UCLA

This dissertation deals with the problem of human-wildlife conflicts in Kenya from 1850 to 2000 and seeks to contribute to the larger discourse on indigenous peoples' notions of the environment and its conservation. I examine alarming declines of wildlife populations of upwards of 60 percent by the 1990s that were attributed to persistent human-wildlife conflicts in and around the expansive Maasai group ranches/game sanctuaries bordering Amboseli National Park and Masai Mara Game Reserve, two of Kenya's foremost wildlife sanctuaries. I specifically focus on the Maasai, one of Kenya's best known ethnic communities who are often romanticized as paragons of ecological virtue, to question the potential of traditional environmental knowledge and perceptions to alleviate human-nature contestations. By focusing on the British-Maasai relationship during the colonial period the dissertation illuminates ambivalence reflected in how outsiders have often defined and reproduced certain Maasai identities as timeless. I examine the colonial administration's creation of the Masai Reserve in 1904 upon which it embarked on a failed quest to modernize the traditional Maasai animal husbandry. I also discuss how by the 1940s these endeavors coupled with the promotion of wildlife conservation in Maasailand profoundly impacted the transhumant nature of the Maasai pastoral economy and respectively led to increased Maasai antipathy towards wildlife and exacerbated progressive ecological degradation. The study also reviews the transformation of expansive Maasai Group Ranches (MGRs) from the early 1960s as livestock development schemes to prominent wildlife sanctuaries by the late 1990s. An assumed traditional Maasai "conservation ethic" that MGRs in their current capacity are predicated upon, however, clouds our understanding of the historical nature of human-wildlife contestations in Maasailand.