第一代写网专业提供英国牛津大学政治学硕士论文代写服务ublished by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
Advance Access Publication 13 April 2006
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES:
DIFFERENCE, INEQUALITY, AND THE
GLOBALIZATION OF EAST AFRICAN
IDENTITY POLITICS
JIM IGOE
ABSTRACT
Although the term ‘indigenous’ implies a state preceding that which isforeign or acquired, indigenous movements in Africa are a recent phenomenon.Drawing from the author’s research of the Tanzanian indigenous
peoples’ movement in the 1990s, this article argues that indigenous identityin Tanzania does not represent miraculously preserved pre-colonialtraditions or even a special sort of marginalization. Rather, it reflects theconvergence of existing identity categories with shifting global structuresof development and governance. Specifically, it reflects a combination of‘cultural distinctiveness’ and effective strategies of extraversion in thecontext of economic and political liberalization. The Maasai, who are‘culturally distinct’, and who have a long tradition of enrolling outsiders intheir cause, naturally dominate this movement.
BETWEEN 1991 AND 1997, I CONDUCTED ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN NORTHERN
TANZANIA, primarily in Maasai herding communities. Throughout thetwentieth century, Maasai communities have seen their territory taken overby national parks, large-scale commercial agriculture, and small-scale subsistenceagriculturalists displaced from neighbouring highland areas. Thesetransformations have made extensive livestock herding an untenable economicactivity. My time in the field was one of especially intensive change, asTanzania liberalized its economy. Throughout the 1990s, foreign investors
flocked to Tanzania in pursuit of cheap land and other natural resources.They were joined by Tanzanian elites, finally free of the investment restrictionsthat had been imposed by Tanzania’s previously socialist government.1
My research examined the cultural and political responses of Maasaicommunities to economic and political liberalization, especially grassrootsJim Igoe is an assistant professor of anthropologyat the University of Colorado at Denver.
1. United Republic of Tanzania, Report of the Presidential Commission for Enquiry into LandTenure Matters (Government Publishers, Dar es Salaam, 1993); Issa Shivji, Not Yet Democracy
(IIED, London, 1998).400 AFRICAN AFFAIRSsocial movements resisting the alienation of traditional grazing land.Responding to new opportunities presented by political liberalization, leadersof these movements established a variety of officially registered nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).2 I worked closely with these nascentorganizations: attending their meetings and interviewing their leaders, staff,workers, and targeted constituents. I also spent time with Western donors:observing their expectations of and interactions with Maasai NGOs.
Finally, I spent about half of my field time in the rural communities thatMaasai NGOs represented and served, interviewing and interacting withtheir intended beneficiaries.
As an anthropologist interested in identity and globalization, I wasincreasingly struck by the ways in which Maasai NGO leaders were transcendinglocal ethnic categories. By 1993, Maasai NGOs were no longermerely Maasai NGOs. They were part of a broader network of ethnically
based NGOs, which made up the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement.This movement also included NGOs representing the Barabaig, a
herding people whose lifestyle and material culture are similar to those ofthe Maasai, as well as an NGO representing Hadzabe hunter/gatherers.These organizations worked together through a forum called Pastoralistand Indigenous NGOs (PINGOs) — established in 1994.3PINGOs leaders invoked experiences of indigenous peoples around theworld to articulate their struggles and identities and described themselvesas part of a global indigenous peoples’ movement. In this capacity, theyparticipated in the UN Forum on Indigenous Issues and sponsored highprofilepublic events celebrating the UN Decade for Indigenous Peoples(1994–2004). They engaged in exchanges with indigenous communities inCanada, Australia, and Latin America.4 PINGOs’ office was decorated
with posters of indigenous movements from East Timor, Chiapas, and theCircumpolar North. PINGOs was also networking with indigenous movementsthat were occurring throughout Africa.5 In 2000, PINGOs sponsoreda regional gathering of indigenous peoples from eastern and southern Africa.
The recent self-identification of PINGOs members as indigenous, andtheir active promotion of African indigenous movements, highlights a centralparadox of the category ‘indigenous’ as it is applied to Africa today. Theterm ‘indigenous’ implies a primordial state, necessarily preceding that
/which is foreign or acquired. And yet the idea of indigenous Africans does
2. Prior to legislative changes in the 1990s, Tanzanian NGOs were practically non-existent.
3. The term ‘pastoralist’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘herder’ in this article.
4. Jim Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society and the Tanzanian pastoral NGO movement’ (BostonUniversity, unpublished PhD dissertation, 2000).
