"We are fleeing our homeland — Nos patriam fugimus," cries out Meliboeus, the dispossessed herdsman in Virgil’s poems, The First Eclogue. Meliboeus’s fields have been confiscated, his animals must be sold, and he is being forced to leave the land on which he has lived and worked.
Virgil wrote these poems in the 30s BC, in the wreckage of a civil war, at the moment when Octavian — soon to be the Emperor Augustus — was seizing farmland around Cremona and Mantua to settle his demobilised soldiers on it. Families who had worked those fields for generations were simply chased away. Tityrus, reclining under a beech tree, represents the opposite fate — a man whose land has been spared because he has secured favour from Rome (the government).
Meliboeus’s lament, spoken as he prepares to abandon his home, would become William ole Ntimama’s because the Maasai people were also removed from their lands. Ntimama, a leading Maasai political supremo who died on September 1, 2016, is now immortalised in a new book, William ole Ntimama: A Biography by Lydia Naneu and Tabitha Sewe.
A biography of Ntimama is, in the usual sense, impossible. He looms too large in Maasai political memory, veering often toward the symbolic, the irreducibly other. To write a human life of this figure — so charged with the hopes, quarrels, and self-understanding of his people — is to brush against a high wall.
The authors add lights and shadows to his portrait but, in a sense, only deepen the mystery. The biographical desire —to know him fully — constantly brushes against its own impossibility.
As the biography starts, Ntimama is born and morphs into a swift-footed Moran, but as it progresses towards the end, he is lumbering across the Maasai land; mellowed, aged and slow but still carrying the weight of his people’s plight — intent on redeeming them from the death grip of landlessness that choked them.
Cover of the book ‘William ole Ntimama, a Biography’ by Lydia Naneu and Tabitha Sewe.
Photo credit: Pool
This fight shaped Ntimama’s entire political life. According to the biography, this dispossession started before Ntimama was born. Between 1904 and 1911, the British signed agreements that removed the Maasai from their northern territories and confined them to reserves. A pastoral people were told, as Meliboeus was told, to leave their homeland so newcomers could be settled. Cattle routes were broken, sacred landscapes lost, and a way of life altered by decree. The poignant picture is the same: a herdsman standing on land that is no longer his, watching others take possession under the authority of a distant power.
That Maasai land, the biography contends, was beautiful: "The land stretched from the Mao Escarpment down to the plains of Kajiado and Loita. To the east, beyond the valleys and acacia groves, it rose towards Kikuyu country and then up to Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Range. In between, the great valley lay, a deep crack in the earth from whose floor the mountains rose. Blue lakes dotted the landscape: Naivasha, Nakuru, Elementaita. Hot springs sent up steam. Dust devils spun across the plains in dry weather. Maasai herds moved across the grasslands…. The Maasai… wore red shúkà cloaks."
Ntimama was born into a land that had already been grabbed by the colonialists, and the fight to get that land back defined the man he became. And he fought with fire and fury.
"Blunt, pragmatic, and fearless, Ntimama’s leadership style cemented his reputation as... a defender of Maasai heritage," admits the biography. One of the fieriest and most famous statements that haunted him for a long time was reportedly a warning to the non-Maasai living in Maasai land when he told them "to lie low like envelopes," as it was reported, or "like an antelope," as he ever afterwards insisted he had said. "What he never claimed was innocence of intent. The warning was addressed to non-Maasai communities in Narok and Enoosupukia during the turbulence of the early 1990s..." the biography says.
Like many people, Ntimama was a complex man. But when all this is admitted, there remains a wonderfully rich, lovable character. He is the very ideal of a Maa hero, the kind the legends especially love to paint. The shepherd’s staff, the rungu, the spear, and the shield are equally familiar to his hands. And he was an orator, his own kind of poet with words. He was mesmerised by British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, whom he considered a mentor in the use of words. He loved the poetry of it all.
That union of the warrior and the poet gives his life a peculiar charm and is very strikingly brought out in the biography. Thus, on the one side, we see the true poetic temperament, with all its capacities for keenest delight and sharpest agony, with its tremulous mobility, its openness to every impression, its gaze of childlike wonder, its booming laugh and its eager welcome to new things, its simplicity and its yearnings after utopian worlds yet unrealised.
And on the other hand, there was Ntimama, who embodied the finest qualities of an antique warrior leader, the kind celebrated in Maa legend: fierce, vocal, unflinching, bold yet gentle, calm in danger, chivalrous even to his political foes, ever watchful, ever hopeful—a born leader, and a king of the Maa.
His was a difficult mission like one chasing a horizon, and horizons recede at exactly the speed you approach them. The Maasai are yet to get all their land, but he made good progress in his fight with getting back the Maasai Mara and Amboseli to benefit locals.
Like all biographies, the portrait of this singular figure is, of necessity, incomplete. Ntimama remains enigmatic; an inscrutable subjectivity haunts him as though he still holds a secret.
William ole Ntimama: A Biography will be launched today at the late minister’s home at Motonyi in Narok town as the family marks the 10th memorial ceremony since his death.
