[ A look at U.S. border externalization, the death it has caused,
and the art of negotiating and resisting borders in Maasailand.]
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HOW THE U.S. BORDER ARRIVED IN KENYA  
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Todd Miller
February 2, 2023
The Border Chronicle
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_ A look at U.S. border externalization, the death it has caused, and
the art of negotiating and resisting borders in Maasailand. _

A marker denoting the Kenya-Tanzania border with an unauthorized
border crosser in the background., (Photo credit: Todd Miller)

 

When I got in the car in Nairobi to go to the Maasai Mara in the
Kenya-Tanzania borderlands, it was hard to imagine that I was going to
a place touched by U.S. border operations, but it was true. The United
States, as I learned when I was researching my 2019 book Empire of
Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, has a
Customs and Border Protection attaché at its Kenya embassy. This is
one of 23 such attachés
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the U.S. has across the world, in various places, including Bogotá,
Mexico City, and New Delhi. The border, in other words, has far more
reach than you might think.

The U.S. has long been pushing its borders out to places across the
globe. Perhaps the most well-known cases are the Mexico-Guatemala and
the Dominican Republic-Haiti frontiers (as _The Border
Chronicle_ detailed
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year), along with others in Latin America and the Caribbean. As former
DHS secretary John Kelly put it
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2017, “Border security cannot be attempted as an endless series of
‘goal line stands’ on the one-foot line at the ports of entry or
along the thousands of miles of border between this country and
Mexico. … I believe the defense of the Southwest border starts 1,500
miles to the south, with Peru.”

In reality the “defense” starts even further away, beyond the
Western Hemisphere, in the Philippines, Jordan, Morocco, and Kenya.
U.S. border forces have had programs in more than 100 countries across
the globe. Externalization has become a fundamental strategy of U.S.
border policing in the post 9/11 era, comparable to its
long-standing prevention through deterrence
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Outside Nairobi, we stopped at the escarpment in the Great Rift
Valley, which extends nearly 6,000 miles from Mozambique to the Red
Sea. From my vantage point, I had a sweeping view of southern Kenya, a
vast expanse of green and brown, with distant mountains under a mostly
blue sky. To the south, I could see to the Kenyan-Tanzanian
borderlands, where I was going. I was excited not only because the
Maasai Mara was teeming with wildlife such as elephants, lions,
giraffes, and leopards, but also because the Maasai have one of the
most creative and practical approaches to borders. Borders, to the
pastoral Maasai, are always movable and porous, never fixed, never
hardened, never militarized. And the negotiation of a border happens
between peoples, peoples and the biosphere, or peoples and animals
meeting on equal ground, a coexistence that existed well before the
colonial British government brought its private enclosures.

It was this vision—including how free movement becomes more
essential in the era of climate change—that I wanted to hear more
about as I headed to the Dopoi Center
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a Maasai cultural and education center near the small town of Talek,
where I would be spending the next week.

The U.S. commitment to border proliferation, however, does not see
things as the Maasai do. According to a U.S. Embassy dispatch
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“Security Sector Assistance in Kenya, Part II: Land Border Security
Training,” it was in 2003 that, at the request
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the Kenya Ministry of Defence, “the United States began to assist in
the development of military units capable of responding to
cross-border security challenges.” The purpose of the CBP
attaché—in Kenya and across the world—is to coordinate trainings
and equipment transfers for border operations, which in 2009 included
helping fund Kenya’s Rural Border Force. A U.S. Border Patrol
assessment that year determined that the force would need specialized
training and more equipment. From 2007 to 2009, the U.S. sent $53
million to Kenya to help provide
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assistance. The first operation of the newly anointed border force so
startled
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in a small Kenyan town of Migori—the force arrived in camouflage,
heavily armed, and with tanks—that they closed down their shops and
retreated to their homes in fear of an imminent crackdown.

The first time I went to the Kenya-Tanzania international boundary, in
2017, it was a small crumbling marker that was hidden in the tall
grass where the Maasai Mara met the Serengeti Plain. Looking across
into Tanzania, I could see the distant silhouettes of four large
elephants and three giraffes in the setting sun amid spread-out acacia
trees and croton bushes. The animals, of course, crisscrossed the
international boundary all the time and with ease. That year I had
come to Kenya straight from Israel-Palestine, where I was studying one
of the most aggressive and sophisticated borders in the world, with
its concrete smart walls, checkpoints, and armed soldiers. On the
Kenya-Tanzania border, if we hadn’t found the boundary marker, we
wouldn’t have known that the border was even there.

