastures of the Laikipia plateau, confining them to a poorly watered ‘Native Reserve’ in the southern portion of the country. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the campaign for the restitution of these lost lands has been revived, amid a political clamour in Kenya for the revisiting of history to confront past wrongs. This article provides a personal account of the unfolding of this campaign in Kenya and the response of the NARC government to the Maasai challenge, drawing upon both first-hand experience of the events described and newspaper reports. The final section reflects upon the seemingly unchanging character of Kenya politics even in this ‘new age’ of liberal democracy.

In August 2004, members of the Maasai community in Kenya launched a campaign for the return of lands allegedly stolen from them during the colonial era. The campaign was launched on 13 August 2004, a date coinciding roughly with the centenary of the signing of the first Anglo-Maasai Agreement. It was planned as a series of demonstrations that would culminate in the presentation of a petition to the Kenya and British governments demanding the return of lands allegedly stolen from the Maasai during the colonial era, and financial compensation for the trauma of land loss and the resultant ‘under-development’ of the Maasai community. While the campaign's broad objective was land restitution, the initial focus was on the return of Laikipia, the two million-acre site of the former northern Maasai Reserve and now home to a handful of ranches largely in the hands of the remnant white settler community.1

Under the terms of that agreement, the Maasai had, so the agreement states, willingly ceded their territory in the central Rift Valley to move to two reserves, one to the north of the newly-constructed Kenya–Uganda railway, and the other south of it. The agreement, the Maasai were assured, would last ‘as long as the Maasai shall exist as a race’. A second agreement made seven years later in 1911 reneged on the earlier assurance. The Maasai were forced to leave the Northern Reserve of Laikipia and settle in an expanded Southern Reserve. A court case in 1913 challenging the legality of the second agreement was dismissed on a technicality, a ruling that was upheld by a higher court when it went to appeal.2 The campaign of 2004 would in fact be the fourth time over the past century that the Maasai had challenged the loss of Laikipia and other lands. All three previous attempts – the 1913 court case, a 1932 petition to the Kenya Land Commission of 1933–34, and a plea made at Kenya Constitutional Conference in London during 1962 on the eve of Kenya's independence – ended in bitter failure.3

This article situates the latest Maasai campaign within the context of Kenya's contemporary politics. I do this by dealing with two questions: first, do the Maasai today have any right to make claims on ancestral lands lost to the British? Second, what is the effect of ancestral land claims on contemporary Kenyan politics?

The circumstances in which the Maasai found themselves at the turn of the last century determined the future of the British colonial project in East Africa. Kenya had never been part of imperial Britain's grand design; it was a failed commercial prospect – going by the woeful record of the Imperial British East Africa Company – and a throughway to Uganda, the source of the Nile. The rush to secure the headwaters of the Nile was motivated by the imperial logic that whoever did so controlled Egypt, the Suez and, ultimately, India. The British declared a Protectorate over East Africa in 1895. In December of that year, construction began on a railway. Construction became expensive, with a final bill to the British taxpayer of 5.5 million pounds, an amount that caused uproar in the House of Commons. The Protectorate would have to recoup the cost of the railway. This was to be done by the development of the East African hinterland. And so the idea of British settlement was born.4

The problem was the Maasai. Their reputation, developed along the imperial, ethnographic lines of the day (the African as ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’) had preceded them. Late nineteenth-century explorers’ exaggerated tales, such as those of Joseph Thomson, the first European to cross Kenyan Maasailand, and Harry Johnston, who later became Uganda's first Protectorate Commissioner, had spoken of a ferocious, bloodthirsty tribe.5 It was a tag that stuck.6 If British settlement in Kenya was to become a reality at the end of the nineteenth century, then the Maasai had to be confronted. They controlled a vast territory in central and southern Kenya that stretched into northern Tanzania. Significantly, they occupied the lands directly adjacent to those most favourable for European settlement: what would later become known as the White Highlands. As it turned out, the Maasai provided less resistance to British penetration than the latter had anticipated. The dawn of the twentieth century had found the Maasai severely weakened by a combination of civil wars, human and livestock epidemics, and drought. Their power on the wane and their herds depleted, many Maasai military units had become guns for hire, fighting other people's battles and getting paid in stock. Instead of the resistance the British expected, they found that they were able to enlist these units as auxiliaries during their punitive expeditions upcountry. For instance, Maasai auxiliaries accompanied Meinertzhagen during his infamous expedition against the Nandi in 1907.7 Paid in stock, the Maasai were able gradually to rebuild their herds.8

The signing of the first Anglo-Maasai Agreement ushered in a new phase in Anglo-Maasai relations. From unlikely collaborators in ‘the conquest state’, they – not through anticipated military conquest but by bureaucratic sleights of hand – were now respectively master and subject. Significantly, this change in relations that facilitated white settlement in the central Rift Valley marked the proper start of the colonial administrative project in Kenya. It was not the violent struggle that the British had anticipated: rather, it was a kind of ‘consensual conquest’.

Moving forward fifty years, the Maasai arrived at decolonisation in the early 1960s in much the same way they had entered the twentieth century: weakened once again, this time by a severe drought that had killed off two-thirds of their stock and consigned many to famine relief, they had begun to see the patterns of their history with sharper clarity. It was no coincidence that the Maasai sections that had been forced out of Laikipia were the hardest hit, a point that was made during one of the early meetings between the Maasai delegation and the Colonial Secretary in the run-up to the second Kenya constitutional conference in 1962.9 Turning to the departing power for an assurance that their present lands would be safeguarded, and their lost ones returned in the new dispensation, they met thinly-disguised indifference. The Maasai claimed 70 per cent of the White Highlands as, to quote Maasai Legislative Council member Justis ole Tipis, ‘properly ours’. Now that the British were departing, should not this land revert to its true owners, the Maasai?10 Colonial officials were polite, but distant: undoubtedly aware of the existence of the agreements, they nonetheless remained emphatic that the only obligations they had towards the Maasai were moral, not legal. In the eyes of the departing colonial regime, and in the eyes of the Kenyan government who took up the reins of power from them, the Maasai had no legal claim to the lands they had forfeited by treaty.11

