Abstract
Before Europeans arrived on the scene, the Maasai were the acknowledged ‘lords of East Africa’, driving all before them. So why did they meekly allow white settlers to take their best lands, and why did they not violently resist the forced moves? They were not in a strong position to do so, as mentioned at the start. But the answer may also partly lie in a blood-brotherhood oath or peace treaty, said to have been made by leading settlers and Maasai representatives beneath an ancient fig tree on Lord Delamere’s Soysambu ranch in the Rift Valley, sometime before 1911. Go there today, guided by Maasai farm workers, and one finds an atmospheric spot — a natural conference site of wood and rock, bounded by a stream and an orange grove planted by the current Baron’s son and heir, Tom Cholmondeley. What might have happened here, and why do certain Maasai still talk about it a century later, even if the British have long forgotten?
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I know about the oath, with its agreement ‘please don’t swallow me because I can’t resist you’. Ole Gilisho decided [to do] this, because he did not want the battle. Iloju Ole Kariankei, grandson of Ole Gilisho
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Notes
Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya Vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 45, quoting Delamere’s report, presumably to government, of a meeting on 24 September 1918; no original source given.
Gerald Hanley, Warriors and Strangers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), p. 302.
From ol-kiyieu brisket, Frans Mol, Maasai Language and Culture Dictionary (Limuru, Kenya: Kolbe Press, 1996), p. 208.
E. Cole, Random Recollections of a Pioneer Kenya Settler (Woodbridge: Baron Publishing, 1975), p. 44.
F. D. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Nysaland and Uganda (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1893). Huxley describes how Delamere read avidly about African travel in the six months he spent flat on his back after a hunting accident, prior to first visiting East Africa, White Man’s Country, Vol. 1, p. 25.
Reproduced in M. Perham (ed.), The Diaries of Lord Lugard, Vol. 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 421.
Errol Trzebinski describes some of these in her portrait of Denys Finch Hatton, Silence Will Speak (London: Heinemann, 1997), Ch. 3.
A. C. Hollis, The Masai: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 322.
C. W. Hobley, Eastern Uganda: An Ethnological Survey (London: Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1902), p. 42;
H. H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate (London: Hutchinson, 1902), p. 884; Hollis, The Masai, p. 322. Charles Eliot also mentioned the peace-making ceremony at Sangaruna, saying this was made between the agricultural and pastoral sections of the Maasai, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 142.
J. R. L. Macdonald, Soldiering and Surveying in British East Africa, 1891–1894 (London: Edward Arnold, 1897), p. 35.
Harry Tegnaeus, Blood-Brothers: An Ethno-Sociological Study of the Institutions of Blood-Brotherhood with Special Reference to Africa (London and Stockholm: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, Ethnographical Museum, 1952), p. 70.
A. H. Neumann, Elephant-Hunting in East Equatorial Africa (London: Rowland Ward, 1898; Bulawayo: Books of Zimbabwe, 1982), pp. 42–4, 128, 130 of 1982 edn.
W. S. and K. Routledge, With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), pp. 176–7.
Ibid., p. 52; L. R. Von Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie: A Narrative of Count Samuel Teleki’s Exploring and Hunting Expedition in East Equatorial Africa in 1887 and 1888 (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), from p. 314.
L. S. B. Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu before 1903, Vol. 1 (London: Academic Press, 1977), p. 60.
E. Hertslet, The Map of Africa by Treaty Vol. 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1967), lists 84 treaties made between 1887 and 1891 by agents of what became the IBEAC, pp. 374–8.
See Sir John Milner Gray, ‘Early treaties in Uganda, 1888–91’, Uganda Journal, Vol. 12 (March 1948), 29, 31;
H. M. Stanley, In Darkest Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1890), where references to blood-brotherhood include Vol. 1, pp. 358–61; Vol. 2, pp. 348–50.
Expedition surgeon T. H. Parke wrote his own account of these ceremonies in My Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa: As Medical Officer of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1891).
A. T. Matson, Nandi Resistance to British Rule, 1890–1906 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1972), p. 169.
C. C. Von der Decken and Otto Kersten, Baron Carl Claus Von der Decken’s Reisen in Ost-Afrika in den Jahren 1839 bis 1865 (Leipzig and Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1869–79), p. 309.
T. Ternan, Some Experiences of an Old Bromsgrovian: Soldiering in Afghanistan, Egypt and Uganda (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1930), pp. 199–200; Matson, Nandi Resistance pp. 89–90.
Paul Spencer, The Maasai of Matapato: A Study of Rituals of Rebellion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 264. See pp. 252–69 for a full discussion of the significance of meat eating and particular cuts of meat. Cuts are ritually paired, and there is a deliberate emphasis on the opposition of human pairs in ceremonial - celebrants are linked to ritual partners, who are, for example, in turn ‘opposed’ to a pair of patrons who bless them. ‘By pairing [people] with paired cuts of meat they remain opposed and yet are uniquely united’, p. 261. The pairing of Delamere and Colvile with Ole Gilisho and Olonana, which is central to most stories about the blood-brotherhood, makes sense in this context.
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© 2006 Lotte Hughes
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Hughes, L. (2006). Blood Oaths, Boundaries and Brothers. In: Moving the Maasai. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_6
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