Increased pressure by both the state and missionaries regarding the implementation of development projects and programmes brought home the realization that development interventions were inevitable. The Loita reacted by trying to turn development interven- tions to their own advantage and their leaders, particularly PA chiefs and councillors as the designated intermediaries with the outside world, would play an active role in this. Land and territorial control were high on their agenda.
Plans for a second school in Loita emerged after independence. It was built by the Catholic Church and Loita leaders consented to its construction after it was agreed that it would be built at a place of their choosing:
In 1967 the Loita allowed the Catholic Church to build a second primary school. The Loita councillors decided that Leshuta would be its location. It was situated near the border zone with the Purko. It was a strategic choice. The Loita school was to stop the further intrusion of Purko into Loita. (Voshaar 1998: 102)
Loita leaders gave in, not so much because they wanted Loita children to go to school but because they hoped that a permanent structure in the form of a ‘Loita’ school – and not a ‘Purko’ school – would function as a ‘territorial marker’ (Sikor & Lund 2009: 14) and a barrier to further land encroachments by the Purko. In the end, however, their strategy failed. Ironically, the school attracted more Purko to the area who, unlike the Loita, were more interested in sending their children to school (Voshaar 1998: 102). Purko children soon outnumbered Loita children at the school and the area eventually became more populated with Purko than Loita. Today, Leshuta lies in Purkoland.
Although their plan failed, it did set an important precedent for future action. What the Loita leaders had done was to use the new discourse and practice of development as a strategy for staking a claim to land. Using their new relationships with the outside world (whether with the state or missionaries in the name of development or with inter- national organizations for purposes of nature conservation) to prevent alienation and dispossession of their land would become a recurring practice employed by Loita lead- ers. Chapter 8 illustrates how this strategy was ingeniously used by (one group of) Loita leaders when they brought in IUCN in the 1990s to set up a Loita forest management project as the best available option to avoid Narok County Council appropriating the forest. Until then, the biggest threat to land loss had been the persistent appropriation of former Loita land by the neighbouring Purko Maasai. The Ilkerin Project had also been embraced for the same purpose.
The Ilkerin Project was born out of the friendship and collaboration between Kone and the Dutch missionary Jan Voshaar from the Catholic Mill Hill Society (Voshaar 1998: 106; Kronenburg 1986: 16-17).12 Kone’s intermediary position between the Loita and the outside world most likely led to his acquaintance with Voshaar. Although no longer a councillor, Kone’s tenure as PA chief and councillor undoubtedly meant that he was familiar with the world of development as both Provincial Administration and Local Government had emerged as state institutions that were active in development programmes. Despite Kone’s reputation as being a ‘stumbling block’ for development in Loita (Ibid.: 17), he was one of the first to argue in favour of the Ilkerin Project. To understand this contradiction, the reasons for resisting or accepting development efforts need to be understood. The effect that a particular development intervention was thought to have on land access and land control seems to have been a consideration of utmost importance. Deliberations on particular development initiatives were based on the effects observed elsewhere in Maasailand. Development policies introduced there would be implemented much later in Loita, if at all, because of its isolation and distance from the administrative centre. The Loita were thus in the fortunate position of being able to evaluate the effects of these development projects and programmes elsewhere in Maasailand. Interventions that had led to a loss of access and control over land were thus opposed. Voshaar (1998: 106) explained how the leaders of Loita formally dis- missed the setting up of private wheat farms in the early 1980s because they had seen that elsewhere they had led to a loss of prime grazing land for the majority, while only a few were benefiting from them (see also LNECTC 1994: 2). It is in this light that the acceptance of the Ilkerin Project in Loita is examined here.
When Voshaar visited Kone in the late 1960s, Kone heard from him that the Purko had refused to set aside land for an educational, health and animal husbandry develop- ment project that Voshaar had proposed (1998: 106, 109-110). Kone must have seen the chance to address the problem of Purko encroachment.13 The choice of the project site
12 See http://ilkerinloita.org/introduction.php accessed 19/9/14. The initiative came, however, from
Voshaar and Cebemo (later Cordaid), the Dutch donor agency that agreed to fund the project (Kronenburg 1986: 18, 21).
13 ‘Development’ concerns must have also been on his mind. Voshaar, who makes no mention of the
land-claim strategy in his book but confirmed it during a conversation with me in 2007 elaborated on the development concerns of Kone. According to Voshaar (1998: 100-110), Kone’s support for the
was telling. After Loita leaders gave the go-ahead to the project,14 it was decided to lo- cate it on the slopes of the Ilkerin Hills in the west of Loita, hence the name the ‘Ilkerin Project’ (Kronenburg 1986: 16-17). Voshaar would have actually preferred Entasekera in the centre of Loita on the edge of the Naimina Enkiyio Forest because of the availa- bility of permanent water there (Kronenburg 2012, personal communication). The Ilker- in Hills are in the lowlands in the same border area as Leshuta, which was being en- croached on by Purko. It is a place with good wet-season pastures but with no water in the dry season (Kronenburg 1986: 17, 19). Settlements there were thus only temporary and Loita had weak claims to the land (Ibid.: 17). They feared that the encroaching Purko might slowly take over the area.