Under the regimes of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, Maasai were denied the political space in which to revive their claim to the ‘lost lands’. Public silence over these years did not betoken acquiescence, however, and within a few months of the election defeat of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) in December 2002, Maasai protagonists were again stirred into action, with expectations that the ‘new dispensation’ of Kenya's politics might afford opportunities to revisit a distant but still potent history. After all, one of campaign pledges of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) was to ‘deal with the past’.12 The Maasai land case would show this to be an awkward pledge for the government to honour, and in doing so expose the deeply rooted, conservative structures of Kenya's politics. Our narrative begins some 21 months after NARC's election victory, as the high hopes of the ‘new era’ were beginning to fade in the glare of Kenya's real politik.

Report of an Event: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail13

Friday, 13 August 2004 dawned grey with the threat of end-of-the-week downtown Nairobi chaos. The streets would be clogged with double- and triple-parkers. There would be people banking and insuring, people from the suburbs come to pay outstanding phone, water and electricity bills, out-of-towners stocking up for the weekend trip back upcountry, politicians, mzungu 14 expatriates, non-governmental organisation(NGO)-types and/or their wives drumming fingers on steering-wheels as they negotiated the traffic to some weekend getaway – the Maasai Mara, or the coast or that quiet little place just before you get to Magadi, an hour's drive south if you don't factor in the traffic. The sidewalks would be jammed with the usual pretty college students already dressed up for Friday night clubbing, job-seekers, vegetable hawkers, trinket traders, street-preachers, thieves, men in loud green jackets, brown khaki trousers and heaving pot-bellies making their way to City Hall to clinch a deal, debt-collectors chasing debtors. And this Friday they would all be jostling with out-of-town primary and secondary school students attending the National Music Festival at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC). The students would take advantage of gaps in the festival programme to wander about in long, slow rows across the narrow sidewalks, do some sightseeing and shopping, and some sneak-drinking. The year before, the public had been shocked by pictures in the press of festival students in various stages of disarray, drunk on the sidewalk beyond the point of caring. There were no guarantees that this year would be any different.

Friday the 13th was not a day prepared for riots. And yet, the promise of a riot, of some police action or another, loomed large. The Maasai were demonstrating. By mid-morning about 300 men and women from the Maasai community, distinctive in their red and blue shukas,15 had gathered on the grounds of the KICC and were standing around in small groups. Reporters from the local and international press flitted from group to group looking for anyone who could provide background information – several impromptu interviews were occurring simultaneously. Some reporters gathered around the twin figures of Maa Civil Society Forum (MCSF) chairman, Ben ole Koissabba, a logistics officer with World Vision International, the Christian charity; and Sidney Quntai, a former journalist now running an NGO, the Human–Wildlife Conflict Network.

I could not see Elijah Marima ole Sempeta. Tall and light-skinned, he always stood out in a crowd. He was a young, outspoken and brash Maasai lawyer who had made headlines in early 2003 by demanding back-royalties from the Magadi Soda Company, a mining company that had been extracting soda ash from Lake Magadi since 1911. Located in the old Southern Province (which contained the two Maasai districts of Narok and Kajiado), Magadi Soda produces almost 40 per cent of global soda output. The parent company is British.16 The original company, Brunner, Mond & Co was founded in Northwich, England by Ludwig Mond. Magadi was the company's most profitable soda ash operation.17 Soda ash is used in the manufacture of glass, paper and bleaching industries. Royalties from the company's operation had always been paid to the central government. Sempeta argued that Lake Magadi, and the thousands of acres which had been ceded to the company by the colonial government, had been illegally ‘grabbed’ from the Maasai. In addition, the Maasai had received nothing by way of compensation.

The agitation for compensation coincided with the Magadi Soda Company's negotiations with the International Finance Company (IFC), the World Bank's private sector lending arm, for a $100 million loan facility from the IFC. The Magadi–IFC negotiations were almost at an end. What remained was an environmental appraisal and an assurance that their lease would be extended when it expired in 2023. Sempeta led a highly-publicised demonstration accusing the company of abuses against the Maasai, leading demonstrators on a 40-km walk from baking-hot Magadi into Nairobi and addressing the media in tones that were sure to alarm the visiting IFC delegation. The demonstration stunned the company, which had considered this final stage of the negotiations a mere formality. The police were brought in. According to Magadi residents I interviewed around the time of the campaign, anybody known or suspected of being associated with the demonstration was arrested. Police harassment continued for weeks afterwards. Although the loan was granted in the end, Sempeta's name was now on the map. He, along with the likes of ole Koissabba, was considered by many to be the inspiration behind the 13 August demonstration.

At KICC all the local dailies had reporters present. There were TV crews from the Kenya Television Network and Reuters. There were people handing around placards, while others scribbled slogans on manilla paper. Several demonstrators carried yet other placards with slogans like: ‘We Demand Our Land Back From the British!’ and ‘100 Years Is Enough!’ and ‘The Laikipia Leases Have Expired Give the Maasai Back Their Land!’ Journalists were informed that there were planned demonstrations in four other towns – Kajiado, Naivasha, Nanyuki and Ngong, all of which were located in what can be called Maasailand – all set to go off at the same time. The demonstrations had been planned for 15 August but because it fell on a Sunday, the organisers, a pressure group called the Maa Civil Society Forum, had moved them up. Sunday is a slow news day. The media was central to the campaign strategy: Maasai claims for the resolution of outstanding grievances had always previously been made behind closed doors, and addressed directly to the State. Exposing the issue to public scrutiny would have the calculated aim of embarrassing a popularly-elected government, forcing the State to negotiate. By the time the demonstration started the crowd had doubled.

