Abstract
More than 90 years after the second move, Maasai elders in western Narok still talk with passion about its effects on the health of humans and herds. They describe the impact of the move in ‘pathological’ terms, believing that the British deliberately sent them ‘to that land where ol-tikana is’ in order that they might die there.1 They claim that they and their herds succumbed to diseases in the Southern Reserve which were unknown or not prevalent in their northern territory, most specifically Laikipia, and that they have been blighted by sickness ever since. They insist that the land they were moved to was not only grossly inferior to Entorror in terms of water, grazing, ticks and tsetse fly, but that the new environment infected and killed them. It was literally deadly. Some go further, and insist there was no disease in Entorror. In the collective oral mythology, Entorror is seen as Eden, its sweetness constantly compared to the bitterness of the south, or Ngatet.
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Shomo pii Ngatet, enakop o ol-tikana
Go completely to the south, land of East Coast fever and malaria.
What Maasai believe the British told them, while forcing them from Laikipia
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Notes
Isaac Sindiga, ‘Land and population problems in Kajiado and Narok, Kenya’, African Studies Review, 27, No. 1 (March 1984), 27.
R. L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton and Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 38.
Marcel Rutten, Selling Wealth to Buy Poverty (Saabrûcken and Fort Lauderdale: Verlag Breitenbach, 1992), p. 8;
D. Western and D. L. Manzolillo Nightingale, ‘Environmental change and the vulnerability of pastoralists to drought: A case study of the Maasai in Amboseli, Kenya’, in Africa Environment Outlook Case Studies: Human Vulnerability to Environmental Change (Nairobi: UNEP, 2004), pp. 31–50.
For other examples, David J. Campbell, ‘Response to drought among farmers and herders in southern Kajiado district, Kenya’, Human Ecology, 12, No. 1 (1984), 35–64;
M. Thompson and K. Homewood, ‘Entrepreneurs, elites, and exclusion in Maasailand: Trends in wildlife conservation and pastoralist development’, Human Ecology, 30, No. 1 (March 2002), 107–38.
M. Merker, Die Mäsai (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1904, 1910). In the Frieda Schütze translation, pp. 473–6.
R. A. I. Norval, B. D. Perry and A. S. Young, The Epidemiology of Theileriosis in Africa (London: Academic Press, 1992), p. 51.
Norman Leys, Kenya (London: The Hogarth Press, 1924), p. 104.
K. M. Homewood and W. A. Rodgers, Maasailand Ecology: Pastoralist Development and Wildlife Conservation in Ngorongoro, Tanzania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) citing Waller: 1979.
See also R. Lamprey and R. Waller, ‘The Loita-Mara region in historical times: Patterns of subsistence, settlement and ecological change’, Ch. 3 in Peter Robertshaw (ed.), Early Pastoralists of South-Western Kenya (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1990).
T. R. McClanahan and T. P. Young (eds), East African Ecosystems and their Conservation (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 225, 229.
D. E. Hutchins, Report on the Forests of British East Africa (London: HMSO, 1909);
D. E. Hutchins, Forests and Timber Resources of British East Africa, no author given (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1920);
R. S. Troup, Report on Forestry in Kenya Colony (London: Waterlow & Sons, for Government of Kenya, 1922), p. 10.
My calculation of how much of Chepalungu lay inside the reserve is made on the basis of the map in the frontispiece of G. R. Sandford, An Administrative and Political History of the Masai Reserve (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1919)
and E. A. Lewis, ‘Tsetse-flies in the 01 Orokuti area of the Masai Reserve, Kenya Colony’, Bulletin of Entomological Research 28, Part 1 (1937). Lewis, who gave the size of Chepalungu as about 164 sq. miles, stated ‘the greater part is outside… the Masai boundary’, p. 395.
Joseph Thomson, Through Masai Land (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), p. 405.
This was estimated higher in the 1930s, at 40–50 inches p.a., and the Southern Rift Valley at 10–30, Thos. E. Edwardson, Regional Report on Kenya Colony (unpublished, Imperial Forest Institute, Oxford, April 1934).
Harry Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1902), p. 2.
Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), pp. 80–2, 170–1.
W. Plowright, ‘Inter-relationships between virus infections of game and domestic animals’, East African Agricultural and Forestry Journal, 33 (June 1968), 262.
I shall not cover tsetse in any detail; it is another story. The early reports include R. B. Woosnam, ‘Report on a search for Glossina on the Amala (Engabei) River, Southern Masai Reserve, East Africa Protectorate’, Bulletin of Entomological Research, iv (1914), 272–8;
and later E. A. Lewis, ‘Tsetse flies in the Masai Reserve, Kenya Colony’, Bulletin of Entomological Research, 25, Part 1 (1934), 439–55;
Lewis, ‘Tsetse flies and development in Kenya Colony’, Part 1, East African Agricultural Journal 7 (1941–42), 184–7. Also see the section on tsetse in Lamprey and Waller, ‘The Loita-Mara Region’, pp. 25–8;
R. Waller, ‘Tsetse fly in western Narok, Kenya’, JAH 31 (1990), 81–101, which briefly mentions the links between ticks and tsetse in the Lemek area, note p. 89.
S. L. and H. Hinde, The Last of the Masai (London: Heinemann, 1901), p. 112.
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976; London: Penguin 1994), pp. 27, 54, 89, 71.
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© 2006 Lotte Hughes
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Hughes, L. (2006). The Ecological Impacts. In: Moving the Maasai. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_5
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