5. See Hanne Veber and Espen Waehle, ‘Introduction’, in Veber et al. (eds), Never DrinkFrom the Same Cup (International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs [IWGIA], Copenhagen,1993); Alan Bernard and Justin Kenrick (eds), Africa’s Indigenous Peoples (University of
Edinburgh African Studies, Edinburgh, 2001).BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 401not represent some sort of miraculously preserved pre-colonial existence.n fact, it is an identity category that would not have made a great deal ofsense prior to the turn of the 1990s. This article begins by asking, therefore,why the indigenous category is salient in Tanzania at this particular
historical moment.
Engaging with this question will contribute to two related areas ofAfricanist scholarship. The first is a body of historical and anthropological
literature that examines the ways in which African ethnic categories havebeen shaped by colonial encounters and post-colonial state formation.6
This is a literature that is especially rich for the Maasai.7 It provides anuanced analysis of how the formation and maintenance of Maasai identityworked in the past, but little about how these processes have continued
into the present. The first contribution of this article, therefore, is to illuminatethe continuities of East African identity politics from colonialism tothe contemporary indigenous peoples’ movements.Its second contribution is to link the dynamics of African identity politicsto a broader literature on the dynamics of African politics in general, especiallythe ways in which the power of African elites has been consistentlytied to their adeptness at engaging in what Bayart has termed ‘strategies of
extraversion’.8 These strategies represent more than just external networking,a common part of most political activity; they are symptomatic of apolitical system that is externally oriented as a result of long-standingdependency on external resources. African elites have long derived powerand authority from their access to external institutional structures, whichfrequently means access to resources that can be used to build and maintainpatronage structures. This position is of course tenuous, because withdrawalof external support can frequently result in the decline of particularelites. It also means that African political systems frequently morph inresponse to external changes. For instance, Africa’s recent NGO revolutionmay be viewed from this perspective as an opportunistic response tothe changing structures of international aid.9
6. Especially Leroy Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, CA, 1993).
7. Works on the Maasai culminate with Richard Waller and Thomas Spear (eds), BeingMaasai (James Currey, London, 1993) and Dorothy Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors (JamesCurrey, London, 2001).
8. Jean-François Bayart, ‘Africa in the world: A history of extraversion’, African Affairs 99,395 (2000), pp. 217–67.
9. Michael Maren, The Road to Hell (The Free Press, New York, NY, 1997); Patrick Chabaland Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as political instrument (James Currey, London,1999). While many African NGOs are not opportunistic, the popular perception is that theypresent an obstacle to more legitimate organizations: see Jim Igoe and Tim Kelsall, ‘Introduction:Between a rock and a hard place’, in Igoe and Kelsall (eds), Between a Rock and a HardPlace: African NGOs, donors, and the state (Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, 2005),pp. 9–10.
402 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Definitions of indigenous, as applied to East Africa, implicitly stand outsideof these historical and political processes. As such, they elidethe relationshipsof African indigenous politics to broader political trends, fundingshifts, and institutional transformations. Unpacking the current salience ofthe indigenous category in East African identity politics necessitates a close
examination of these relationships and reveals two fundamental aspects ofEast African identity politics: first, the ways in which certain identity categorieshave become increasingly tied to a global network of institutions,ideas, and money; and second, the ways in which these categories relate tothe formations of economic/social classes that are uniquely African, butwhich have their roots in experiences of colonialism and aid dependency.
The indigenous frame applied to East AfricaThe global indigenous peoples’ movement emerged primarily from the
experiences of the first peoples of countries now dominated by majoritypopulations of European descent. It was only in the early 1990s that this
movement expanded to include peoples from Africa and Asia.10 Thisexpansion in turn necessitated expanded definitions of the ‘indigenous’
category to account for the experiences of peoples who lived in placeswhere descent could not clearly confer indigenous status.11 The vast majorityof Africans, for instance, are descended from the continent’s original
peoples, leading some observers to question the appropriateness of someAfrican groups having special indigenous status. The ensuing debates have
been discussed at length elsewhere and need not detain us here.12 For thepurposes of this article, I am concerned primarily with the central featuresof the definitions and conceptual frames that emerged from this process.
Because of its increasing diversity, the global indigenous peoples’ movementhas come to be defined as a movement of ‘culturally distinct’ non-
Western societies. By virtue of their historical resistance to colonialism,
state formation, and global capitalism, these societies have managed toremain connected to their traditional homelands, while maintaining theircultural traditions. The traditions and livelihoods that they have worked sohard to protect have become a stigma in the context of the modern nationstatesin which they now reside. Anthropologist Ronald Niezen, a longtimeobserver of the global indigenous peoples’ movement, describes its10. Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,2003).
