Disability-Selective Infanticide: The Hidden History in Maasailand

The claim that Maasai communities contain no disabled people is false. Yet field research in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya records testimony about disabled people being killed, abandoned, denied food, exposed to danger or hidden. Some witnesses described past killing; others suspected it continued secretly.

The historical record of disability-selective infanticide is incomplete. There is no reliable count of victims, proof of one compulsory procedure across Maasailand or basis for declaring every Maasai family guilty. Yet missing statistics do not erase what participants, disabled people and rehabilitation workers told researchers. The bitter truth is that some disabled Maasai children appear to have died because others judged their lives to be burdens.

Who Are the Maasai People Behind This Evidence?

The Maasai are Indigenous East Africans whose homeland extends across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. Maa language, cattle, land, kinship and age-set relationships have historically shaped social life.

Today Maasai people are also farmers, teachers, nurses, advocates, business owners and urban professionals, as XTRAfrica’s guide to Maasai history and modern life explains.

The evidence in this article comes mainly from Monduli District in northern Tanzania and Loita in southern Kenya. These locations cannot stand for Kajiado, Narok, Laikipia, Arusha, Longido, Ngorongoro or every Maasai section. That limit is not an excuse to avoid the findings. It tells us exactly where the strongest testimony applies and where further investigation is still required.

Disabled Maasai people unquestionably exist. Tanzanian researchers interviewed children and adults with physical, visual, intellectual and multiple disabilities. Kenyan Maasai advocate Jemimah Kutata has written publicly about growing up with a physical disability, reaching school and later organising women with disabilities. Their survival disproves the “zero disabled people” myth while exposing how exclusion can make a population appear absent.

What 68 Participants Admitted in Northern Tanzania

The most direct accessible study was conducted by Sheryl Feinstein and a predominantly Tanzanian research team in Monduli District. Amina Mollel, a Maasai woman, led interviews in Maa or Kiswahili. The study covered Simanjiro, Makyuni and Manyara wards and included 68 Maasai participants: disabled people, relatives, village residents and a rehabilitation-centre director. Researchers conducted 21 individual interviews and five focus groups (Feinstein, 2014, pp. 2–3).