The demonstrations had been in the works for at least a year. I had been involved with the MCSF since early 2003 during the Magadi campaign when the most recent discussions about agitating for the return of stolen Maasai lands began. The Maa Forum was the brainchild of a group of Maasai professionals – lawyers, journalists and NGO activists. The logic behind the present agitation – there had been three others since 1912 – was that since the Laikipia leases expired on August 15, the two million acres that constitute the former Northern Maasai Reserve should revert to the Maasai people. Some 37 white settler families occupied the land. From early 2003, there had been rumours that the Laikipia sellers were worried about the expiry of the leases; with a new government in place, there were no guarantees that their interests would be protected. Stories abounded of panic selling, secret missions by settler lobby groups to the Minister of Lands. I was never able to confirm any of them.

The demonstration set off. At the front of the procession a chant started, a stirring popular Maasai gospel tune that rippled through the group, became a roar that echoed against the office blocks on both sides of Harambee Avenue. Traffic stopped. The street looked up, not sure what the problem was this time around, eyes darting this way and that for any sign of the riot police – still no sign of them yet – but curious enough for it to provoke spontaneous conversations among strangers.

As we entered Harambee Avenue, I suddenly saw an uncle of mine whom I had not seen in months. He was standing on the sidewalk waiting for the demonstration to pass, arrested by the spectacle. I stopped and we chatted briefly. He was curious to know what was going on. Here in downtown Nairobi he was more city man in suit and a tie, than a Maasai. He declined my invitation to join us. He had things to do. I was not sure myself to what extent I had moved from being the disinterested reported and become the reporter. There was a euphoria in the air, a sense of destiny and mission that I had to contend with.

Press photographers dashed to the front of the procession, crouched and snapped away, darted to the other side of the street, trying to capture in one memorable shot the Portrait of Fierce Maasai Moran as Political Activist Out of His Element on the Streets of Nairobi and a front-page credit in tomorrow's papers. Down Harambee Avenue the group headed, the chanting repetitive, as if the demonstrators were falling in love with their own baritones. Harambee Avenue: the address of the Office of the President, Justice and Constitutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs – executive authority and national best-foot-forward. State Power.

The Administration Policemen (AP) manning the gates at the Ministry of Justice were polite but firm: they would allow neither the group nor any of its representatives in to deliver the petition they had with them. Entitled A Memorandum on the Anglo-Maasai Agreements: A Case of Historical and Contemporary Injustices and the Dispossession of Maasai Land, the petition, addressed to the Kenyan and British governments, makes two demands. The first is the return of Laikipia, the old Northern Reserve:

The MAA community does strongly urge the Government of Kenya not to extend any of the leases, which are at the verge of expiring. Instead, the land should be reverted back to the MAA community. The land is theirs.18

The second is a demand for compensation:

The Kenyan and British Governments should compensate the MAA communities for all the historical and contemporary injustices subjected to them. The compensation should be in the form of lands and territories equal in quality, size and legal status to those taken away from them wrongfully. It should also include monies to mitigate their social-cultural welfare such as education, livestock management and markets, amenities and infrastructure. The compensation should be just, prompt and fair to benefit all the population of MAA people.19

Fifteen minutes of cajoling the APs had produced no results. The singing and the chanting no longer flowed; they broke out every now and then from different parts of the procession, an itch on a sweaty body. People stood about in small groups, the procession leaders haranguing and cajoling the sphinx-like APs, others interviewing and strategising, and yet others studying the petition again. So the procession was sighing and sweating and generally catching its collective breath when Assistant Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Danson Mungatana rolled up to the gate in his brand new official, white and metallic-silver Toyota Prado. Seeing the TV cameras and the demonstrators, he realised he had just stumbled on a situation. Driving in – being driven in: he was seated at back-left, waving with the imperial insouciance of a man who has only recently grown accustomed to his new status. Mungatana is a young politician, in his late 30s, who graduated at the top of his law class at the University of Nairobi. Trim and youthful, he is as yet un-afflicted by the pot-belly, the mark of political ‘arrivalism’. He is an unlikely – and inadvertently comical – defender of the ‘Mt Kenya Mafia’, the Kikuyu-dominated kitchen cabinet within the NARC coalition widely perceived to be the power behind President Mwai Kibaki. While Mungatana does not have a reputation for corruption, the Mt Kenya Mafia does. He comes from a small, marginalised community at the coast, the Pokomo, who have land grievances of their own that date back to colonial times.20 Baby-faced and outspoken, Mungatana often sabotages himself by his eagerness to scrap with ‘political heavyweights’ on behalf of the Mt Kenya Mafia faction. He is said to possess presidential ambitions. Here is a situation. And it would not do to ignore it and just drive in. For one, it would allow the crowd through the gates and Mungatana had no idea what they wanted. But TV cameras always present an opportunity to make some political mileage in the bickering between the two rival factions within the NARC government. So, reluctantly (although you would never suspect it, the way he made the leap from the back seat of the Prado to the tarmac, the youthful pugnacity of his walk) he gets out of his vehicle and walks directly to the TV cameras, the crowd parting Red Sea-like.

