NAIROBI LETTER:Having lost much of their land to the British in early 1900s, the Masai now face new pressures, writes JODY CLARKE
AS NAIROBI expands, the Masai way of life is coming under pressure Huddled against the breeze blowing off the Nairobi- Mombasa road, David Lenana has tuned his Sonitec radio into QFM.
But nestled on a green patch of land separating the road running west and east, it’s hard to see why he bothers. A Masai language station, its sounds are muffled by the traffic on either side of the road and, overhead, the sound of aircraft coming into land at Jomo Kenyatta airport.
It seems like an odd place to bring your sheep to graze, especially since he says the local authorities regularly harass him and ask for fines of up to 8000ksh (€80). But as Lenana looks over his 80 strong herd of Masai reds, he says that as Nairobi expands, eating up the grazing land around the city, it is now as good a place as any.
“We bring them here because it is green. Where we came from it is dry and new buildings are going up where we used to bring our livestock. Here at least they can pasture.” As Nairobi expands and its population increases, it is becoming difficult to know where the Kenyan capital begins and ends.
That’s putting pressure on the traditional ways of life of many Masai, who have already seen their lands diminish significantly over the past 100 years.
It started with the British in the early 1900s, who evicted Masai from their lands north of Nairobi in the Rift valley to make room for European settlers. Restricted to the south of the country, the tribe was further limited in where it could bring livestock to graze when national game parks were set up in the 1940s and 1950s.
In recent years, farmers and speculators have moved in, often with dubious title deeds, fencing off vast areas of land traditionally viewed as communal property.
“Forty to 50 per cent of land has been lost to outsiders since the 1980s, when privatisation started” says Kenny Matampash, executive director of Neighbours Initiative Alliance, an aid group working with the Masai in Kajiado, south of Nairobi. “The main effect is the dilution of our traditional lifestyle.”
Anecdotal evidence points to rates of heart disease rising among members of the tribe as they exercise less but continue high animal fat diets, trekking less often in search of pasture for their livestock than they once did.
Meanwhile, women complain that men have got lazy as the attractions of urban life have come nearer, spending the day with their friends and “catching up on news” in Nairobi instead of tending to their livestock.
Women’s work has increased as a result. “For every 10 men that go into town in the morning, maybe one comes back with food for the family,” says Joyce Saiko, a field co-ordinator with the alliance.
“Since the late 1990s, men have started going into Nairobi to sell one or two sheep or cows and then sleep with prostitutes.
“They stay for a week or until their money has run out, leaving women to look after the cattle and goats but still continue with their normal day-to-day chores.”
But if the attractions of urban life were not foreseeable, the fact that Nairobi is expanding probably was.
The city’s population has risen from one million in the 1980s to three million today, with much of that living space informal settlements, a legacy of white rule when settlers grabbed huge swathes of land and displaced the local Kenyan population. The poorest 60 per cent of Nairobi residents now live on about 9 per cent of the city’s land, says the UN, with most living without proper access to clean water.
The Dandora municipal dumping site, for example, which receives most of Nairobi’s solid waste, is only about eight kilometres from the city centre and is surrounded by low-income residential areas.
Because of this, in 2008, the Kenyan government produced the “Metro 2030 strategy”, which proposes to expand the metropolitan area from a radius of 40kms to 100km.
Under it, the boundaries of the city will be expanded to include adjoining towns and municipalities, with Kajiado and Masai lands in its sights.
That could ease the pressure on many of Nairobi’s poorest residents. But already feeling the worst effects of urbanisation on their traditional ways of life, it’s worrying many Masai. “When Nairobi comes, our lands get smaller,” says Nina Ikuura, a local tribal leader in Kajiado.
Masai land once stretched from northern Kenya to the central lakes of Naivasha and Nakuru and down to the open savannah of the Serengeti plains in northern Tanzania. Now, restricted to the southern part of the country on the Kenyan side of the border, their land could be destined to get smaller.
“More of us are getting into the issue of buying and selling land. But the economics of livestock keeping mean that you have to have vast tracts of lands, which means it has to be shared. Otherwise it becomes uneconomic to keep livestock.
“And if we can’t keep livestock, out traditional way of live will be finished,” says Ikuura