Around 1970 the process of encroachment by the Purko Maasai into the areas where traditionally the Loita Maasai grazed their livestock had reached not far West from the Ilkerin hill. By staking out the boundary with a project the Loita leaders hoped to prevent the loss of more grazing grounds to the
Purko.15 (Kronenburg 1986: 18)
For exactly the same reasons as with the choice of the site for the new school, Loita leaders decided on the Ilkerin Hills as the location of Voshaar’s newly proposed project. A permanent claim to land can be achieved by building permanent structures. And the tentative project plan that was drawn up at a meeting with Kone, amongst others, did indeed detail the construction of infrastructure, including offices, staff houses, class- rooms and a cattle dip (Kronenburg 1986: 15; Voshaar 1998: 111).16 The Ilkerin Project has always succeeded in its unofficial goal of being a Loita ‘flag post’ and stopping Purko appropriation of former Loita land on that side of the Loita-Purko border.
As the case of Leshuta School has shown, not all the development strategies to pro- tect the land from Purko encroachment succeeded. The World-Bank-funded land adju- dication programme, which was introduced by the Kenyan state in the late 1960s, was designed to set up group ranches in Maasailand. The process of land adjudication in-
Ilkerin Project stemmed from a realization that the changes that had been triggered by colonialism were making ‘traditional pastoralism’ an unviable and unsustainable way of life. The Ilkerin Project was seen as the best way to respond to these changed circumstances. It was set up as an avenue for managing change and development proactively ‘to train, prepare and empower the Loita Maasai pastoralists to do their own development’ (ILIDP 1995: 1). Other options in Maasailand that were available at the end of the 1960s were the division of land into group ranches and individual ranches, and the creation of private wheat farms. It has already been seen that individual and private wheat ranches had been discounted as an option by the leaders of Loita.
14 This was by no means a smooth process. Both Voshaar (1998: 111) and Kronenburg (1986: 17, 20)
documented how there had been considerable initial resistance to the project on the side of the non- Inkidongi Loita Maasai. One of the reasons for this was that it was believed that ‘“that European” … was taking the land from Loita’ (Voshaar 1998: 111). Trust in Kone, who was a strong proponent of the project and who in turn trusted Voshaar, seems to have led them to accept the project (Kronenburg 1986: 17).
15 See also Knowles (1993: 22).
16 After setting up the Ilkerin Project, Voshaar left Kenya in 1974. Management of the project was taken
over by another Dutch missionary and an expatriate animal husbandry expert, Jos Kronenburg (my father). The project’s leadership and management was Africanized in 1983 and a Loita Maasai was appointed as project leader. Voshaar wrote several books on the Maasai, one of which was on the Loita Maasai (1998). He went back to live in Loita many years later to build the first secondary school there. We were virtually neighbours during my field research period before he moved back to the Netherlands in 2009. Voshaar passed away in 2014.
volved setting aside certain tracts of land after surveying, drawing and recording the boundaries, as well as identifying and registering the members of the group ranch. All this would be filed in legal documents. Group ranches, therefore, provided a certain degree of tenure security that policymakers hoped would encourage landowners to in- vest in land and livestock but that Maasai saw primarily as a way of stopping further land alienation. Tenure security seems to have been one of the main reasons why the Maasai welcomed group ranches: they secured access to the land in the face of growing external and internal threats of land appropriation (Rutten 1992: 266, 272-273, 286, 309, 324-325; Kimani & Pickard 1998: 203-204, 210, 211; Mwangi 2007b: 896, 903).17 These threats included steady infiltration by agricultural neighbours, such as the Kikuyu and the Kamba; the creation of game reserves and national parks by the state; and the growing number of individual ranches established by some Maasai who were taking large chunks of prime grazing land without the general consent of the community. The Kaputiei Maasai of Kajiado District, the first Maasai section to accept the group ranch scheme, also seem to have wanted to adjudicate the land because they feared losing more of it to the politically well-connected Kisongo Maasai in the south (Rutten 1992: 272). In this respect, the Kaputiei are very similar to the Loita.
Fear of losing land to neighbouring Purko Maasai, who had been successful in push- ing the Loita-Purko boundary back to the disadvantage of the Loita, and the possibility of losing land to powerful Loita and non-Loita individuals seeking individual title, as was happening elsewhere in Maasailand, are the main reasons given by Loita inform- ants for the initial acceptance of the group ranch scheme in the 1970s (see also Kronen- burg 1986: 51; Voshaar 1998: 112). Its acceptance was a ‘defensive strategy’ (Mwangi 2007a, 2007b), as a way of securing the borders with the Purko in a legal manner and preventing future land losses.18 However, given the limited size of Loitaland and the fact that the lowland lacked permanent water, it was feared that dividing the Loita into several group ranches would negatively affect the mobility upon which their transhu- mant pastoralism was predicated, threatening the very continuity of the livelihoods of many (see also Voshaar 1998: 108). It was thus agreed to form one group ranch encom- passing the whole Loita area (Kronenburg 1986: 51). When this proposal was rejected by the DC of Narok on the grounds that it was too big and unmanageable, an alternative of three group ranches was discussed (Kronenburg 1986: 51; Voshaar 1998: 112). The boundaries were drawn from lowland (the grasslands) to highland (the forest) so that each group ranch would have wet- and dry-season pastures. Disagreements between the Loita and Purko over the perimeter boundary hampered the process of land demarcation at this stage (Kronenburg 1986: 52). Loita interviewees blame the Purko for continually and deliberately boycotting the demarcation of the Loita-Purko boundary because a fi- nal boundary would put a stop to their encroachment on Loitaland.19 The ultimate aim
17 Calls by group ranch members a decade later for the subdivision of these group ranches would be
based on the same grounds (Mwangi 2007b; Kimani & Pickard 1998: 205).
