Wilson Sitonik Tisia, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man, began to grow old on the one-hour commute between Bomet and Narok towns in the southern Rift Valley. A headmaster at a secondary school in Bomet, he had been elected chairman of the Saptet Multipurpose Group, a 147-member co-operative. In the late 1990s, the co-operative had bought a piece of land from the family of an old Maasai man, Mzee Kuluo, carved out of a communal ranch. The land bordered the Maasai Mau forest.
The forest, regarded as communal land under the trusteeship of the Narok County Council, had never been clearly demarcated. It was, in fact, forest land by default, its borders defined by the five group ranches that bordered it.
