Abstract
Maverick colonial servant Dr Norman Leys once lamented that the true story of how the British relieved the Maasai of their land would never come out, despite his best efforts to publicise it. He wrote to his friend, the British MP and Quaker Edmund Harvey: `Things aren’t bad enough yet to give the chance of a scandal. Ten years more and somebody will write a sensational novel or there will be a native rising or in some other way the British public will get disillusioned.’2
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I have no desire to protect Masaidom. It is a beastly, bloody system, founded on raiding and immorality, disastrous to both the Masai and their neighbours. The sooner it disappears and is unknown, except in books of anthropology, the better. Sir Charles Eliot to Lord Lansdowne, 19 April 19041
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Notes
This is not the term people use to describe themselves. For a recent discussion of ‘Il-Torobo’, see Lee Cronk, From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Kenya (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004).
Isaac Sindiga, ‘Land and population problems in Kajiado and Narok, Kenya’, African Studies Review, 27, No. 1 (March 1984), 26;
Thomas Spear, Introduction, T. Spear and R. Waller (eds), Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa (Oxford: John Currey, 1993).
Marcel Rutten, Selling Wealth to Buy Poverty: The Process of the Individualization of Landownership Among the Maasai Pastoralists of Kajiado District, Kenya, 1890–1990 (Saarbrücken and Fort Lauderdale: Verlag Breitenbach, 1992), p. 6.
For example, John L. Berntsen, ‘Pastoralism, Raiding and Prophets: Maasailand in the Nineteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, Wisconsin (1979);
Alan Jacobs, ‘The Traditional Political Organisation of the Pastoral Masai’, Ph.D. thesis, Oxford (1965);
published works by all these authors; John Galaty’s chapters in Spear and Waller, Being Maasai and Galaty and P. Bonte (eds), Herders, Warriors and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); and others.
See my D. Phil. thesis, ‘Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure’ (Oxford, 2002). For length reasons I have cut the section on comparative resistance from this book.
M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Oxford: OUP, 1968), p. 276.
Norman Leys, Kenya (London: The Hogarth Press, 1924), p. 63 of 2nd edn (1925). All quotes will be from the latter unless otherwise stated.
Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).
John L. Berntsen, ‘Maasai age-sets and prophetic leadership, 1850–1910’, Africa, 49, No. 2 (1979), 145.
R. L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976);
R. L. Tignor, ‘The Maasai warriors: Pattern maintenance and violence in colonial Kenya’, JAH, 13 (1972).
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), p. 68.
Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 50.
E. Tonkin, Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 8.
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). He defines public transcripts as ‘a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate’, p. 2.
Diana S. Wylie, ‘Critics of colonial policy in Kenya, with special reference to Norman Leys and W. McGregor Ross’, M.Litt. thesis, Edinburgh (1974);
Wylie, ‘Norman Leys and McGregor Ross: A case study in the conscience of African empire, 1900–39’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 5, No. 3 (May 1997);
John W. Cell (ed.), By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, 1918–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
I consulted an earlier draft, see Bibliography. G. H. Mungeam, British Rule in Kenya, 1885–1912 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
G. R. Sandford, An Administrative and Political History of the Masai Reserve (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1919). Sorrenson, Origins; Tignor, Colonial Transformation.
Leys, Kenya; W. McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within: A Short Political History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927).
Sandford, Administrative History pp. 2, 3, 28, 58. The Eliot quote is from the Introduction, dated 14 Nov. 1904, to A. C. Hollis, The Masai: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. xvii.
Dorothy L. Hodgson ‘Pastoralism, patriarchy and history: Changing gender relations among Maasai in Tanganyika, 1890–1940’, JAH, 40 No. 1 (1999);
Hodgson (ed.), Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).
B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Book 1: State and Class (Oxford: James Currey, 1992), p. 1.
Anonymous obituary, The Friend (London: Religious Society of Friends, 9 Feb. 1940), p. 80.
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© 2006 Lotte Hughes
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Hughes, L. (2006). Introduction. In: Moving the Maasai. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_1
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