Abstract
This chapter will describe the 1913 Maasai Case and appeal, and critiques of and responses to the judgement. Shortly before the case came to court, the Maasai won an injunction restraining the Crown from moving or continuing to move them from Laikipia. However, this proved useless: it came through on 10 April 1913, a fortnight after the last Maasai had left Laikipia. O1e Gilisho’s son-in-law Murket Ole Nchoko, misspelled 01 le Njogo by the British, became first plaintiff in Civil Case No. 91 of 1912, which begat the Maasai Case.2 He was described in the plaint as a leading moran of the Purko section. His seven fellow plaintiffs were Purko and Keekonyokie.
It must be admitted that it often seems unreasonable to apply civilised law to simple savage life. Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner of British East Africa1
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Notes
Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 197.
Olonana’s contested legacy is discussed in a short biography by Peter Ndege, Olonana Ole Mbatian (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2003) from p. 82.
Frederick Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (London: Edward Arnold, 1930), pp. 330–1.
Y. P. Ghai and J. P. W. B. McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya (Oxford: OUP, 1970), pp. 24–5.
KLC Evidence and Memoranda Vol. 3 (London: HMSO, 1934), p. 3267; original source R. L. Buell, The Native Problem in Africa Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 314.
M. F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), pp. 321, 323, cited KLC Evidence p. 3378.
KLC Evidence p. 3379, citing F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1922), p. 288.
Claire Palley, ‘The evolution of the powers of the Crown in protectorates’, in Palley, The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia, 1888–1965: With Special Reference to Imperial Control (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
David V. Williams, ‘Unique Relationship Between Crown and Tangata Whenua?’, in I. H. Hawharu (ed.), Waitangi-Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: OUP, 1989), pp. 68–70.
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© 2006 Lotte Hughes
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Hughes, L. (2006). The Court Case. In: Moving the Maasai. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246638_4
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