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  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 66 (2004/05)
  • Article

In this Issue

Studying Africa

  • Bessie Head - Elinettie Chabwera
  • Sudan's Privatisation Experience 1990-2000 - Khalid Hassan Elbeely
  • Myth-Making and the Rationality of Mass Murder - René Lemarchand

Reading Africa

  • Review of Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea - Jane Plastow
  • Review of Olonana Ole Mbatian - Christopher Fyfe
  • Review of The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War - Christopher Fyfe
  • Review of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid - Yvette Hutchison
  • Review of Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing 2002 - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
  • Review of Talking Gender: Conversations with Kenyan Women Writers - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
  • Review of Theatre and Performance in Africa: Intercultural Perspectives - Martin Banham
  • Review of Art of the Lega / Ways of the Rivers / African Folklore / Omoluabi - Martin Banham
  • Review of “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries - Malyn Newitt
  • Review of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio - Kevin Dawe
  • Review of The Names of Ankole Cows / Oral Literature of the Asians in East Africa - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli and Dan Twinomujuni
  • Review of African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change - Andrew Dougill
  • Review of Africa in the New Millennium: Challenges and Prospects - Samuel Bekalo
  • Review of A Short History of African Philosophy - Paul Davies

Imagining Africa

  • Two Poems - Solomon Tsehaye

Remembering Africa

  • Professor Carolyn Baylies - Lionel Cliffe

Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 66 (2004/05) Friday 16 July 2004

Review of Olonana Ole Mbatian

By Christopher Fyfe

Abstract

 

  • Article keywords:
  • Christopher Fyfe
  • Kenya
  • Olonana Ole Mbatian
  • Peter Ndege

Olonana Ole Mbatian by Peter Ndege. East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi, 2003. ix+100pp. ISBN 9966250948 (pb). £12.95 / $20.95.

This volume appears in a new series, ‘Makers of Kenya’s History’, edited by Professor Simiya Wandibba. It tells a tragic story. Olonana Ole Mbatian (known to the British as Lenana) was the son of a powerful Maasai laibon (a leader with religious authority) whose status he was determined to inherit. Engaged in war against his rival step-brother, he made friends with the pioneers of the advancing British occupation who were glad to find an ally among the potentially hostile Maasai. He became their intermediary and was made a salaried ‘Chief of the Maasai’ – a centralised office unknown to this people of small autonomous political units.

Successive governors dreamed of ridding the territory of pastoralism and making it a farming country for white settlers. In 1904 Olonana was persuaded to accept a treaty confining the Maasai to a reserve, leaving the vacated land for white settlement. Anxious to introduce the white man’s useful skills, he welcomed the arrival of American missionaries. But as they, like the government, feared pastoralism and taught farming skills instead, few Maasai ever joined them. Increasingly Olonana became alienated from his people. In 1911 he was tricked into accepting an agreement reducing the reserve in size. He then fell ill and died, ‘transformed from a broker into a broken man’.

Ndege tells his story in a lively style, using a good selection of sources and fitting it lucidly into the context of Maasai culture and environment. He also adds some well-chosen photographs. It is heartening to find good work of this kind still appearing amid all the difficulties experienced by the African universities.

 

 

[Published in Leeds African Studies Bulletin 66 (2004), pp. 88-89]

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