At least 100 Maasai tribesmen demonstrated on Friday in the Kenyan capital to demand back land ceded to British settlers under treaties signed with the colonial government in 1904 and 1911, which expire this weekend.
“We want the British to hand over back our land as a way of addressing historical injustices that have been wrought upon the Maasai community,” Maasai Civil Society Consortium chairperson Ben Ole Kuisaba told reporters.
More than a million hectares of tribal land were leased to settlers under the Anglo-Maasai Land Agreement, signed in 1904 by Laibon (paramount chief) Olo-Lenana and Sir Donald Stewart, administrator of what was then a British colony, the East African Protectorate.
A second agreement was signed in 1911, after complaints from the farmers that the Maasai were not keeping to lands assigned to them under the first treaty.
The protesters, wearing traditional regalia, took to the streets carrying placards that poured scorn on Britain, which ruled Kenya until independence in 1963.
“The British are equally greedy, gluttons, stop vomiting on our ancestral land,” read one banner. Others read “Our land rights are our lifeline”, “Sunset for Britain and sunrise for Maasai” and “Honour your promise, Britain if you are democratic”.
The tribesmen handed a petition to the Kenyan ministries of lands and justice, urging them to initiate tripartite talks with Britain and the Maasai on how to compensate the tribesmen and how about 50 British ranchers and the Kenyan Magadi Soda Company could surrender the land.
Kuisaba said other tribesmen were holding similar demonstrations across the Rift Valley province, largely inhabited by the Maasai, a pastoralist community that loosely holds to its traditional culture and lifestyle.
The Maasai claim that most of their sacred shrines — including burial site for their paramount chiefs — were damaged by settlers. — Sapa-AFP