Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World

Conclusion: What Do You Want?

X Conclusion What Do You Want? One day in 2006 a prominent Maasai activist told me a story about a recent meeting that he had had with the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania. After my friend made a long presentation about the struggles of pastoralist organizations and activists to retain their land and protect their livelihoods and the anti-pastoralist bias of most government policies and practices, the ambassador replied, “What do you want?” My friend then described a similar meeting with representatives from IFAD, after the successful intervention of pastoralists to revise the policy. “What do you want?” they asked. He also met with ambassador of Japan. The ambassador asked, “What are these things called pastoralists?” My friend replied “They are people, not things.” Although the ambassador did not speak English well, he listened to my friend. And then he asked, “What do you want as pastoralists?” My friend later shared these stories at a workshop convened by PINGOs for pastoralist activists, members of Parliament, and sympathetic partners and donors to debate strategies for more effective advocacy with the Tanzanian state. “We are not prepared for this question,” he concluded. The repetition of this question, “what do you want?” suggests that, over the years, Maasai activists have done a better job of describing what they do not want (such as land alienation and forceful settlement in ranches) than what they do want. One reason is that they were almost always forced to respond to policies and practices that they perceived as harmful in some way, rather than have the time and political space to devise and propose policies of their own for the government to consider. But the dilemma of not being prepared with a positive, coherent plan was also the product of the “precarious alliances,” “structural predicaments,” and social frictions and factions described in this book. The book has traced the emergence, consolidation, and transformations of Maasai NGOs over a twenty-year period as they positioned and repositioned 212 Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous themselves to advocate for the recognition of pastoralists’ economic, political, and cultural rights and their secure access to resources. The struggles of pastoralists to adopt and create new forms of collective belonging and political action have taken place in the context of a specific historical conjuncture of several political-economic processes: the adoption and implementation of neoliberal political and economic “reforms” by the Tanzanian state, the reframing of donor development agendas to target “grassroots” organizations, and the emergence of new opportunities for transnational advocacy and connection through the expansion of the indigenous rights movement. Through the formation of NGOs and their involvement with the indigenous rights movement, Maasai and other pastoralists sought to simultaneously challenge and circumvent the Tanzanian state in order to seek political and economic empowerment in the face of their long history of disenfranchisement and marginalization . In so doing, they confronted a drastically restructured political and economic landscape shaped by democratization, economic liberalization, and decentralization that had transformed their relationship with the government , donors, and their communities. The structural predicaments faced by these NGOs at this time were numerous , intense, and unrelenting. Of course, translocal and especially transnational organizing of any kind must confront similar problems (Brown and Fox 1998; Edelman 2001; McAdam et al. 1996). As the vast literature on social movements makes clear, building political alliances, or “umbrella organizations ,” is no easy matter, and sustaining them over time is even more difficult. Members must share a common cause or objective that is sufficiently unifying and inspiring, compromise over differences in their particular agendas, share information and resources, and seek ways to maintain their visibility and momentum. Moreover, all movements confront spatial and temporal challenges to their long-term viability: they must create the necessary mechanisms to reach, engage, and coordinate groups and individuals who are often dispersed in different places, and they must negotiate shifts, both gradual and sudden, in the internal dynamics of their members as well as local, regional, national, and transnational economic and political landscapes over time (cf. Li 2001a; Saugestad 2001). The structural predicaments of the Maasai NGOs, however, were unique in some ways. The historical conjuncture between the intensified inequalities experienced by marginalized minorities such as Maasai as a result of neoliberal economic interventions; donor fantasies about, and expectations of, the possi- Conclusion 213 bilities for NGOs and civil society; and the transnational prominence, appeal, and strength of the indigenous rights movement was...