Introduction

In this chapter, I offer a critique of current approaches to the concept of historical land injustices. Whilst Kenya provides the starting point, my analysis can be extended to other African and non-African countries trying to address historical wrongs connected with land, especially those of indigenous peoples. Before tracing the provenance of the term in a range of legal and policy documents, this chapter opens by exploring what must surely be an exemplary case of colonial and post-colonial injustice relating to land, dispossession and the loss of a way of life (Roux 2009). I discuss the colonial legal struggles of the Maasai and suggest that the ontological and material harms of settler colonialism were inherited and deepened by the post-colonial Kenyan state. Having shown how the term historical land injustices emerged as critical terms in contemporary politics and law, I go on to offer a critique of our current understanding of this idea. I argue that we need to be attentive to its complex temporalities and inter-temporalities. I suggest that past and present cannot be neatly sealed off from each other, and that historical land wrongs bleed into and shape the present-day economy.

The Maasai and the colonial encounter

There are a number of reasons why the Maasai are explored here as an exemplary instance of historical land injustices and its conceptualisations. Most obviously, the two treaties signed between the Maasai and the British colonial authorities in 1904 and 1911 constituted the earliest concrete taking of land or colonial expropriation in Kenya (Ngugi 2002). A century later, in 2004, the question of the legality of the Anglo-Maasai treaties was still under discussion (Kantai 2007). This is a case of a longstanding land-related injustice grounded in contested law (specifically, the status of the ‘Maasai treaties’).