Abstract
Reports by nineteenth-century travellers and missionaries of the environment and peoples of the highlands of East Africa were to heavily influence the early administration of the Maasai, official and settler views of them and their territory, and settlement itself. This chapter touches on a key text before going on to describe how European settlement came about, the furious disagreements over land policy that forced Charles Eliot out of office, the events that led up to the first Maasai move, and why the second move went so disastrously wrong.
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Meisho ilimot, inkulie ebaya
When events occur, only part of the truth is sent abroad; the rest is kept back.
Maasai proverb1
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Notes
Peter Rigby, Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition (London: Zed Books, 1985), p. 67. His translation differs slightly.
Joseph Thomson, Through Masai Land (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), pp. 407, 408.
F. D. Lugard, The Rise of our East African Empire (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1893), p. 419.
C. Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 3.
G. R. Sandford, An Administrative and Political History of the Masai Reserve (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1919), p. 20. This is based on A. C. Hollis, ‘Memorandum on the Masai’, 5 July 1910, published in ‘Correspondence Relating to the Masai’ (London: HMSO, Cd. 5584, June 1911), p. 15.
H. H. Johnston, The Kilima-Njaro Expedition: A Record of Scientific Exploration in Eastern Equatorial Africa (London: Kegan Paul & Trench, 1886), pp. 537, 552.
See also Ch. 1 of Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate (London: Hutchinson, 1902) for glowing descriptions of ‘empty’ country in its eastern province (soon to be absorbed into BEA) that reminded him of Scotland, Wales, Surrey and Sussex. In The Nineteenth Century and After magazine, in October 1908, he advocated moving the Maasai to make way for white settlement on Laikipia.
M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi: OUP, 1968), p. 47.
Norman Leys, Kenya (London: The Hogarth Press, 1931), pp. 79–80.
B. Berman, Control & Crisis in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 1990), pp. 150–1.
C. C. Wrigley, Ch. V, in V. Harlow and E. M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa Vol. 2 (Oxford: OUP, 1965), p. 217. For Zionist settlement plans, see Sorrenson, Origins Ch. 2.
B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Book 1 (Oxford: James Currey, 1992), p. 89; Sorrenson, Origins p. 146.
Some prophecies are described in C. H. Stigand, The Land of Zinj (London: Constable, 1913).
E. Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 104. She claims this was the only grant he received from government; the rest he bought from other settlers.
Lord Delamere’s Emigration Scheme’, The Times (London: 26 March 1904).
Enc. 1 in Desp. 495, 22 July 1904, FO 2/838. Also see C. W. Hobley, Kenya: From Chartered Company to Crown Colony (London: H. E & G. Witherby, 1929). There is a useful account of how Hobley’s views on the Maasai differed from Eliot’s in Mungeam’s introduction to the 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1970), p. xii.
Gerald Hanley, Warriors and Strangers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), pp. 293–5.
J. Ford, The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 139.
Also see R. D. Waller, ‘Emutai: Crisis and response in Maasailand, 1883–1902’, in D. Johnson and D. M. Anderson (eds), The Ecology of Survival (London: Lester Crook, 1988), p. 101;
Waller, ‘The Maasai and the British 1895–1905: The origins of an alliance’, JAH, 17, No. 4 (1976), 530–3.
R. A. I. Norval, B. D. Perry and A. S. Young, The Epidemiology of Theileriosis in Africa (London: Academic Press, 1992), p. 48.
See P. F. Cranefield, Science and Empire: ECF in Rhodesia and the Transvaal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), p. 40.
H. W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London and New York: Harper, 1906).
John W. Cell, Introduction, in Cell (ed.), By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, 1918–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 17.
Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express (New York: Macdonald, 1971), p. 495.
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© 2006 Lotte Hughes
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Hughes, L. (2006). The Moves. In: Moving the Maasai. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_2
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