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4 w The Time of Disasters Creating Wilderness, 1840–1920 In the late nineteenth century a series of disasters brought significant challenges to the imagined ecological, social, and sacred landscapes of the western Serengeti. As in other parts of East Africa, drought, epidemic disease, interethnic warfare, and ecological collapse marked western Serengeti incorporation into both a regional system controlled by the Maasai and a global Indian Ocean trading system. It is in the oral traditions about the time of the disasters that we can see how the generative principles embedded in older core spatial images get recontextualized in new kinds of oral traditions and how new core spatial images of loss and dispersal are generated. It is here where the static ways of seeing the landscape presented in earlier chapters take on historical motion. Western Serengeti peoples successfully responded to the disasters by integrating the generative principles of core spatial images from older imagined landscapes into new historical realities that radically transformed their societies. This time period also introduces a new way of seeing the landscape from the Maasai, which turned the older ecological landscapes of interdependence into a system dominated by pastoralist control. Maa-speaking people came to eastern Africa from southern Sudan sometime during the first millennium CE, gradually specializing in pastoralism as the defining mark of their ethnic identity—in contrast to Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and Okiek-speaking hunter-gatherers. Maasai defined a landscape centered in the plains but reaching out to incorporate other ecologies into its system through raiding.1 Western Serengeti peoples both accepted and resisted this landscape by integrating it into their own understandings and strategies of survival as well as generating new core spatial images. The time of the disasters also left a significant impact on the appearance of the Serengeti: the dispersed pattern of homesteads was consolidated into fortified settlements, large areas were 135 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. depopulated and recolonized by the bush, epidemic disease killed wild animals as well as livestock, and an empty wilderness was created where people had once lived. Dateable history from the perspective of western Serengeti oral traditions begins in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the oral traditions discussed previously provide no dateable account of events or personalities, elders narrate the stories of this period, including battles with Maasai, suffering during famines and migration to Sukuma, with elaborately precise details that written sources corroborate. This historical moment, when western Serengeti traditions became historically grounded in verifiable events, represented a time of transition in social identity. Judging from observation of other societies, because specific social groups transmit oral traditions to promote their own interests, then groups developing new forms of social identity will transmit new kinds of oral traditions generated from recontextualized earlier material. Among societies with centralized states, the traditions of historical time often begin with the consolidation of the kingdom under a known king, even if recontextualized genealogies extend the antiquity, and thus the legitimacy, of the kingdom in oral tradition .2 In the oral traditions of the Maasai, historical time begins with the leadership of prophets in the late eighteenth century.3 Historical time in the western Serengeti begins with the events of the disasters, representing a rupture in previous ways of understanding social time and in social identity.4 In addition to recontextualizing older core spatial images, the oral traditions describing the disasters incorporated new core spatial images of loss and dispersal . An Ishenyi example of a disaster narrative provides a view of what this rupture in time meant for historical consciousness and local interpretations of the events of the late nineteenth century in terms of past landscapes. The story begins with familiar core spatial images of the interactions of herders and farmers and the sacred places where spirits are propitiated. It takes place at Nyiberekira, a settlement marked by Bwinamoki, a tall rock outcropping that served as an outlook for Maasai raiders and associated with a pool on the Grumeti River, an erisambwa site of ancestral spirits that today lies within the western boundaries of Serengeti National Park.5 It ends with the necessity to leave that fertile place and the dispersal of Ishenyi people. Mikael Magessa Sarota, the son of one colonial Ishenyi chief, told this version of the story that is illustrated in map 7...

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