This book is a powerful retelling of Maasai history, written by Maasai community leader and activist Meitamei Olol Dapash and American historian Mary Poole, who have worked together on land rights, environmental justice and decolonizing research for over twenty years. They founded and directed the Kenyan (1987) and US (1994) Institute for Maasai Education, Research and Conservation (MERC), located at the Dopoi Centre in Maasai Mara, where this book was written. The book came into being in conversation with the leadership of the Maa nation and in partnership with Prescott College Arizona, whose students and faculty contributed through archival research and fieldwork. As a result, its tone and approach are quite unique. Relying on Indigenous knowledge sources including oral history, it forms a critique of the history of Maasai people as produced by the West. In my own research, Maasai communities have repeatedly expressed the desire to produce books like these, and it is immensely valuable that the authors held onto their vision, despite substantial negative feedback during the publishing process.

This heavily footnoted book, which is available Open Access, discredits and disputes most of the celebrated (Western) scholars and expertise in Maasai studies as complicit with the ‘aggressive production of colonized peoples into nonexistence through narrative’ (p. 14). Instead of presenting Maasai identity as fragmented, fluid and without a coherent historical basis, it tells the story of Olosho le Maa (the Maa nation) as a unified people who have been colonized not only under the British and Germans, but even more so after independence. In this regard, it focuses mainly on the Kenyan state, but also refers at times to its people in Tanzania. Like other decolonization scholars, such as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang,Footnote ¹ the authors strongly focus on the repatriation of land, which is of importance at a time when we try to decolonize everything, with the risk of producing a buzzword instead of real transformations. Furthermore, they combat the story of an alliance between Maasai and colonial forces, underlining the people’s resistance in the face of violence, betrayal and what is outlined as the continued occupation of their land by European as well as post-independence governments. Knitting together the Maasai experience of (more broadly researched) alliances between conservation, hunting, tourism, African elites and Western political and economic interests, the book contributes a convincing portrayal of Maasai as an Indigenous nation.

The greatest shortcoming might be that the book remains silent on how Maasai themselves might have acquired their territory and the wealth it brought them. It relates how Maasai migrated from the upper Nile region into the Rift Valley and finally ‘moved into their full homeland’ (p. 127), but, as European colonizers did after them, the authors seem to paint a picture of these lands as empty, except for wildlife. Such a situation seems unlikely, especially in the case of the prime forests and water sources (e.g. Mau forest, Amboseli’s Ol Tukai swamp) that the book strongly focuses on. In addition, there may be an overly harmonious depiction of Maasai unity, and their relationships with neighbouring East African peoples, especially regarding ilmurran (warriors) raiding practices. These days, my experience is that different iloshon (sections) do have conflicts and argue over who are ‘real’ Maasai. Furthermore, although it is of high importance not to take for granted Western sources that promoted their own conquests by imagining violence and chaos as rulers of ‘tribal’ or ‘premodern’ life, the Maasai-centredness of an account that portrays the possibility of ‘violence that was restorative to the land and people’ (p. 128) may at times overcompensate or be blind to other possible interpretations. To the writers’ defence, one may not be able to tell history from an objective standpoint at all, and drawing from sources from ethnic groups neighbouring Maasai may have been outside the project’s scope.

Overall, the research underlying the book is of high quality and scholarly rigour, opening up fresh perspectives on Maasai history. Being Indigenously motivated, it may necessarily be an activist publication. The result is a victory of great importance, one that I expect to be employed and celebrated throughout the Maa nation, while its arguments and approaches can also be of inspiration to other (African) Indigenous peoples to write their own stories into history. It is certainly of value to Africanists, historians, anthropologists and other scholars who aim to decolonize their understandings of how histories have been constructed. The book exemplifies how Indigenous experts and narratives are crucial to combat the universalizing tendency of Western history to twist multiple storylines and perspectives, in order to create ‘one coherent narrative’Footnote ² that is subsequently used in ‘vetting what is true and “debatable”’ (p. 15).

While violent evictions from Ngorongoro are ongoing, the authors call for unified ceremonies and integrity of its leaders to secure the future of Olosho le Maa. Not only do many Maasai feel that ‘our knowledge of the past is our path to survival’ (p. 159), as the book concludes, but the inclusion of African, Indigenous and other subordinated voices is vital for epistemological and ontological justice, and a truly global, multivocal academia.