Ethno-Erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya by George Paul Meiu (review)

The last few years have witnessed increased scholarly interest in personal relationships established by African peoples. Working to complicate the long-standing yet limited historiographical focus between European men and African women, George Paul Meiu provides a beautifully written and examination of morans, a small but highly visible group of male Samburu (a northern Kenyan ethnic group), who travel to the Kenyan coast hoping to profit from tourists along the beach by winning the affection of and obtaining monetary support from European and American women. Through this examination, Meiu develops the term ethno-erotic economies to describe the commodification of moran sexuality, as its members strive to secure foreign relationships and patronage while spending their profits in the Samburu homeland, thus shaping "subjectivities, identities, and [the] social world" (p. 33). The topic has been publicized in popular accounts, mostly written by European women capitalizing on the going-native genre, as they marry Samburu men and live in Kenya, but Meiu provides a needed scholarly counternarrative; more importantly, he connects Samburu accounts of this phenomenon to local, national, and global economic and social changes.

Meiu's extensive anthropological observations and numerous participant interviews elicit fascinating anecdotes and case studies, which illustrate the culture of morans with regard to economies, genders, and ethnicities. His examination of this culture extends our understanding of the coexistence of African sexual and economic relationships beyond the scope of recent works by Jennifer Cole (his dissertation advisor), Lynn Thomas, Carina Rey, and others. His work provides an important answer to the call by Rachel Jean-Baptiste (though too recently published to be cited by him) to examine how "African historical actors thought of and embodied their sexuality" (2014:14). Thus, Meiu provides a study that helps scholars move away from the near-constant examination of sexual relations between European men and African women, mainly in the colonial period, this reversal hopefully being part of a growing historiographical trend.

After providing historical context for the local drought and turbulent global economic forces of the 1970s and 1980s, which essentially destroyed the cattle-based Samburu community, Meiu provides thematic chapters that examine moran life on the Kenyan coast and in the Samburu homeland, before detailing an extensive ceremony associated with adultery and the reconfiguration of authority that Meiu enjoyed the good fortune to witness. Meiu is at his strongest when outlining the tensions that define the moran lifestyle and providing the historical context that created the conditions for morans—including the invention of local traditions and Kenya's transformation into an international tourist destination during the 1980s. With few other economic opportunities, morans quickly realized an opportunity to gain wealth and commodify their culture, as they dressed up in so-called traditional cloth, danced in hotels, and sold traditional goods on the beach. Through performing an Africanness that tourists expect to encounter, they leveraged their interactions into the exchange of money and the formation of relationships with Europeans.

In subsequent chapters, Meiu highlights other tensions associated with being a member of the moran community—including generational freedom, set against the near-constant attempts of older men to reassert their power. The economic and sexual freedom that morans enjoy on the coast remains limited and belittled in their homeland. They remain highly integrated into the global tourism economy while firmly tied to the traditions of their homeland, howsoever novel. As Meiu argues, morans are both "desirable and derided" (p. 64), and their individualism is contrasted with their quickly developing solidarity, exemplified by ethnic associations designed to foster cooperation, guide newcomers, and allow elders some degree of control—a factor that emerges as a recurring theme throughout the book. Perhaps most importantly, Meiu demonstrates that the morans' quest for wealth is often fed by a desire to achieve respectability and become important members of the community; however, the greater their success in bringing money back to the homeland, the weaker "their claims to inclusion in the Samburu social world" (p. 243...