Warden’s murder fuels racial tension

Whereas the motive of the murder was not linked to land disputes but an undercover operation gone sour, the Maasai have never forgiven the white settlers for taking away their land, on which they previously roamed freely with their cattle.

When Cholmondeley, a scion of Lord Delamere, was acquitted of murder charges only three weeks after his arrest, the Maasai saw this as selective application of the law. Seenoi Sisina, the widow to the slain warden remarked: ‘The farmer’s release is a clear indication that there was a law for the poor and the rich. I have asked myself what would have happened if it was my husband who shot the farmer. Would he have been accorded the same treatment?’, she posed, struggling to hold back tears.

Members of the Maasai community subsequently demonstrated on the road leading to the world-famous Maasai Mara Game Reserve. They also threatened to invade the 50000-acre Soysambu ranch in the Rift Valley, where their kin was murdered. The government reacted by deploying a heavy contingent of security forces on the ranch and a helicopter to boot. The invasion was, however, postponed after Maasai leaders including their self appointed spokesman William ole Ntimama, a cabinet minister, promised to seek a solution from the government on their behalf.

Yet, Cholmondeley’s release elicited a plethora of reactions, some bordering on racism.
‘This is a man I believe to have roots in Britain and he should be expelled to go and practice the law of the jungle there, where it seems to be accepted. It is a shame that after 40 years of independence, hundreds of thousands of acres still belong to settlers with squatters in their backyard’, said Labour minister Newton Kulundu in reaction to the Attorney general Amos Wako’s decision to terminate the case against the white farmer, citing insufficient evidence.

But the sour relations between the Maasai and the white farmers date back to 1904 when the British colonial government duped illiterate Maasai elders into signing a controversial Anglo-Maasai agreement. The agreement arose from a 1902 notice published by the colonial administration with a view to attracting white settlement. The British settlers then arrived with their own demands, asking to be given 999-year leases and demanding that Africans be moved into reserves, far away from European settlements.

And so, taking advantage of the illiterate Laibon Olonana ole Mbatian and 18 other clan heads, the 1904 agreement, signed on behalf of the British government by Sir Donald Stewart, then Commissioner of East African Protectorate, stated thus: ‘The Maasai have agreed of their own free will that it was for their best interest to move their people, flocks and herds into reserves away from any land that might please colonial settlers now and in the future’. The area identified then was Laikipia District in Rift Valley, but when in 1911, the settlers developed interest in Laikipia, the Maasai were again moved to the southern Rift Valley. Thus was born the 1911 Anglo-Maasai agreement, which was also made in the ‘best interest’ of the Maasai. This time, the justification of moving them was based on the premise that they needed to occupy one common area rather than continue to occupy two reserves.

Following the two agreements, the Maasai lost a pastoralist system that had earlier been self-sustaining. In his book ‘East Africa through a thousand years’, Kenyan historian Gideon Were says the Maasai could no longer move their livestock up and down the Rift Valley, between Mau escarpmet to the west and Aberdare ranges to the east, and between Lake Baringo to the north and central Tanzania to the south. Consequently, the Maasai were restricted to an area largely infested by tse-tseflies.

But in August 2004, the Maasai could no longer hold their anger. They demanded their land back or compensation to the tune of KES 10b [$134m], arguing that the 99-year leases signed in 1904 had expired. ‘If the government could write off KES 5b owed by coffee farmers, then it can extend the same to the Maasai’, argued Ntimama. But unbeknown to the Maasai, their ancestors had been duped into signing 999-year leases instead of 99-year ones. This was confirmed by Lands and Housing minister Amos Kimunya.

The Maasai, would, however, hear none of it. With a firm belief that the fenced ranches have blocked their grazing grounds and migration routes, they forcefully drove their herds into private ranches in Laikipia for months, forcing the government to come in to solve the dispute. Under Kenya’s constitution, the colour of a person’s skin does not determine the right to own land, though a number of Kenyans believe that black people have a greater right to own land than other races.

Yet, since independence in 1963, the inequity has been a source of widespread dissatisfaction, exacerbated by relentless population growth. Indeed, the history of Kenya's independence struggle is intertwined with that of land, with the Mau Mau resistance singled out as a showcase by Africans to repossess their land. It was no wonder that the pressure for land in Kenya had built up tremendously in the run-up to independence, especially among the displaced population, who equated independence with the chance to own land.

Just like in Zimbabwe and Namibia, the advent of British rule at the dawn of 19th century opened the way for White settlers to have unlimited access to fertile land while blacks were pushed to low potential areas. But unlike Zimbabwe, it is not only the Whites— comprising less that 1 percent of the total population of 30 million—who own huge tracks of land. A cabal of indigenous Africans with links to the previous governments of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi, took advantage of their proximity to power to acquire and hoard—either legally or illegally— huge chunks of prime land at the expense of the majority landless.

But what cannot be gainsaid is that Kenya has her fair share of White big farm owners, some of whom owe their possessions to the colonial legacy. There is a glaring inequity in land holding, where a small minority of Kenyans own as much as one thousand hectares—among them White farmers and multinationals— while a large majority have to contend with less than five acres or landlessness, in a country where only 20 percent of the land can be classified as medium to high land potential, the rest being arid and semi-arid.

‘The multinationals who are engaged in large-scale farming are very influential. But you cannot ignore the power of the people in a situation where few people own land against backdrop of widespread landlessness’, observed Lumumba Odenda, a member of the Kenya Land Alliance lobby group and the Presidential Commission of inquiry on illegal allocation of public land.

Among the huge land owners are the Delamere family, who own virtually the whole of Naivasha Division in Rift Valley's Nakuru District and who engage mainly in dairy farming. Then there are; Rea Vipingo with interests in Sisal farming at the coastal region, Kakuzi that deal in tea, horticulture and ranching, and Del Monte, the famed pineapple farmers and processors in Thika District, Central Kenya. Then there are individual ranchers, especially in the Rift Valley, that own thousands of acres, but who are in constant conflict with the Maasai pastoralists over what the latter consider their traditional grazing land.

Lilian Njenga, Assistant Director of Settlement at the Lands ministry, is a worried that the situation in Zimbabwe has made their work more difficult, as landless Kenyans who have learnt from the events in other countries, are piling pressure on the government to settle them. ‘People are now talking of getting back their ancestral land that is in the hands of multinationals. They are testing the waters, trying to find out if the government can give in to their demands’, she noted.

But unlike in Zimbabwe, where president Robert Mugabe is engaged in forceful seizures of White-owned commercial farmlands for redistribution to landless blacks under the premise that it is wrong for most of the country's commercial farms to owned by Whites, Kenya's successive governments have instead been concerned with how to settle those displaced by the White settlers through settlement schemes across the country that now number over 400.

Tension among the locals and white land owners, however, is not restricted to the Rift Valley. Basil Criticos, a Kenyan of Greek descent, is now pleading with the government to help him repossess a big chunk of his 47,000 acre sisal farm in the coastal district of Taveta, that was invaded by 3,000 squatters in 2001, but who have refused to leave, forcing him into a two-year exile in the US.

With time almost running out for the National Rainbow Coalition [NARC] government that was elected on a reform platform, Kenyans are now eagerly awaiting the National Land Policy which was to be ready by June 2005. President Mwai Kibaki’s government, while appealing for patience, has embarked on a comprehensive land reform programme, after what current government officials term as 40 years of KANU mess in the land sector.