Being Masai, Becoming Indigenous:Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (review)

Dorothy L. Hodgson here offers an ethnohistorical case study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that claim to represent the Maasai people of Tanzania. She provides historical and contemporary dynamics "of the involvement with an eventual disengagement from the indigenous rights movement by Maasai from Tanzania" (p. 3). She uses her position as a participant-observer, interlocutor, development worker, and friend to carry out this research (p. 17).

For this study, Hodgson interviewed Maasai representatives who were participating in local and international conferences. The book is divided into five chapters, which look at the alliances that NGOs claim to represent the Maasai have had with the Tanzanian nation over a twenty-year period and their attempts to frame their demands within a justice discourse, and challenges that the Maasai are facing, including forced marriages, a lack of schools, women's rights, and work opportunities. The first half of the study is dedicated to analyzing the attempts by NGOs that represent the Maasai to name themselves indigenous, hunter-gatherers, or pastoralists. In the foregoing context, indigenous refers to "communities, peoples and nations . . . which have a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, [and] consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them" (p. 38).

By representing themselves as indigenous, Maasai NGOs believe they share the same experiences as Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in the United States. After a visit to Native American reservations in the United States, an NGO leader, Moringe Ole Parkipuny, was "struck by the similarities of our problems. I looked at the Windrock, the poor state of the roads and reservations, it was just like the cattle trails in Maasailand. But this was in the United States!" (p. 28). Maasai NGOs use international gatherings sponsored by the United Nations to make the international community aware of their plight. What are their demands? First, they want the right to determine who uses their land and other resources so the state can stop leasing them out. Second, they want their culture to be allowed to flourish as they see fit. Third, they want to have educational and medical facilities These demands are not different from those of the majority of the Tanzanian people.

Why would donors help NGOs that claim to represent the Maasai? Hodgson conveniently ignores the role of resources in Maasailand, such as minerals and the flora and fauna. It is doubtful that donors would fund these NGOs as a feel-good effort. Through the distorted lenses—even though she claims that this is an ethnohistorical study, the history is very short—that she uses to study the Maasai, she fails to answer a crucial question: what is the issue? Is it that the abundant land that made nomadic life possible in the past is no longer available? or is it that the state and other cultures are forcing the Maasai to change? The Maasai of Tanzania should learn from the Maasai of Kenya, who have the right to manage major national parks, such as Maasai Mara. Instead of becoming victims or pawns, first of the anthropologists, then of the international donors, the Maasai of Kenya have learned to take the best that the modern world has to offer (education, health facilities, amenities) to create a space for themselves, both as Maasai and as Kenyans. Indeed, the Maasai of Tanzania should learn from the experience of their Kenyan brothers and sisters, who would tell them that one has to change with the times, and that such change involves taking the best of both worlds. Only people willing to change will survive. After all, the Maasai are warriors; as all good warriors, they know that they must change their hunting strategy to suit the circumstances.

This study borders on nostalgia for the Maasai as noble savages who happen to be victims. It evokes a dangerous type of ethnonationalism, which is currently aggressively promoted...