Across the Great Rift (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Across the Great Rift (Cont.)


	African Arcadia: The remote Loita Hills, a stonghold of Masai pastoralism that faces privatization and development

NO ONE IS CERTAIN WHEN the Masai first appeared on the high steppes of East Africa, or where they came from. Taller and fiercer than the more numerous Kikuyu and other Bantu-speaking peoples that surrounded them, and contemptuous of their neighbors' agrarian ways, they roamed the landscape in nomadic bands, driving their livestock before them, running down lions with spears, and subsisting almost exclusively on blood and milk. By the mid-19th century, when the first European explorers arrived, the Masai controlled a major part of what is now southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, from Mount Kenya in the north to well beyond Mount Kilimanjaro and Ngorongoro Crater in the south.

When a 29-year-old Scot named Joseph Thomson proposed to cross Masailand, in 1882, the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley advised him to take a thousand men "or write your will." Thomson took 143, but made it from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and back, the first white man to do so, and the first of many to become smitten with the Masai. "I could not but involuntarily exclaim, 'What splendid fellows!'" he wrote of his initial encounter with a band of warriors. They had "an aristocratic savage dignity that filled me with admiration."

Masai spears were no match for European guns, of course. But even as the British who colonized Kenya drove the Masai from some two-thirds of their land in the first two decades of the 20th century, they retained a lingering affection for the proud pastoralists. "Maasai-itis," as one British writer termed it, has stricken generations of visitors.

My girlfriend and I, however, were not among them—or so we thought when we flew to Kenya on a spur-of-the-moment vacation two years ago. Our plan was to spend a couple of weeks lounging on the beach near Mombasa. When we met an American photographer named Elizabeth Gilbert there, and she mentioned that she was compiling a photographic record of traditional Masai culture, both of us wondered why—hadn't everyone done a coffee-table book on the Masai? Our cynicism evaporated when Liz invited us to join her on a four-day shoot on the west side of the Great Rift Valley, the massive, volcano-strewn trench that runs through the heart of East Africa. We caught the next train to Nairobi.

Liz's translator and photo assistant on that trip was a handsome, articulate 27-year-old Masai named Michael Saitoti Ole Tiampati. Born in the hills above Lake Naivasha, Mike had tended the family herds until age 12, when he'd won a place at a prestigious Nairobi boarding schoola rare achievement for a Masai. Since then he'd worked in journalism, first as aninterpreter and assistant producer at the Reuters Nairobi bureau, and later as an underpaid reporter for a magazine called Nomadic News. He'd been pretty much everywhere in Kenyan Masailand, with one exception. One day, we scrambled to the top of a granite outcropping and he pointed to a distant blue range down on the Tanzanian border: the Loita Hills.

"That's the place I want to go," Mike said. "That's where the pure Masai live."

Actually, until the British came, the Masai had largely steered clear of the Loitas. It was a place known for disease—cattle didn't last long there—and for witchcraft. But a century ago, after being dispossessed of the so-called White Highlands of the Laikipia Plateau and driven south across the Great Rift Valley, a few renegade clans had settled the hills. The roads were supposed to be terrible, Mike said, some of the worst in the country. But a famous laibon, or holy man, lived in the Loitas, a direct descendant of Mbatian, the legendary Masai leader who in the late 1860s had foretold the coming of the "iron snake"—the British railroad—and the subsequent downfall of his people. There was a sacred forest, too—the Naimina Enkiyio, or Forest of the Lost Child, perhaps the biggest chunk of primeval wilderness left in southern Kenya.

The Loitas were also the setting for a troubling land dispute. In 1993, Mike said, the Narok County Council, the reigning political authority in western Masailand, abruptly designated the forest a game reserve and announced plans to develop it as a tourist destination. A fierce battle had raged ever since. The Loita Masai were stubborn, and not about to relinquish control of their forest to anyone, even other Masai. The inevitable result, they argued, would be another park like Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater—a beautiful corner of Masailand where the Masai themselves were no longer welcome.

It was a small fracas, perhaps, but emblematic of a phenomenon infecting all of Masailand. Acreage there has traditionally been "owned" collectively. But since Kenya's independence in 1963, non-Masai farmers have steadily chipped away at its edges, and water and good pastureland have become ever scarcer. Even the Masai themselves have begun to take individual ownership of plots for farming and grazing, particularly in eastern Masailand, close to Nairobi. Every year more and more land is broken up into titled parcels—the kiss of death for a nomadic people.

That one glimpse of the Loitas stayed with me long after I left Kenya. The idea of a verdant African Arcadia shimmering out there in the desert haze was tantalizing. But Mike's quest also intrigued me. What were the Loitas for him? Were they merely a journalistic opportunity? Or was there something else out there he hoped to find?

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