After speaking directly and briefly into the cameras, he accepts the petition, and, switching to Big Man mode proper – a subtle shift, a narrowing of the eyes, a pursing of lips; a little deep-throated growl – assures the group that the petition ‘would be studied by the government before a decision is reached’.21 He then walks through the gate, a group of reporters running after him for a quote. Whether he actually delivered the petition to the Justice Minister is another matter altogether; no comment ever emanated from the ministry. Danson Mungatana was the last public official the Maasai demonstrators would have any contact with, either on that first day of the demonstrations or at any other point during the campaign. The procession left the city centre and snaked one-and-half kilometres up Community Hill to the Ministry of Lands. The Minister, Amos Kimunya was not in his office, the group was informed. They marched across the road to the British High Commission. Edward Clay, the High Commissioner was not in either. It was a Friday and the High Commission closed at lunchtime on Fridays. Sempeta and Koissabba refused to hand the petition to young Ms Amanda Rose, the official sacrificed for the occasion. They railed at Clay's unavailability: ‘Clay's refusal to see us shows how much contempt he has for us. It smacks of colonialism,’ said Sempeta.22 One of the placards echoed him: ‘The British are Equally Gluttonous. Stop Vomiting On Our Ancestral Lands’. It was a dig at Clay's recent condemnation of corruption in the Kenya government. He had taken the very undiplomatic but unexpectedly popular position of accusing the government of ‘being gluttonous’ and ‘vomiting on the shoes of the donors’. The public had applauded him. Government officials spluttered their indignation onto the front pages of the dailies.

The police remained quiet that first day, perhaps through no fault of their own. There was nobody giving instructions. It was, after all, a Friday in Nairobi. Everybody was lunching and golfing and out-of-towning. They watched and waited.

The petition was delivered to the administration in each of the four towns, with some replays of the Mungatana scenario. For instance in Naivasha, from where the Maasai had been obliged to move in August 1904, exactly a century before, scores of demonstrators reportedly ‘ambushed’ the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner and presented him with the memorandum. He was, said news reports, preparing to receive President Mwai Kibaki.23 In Nanyuki, the administrative headquarters of Laikipia district, 3,000 Maasai demonstrated and presented the petition to the District Commissioner as police in riot gear watched from a distance. Everywhere, the demonstrations were said to have been peaceful. Significantly, the media picked up on the issue of the Laikipia leases expiring on 15 August. The lease-expiry issue was to play a crucial role in the future direction of the campaign.

15 August passed without incident. So far the campaign had played on two different media registers, satisfying two different sets of expectations. The local press, which served the literate, the majority African middle-class constituency, had presented the campaign as a drama of land dispossession and British colonial injustice, a theme at the heart of the nation's official ‘struggle’ narrative. However, land dispossession has been distorted in the post-independence era. With the hijacking of anti-colonial struggles by an African nationalist elite that used the rhetoric of African self-determination as a cover for private accumulation, it is difficult these days to tell who was worse: the mzungu or the mbenzi.24 And so, while the exploitation of public disgust with the nationalist elite has become the standard fare of headline news stories, by casting the Maasai story as a drama whose implications did not necessarily threaten the course of contemporary Kenyan politics, the media was taking its audience on a museum tour. The Maasai story thus opened a window onto the expired relations of another age.

It was as if the public were being primed for a repeat of the last instalment of the Maasai drama with a viewer-friendly ending; justice comes to the African underdog, albeit a century after the crime. In late July and early August 2004, a two-part series had run in the Daily Nation about the Anglo-Maasai treaties.25 What the nationalists had failed to provide – a closure of the colonial moment – could perhaps be partly offered in this encounter, since the Maasai campaign promised the opportunity to bear witness to one of the last scenes of the colonial drama on terms that, with over 40 years of African rule, seemed to favour the African. In addition, the nature of colonialism could be examined through a lens almost undistorted by the messiness of African elite rule – by the ethnic clientilism, corruption and mismanagement of post-independence nationalist politics. And here was a cast of characters that promised a kind of Galapagos of the theatre of colonialism – petrified early colonial relations between conqueror and conquered suddenly resuscitated, and being contested in contemporary Kenya. A once rich and powerful African people, swindled, dispossessed and impoverished by their encounter with the greedy, hypocritical British colonialist.

The fascination for this drama was enhanced by the location on which the final contest would take place: Laikipia – a faraway place of endless savannahs and rolling mountain ranges teeming with wildlife – less (first Protectorate Commissioner) Eliot's tabula rasa,26 than a huge and finely preserved stage for history's denoument.

Certain details threatened to upset the mkokoteni,27 so to speak. In late July, President Mwai Kibaki had toured Laikipia District and, in apparent reference to the trauma of the ethnic clashes of the 1990s, assured Kikuyus in the area that they would never be moved from Laikipia against their will.28 Also, the Minister of Lands and Settlement came from Kipipiri constituency, Laikipia. In the event, the local media followed the campaigners’ lead of reconstructing Laikipia as a colonial space existing within a post-colonial environment. It was occupied, not by the mix of Africans, Europeans, pastoralists, peasant farmers, ranchers and nusu nusus (mixed race people) who actually lived there, but by ‘the couple of dozen ethnic European landowners’, to paraphrase settler author and Laikipia farmer, Aidan Hartley.29

Size was important, central even, to the public's perception of the stated injustice. And the mzungu ranch-sizes ranked beyond the dreams of avarice – two million acres owned by 37 families in a country where family feuds over a five-acre piece of land persisted from one generation to another. This Laikipia was, as the Maasai campaigners depicted it, still an occupied zone, still colonised. The basis of this struggle was to wrest it from the ‘hybrid gluttons … and their heirs’.30 So not only was an old struggle going to be re-enacted, but the ensuing drama would have an added bonus: that the suspects were still at the scene of the crime. Crucially, this ‘Final Showdown’ promised the audience a rare and blissful opportunity of non-participatory entertainment: the scene had been crafted to carefully avoid the contamination of ethnic competition. The campaigners’ strategy to target white-owned ranches as an entry-point into a wider land restitution debate, ensured an almost guilt-free ride for the audience. By presenting the petition in a colonial context the Maasai had racialised the Laikipia claims without ethnicising them.

Whereas the expectations generated for the Kenyan audience by the local press were for restitution and closure, the international audience was sold the story on the strength of fear and racial violence, on the strength, that is, of another story: the Zimbabwe land ‘invasions’. Certain sub-texts were effortlessly and mercilessly exploited: the last white settler under threat from the primitive hordes.31 The old fear of servant anger. Africa as a series of interconnected villages in which the drum-beats of anti-white land claims resonate deeply from one village to the next, communicating insurrection. And then the invasion, the human equivalent of an African dust-storm – unpredictable, sudden. And with domino-like collapse, white communities fall in a bloody mess of mindless violence.

