Friday, August 13, 2004, dawned grey with the threat of end-of-the-week downtown Nairobi chaos. The streets were thick snails of traffic.

The sidewalks flowed not much faster, viscous with humanity, a slow-moving riot of colour. Even at this hour, the pretty college girls stood out in the crowd, already dressed up for Friday night clubbing. The whole of Nairobi seemed to gather on the city streets: job-seekers, vegetable hawkers, trinket traders, street-preachers, thieves.

It 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, had gathered on the grounds of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre.

The demonstrators stood around in little groups. Reporters from the local and international press flitted from group to group looking for anyone who could provide background info – several impromptu interviews were occurring simultaneously.

Some reporters gathered around the twin figures of Maa Civil Society Forum chairman Ben ole Koissabba, a logistics officer with World Vision International, the Christian charity, and Sidney Quntai, a former journalist now running an NGO called 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.

In 2004, the parent company was wholly British. (It has since been acquired by India’s Tata Group.) Royalties from the Company’s operation had always been paid to the central government.

Sempeta argued that Lake Magadi, and the thousands of acres that had been ceded to the company by the colonial government, had been “grabbed” from the Maasai. And 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, the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, for a $100 million loan facility. The Magadi-IFC negotiations were almost complete. All that remained was an environmental audit 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, taking 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 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 August 13 demonstration.

At KICC, all the local dailies had reporters present. There were also TV crews from the Kenya Television Network and Reuters. Demonstrators handed around placards, others scribbled slogans on manila paper.

The placards carried 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 would be similar demonstrations in four other towns – Kajiado, Naivasha, Nanyuki and Narok, all located in what can be called Maasailand – and all would begin at the same time.

The demonstrations had originally been planned for August 15, a date that marked the centenary of the signing of the first Anglo-Maasai Agreement in 1904 under which 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 to the south of it.

(The agreement, the Maasai were assured, would last “as long as the Maasai still exist as a race”.) But because August 15 fell on a Sunday, the organisers, a pressure group called the Maa Civil Society Forum, had moved the demonstrations forward to Friday the 13th. Sunday is a slow news day in Kenya; people go to church.

The media was central to the campaign strategy: Maasai claims for the resolution of outstanding grievances had always been made behind closed doors, and addressed directly to the state.

This particular campaign would in fact be the fourth time over the past century that the Maasai would be challenging the loss of their lands.

All three previous attempts – a court case in 1913, a petition in 1932 to the Kenya Land Commission and a plea made at the Kenya Constitutional Conference in London in 1962 on the eve of Kenya’s independence – ended in bitter failure.

Exposing the issue to public scrutiny would have the calculated aim of embarrassing a popularly elected government and thus forcing it to negotiate.

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, home to a handful of white ranchers, mostly descendants of the settler community.

The August 13 demonstration was planned as part of a series 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 resultant “underdevelopment” of the Maasai community. By the time the demonstration started, the crowd had doubled.

These demonstrations had been in the works for at least a year. I had been involved with the Maa Civil Society Forum since the early 2003 Magadi campaign.

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 land should revert to the Maasai people.

Some 37 white settler families occupied the land. From early 2003, there had been rumours that the Laikipia settlers 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 and secret missions by settler lobby groups to the Minister of Lands. I was never able to confirm any of them.

The demonstrators 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 government buildings on both sides of Harambee Avenue.

The line of pedestrians on the sidewalks, thinner now without office workers, seemed for a moment to pause, as if zapped by the singing. And then people gathered their wits and warily looked around for the first signs of trouble, sniffed the air for teargas. None appeared. Not yet anyway. Tension gave way to spontaneous conversations among strangers.

The marchers were a mixed bunch underneath the red and blue of their traditional dress, their beads and bracelets. Many were Maasai from out of town, men and women for whom Nairobi, with its alien noises and rhythms, its exhaust fumes and high-rises, was the concrete jungle.

Others wore office clothes underneath the traditional garb. They had the morning off from work in precisely those high-rises, to participate in what they considered a historical moment.

I realised this as I fell into step with a woman who was singing soprano, as tears streamed down her cheeks. She smiled as she caught my eye and for a moment I felt a rush of uncontrollable emotion.

Where was she from, I asked. Narok, she said, but she worked in a company in the city centre and lived in Kitengela, on the outskirts of the city.

