Most colonial-era street names in Nairobi were scrubbed after independence. Delamere Avenue became Kenyatta Avenue. Hardinge Street became Kimathi Street. Government Road became Moi Avenue. But Lenana Road survived, and its survival tells a more complicated story than any of the renamings.
The road is named after Laibon Lenana, a Maasai leader born in the 1870s, the son of the powerful laibon Mbatian. When Mbatian died around 1890, a succession dispute erupted between Lenana and his brother Sendeu. Both claimed their father had designated them as heir. The conflict fractured the Maasai into rival factions at precisely the moment when British colonial power was consolidating across East Africa. Lenana made the calculation that would define his legacy: he allied with the British. He needed their military support against Sendeu's faction. The British needed Maasai cooperation — or at least Maasai non-resistance — to build the Uganda Railway through the Rift Valley and settle European farmers on the highlands.
The alliance produced the Maasai Agreements of 1904 and 1911, among the most consequential and controversial treaties in Kenyan colonial history. Under these agreements, the Maasai were moved from their most fertile grazing lands in the central Rift Valley to two reserves — one in the south near the Tanganyika border and one in Laikipia to the north. The 1911 agreement then consolidated the Maasai into the single southern reserve, freeing Laikipia for European settlement. Lenana's role in these agreements remains fiercely debated. Some accounts hold that he was deceived about the terms. Others argue he understood the bargain and judged it the best available option for his people's survival. What is not debated is the outcome: the Maasai lost their most productive lands permanently, and their political marginalization in independent Kenya can be traced in part to this territorial dispossession.
Lenana died in 1911, reportedly telling his people to maintain their alliance with the British. His name was subsequently attached to one of Nairobi's most prestigious residential roads, to a peak of Mount Kenya (Point Lenana, the most commonly summited of its three peaks), and to Lenana School, one of the country's elite secondary institutions.
The persistence of Lenana's name through independence and beyond is a story about the politics of memory. Street Names Kenya shows how the post-independence government systematically replaced settler names with those of African heroes. But Lenana's name was already African. It could not be attacked as a symbol of colonial imposition in the same way that Lord Delamere's could. Yet the figure it honors was a collaborator with the colonial project — or a pragmatist navigating impossible circumstances, depending on who tells the story. The Maasai community itself holds divided views on Lenana's legacy, and the broader Kenyan public has never mobilized to rename the road in the way that pressure built to rename Grogan Road or other colonial-era survivals.
Lenana Road runs through the Kilimani and Hurlingham neighborhoods of Nairobi, an area of embassies, international organizations, and upscale residences. The road's prestige makes the naming question more, not less, pointed. A collaborator's name marks one of the city's wealthiest corridors, a daily reminder that the boundary between resistance and accommodation was never as clear as the independence narrative preferred to claim.
See Also
Sources
- Hughes, Lotte. Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
- Waller, Richard. "The Maasai and the British 1895-1905: The Origins of an Alliance." Journal of African History, vol. 17, no. 4 (1976): 529-553.
- Sandford, G.R. An Administrative and Political History of the Masai Reserve. London: Waterlow and Sons, 1919.