The Maasai were reconstructed for this purpose. No longer the benign noble savage of an earlier era whose photographs had graced so many coffee-table books, so many tourist postcards, the Maasai moran was re-stereotyped, re-armed, ‘Mau Mau-ed’ – that is, turned into the potential bearer of savagery against Europeans – by virtue of the assumed proximity to the Zimbabwe scenario. He was no longer ‘inhabiting the vast savannahs of East Africa’ but was instead ‘marching onto sprawling ranches’.32 He was no longer ‘dressed in traditional regalia’ but was ‘clad in blazing red’. And he was no longer ‘in perfect harmony with nature’ but was instead ‘ready to mount Zimbabwe-style violence’ on a helpless population of unprotected white settlers.33

Later, once the drama in Laikipia was under way, once the story was telling itself, the foreign media would stream in. They would leave Nairobi after hurried breakfasts served by Jumas and Annas and Franciscas, grateful, loyal domestic help for $100 a month, less in the Westlands apartment. Or coffee and juice and a quick skim over the local dailies on the porch in Karen and Muthaiga, the old settler suburbs in Nairobi mythologised by Blixen and Huxley. And so the departure from the bungalow in Karen, but not before a final round of rapid-fire instructions to Laban, the groundsman, mowing that lawn that seems to have been designed specifically for your new penchant for endless garden soirees. The way it rolls and slithers and sashays down to the brilliant blue of the swimming pool! And so into the Pajero and off down the long driveway, past the unsmiling armed security at the gate, past the sizzling electric fence – this city wasn't nicknamed Nai-roberry for nothing – and eventually onto Thika Road, north towards Nanyuki. Now, the journalistic nose is hard and jutting. The gaze, having marvelled and raked and imbibed this very scenery over the course of so many holiday weekends, is now sober and fixed behind the Raybans. A gaze not unkind, just … critical. The mental notes form and un-form, test themselves against the whizzing landscape: delete ‘endless, undulating plains’, replace with ‘parched African wilderness’. It was mostly in response to the foreign media's version of events that the State would respond, would act.

On Saturday, 21 August 2004, a group of Maasai herdsmen cut a section of the Loldaiga Ranch fence in Laikipia and were driving in their herds when a contingent of security personnel from the regular forces as well as the fearsome paramilitary force, the General Service Unit (GSU), arrived and began firing. They were, eye-witnesses would later say, accompanied by a white rancher, probably the owner.34 One herdsman, 70-year-old Ntinai ole Moiyare, died on the spot. Three others had serious bullet injuries. Twenty-two spent cartridges were found on the ‘bloodstained scene’. A survivor said one officer shot in the air ‘while the others pointed [their guns] at the herdsmen and shot at them’.35At Segera Ranch close by, reported the East African Standard, a group of Maasai youth, ‘chanting war songs and armed’, charged at a contingent of security officers. The police fired several rounds of ammunition in the air to scare ‘the warriors’.36

With the kind of sloppy self-assurance of the criminal who knows that his alibi is a mere formality in a wider cover-up scheme, the police explained that they had been threatened. The group of herdsmen was armed ‘with bows, arrows, spears and rungus [knob-kerries]’. A glimpse of what the real transgression had been was found at the end of the statement: ‘They had cut the barbed wire at one end of the farm.’37 In other words, they had appeared to physically act on the claims made by the 13 August demonstrators.

Another version of the events leading up to the Loldaiga Ranch killing emerged but was quickly swallowed in the unfolding drama. One of the survivors, Josephat Oldioi Ndooko said the herdsmen were discussing the current drought outside the fence when security personnel arrived. The surviving herdsmen vowed not to withdraw their livestock from the ranch since there was no pasture in community lands and their livestock risked starving to death.38 A few years previously, severe drought in Laikipia had led to pastoralists ‘invading’ white-owned ranches. When the ranchers had tried to drive the pastoralist cattle away, then President Daniel arap Moi had intervened and urged some kind of accommodation between the two groups, a proposal to which the ranchers acquiesced. In the charged atmosphere created by the land restitution campaign Ntinai ole Moiyare's death was merged with the drama of land invasion. The swift intervention of the State was a clear indication that the campaign was now being regarded as a fundamental assault on the sanctity of property rights in modern Kenya.

Events moved rapidly thereafter. The Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner – he who had been ‘ambushed’ with the Maasai petition a week before – placed the Provincial Security Committee on high alert. He immediately ordered the deployment of police helicopter units, additional police and GSU ground contingents. He also called in the highly experienced Anti-Stock Theft Unit. Police and the Anti-Stock Theft Unit were ordered to patrol ranches in Laikipia, Naivasha and Nanyuki. The district administration reiterated a warning from the Lands Minister that Maasai ‘invading ranches in Laikipia will only have themselves to blame [for the consequences]’. Laikipia District Commissioner, Wilson Njenga, said the Segera Ranch youth would be charged with encroaching on private property. Seventy Maasai herdsmen within the vicinity of Loldaiga were arrested that same day.

