Abstract EN:

Falsely presented as being in community interests, the Group-Ranches reform was a mere pretext for the further development of the politics of encapsulation implemented among the kenyan Maasaï, an East African people which has become an ethnic minority within the framework of the nation-state. It was also a pretext for the propagation of the liberal values of development and private property, characteristic of western economic ideology. This reform should be viewed as a natural extension of the authoritarian policies of the british colonial period, part of a long chain of impoverishment which has been affecting the Maasaï since the beginning of the twentieth century. Even if they have succeeded in resisting and adapting to the reform for some time, thanks notibly to their traditional approach to land tenure and the community's remarkable solidarities as expressed through an organisational structure based on age groups, there is practically nothing the Maasaï can do in the face of modern politics, a key factor in the breaking up of Maasaï society and which promises to bring about the final destruction of traditional social structures, with, in particular, the abolition of "moranism" and the deviding up of the entire Maasaï territory into