settlers for low prices resulted in rampant land speculation, to the extent that by 1930 approximately sixty five percent of land reserved for Europeans was not under any form of agriculturally productive activity. Alienation When European settlement began, the Highlands were primarily inhabited by nomadic pastoralists and this absence of settled agrarian communities allowed British officials to describe the region as uninhabited. At the time, the African population was distributed between cultivating tribes and pastoralist people. The cultivating tribes existed mainly in the high rainfall areas of Nyanza and the slopes at the foot of Mount Kenya such as the Aberdares, Elgeyo and the hills of Ukambani. The intervening areas consisted of extensive but sparsely inhabited plains, at over 5,000 feet, where rainfall was more uncertain and pastoralists instead relied on the grazing of animals. European settlement was predominately in these extensive plains, traditionally inhabited by the Maasai tribe. At the turn of the century, the Maasai had been decimated by a concurrence of natural disasters. Accompanying a smallpox epidemic was a severe drought and an invasion of locusts which consumed vegetation over large tracts of land, whilst rinderpest had killed large numbers of cattle resulting in starvation within the community. The Maasai entered into treaties with British officials to surrender large amounts of land, which reduced manpower meant they were unable to defend against rival tribes. Of the 12,000 square miles of European settled land, 7,000 consisted of former Masai grazing grounds abandoned under agreements between 1904 and 1913, and large parts of remaining areas, such as the Uasin Gishu plateau, were uninhabited. British officials also alienated land from other tribes, whom the Maasai had pushed to woodlands on the fringes of the Highlands. These tribes practised shifting cultivation, resulting in large areas of land remaining abandoned for a number of years. Similar disasters as afflicted the Maasai also caused havoc amongst these tribes and, between 1901-02, a famine resulted in the Kikuyu losing between twenty and fifty percent of their population on their frontier with the Maasai. Many survivors sought refuge amongst relatives elsewhere in their domain, but by leaving their land it made the frontier appear disused to European officials. Before the famine, the Kikuyu had been buying up parcels of land in the frontier for individual holdings. As had happened in colonies in North America, when British officials later began paying the Kikuyu for that land,