The security operation shifted another gear. On instructions from the ranchers, the press was denied entry to the ranches.39 This was clearly no ordinary police job. It was, as the details trickled out would reveal, a punitive operation. An MCSF team touring Laikipia in the aftermath of the security operation interviewed residents who claimed the security personnel had raped an unspecified number of women and, in Rumuruti, castrated at least three men. Houses had been torched and household goods stolen and destroyed. The arrested herdsmen, now regarded as invaders, were held in various police stations within Laikipia district. They were not arraigned in court until the middle of September 2004, and were denied food, water and any contact with visitors. In addition, security personnel had confiscated cattle and other livestock, the equivalent of freezing bank accounts. And as if to add some bizarre festivity to the operation, smoke was seen rising from the police station compound the whole time during the operation. The smell of nyama choma (roast meat) filled the air.40

In Nairobi, a second attempt at presenting the petition to the Lands Minister and the British High Commissioner on 24 August 2004 was foiled when police descended on a group of demonstrators and, in full view of TV crews, proceeded to severely beat up and arrest the demonstrators. Over 30 were charged with incitement in the High Court in Nairobi a few hours later. That same evening Lands Minister Amos Kimunya appeared at a televised press conference. He dismissed the Anglo-Maasai Agreements as invalid, saying that any historical obligations to the Maasai had been dispensed with at independence when a new nation was born. He also repudiated Maasai claims that the Laikipia leases had expired. The Maasai, he said, had got their maths wrong. The treaties were valid for 999 years, not 99 years as the Maasai had claimed. Mining a vein of his own private wit, he continued: ‘They should come back in another 900 years and we can discuss the matter, although I suspect things will have changed a little.’ The State was clearly responding to Western fears generated by the foreign media accounts, not the expectations of its domestic constituency. It had acted precisely in order to reassure the West that its interests would be protected. And there was a sub-text here that recalled a covenant from another age: that of the nationalist elite's commitment to the protection of settler interests. Both the letter and spirit of Kenyatta's Nakuru Covenant were still alive.41

Back at the ranch, so to speak, a cloud of amnesia floated behind the State security cordon. When the media was finally allowed access to Laikipia a week after the security alert had been placed, they found a ranching community gripped by sudden and debilitating memory loss. Ranchers interviewed could not remember how long their own land-leases were supposed to last, were unaware of the Anglo-Maasai Agreement, and, in at least one case, were unable to produce title deeds to their ranches. And when opinion was expressed, it bordered on the absurd: the ‘invaders’, observed Ms Odile de Weck, who had inherited her father's 3,600-acre Loldoto Farm, were not genuine – not Maasai at all. They were, she noted emphatically, Kikuyus. The Maasai, she said, had willingly ceded rights to Laikipia, had been compensated long ago and now resided happily in some other part of Kenya, far away.42 A Mr Jack Kenyon, who could not produce his annual lease payment receipts to his 16,000-acre ranch, had heard of the Anglo-Maasai ‘lease’ Agreement but was not sure of its contents. It was all very confusing. He urged for government arbitration. Now that the government was actively nursing settler interests, it was safe to play dumb. However, in stating so unequivocally where its loyalties lay, the State knew that it had exposed a trait that many of its critics had begun to accuse it of possessing: elitist contempt for wananchi (ordinary citizens).43

The Kibaki government had been elected on a two-thirds majority vote. Soon after coming to office, Mr Kibaki had reneged on a pre-election power-sharing agreement with the other coalition members, notably the Liberal Democratic Party of Kenya (LDP). It was led by Raila Odinga, Kenya's longest-serving political detainee. He is the son of one-time Vice-President and independence hero, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Kibaki was accused of having taken the old-boy network all the way to State House. He and his inner coterie were known to be old business associates and had long enjoyed Friday afternoon golf together at Muthaiga Golf Club, the old rendezvous of settler high society. Kimunya, an accountant and former chairman of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK), was said to have become close to Kibaki ever since he had become chairman at Muthaiga. Such talk was potentially damaging especially for a regime that had rode to power on a two-thirds majority vote and had quickly betrayed a pre-election deal with its coalition partners. Now, it was barely able to hold together a shaky and querulous coalition. In reacting so violently to the Maasai campaign, it had confirmed the accusations. It needed to minimise the damage.

In order to do so effectively, the Maasai campaign had to be criminalised. Their claims had to be corrupted, divested of agency. The campaign, as was standard State practice, had to be portrayed as a conspiracy conceived by foreign-funded agitators.44 Under cover of this conspiracy, vulnerable areas of the offending body would then be identified, isolated and exposed as contaminated. The public had to be convinced of the distinction between the State's use of violence and the enemy's agenda that carried the potential for violence. For this, the rule of law would be deployed: they are breaking the law; we are enforcing it. The tactics had been taken, word-for-word, play-for-play from the Moi-era single-party rule-book.

‘There are some NGOs who are inciting the Maasai for their own gain,’ announced Lands Minister Kimunya, sounding eerily like a member of the Moi government at the height of single-party rule.45 The State's counter-strategy followed the familiar Moi-era patterns of harassment and intimidation. So in Laikipia, ‘relatives of 44 Maasai herdsmen charged with invading white-owned ranches were left in shock after a Nyeri court ordered them to pay a total of Sh 3.5m [approx. 25,000 pounds sterling]’.46 The charges would later be dropped without explanation. State authorities also seized computers, files and other material from the offices of the Maasai Laikipia-based NGO Osiligi, and froze its accounts. Osiligi was the NGO referred to as ‘inciting’ the Maasai. Its fate at the hands of the State was calculated to serve as a warning to members of the wider campaign.

The Maasai had the tacit sympathy of the public and the steady spotlight of the media. They exploited the two ruthlessly. And in Sempeta and others, they had articulate defenders among themselves. In addition veteran Maasai political leaders, both within the Cabinet and elsewhere were shouting their distant support. Sempeta and other pro-Maasai lawyers were quite prepared to challenge the primacy of settler property rights by using the argument that the Anglo-Maasai treaties were illegal. While seeming to relent on the issue of the leases – there was no direct evidence in the agreements to support the claim that the leases had expired, or that the lease-expiry was linked to the agreements at all – Sempeta went directly to the heart of the issue. ‘The Minister's position could be correct that the leases have not expired, but to give those Agreements a lease of one day is to strangle the whole system of law. The agreements are illegal … the basis upon which they were created is a forgery.’ The Maasai, he said, were demanding ownership of all the lands that had been alienated from them in the 1904 and 1911 agreements. And they were demanding them directly from the British. Why? ‘The British own and control all the resources of this country … Kenya's independence is a fallacy and there is documentation that can prove it.’ 47

During the last weeks of August, an eruption of other historical land grievances spilt into the open. In the southern Rift Valley, the Kipsigis48 alleged that parts of Kericho District, home to multinational-owned tea plantations, had been excised from them during the colonial era and never returned. No compensation had been paid to them and they therefore intended to reclaim the area. In the Mt Elgon area in the extreme west, the Sabaot claimed that their ancestral land had been taken by the government. They were now demanding it back. Then there were the old flare-ups from the Pokot in the Northern Rift, making the charge that the colonial government had illegally taken a district, Trans-Nzoia, from them. They had received no compensation and had been forcibly moved to arid land. All these cases sounded like the echoes of the Maasai claim.