Later, when I talked to the director of the Dopoi Center, Meitamei
Olol-Dapash
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I realized that despite its illusion of absence, this border is a
powerful impediment to movement. Olol-Dapash is a respected Maasai
leader long-involved in a strong land-rights movement, and while I was
in Kenya in June 2017, he was a candidate for parliament in an
election that was only a few months off (he would run again in 2022).
Even without walls, barriers, obvious surveillance systems, the
rumbling vehicles of border guards, or any other such markers of an
international boundary line, Olol-Dapash said, the border was a
“tool of oppression.”

On top of that, here I was further from my home in Arizona than I had
ever been, only to learn that the Border Patrol had also been in the
Maasai Mara. CBP had provided
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for 15 law enforcement departments from Kenya, Tanzania, and
Uganda—including the Kenya Police Service and the General Service
Unit, the Kenya Administration Police Service, the Kenya Wildlife
Service, the Tanzania Police, the Tanzania National Parks Agency, the
Tanzania Wildlife Department, the Uganda National Police, the Uganda
Customs Police, the Uganda Wildlife Service, and the Uganda
Anti-terrorism Unit. According
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the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, CBP trained 330 law enforcement personnel
in the area “to better secure the region’s borders,” an example
of its dedication to advancing “peace and security” and promoting
“opportunity and development in the region.”

Olol-Dapash—whose Maasai mother was born in Tanzania—called the
boundary a “product of colonial power when they were partitioning
Africa, with their own political and economic interests.” He was
referring to the1884 Berlin Conference
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in which European powers sliced up Africa and handed out territories
to different countries, including England, which got Kenya and
Germany, Tanzania. This border remained after Kenyan independence in
1963 and was “a gross injustice,” he told me. Like so many borders
drawn arbitrarily by European powers around the world, this
international boundary cut right through ancestral Maasai land, whose
people share language, traditions, and history but could no longer
organize together effectively.

From the escarpment on the Great Rift Valley, I saw this whole expanse
of Maasailand, a place overrun with constant attempts at land grabs
and land privatization—from the British to the neocolonial
government that followed—for more than a century. As I stood there,
I noticed a family of baboons along the side of the road. I walked
over to them with one of the drivers, without realizing that what I
would see would profoundly affect me and even frame a mindset for the
journey. The mother baboon caressed a small baby, and another baboon
munched on a mango rind. We had been there for about a minute,
mesmerized, when another man approached us from behind and said we had
to go. There was a dead body. “What?” I asked. We had to get out
of there. We turned around, and I immediately saw the body, face down
in the bushes off the side of the road, as if he had just been tossed
there. The body almost looked alive, but it was still, unmoving, and
naked.

As we came down the escarpment, it soon became clear that we’d never
find out what happened. The drivers didn’t know, though they
speculated. But the image of the body dumped on the side of the road
stuck with me. Later that night, when I arrived at the Dopoi Center
deep in Maasailand, after we passed elephants and giraffes en route,
Olol-Dapash showed me a picture of an old Maasai man curled on the
ground after being attacked by the Tanzanian police. He later died. I
again in my mind saw the body I had seen earlier that day. This was
part of an eviction of 70,000 people to make way for a private company
(which I will be writing about in my next post). Since these evictions
began in June, thousands of refugees have crossed into Kenya.

When this started to happen in June, Olol-Dapash and others from the
Dopoi Center went on rescue missions. Remember, here borders are
agreements, not impositions. They move with changing contexts and
circumstances, and they are negotiated on equal ground. This includes
people and peoples, animals, and the living planet. And it is for this
reason that Donkol ole Keiwa, the director of language and culture at
the Dopoi Center, told me that the Kenya-Tanzania “border is
illegitimate,” adding, “This border was put here by the
colonialists. There was no reason to put the border between our
communities.”

As Prescott historian and codirector of the Dopoi Center, Mary Poole,
told me in 2017, “If you’re not negotiating, then you’re
colonizing land rather than living on the land.” It is in this
context that the Maasai are facing off against the U.S. global border
apparatus.

_Todd Miller is the author of Build Bridges Not Walls and editor of
The Border Chronicle._

_THE BORDER CHRONICLE is a weekly newsletter that publishes original,
on-the-ground reporting, analysis, and commentary. Every Tuesday and
Thursday subscribers will receive our latest dispatch in their inbox.
We’ll be doing some investigative reporting, short audio pieces,
Q&As, reported pieces, occasional film and book reviews, media
critiques, op-eds, and—what the hell—we might even publish some
poetry and satire. Eventually, we’d also like to host a podcast. We
want to create a community of ideas so that we can break free of the
“crisis” narrative that does such a disservice to our
region.  SUBSCRIBE_

* Kenya
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* Maasai
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* US borders
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* Climate Change
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* colonialism
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