Why was she here, I asked. She was half-jogging and half-singing, only part in conversation with me. Now she turned fully to me: How could she not be here? Our lands had been stolen and continued to disappear.

Our children were growing up without a sense of who they were. She was, she said, playing her part in making a change. Ten days later I would see her on TV, weeping again, as the riot police bludgeoned her.

My family is from Ngong in Kajiado, one of the nine districts in Kenya that form Maasailand. My grandfather, Nathaniel Kantai ole Seet, is from the section known as Kaputiei, from the Enkidong’i clan, the clan of laibons or spiritual leaders.

His father, Seet ole Nagela, was an olaiguenani or chief counsellor, whom the British too appointed as one of their chiefs.

My grandfather moved to Ngong in the 1920s while tending herds of cattle on European settler farms in the Rift Valley. At his last job, he disagreed with the European farm manager, punched him out and moved to Ngong.

It is a story that some of my older uncles like to tell, although they are equally proud of a long wooden table — painted over in a garish green and used at family gatherings — that my grandfather received “personally from the mzungu owner” as an appreciation for faithful service rendered.

My grandfather would continue to tend his herds but he would also adopt Christianity and send his children to school, a rare occurrence in Maasailand in those days. It is a story that contains, in other words, the double-helix of the Maasai relationship with the British: Resistance and collaboration.

Press photographers dashed to the front of the singing procession, crouched and snapped away, darted to the other side of the street, trying to capture 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 incantatory, the demonstrators 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.

The Administration Police officers 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.

The petition, addressed to the Kenyan and British governments, mades two demands. The first was the return of Laikipia, the old Northern Reserve.

The second was a demand for compensation:

“The Kenyan and British Governments should compensate the Maa communities for all the historical and contemporary injustices [to which they have been] subjected. 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.”

Fifteen minutes of cajoling the APs produced no results. The singing became sporadic, breaking out from different parts of the procession like an itch on a sweaty body. Once again people were standing around in small groups, the procession leaders haranguing and cajoling the sphinx-like APs.

I fell into conversation with a tall man aged about 30. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and his afro was fashionably uncombed.

He wore a Maasai bracelet on his wrist, as if to say that he straddled two worlds. He was from Loita in Narok and had only recently returned from two years in the Netherlands where he had finished his Masters degree and was hoping to start work on his doctorate.

In between, he had returned home and was working for a Dutch NGO that did work among pastoralist communities. There was about him an air of detachment, as if, like me, he was both participant and critical observer. He turned to me and said: “This is our time. We are the warriors now. When our children ask us what we did for the struggle, we will be able to tell them about this.”

And so the procession was sighing and sweating and generally catching its collective breath when then 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 – sorry, being driven in — he was seated 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 was as yet unafflicted by the pot belly, the mark of the political arriviste.

He was an unlikely defender of the “Mount Kenya Mafia,” the kitchen Cabinet within the NARC coalition widely perceived to be the power behind President Mwai Kibaki. Mungatana comes from a small, marginalised community at the Coast, the Pokomo, who have land grievances of their own that date back to colonial times. Baby-faced and outspoken, Mungatana was said to possess presidential ambitions.

And here he found himself in a situation. And it would not do to ignore it and just drive in. TV cameras presented 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 backseat of the Prado to the tarmac, the youthful pugnacity of his walk) he got out of his vehicle and walked directly to the TV cameras, the crowd parting Red Sea-like.

After speaking briefly to the cameras, he accepted the petition, and, switching to Big Man mode proper – a squaring of shoulders and pursing of lips, an elevated gaze into the middle-distance, an extended clearing of the throat – assured the group that the petition “will be studied by the government before a decision is reached”. He then walked 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.

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 then lands minister, Amos Kimunya, was not in his office, the group was informed. They marched across the road to the British High Commission. Edward Clay, then high commissioner, was not in either. It was a Friday. The High Commission closed at lunchtime on Fridays.

Sempeta and Koissabba refused to hand the petition to young 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.

The police remained quiet that first day, perhaps because there was nobody giving instructions. It was, after all, a Friday in Nairobi. Everybody was lunching, golfing or 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. 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 August 15. The lease-expiry issue was to play a crucial role in the future direction of the campaign.

August 15 passed without incident. So far, the campaign had played on two different media registers that were satisfying two different sets of expectations.

