The Pauperization of the Maasai in Kenya

Since the advent of colonialism in East Africa, the Maasai people have been progressively dispossessed of their communally held land. Most of it, and the best of it, has already been expropriated for the benefit of others. The major beneficiaries are the absentee owners of large cash-crop plantations and commercial ranches.1 Not only the high potential agricultural zones needed by the Maasai during the annual dry seasons and recurring drought years, but even the moderate and marginal areas have been extensively alienated together with countless sources of permanent water. It is no secret to the readers of Kenya's daily and weekly news publications that the alienation-nowadays called land grabbing-of the remaining Maasai lands is still going on in the 1990s.2 We are witnessing the final stage in the British colonial policy of using the lands of the Maasai people, both in Kenya and in Tanzania, to solve problems arising from the needs and wants of other people. It is a welldocumented historical truth that the Maasai pastoralists have been persistently and variously required (by force, trickery and legalisms) to pay the price for social, economic and political decisions made by others and for the benefit of others. Given the traditional Maasai understanding of