Beyond the Politics of Betrayal

Elijah ole Sempeta was driving into his Ngong residence one Saturday night in mid-March when he was attacked and shot. He was found dead in his car moments later. The killers have not been found. Apart from some money in his wallet, nothing was stolen. The police have not been able to trace the killers. Had he been assassinated? Many Ngong residents and Maasai campaigners think so. Ngong is one of the biggest towns in Maasailand. Highly cosmopolitan – it is located about half an hour's drive from Nairobi – Ngong was rocked by a spate of violence during 2004 and 2005. The killing seemed to follow a pattern of violence in the area that some suspect is linked to the State's anti-Maasai campaign. Whatever the case, his killing robbed the Maasai of one of their most charismatic and outspoken defenders.

The Maasai campaign speaks of the State's failure to institute a new constitutional order. It was born of a realisation that the State – whether in its colonial or its post-colonial phase – was not just unwilling to address the community's grievances, but had an active interest in perpetuating them. Uhuru, as is so often pointed out, merely led to a change of guard. Sempeta alluded to this when he said in an interview that independence was a myth.

The nationalist elites profited hugely from retaining the colonial order. The State became a vehicle for their accumulation, land – especially Maasai land – a tool to support their ethnic patronage system. The Maasai, therefore, needed to be querbogen, their silence perpetuated by the reinforcement of the stereotypes of ‘strangeness’ and ‘primitivity’. Beneath the silence is almost a century of increasing poverty and underdevelopment. When the British arrived in Kenya, the Maasai were, in the words of the colonial, cynical as they may be, ‘probably the richest uncivilised race in the world’. By their departure and in the post-colonial era, they became among the poorest. By exoticising the Maasai, or at least encouraging that process, elites were able to deflect attention from Maasai grievances. It must be pointed out that, as consumers of those stereotypes, the Maasai themselves were in many cases active accomplices in the process.

The popularly-elected NARC government ran on a constitutional reform agenda. In fact, many among the new government's top brass suffered arrests and intimidations for their agitation for constitutional change. And yet, within weeks of taking office the new government began displaying the all-too-familiar reluctance to implement the draft constitution that they had so recently championed. Why? Because the vampire state is infective; power corrupts, as President Kibaki very quickly found out, and had known in his 40-odd years in Kenyan politics. The Maasai had presented a detailed petition at the constitutional conference calling for the return of their lands and for a majimboist order that would safeguard them from State abuse. When the draft constitutional was not delivered the fight moved from the State structures to the streets, as was seen in the August 2004 campaign.

This sense of futility is not confined to one group. Since 2004, the country has been rocked by ethnic and clan violence and a chorus of ancestral land claims and counter-claims. The land issue is deeply felt. To give some examples: in April 2005, a brother to Chirau Ali Mwakwere, the Foreign Affairs Minister, was arrested and charged with belonging to a shadowy separatist group, the Republican Council. The Council has been linked to a number of recent attacks against the police, and of planning ethnic violence, recruiting and training a militia. Mwakwere is considered one of the President's allies in Coast Province. However, neither Mwakwere nor any politicians from the Coast condemned the group. Following this, there was talk of the formation of a Coastal Peoples’ rights party. On Christmas Day 2004, police arrested Samuel Moroto, a Pokot MP, at his home in Kapenguria. He was charged with incitement and fomenting ethnic violence. He was released on bail a few days later, only to be received by 50,000 cheering Pokot. These events suggest and deeply rooted and troubling politics.

The NARC regime continues to display the old patterns.49 In mid-April 2005, President Kibaki toured Kalenjin country in the Rift Valley. While there, he declared that claims to ancestral claims to land would not be recognised. In May 2005, one of the groups supporting the Laikipia campaign, the Manyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organisation (MPIDO) was threatened with deregistration. The intimidation takes many forms and has extended to other pressure groups dealing with unresolved land grievances countrywide, such as the Kenya Land Alliance, which has been receiving undue attention from tax authorities. There are a growing number of similar cases.

In vampire films, the creature at first appears invulnerable. Charming and sophisticated, it draws in the unsuspecting victims, seduces them and drains the life-blood out of them. They don't die, they get infected, and for a while they too are invulnerable. But they have a devastating secret: their mask cracks in the light. Will the Kenyan State, once subjected to the scrutiny of its history, similarly crumble? Kenya is a country that has not imagined itself into being. Not yet. But already the pressure for a new constitutional order, for a re-constitution of Kenya, has resumed in earnest, as the August 2004 campaign shows.50 More recently, the resumption of agitation for the implementation of the draft constitution is a clear sign that that process is alive in many different places; it refuses to die or be hoodwinked. Elijah Sempeta's death and those of the others before him will not be in vain. The struggle continues.

I am indebted to my supervisor David Anderson for his valuable advice in the shaping of the ideas behind this project, which was originally presented as a dissertation on the Reuters Programme at the University of Oxford. I acknowledge with gratitude the generosity of Lotte Hughes, who shared with me her research findings on the history of the Maasai moves.