18 In the forest conflicts two decades later, this same reasoning was reiterated during the court case:
‘Have our land, which we currently own and use communally, adjudicated and demarcated in an appropriate manner and as a matter of agency (sic: urgency?) in order to stop land loss and alienation’ (CCD ‘Statement’: 6 (l, 2)).
of the more numerous and politically well-represented Purko was, they claim, to push the Loita out of Loitaland and to appropriate the valuable forested Loita highlands.New attempts to adjudicate the land into group ranches were made in the 1980s but this time it was agreed to divide Loita into two group ranches. Efforts failed once again but this time due to internal quarrels among Loita’s leaders about where the boundary should lie. The divisions that this internal quarrel generated would simmer for years until they resurfaced once again during the forest conflicts (see Chapter 8).
As a result, Loita was not divided into group ranches. In fact, the Loita section is unique as the land has not been demarcated and/or registered to either group or as indi- vidual holdings. While the rest of Maasailand has been effectively adjudicated and le- gally privatized, Loita remains classified as Trust Land, a legal category that provides ambiguous and insecure tenure (see Chapter 1 & 8). The failure to adjudicate and de- marcate the land in Loita is popularly interpreted as Loita resistance to government in- terventions and linked to a reputation of being the most traditional of all Maasai sec- tions (LNECTC 1994: 2; Kantai 2001: 41; Karanja et al. 2002: 4, 19, 21; Ngece et al. 2007: 178; Péron 2000: 385-386, 393; Holland 1996: 7-8, 11-12, 85, 357 n. 1).20 As discussed above, the research material presented in this thesis reveals instead a willing- ness to formally demarcate Loita but continued failure to do so due to unresolved exter- nal and internal boundary disputes, a point also made by Kronenburg (1986: 50-52) and Voshaar (1998: 106).
In one case, a group of Loita elders and other elders from the Loodokilani section and influential individuals from areas further away (14 elders in total) succeeded in forming a group ranch.21 It was set up on the slopes of the Nguruman Escarpment in the east of Loita beyond the Naimina Enkiyio Forest in an area called Kamorora. This is a border area between the Loita and Loodokilani Maasai who live on the floor of the Rift Valley. It was previously uninhabited because of the presence of tsetse fly but was used periodically by both Loita and Loodokilani Maasai for grazing during periods of drought. Kamorora was thus a shared drought refuge area and a border zone for both Loita and Loodokilani. There are different versions as to why the group ranch was formed. Some say that it was simply an opportunity seized by a group of progressive and literate Maasai who succeeded in setting up a ranch because it was an area whose ownership was ill-defined and was of little value for permanent residence and therefore did not generate much protest from fellow section members. Another version suggests that political strategy was the main concern, namely the utilization of development initi- atives to prevent a loss of land. According to this version, the group of elders quickly established a group ranch of 65,000 acres in Kamorora in 1973/1974 when they learned that Philip Leakey, a white Kenyan who worked for the Kenyatta government, had ob- tained a concession of 10 acres for a lodge in the area (see Kronenburg García 2003: 132-133). It also appears that Narok County Council had plans to turn the area around Leakey’s concession into a wildlife park.22 Forming a group ranch was the best availa-
20 This is sometimes the initial response in interviews with Loita Maasai too.
21 See Galaty (2011, but also 2013b) for a brief account of this case from the point of view of the
Loodokilani.
22 This move was part of a larger plan of creating a southern tourist circuit linking this new park with the
ble option at hand at the time. The Kamorora Group Ranch did succeed in preventing Leakey from acquiring the land, but subsequent developments have resulted in a legal conflict with a new player, Herman Stein (of German/Namibian origins), to whom the land was leased for 20 years in 1986 but who now claims ownership of the area. The complicated legal battles that this fight triggered between two Loodokilani group ranch- es in Kajiado and Stein, between the two group ranches and the original members of the Kamorora Group Ranch, between the original members and Stein, and between Stein and a former friend called Jan Bonde Nielsen (the same man who accompanied Prime Minister Odinga on his visit to Loita in 2010, see Chapter 1) to whom he sold part of the Kamorora lands, are still ongoing. The occupation of Kamorora by the hostile and politically well-connected Stein has effectively prevented the Loita and the Loodokilani Maasai from entering and using the land for their pastoral needs in times of drought for the past three decades. Chapter 8 elaborates on this case in greater detail.23