11. See Report of the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and IWGIA, Copenhagen,2005), p. 87.
12. See especially, Julian Burger, Report From the Frontier (Zed Books, London 1987); DorothyHodgson, ‘Introduction: Comparative perspectives on the indigenous rights movements inAfrica and the Americas’, American Anthropologist 104, 4 (2002), pp. 1037–49; Adam Kuper,
‘Return of the native’, Current Anthropology 44 (2003), pp. 389–402; and Niezen, Origins.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 403constituents thus: ‘Their territories are imposed upon by extractive industries;their beliefs and rituals imposed upon by those who would convertthem; and their independence is imposed upon by states striving for social
and political control. They are those people whose position in the modernworld is least tenable’.13
This description is consistent with the ways in which Tanzanian activistshave come to identify with the global indigenous peoples’ movement and
define their own indigeneity. To quote Maasai leader Moringe Parkipunythe experiences of the Maasai and other similar groups match ‘the plight ofindigenous peoples throughout the world’, especially as they are deniedtheir ‘cultural identity and the land that constitutes the foundation of theirexistence’.14 African indigenous activists and their Western supportersdescribe indigenous Africans as ‘distinct cultural minorities who have beenhistorically repressed by majority African populations who control the state
apparatus’.15 These groups, according to international observers, have becomepart of a ‘self-ascribed polythetic class’ that is global in scope.16 This classhas emerged through the interaction of indigenous representatives at internationalfora promoting indigenous sovereignty. They attend these fora‘with little doubt about their own status as “indigenous”, and few opendoubts about the claims of others’.17
This process of mutual recognition apparently alleviates the need forpedantic discussions about which African groups are indigenous. However,
the idea of indigenous peoples as a ‘self-identified polythetic class’ is onlyunproblematic so long as it ignores the question of access to these forawhere claims to indigenous status are recognized. At the very least, this
access requires an awareness that such fora exist, as well as knowledge ofthe indigenous category and its implications for local resource struggles. Italso requires access to rather substantial monetary resources. In Africa, these
kinds of resources are most commonly received as aid. In the context of theTanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement, aid is often tied to recipients
13. Niezen, Origins, p. 5.
14. Moringe Parkipuny, ‘The human rights situation of indigenous peoples in Africa’,Fourth World Journal 4, 1 (1989), p. 3. Also see Daniel Murumbi, ‘The concept of indigenousin Africa’, Indigenous Affairs 1 (1994), pp. 52–7.
15. Dorothy Hodgson, ‘Precarious alliances: The cultural politics and structural predicamentsof the indigenous rights movement in Tanzania’, American Anthropologist 104, 4(2002), p. 1086. Also see Parkipuny, ‘The human rights situation’; Murumbi, ‘The conceptof indigenous’; Marcus Colchester and Larry Lohman, The Struggle for the Land and the Fateof the Forests (Zed Books, London, 1993); Gunvor Berge, ‘Reflections on the concept of i/ndigenouspeoples in Africa’ and Mohamed Salih, ‘Indigenous people and the state’, both inVeber et al. (eds), Never Drink, pp. 235–46; 121–39.
16. A polythetic class is defined in terms of criteria that are neither necessary nor sufficient.See Burger, Report, p. 7; Sadrrudin Khan and Hassan bin Talal, Indigenous Peoples: A globalquest for justice (Zed Books, London, 1987), p. 8; UN High Commission for Human Rights,
Convention no. 169 (Geneva 1989), p. 2; Marcus Colchester, ‘Indigenous rights and collectiveconsciousness, Anthropology Today 18 (2003), p. 2; and Niezen, Origins, pp. 18–23.
17. Niezen, Origins, p. 21.404 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
第一代写网专业提供英国牛津大学政治学硕士论文代写服务meeting certain cultural profiles. As such, being indigenous in Tanzania is.
The idea of ‘cultural distinctiveness’ is in turn closely tied to the putative
dichotomy between African indigenous minorities and national mainstream
populations. This dichotomy is essential at the international level,
where the idea of a ‘national mainstream’ presents an implicit analogy to
European-descended majorities in countries such as Canada and Australia.
