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4. Repositionings: From Indigenous Rights to Pastoralist Livelihoods
- Indiana University Press
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4 X Repositionings From Indigenous Rights to Pastoralist Livelihoods While the involvement of Maasai activists with the international indigenous rights movement in the 1990s was tremendously successful in terms of increasing their international visibility and attracting donor funding, it backfired with regard to their relationship with the Tanzanian state. Like leaders in most African states, Tanzanian officials regarded all Tanzanian citizens (except , for some, those of Asian heritage) as “indigenous” and refused to recognize Maasai (and donor) claims that Maasai, like indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere, were discriminated against because of their cultural distinctiveness, mode of production, and political-economic marginalization within the state. In the face of tremendous government hostility, Maasai activists resorted to increasingly confrontational strategies, especially court cases to demand rights and recognition. But, as described in previous chapters, they faced failure after failure—from a lackluster effort to inform the revised land laws, to the state-sanctioned transfer of prime grazing land to wealthy Arab hunters (dubbed “Loliondogate” in the Tanzanian press), to the mass eviction of Maasai from Mkomazi to make way for yet another game reserve. For these and other reasons, Maasai activists eventually decided to refocus their advocacy efforts from the international arena to the national arena. They sought ways to engage rather than fight the government, to be more pragmatic and less political, to practice what one activist called “advocacy by engagement.” As part of the conscious effort to find less confrontational and more effective ways to engage state policy (and policymakers) in Tanzania, Maasai activists and NGO leaders reframed their political struggles from the language of “indigenous rights” to that of “pastoralist livelihoods” and started calling themselves civil society organizations (CSOs) instead of 158 Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous NGOs. After briefly exploring the reasons for these changes, this chapter assesses the effectiveness of these new positionings for Maasai political struggles through a close examination of their efforts since 2005 to inform and improve a new livestock policy proposed by the Tanzanian state. The Limits and Lessons of Indigenous Politics According to Maasai activists themselves, perhaps the most important reason for replacing the language of “indigenous rights” with that of “pastoralist livelihoods” was in response to the vehement hostility of the Tanzanian government over the widespread international recognition and acceptance of Maasai claims of “being indigenous.” As a Maasai activist told participants in a 2005 workshop: As many of you remember, about four or five years ago we had a big debate about the concept of “indigenous people.” We had several organizations that identified themselves as “indigenous organizations ” and many discussions. But at the level of the nation, there was lots of discussion about who are “indigenous people,” since everyone was claiming to be one. Most politicians ruled out the phrase “indigenous peoples.” As a result of this resistance and hostility, he continued, most leaders had agreed to “leave the phrase ‘indigenous peoples’ out of their policy recommendations .” “If we start debating these words now,” he added, “we will not finish today—especially the phrase ‘indigenous peoples.’”1 The Tanzanian government was suspicious of the very terms of their mobilization , especially the unsettling fusion of assertions of cultural difference with demands for collective rights. By organizing around the identity claims of “being indigenous,” premised in part on ethnicity, Maasai NGOs revitalized ethnic identifications and challenged democratic liberalism’s championing of the individual rights and responsibilities of “citizens” with their claims of collective grievances and rights (cf. Muehlebach 2001). The Tanzanian government was wary of appearing to endorse “ethnic favoritism” (Anonymous 2000:8), equated political organizing along ethnic lines with “tribalism,” and feared that such ethnic mobilization could strengthen political opposition, produce economic and political instability, or even foster violence (see, e.g., Neumann 1995). [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:41 GMT) Repositionings 159 Thus a key reason for shifting to discourses about pastoralist livelihoods was to seek less confrontational approaches to influence government policies and practices. According to a Maasai activist I will call Samuel, “Before, we had lots of court cases against the government . . . but they were not very fruitful .”2 Samuel is trained as a lawyer and was the head of one of the pastoralist umbrella groups when I interviewed him. Initially, he was a strong proponent of indigenous rights, including being an active member of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Africa (OIPA; see chapter 1). But in recent years, Samuel has all but abandoned the rhetoric of indigenous rights for the...