Crying for justice 60 years after eviction

They were forced out of Nandi Hills and adjacent areas by colonial administrators, who relocated them to a settlement in Tanzania and took over their fertile land.

About 40 years later, they were evicted from Tanzania and asked to return home. Since then, finding home has been elusive.

Amon Kosgei Chumo, 78, is tired, confused, bitter, angry, and with little hope of ever experiencing a settled life. He has been landless for 60 years, because of other people’s misjudgements. That has drained him.

His dejection runs deep, if he means every word he utters when he says: “I don’t have much energy left. I am now waiting to die. I don’t see much hope. We have experienced enough problems. This is not a small matter.”

That matter dates back to 1951. Between that year and 1955, about 200 Nandi families were forced by the British colonial administration to migrate from their prime lands in Nandi Hills to moderate and tsetse fly infested settlements in Musoma and Serengeti districts in northern Tanzania.

In 1991, they were ordered out by Tanzanian authorities and told to return to Kenya, and because they were not allowed to cross back to Kenya with their possessions, they returned as paupers.

They have since been landless and are desperate.

Chumo is one of the Kenyan returnees from Tanzania, as they are referred to.

The other is Elijah Kimely Keshio, 55, whose parents also migrated to Tanzania in 1955, the same year he was born.

He hasn’t given up hope to the extent that Chumo has, but his emotion over their land problem is equally profound.

“After the colonialist went away, who pocketed our heritage?” he asks.

The migration and relocation of more than 200 Nandi families to northern Tanzania started after the Second World War, when the infiltration of former British soldiers into the Nandi Hills for settlement increased. The fine climate and hilly fertile lands were the attraction.

By then, the colonial administration had introduced a policy of pushing the natives to peripheral areas that had been classified as “reserve land”, to pave the way for other developments.

In Nandi Hills and the surrounding lands, the colonialists were interested in settling in for large-scale farming.

The coming in of the soldiers who had had fought in the Second World War intensified the process. More communities were being pushed to the “Nandi reserve”, which was getting overpopulated.

Chumo was about 18 when his father couldn’t bear the thought of being squeezed into the thinning reserve land. It was a humiliating experience to many, and so his father took the option of migrating to northern Tanzania.

They left with their 30 head of cattle, joined by other families, and took the long trek through Kisii, South Nyanza, and eventually into Tanzania.

“It took a whole month,” Chumo recalls. “There were days it would rain a lot, causing floods. We would wait for the water levels to go down before proceeding. We were moving in groups but with about 2,000 head of cattle in total.”

Eventually, they entered Musoma district, and the reception wasn’t as straightforward as anticipated. Several chiefs expressed reservation about their arrival, and Chumo believes it’s because the people of Musoma thought the visitors were not different from the Maasai, who allegedly kept stealing their cattle.

“One of them was (Julius) Nyerere’s brother,” says Chumo. Records indicate that around the time, Edward Wanzagi, Nyerere’s elder brother, was the chief of the Zanaki people, having inherited the role from his father, Chief Nyerere Burito.

Others perceived their arrival differently. Chumo’s humorous side comes out when he explains what eventually happened.

“A number of them understood we were Nandi and welcomed us, but little did we know they had realised we would occupy the space between them and the Maasai, and therefore act as a shield in their favour.

“We found ourselves being the people to face off with the cattle raiders once in a while. We must have done well because the raiders started asking; ‘Na hawa ni akina nani (who are these people)?’”

According to records from the Kenyan National Archives, Ushashi area and the Nata/Ikoma Settlement Area, where most of the Nandi from Kenya were settled, bordered the expansive Serengeti plains, the home of the Maasai in Tanzania.

Their stay in Tanzania, say Chumo and Kimely, was generally without much interruption after that, except, they claim, that their children were not allowed to attend school beyond Standard Seven.

It was after Kenya got independence in 1963, two years after Tanzania did, that signals stated coming through that it was time they thought about returning home.

