Maasai vow to shed blood
2005-03-13 23:35
Olo Longonot, Kenya - Kenyan Maasai tribesmen "will fight until the last man" for their land and access to water, a government minister warned over the weekend, heightening tension between the tribe and other ethnic groups.
"The Maasais will fight until the last man to reclaim their land and water," Minister of State in the presidency William Ole Ntimama told up to 1 000 people attending the burial of two Maasai herdsmen who were killed by police last month in the country's central Rift Valley region.
"We have the right to be in Mau Mahiu and Naivasha regions," Ntimama, himself a Maasai, said late on Saturday, speaking in his native Maasai language.
Ntimama was referring to the dry regions in the Rift Valley province where warriors from the Maasai and Kikuyu tribes have fought since January over rights to grazing land and water resources, killing at least 21 people, including the Maasai herders.
As a result of the clashes, thousands of villagers have fled the plains on the foot of Mount Longonot volcano, about 60km northwest of Nairobi, to safer areas amid a lingering threat of renewed clashes.
"The community has been branded as criminals by the government while other communities are favoured," Ntimama said, apparently referring to Kikuyu tribesmen, who share the same ethnic group with President Mwai Kibaki.
"The government should find a lasting solution to the water problem and land. Anybody, be they in the government or anywhere, who thinks that the Maasais will move out of Mai Mahiu and Naivasha is dreaming," Ntimama said.
"This is the land of our forefathers which was taken forcefully by the colonialists. We are not leaving," he vowed.
The plains in the centre of dispute were occupied by the Maasai herdsmen since pre-colonial times up to the 1970s, when the country's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, himself a Kikuyu, allocated land to his tribesmen.
But drought and animosity has fanned the latest round of tension between the two tribes that have been at loggerheads since 1970s, when Kikuyu first started farming in plains that offer grazing land to Maasais.
Ntimama, a self-declared Maasai tribal chief, was implicated in tribal clashes between 1991 to 1993 in the east African nation, which claimed hundreds of lives and displaced up to 300 000 villagers. But he denied any wrongdoing.