Notes

1. Hughes, ‘Malice in Maasailand’, sets out the historical background.

2. Hughes, Moving the Maasai, tells the story of the moves.

3. Hughes, ‘Malice in Maasailand’.

4. Hill, Permanent Way, for the history of the railway. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement, for the enactment of British settlement policy.

5. Thomson, Through Masailand; Johnston, Uganda Protectorate.

6. Hughes, ‘Beautiful Beasts and Brave Warriors’, discusses the effects of this stereotyping.

7. On the Nandi example, Anderson, ‘Visions of the Vanquished’, 164–90.

8. The most authoritative account of these events is to be found in the writings of Richard Waller: ‘Maasai and the British’ and ‘Emutai’.

9. Contained in a statement read out to Colonial Secretary, Reginald Maudling by Maasai delegation leader Justus ole Tipis, Government House, Nairobi, 27 November 1961, Public Record Office [PRO] CO 822/2000 115261.

10. These issues became entangled in the majimboist (or ‘regionalist’) constitutional debates of the time: see Anderson, ‘Yours in Struggle’.

11. The Colonial Office's position is laid out in a memo: PRO CO 822/2000/115261, ‘The Masai Agreements’, 19 February 1962. For overviews of the period and commentary on these events, see Kyle, Politics of Independence in Kenya, and Ogot and Ochieng’, Decolonization and Independence.

12. For the revival of majimboism since the early 1990s, see Anderson, ‘Majimboism’.

13. I have here borrowed from the late Dr Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, in an ambitious attempt to recreate some of the mood from his searing novel.

14. Mzungu is Kiswahili for European.

15. Shuka means blanket in Kiswahili, and is the term used for the cotton wrap-around that the Maasai have adopted as their traditional attire.

16. Hughes, Moving the Maasai. The Magadi Soda company was originally owned by Brunner, Mond & Co. When Mond was compulsorily wound up, the Magadi interest was taken over by ICI who sold it in the early 1990s to the Penrice Group, a Canadian company. It reverted to its Brunner, Mond before recently being acquired by the Tata Group of India.

17. See Brunner, Mond & Co. official website: www.brunnermond.com

18. Maa Civil Society Forum, ‘A Memorandum on the Anglo-Maasai Agreements: A Case of Historical and Contemporary Injustices and the Dispossession of Maasai Land’, 13 August 2004.

19. Maa Civil Society Forum, ‘A Memorandum on the Anglo-Maasai Agreements: A Case of Historical and Contemporary Injustices and the Dispossession of Maasai Land’, 13 August 2004.

20. Brantley, The Giriama.

21. ‘Maasai Demand “Their” Land From British Ranchers’, East African Standard, 14 August 2004.

22. ‘Maasai Demand “Their” Land From British Ranchers’, East African Standard, 14 August 2004.

23. Daily Nation, 14 August 2004.

24. Mbenzi is a Kiswahili-ism popularised by the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It means literally, ‘he of the [Mercedes] Benz’, and is used as a signifier for the African nouveau riche of the immediate post-independence generation. It is somewhat anachronistic today, but I can't think of a better word to describe the nationalist elite.

25. ‘Establishing the Pax Lenana in Maasailand’, Daily Nation, 22 July 2004, also 5 August 2004.

26. The reference is to Eliot, East Africa Protectorate.

27. A hand-cart in Kiswahili.

28. For the story of the 1990s clashes, see Oucho, Undercurrents of Ethnic Conflict.

29. Hartley, ‘Cargo Cult’.

30. ‘Maasai Demand “Their” Land From British Ranchers’, East African Standard, 14 August 2004; the quote is attributed to Elijah ole Sempeta.

31. ‘Masai Invaders Target Last White Farmers’, Daily Telegraph, 13 August 2004.

32. Marc Lacey, ‘Tribe, Claiming Whites’ Land, Confronts Kenya Government’, New York Times, 24 August 2004.

33. ‘Masai Invaders Target Last White Farmers’, Daily Telegraph, 13 August 2004.

34. ‘Moran shot dead in farm invasion’, East African Standard, 23 August 2004. The coverage in the two leading mainstream newspapers varied greatly, with the anti-establishment Standard covering the story in vastly more detail than the pro-establishment Daily Nation.

35. East African Standard, 23 August 2004.

36. East African Standard, 23 August 2004.

37. East African Standard, 23 August 2004.

38. East African Standard, 23 August 2004.

39. East African Standard, 23 August 2004.

40. Statement by Joseph ole Simel, Manyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organisation (MPIDO), corroborated by interviews in August 2004.

41. A few months after Kenya gained independence, first President Jomo Kenyatta addressed the white settler community in Nakuru, Rift Valley Province, who were very nervous about their future in Kenya. In a famous and oft-quoted speech, he assured them that in the new dispensation ‘We will forgive but never forget.’ This implied both that their interests would be protected, and that it was also safe to re-invest in independent Kenya. It is a promise that has been faithfully kept by the two succeeding regimes.

42. ‘Ranchers Ignorant of 999-year Lease’, Sunday Standard, 29 August 2004. A similar story ran on Kenya Television Network, the broadcasting arm of the Standard Group.

43. A popular example of this line of criticism can be found in the Sunday Nation op-ed column by political scientist, Mutahi Ngunyi.

44. During the struggle for the return of multiparty rule, the Moi regime often accused the multiparty movement of ‘being used by foreigners’.

45. ‘Maasai Incited by Selfish People’, East African Standard, 1 September 2004.

46. ‘Herders Ordered to Pay Sh 3.5 Million’, East African Standard, 1 September 2004.

47. ‘Land War Between Maasai, British’, East African Standard, 1 September 2004.

48. One of the Nilotic Kalenjin sub-groups whose traditional home is the Rift Valley.

49. Murunga and Nasong'o, ‘Bent on Self-destruction’.

50. Lynch, ‘The Fruits of Perception’, examines the constitutional referendum.