The messages would come in form of jokes by then President Nyerere, according to Chumo. He says: “In 1964, Nyerere told us something like; ‘You were sent away by the colonialists, right? They have now gone away, why not return home?’

“We thought he was joking, but it turned out later that he was serious. You know, Nyerere was a jolly fellow. He cracked a lot of jokes. You would easily think he was joking even when he was serious.”

Nyerere had been a frequent visitor in the settlements, which were close to his home town, Butiama, and everything seemed alright.

But then, according to Kimely, their presence in Tanzania would become a subject of wider discussion when the country embarked on constitutional reforms, beginning 1972.

Part of it, says Kimely, was because their parents had expressed reservation about the ujamaa concept introduced in 1967. The ujamaa (clustering of homes into communal villages) ideology conflicted with their pastoralist lifestyle and they dared to express as much.

Reference to them as “visitors” became more pronounced soon after and eventually in 1990, they were asked to return to Kenya and a deadline of 1991 issued.

Around the time, Tanzania had embarked on land reforms, and the presence of the Nandi might have created discomfort in some quarters.

“So, people started leaving slowly,” Chumo narrates.

“People with a lot of cattle started selling them, together with whatever property they had. Those who did so early were lucky, because later, some Tanzanian authorities decided that any property acquired in Tanzania belonged to the country. You sell a cow and you will not pass the borders with the money because a thorough search would be conducted. We would be stripped naked at border points just in case any of us hid some money.”

The border officials would take away any cash in excess of what was necessary as fare to Nandi Hills. “Hii ni mali ya Tanzania (this is Tanzanian property),” they would be told.

Chumo returned to Kenya in 1991, with seven children, but without the Sh28,000 he had tried to come back with.

“Since I came, I have not done much other than casual work here and there. I don’t have much energy left. I am now waiting to die. I don’t see much hope. We have experienced enough problems.

“This is not a small matter. Even my children have nothing. They didn’t get much education because they were not allowed to go beyond Class Seven in Tanzania. Who will employ them?” he asks.

Kimely and his family of four were in the group that returned before the 1991 ultimatum expired. They generally ended up in forests, lost for where else to call home.

“I went to Kapsasur forest. Some went to Kimondi, others to Mau. Some came to Tinderet to beg for space to farm. After Narc (National Rainbow Coalition) came to power in 2002, we were ejected and I went to Chemelil to be accommodated by a brother who had gone there earlier. Many of us are now scattered in sugar plantations as workers and squatters. None has land,” he says.

The group that was evicted from Tanzania in 1991 at the expiry of the ultimatum went to Kapsabet, according to Kimely, who says he was among the people who facilitated their return.

They stayed there for about three months, he says, before the government told them to find their relatives. Some went to Mosop. Others ended up in Uasin Gishu, Cherengani, and Chemelil, living mainly as squatters.

According to Kimely, the affected people, including himself, are 1,110, and that number excludes the children and grandchildren, whom he claims are growing up facing the same problem.

They have since dug into history to come up with facts that could help them put their matter across for possible resolution by relevant authorities.

Discussions with elders and trips to the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi with the help of Koitalel Samoei Nandi Trust, whose mission is to promote equitable socio-economic development in Nandi Hills, and the Centre for Community Dialogue and Development, an NGO, have yielded significant facts.

Leaning forward on a bench in Nandi Hills at the burial site of Koitalel arap Samoei, the Nandi leader who held off the British invasion into the area before being duped and killed in cold blood in 1905, Kimely says: “We found that our original home was in Tinderet, the lower side.

“It was called Soin, which then covered Tinderet all the way to Muhoroni and Miwani. We also established that’s where the war with the colonialists started – from Londiani to Fort Ternan, where the colonial administrators had established their military base in the area.

“In trying to establish who took over the lands after the colonialists went, we discovered that they were given to Indians as reward to their participation in the British war against Germany in Tanganyika. What about us?

“Where are we supposed to go?” he wonders.