The local press, which served the literate African middle-class constituency, had presented the campaign as a drama of land dispossession and colonial injustice, a theme at the heart of the nation’s official “liberation 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 capital accumulation, it is difficult these days to tell who is worse: the mzungu or the mbenzi.

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 was 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 of 2004, a two-part series ran in the Daily Nation about the Anglo-Maasai treaties. 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, after 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 colonialism – petrified early relations between conqueror and conquered suddenly resuscitated and 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 with 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 — a huge and finely preserved stage for history’s denouement.

Certain details threatened to upset the drama. 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. Also, the Minister of Lands and Settlement came from Kipipiri constituency in 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 so on who actually lived there, but by “the couple of dozen ethnic European landowners,” to paraphrase settler author and Laikipia farmer Aidan Hartley.

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 have 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,” as one activist told the newspapers. 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 of targeting 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 of 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.”

The sub-text was effortlessly and mercilessly exploited: The last white settler under threat from the primitive hordes. The old fear of servant anger. Africa as a series of interconnected villages in which the drumbeats 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 scenario 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,” in the words of the New York Times.

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 (Daily Telegraph, UK).

Later, once the drama in Laikipia was underway, once the story was telling itself, foreign correspondents would stream in. They would leave Nairobi after hurried breakfasts served by grateful, loyal domestic help glad to work for $100 a month or less.

But not before a quick skim through the local dailies on the porch in Karen or Muthaiga, the old settler suburbs in Nairobi mythologised by Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley, and a final round of instructions to the groundsman, mowing the lawn in preparation for the weekend’s garden soiree. And so into the Pajero and off down the long driveway, past the unsmiling armed security at the gate, past the electric fence 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 sober and fixed behind the RayBans.
A gaze not unkind, just… critical.

The mental notes form and unform, 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 act.

On Saturday, August 21, 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, arrived and began firing. They were, eyewitnesses would later say, accompanied by a white rancher.

One herdsman, 70-year old Ntinai ole Moiyare, died on the spot. Three others had serious bullet injuries. Twenty-two spent cartridges were found at 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”.

At Segera Ranch close by, reported the 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 off “the warriors.”

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.” 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.” In other words, they had appeared to physically act on the claims made by the August 13 demonstrators.

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 – 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 into another gear. On instructions from the ranchers, the press was denied entry to the ranches. This was clearly no ordinary police job. It was, as the details trickling out would reveal, a punitive operation.

A Maa Civil Society Forum 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 around 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 filled the air.

In Nairobi, a second attempt at presenting the petition to the Lands Minister and the British High Commissioner on August 24 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 and/or foreign interests. Both the letter and spirit of Kenyatta’s Nakuru Covenant were still alive.

Back at the ranch, so to speak, a cloud of amnesia floated over 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.

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.

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.

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 like a member of the Moi regime at the height of single-party rule. 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 Ksh3.5 million ($50,000).” The charges would later be dropped without explanation.

Authorities also seized computers, files and other material from the offices of the 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 to the hilt. 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.”

The Maasai campaign seemed to unlock a national closet of contested claims. During the last weeks of August, the skeletons came clattering out.

In the Southern Rift Valley, the Kipsigis 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 and they therefore intended to reclaim the area.

In the Mount Elgon area in the 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, repeating the charge that the colonial government had illegally taken a district, Trans-Nzoia, from them.

Elijah ole Sempeta was driving into his Ngong residence one Saturday night in March 2005 when he was attacked and shot. He was found dead in his car moments later. Apart from some money in his wallet, nothing was stolen. The killers have not been found.

Had he been assassinated? Many Ngong residents and Maasai campaigners believe so. Ngong is one of the biggest towns in Maasailand.

Highly cosmopolitan – it is located about half an hour’s drive from Nairobi – Ngong had been rocked by a spate of violence in the months prior to Sempeta’s death.

The killing seemed to follow a pattern of violence in the area that some suspect was 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 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 the accumulation of private property and land – especially Maasai land – and became a tool to support an ethnic patronage system.

The Maasai, therefore, needed 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, they cynically described the Maasai as “probably the richest uncivilised race in the world”; by the time of their departure, they had become among the poorest. By “exoticising” the Maasai, or at least encouraging that process, the post-colonial elite were able to deflect attention from Maasai grievances.

A longer version of this article appears in the book Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits, edited by Rasna Warah and published by AuthorHouse (UK) in 2008