The Laikipia plateau in Kenya is a wildlife conservation haven, and a popular safari destination featuring all the big five animals of Africa. As yet, a simmering local conflict between the Indigenous pastoralist communities and long-established white farmers has remained largely unnoticed by the international community. But The Battle for Laikipia, shot by two seasoned film-makers – award-winning Kenyan documentary-maker Peter Murimi and Daphne Matziaraki, a Greek director with a short film Oscar nomination – walks a tightrope to show the delicate balance in a conflict that has become increasingly violent in recent years due to the climate crisis.
“While making the film, we were surprised by the fact that the people who share that same landscape barely knew each other and did not truly understand one another,” says Matziaraki. “A lack of empathy, fear and sometimes refusal to acknowledge the historical context are the reasons why this conflict has escalated to that point. Climate change is bringing to the surface issues that were buried under the rug for decades.”
In their search for strong characters, Murimi says that Laikipia residents were initially suspicious of their motives. “When someone hears that you’re also talking to their enemy, that creates a lot of problems,” he says. The nomadic local communities have used the ancient grazing routes across Laikipia for centuries, but after white farmers gained access to large swathes of land in the early 20th century, the two groups were at loggerheads.
The climate crisis has raised the stakes, with pastoralists – increasingly desperate for grass for their cattle – forced on to land owned by white farmers for generations. The landowners, who also rely on Laikipia to sustain their cattle, are seen in the documentary struggling to convince pastoralists that they are also Kenyan, and that Kenya is the country they’ve known all their life.
Matziaraki came up with the idea of the film while living in Kenya about 20 years ago, when she was doing an internship with the UNEP. She says she knew from the beginning that she could not do the film alone, which is why she approached Murimi to become her co-director. The first scene she shot, in 2017, shows Maria Dodds, a strong character in the film, drinking tea with a guest when suddenly they hear gunshots in their farm.
“It was a constant challenge to film with both sides of the conflict, stay neutral and continue to nourish the trust and intimacy while keeping ethical boundaries,” Matziaraki says. “We experienced people being scared, breaking down, being angry, questioning themselves and reconciling.”
The film’s main protagonists are Simeon, a Samburu cattle herder, and three nearby white landowners. Simeon, who speaks Samburu, is often shown spending time with his family in humble settings. In Samburu, “nkishon” means life, and it comes from the word “ngishu”, which means cattle. “For us, cattle is life,” Simeon says in the film. “We live on what our cows provide us with: milk, broth, blood and sometimes meat. When a Samburu is born a cow is gifted. And when we die, we are buried in cow hide.”
The lifestyle of the pastoralists is shown in contrast with that of white farmers, who speak English and Swahili, and live in more privileged households. One scene in the beginning of the film shows a farmer in his ranch warning a young black pastoralist to get off his property. Some of the farmers have used electric fences to keep pastoralists out, but many accept that controlling vast areas of land is difficult. “The farm … it actually goes back to before our father, our grandfather and to our great-grandfather. You feel part of the whole jigsaw,” Dodds explains. The film shows Dodd’s funeral after her death from cancer in 2021.
The complicated legacy of British colonialism remains unresolved inside Kenya, with the government reluctant to find a resolution. Kenya’s independence in 1963 did little to change that, with the land ownership remaining unchanged for generations. TV news shows the latest violence, with the pastoralists often referred to as “bandits”. “Being a semi-nomad should not be a crime,” Simeon says towards the end of the film. Violence is evident on both sides. A pastoralist is found dead; farmers find their offices broken into.
Filming started in 2017 and lasted for five years – a drought cycle took place for three years during that period and making the film was a tough job, logistically. “It’s very remote, it’s very sparse and sometimes you have to walk long distances; you have to sleep on the floor, on goat skin or cow skin. But I found it very humbling to have the opportunity,” says Murimi. His previous film was the 2020 feature-length documentary I Am Samuel, about a gay man and his boyfriend.
Murimi says the biggest obstacle in filming was “our unconscious bias”. “Sometimes this unconscious bias bleeds into your work. Actually, when we were marrying this film together, we really had to challenge each other. And I found that a very rewarding process.”
“We also found out a lot about ourselves because sometimes you have these worldviews and you think this is the only way the world works,” he says. “I think the beauty of this project is to challenge these perceptions that people have, and sometimes you have to see the other side to figure it out. The world is much broader than our ideas. So I think that was the biggest challenge because we had to confront realities and sometimes accept that we were wrong.”
• The Battle for Laikipia is in cinemas now.
