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Colonial conservation in Africa was so controversial that it has elicited diverse interpretations from historians. In colonial Kenya, the presence of European settlers amplified the controversy due to their entrenched interests in the territory’s natural resources, particularly land. Settlers instigated colonial imposition of extra-environmental regulations that proscribed African interests and modes of production while seeking to secure their own. Politics of conservation raised the stakes and tensions over access to, use, and management of critical resources that had sustained African livelihoods in pre-colonial times, especially land, forests, wildlife, and even livestock. Colonial conservation policies and programs were premised on ensuring “efficient” use of natural resources and their “preservation” for the future generations. In reality, those policies and programs afforded the colonial state a wide latitude of control over these resources in ways that economically benefited the state and its agencies. They were also tools through which colonial authorities wielded social control over African communities. This control was enacted through ordinances or legislations to protect forests, wildlife, and land from what colonial officials perceived as “abuse” or “misuse” by African communities. Thus, ecological order, social control, and economic interests were all intertwined in the way colonial authorities in Kenya designed and executed conservation measures. African communities were not merely malleable actors in the politics of colonial conservation. Like settlers, they sought to secure their economic and social interests by ignoring or actively resisting the invasive aspects of colonial conservation. Some Africans were co-opted by the government into institutions that implemented restrictive policies. Although violence was not a widespread African response, it was an option, as evidenced in the Mau Mau Uprising during the 1950s. In spite of pushback from Africans, regimented colonial control over critical resources became institutionalized, its most permanent legacy being a transformation from communal to individual or private forms of ownership.

The Rift Valley is a stage on which the history of Eastern Africa has unfolded over the last 10,000 years. It served as a corridor for the southward migration from the Upper Nile and the Ethiopian highlands of Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic speakers and cultures, with their domestic animals, which over time defined and restructured the social and cultural fabric of East Africa. Genetic evidence suggests that, contrary to other regions in Africa where geography overrides language, the clustering of East African populations primarily reflects linguistic affiliation. Eastern Sudanic Nilotic speakers are dedicated livestock keepers whose identification with cattle over thousands of years is manifested in elaborate symbolism, networks created by cattle exchange, and the practice of sacrifice. The geographical attributes of rich grasslands in a semi-arid environment, close proximity of lowland and highland grazing, and a bimodal rainfall regime, made the Rift Valley an ideal setting for increasingly specialized pastoralism. However, specialized animal husbandry characteristic of East Africa was possible only within a wider socioeconomic configuration that included hunters and bee-keeping foragers and cultivators occupying escarpments and highland areas. Some pastoral groups, like Maasai, Turkana, Borana, and Somali, spread widely across grazing areas, creating more culturally homogeneous regions, while others settled near one another in geographically variegated regions, as in the Omo Valley, the Lake Baringo basin, or the Tanzanian western highlands, creating social knots that signal historical interlaying and long-term mutual coexistence. At the advent of the colonial period, Oromo and Maasai speakers successfully exploited the ecological potential of the Rift environment by combining the art of raising animals with social systems built out of principles of clanship, age and generation organizations, and territorial sections. Faced with displacement by colonial settlers and then privatization of rangelands, some Maasai pastoralists sold lands that they had been allocated, leading to landlessness amid rangeland bounty. Pastoral futures involve a combination of education, religious conversion, and diversified rangeland livelihoods, which combine animal production with cultivation, business, wage labor, or conservation enterprises. Pastoralists provide urban markets with meat, but, with human population increasing, per capita livestock holdings have diminished, leading to rural poverty, as small towns absorbing young people departing pastoralism have become critical. The Great East African Rift Valley has had a 10,000-year history of developing pastoralism as one of the world’s great forms of food production, which spread throughout Eastern Africa. The dynamics of pastoral mobility and dedication to livestock have been challenged by modernity, which has undermined pastoral territoriality and culture while providing opportunities that pastoralists now seek as citizens of their nations and the world.