As such, it presents a discursive common ground between indigenous
Africans and indigenous peoples from other parts of the world. Unfortunately,
it also flies in the face of much of the literature on African political
systems. Most African states are not controlled by ‘national majorities’,
but by elite minorities who frequently run roughshod over the politically
and economically marginal peoples who constitute the majority of their
citizenry.18
The recent history of Tanzania provides an instructive example of this
relationship. Between 1973 and 1976, the Tanzanian government forcefully
relocated millions of rural people as part of its socialist policy of villagization
without regard for their customary land tenure practices.19 When
socialism ended, the impacts of displacement remained and were greatly
exacerbated by the explosion of foreign investment that quickly followed in
its wake.20 In the early 1990s, Tanzanian president Ali Hassan Mwinyi
responded to this crisis by appointing a commission of experts to assess the
country’s land problems and make recommendations. The commission found
that ‘rural folk holding land under customary tenure have no security. Their
lands are under constant threat of alienation by state organs ostensibly in
“the public interest” but often in favor of well-connected outsiders’.21
Unfortunately, the plight of these millions of impoverished rural peoples
cannot be brought into focus within the conceptual parameters of the
‘indigenous’ frame as it is applied to Tanzania. The Tanzanian indigenous
peoples’ movement represents only about half a million rural Tanzanians,
and it is unlikely that more than a few hundred of them actually self-identify
as indigenous through participation in NGOs and international fora.22
The members of this group have combined their ‘cultural distinctiveness’
18. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa (Longman, London, 1993); Mahmood Mamdani,
Citizen and Subject (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1996); Issa Shivji, ‘The politics
of liberalization in Tanzania’, in Horace Campbell and Howard Stein (eds), The IMF and
Tanzania (Natprint, Harare, 1991), pp. 67–85.
19. Because this relocation happened so quickly and unsystematically, precise numbers are
unavailable. Estimates range from 10 to 20 million people. See Kjell Havenick, Tanzania: The
limits to development from above (Mkuki na Nyota, Dar es Salaam, 1993), p. 47, and United
Republic of Tanzania, Report of the Presidential Commission, p. 43.
20. Jim Igoe, Conservation and Globalization (Wadsworth, Riverside, CA, 2004), pp. 106–9.
21. Shivji, Not Yet Democracy, pp. 11–12.
22. Cf. Hodgson, ‘Precarious alliances’, p. 1088.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 405
with effective external networking to gain international support for the
local land struggles in which their communities are embroiled. Over time,
however, this external networking has come to represent a strategy of
extraversion. A small group of NGO leaders has converted access to funding
and other material resources into local political influence.23 Even
within this group, the ability to claim indigenous status is far from evenly
distributed, much less the connections and ability necessary to translate
these claims into economic and political capital.
Advocates of African indigenous movements argue that these aspects of
African indigenous movements are less important than the fact that they
bring international support to marginal rural communities and help them
regain their land.24 Unfortunately, recent events indicate that the pursuit
of such strategies in East Africa has not been successful. Cases filed by
Barabaig communities against parastatal wheat farms and a case filed by a
group of Maasai challenging their eviction from the Mkomazi game reserve
both resulted in disappointing outcomes.25 More recently, the Kenyan
high court rejected a bid by the Maasai Civil Society Forum to reclaim
land leased to British settlers in 1884.
Whether or not a particular category or cultural marker enjoys currency
in a particular context is influenced by changes in policies, institutions, and
ideologies that are occurring at multiple and interconnected levels. Illuminating
the ways in which these processes are obscured by category dichotomies
will require an analytical approach that engages shifting relationships
of identity and inequality in different times and places and multiple scales
analysis. Such an approach is also essential for understanding the salience
of the indigenous category in East Africa today. Such is the central task of
the following section.
From categories to processes
Understanding the relationship of bureaucratic structures to indigenous
identities in East Africa is greatly facilitated by the work of Fredrick Barth.
Barth’s seminal work on the production and reproduction of ethnicity has
had significant influence on the historical and anthropological analysis of
Maasai ethnicity. Spear, for example, talks extensively about the significance
of Barth’s work for studies of Maasai identity politics — concluding
23. Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’ and Jim Igoe, ‘Scaling up civil society: Donor money,
NGOs, and the pastoralist land rights movement in Tanzania’, Development and Change 34, 5
(2003), pp. 863–86.
24. See responses to Kuper’s ‘Return of the native’, especially that by Steve Robins.
25. Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation (James Currey, London, 2002); Igoe, ‘Scaling
up’, p. 879; and Jim Igoe, ‘Power and force in Tanzanian civil society’, in Igoe and Kelsall
(eds), Between a Rock and a Hard Place, p. 126.
406 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
with Barth’s central insight that ‘ethnicity at its most basic establishes and
controls access to critical resources’.26
Critics of Barth’s early work emphasize that it was too localized and
placed too much emphasis on ecology. In response to these critiques, and
in an effort to understand this increasingly complex order, Barth suggests
that we conceptualize the reproduction of ethnicity as occurring on three
separate, but interrelated, levels: the micro-, median-, and macro-levels.27
The micro-level is popularly known as ‘the grassroots’. Here, people’s
experiences and relationships are shaped by social demands and cultural values.
The salient feature of this level is that it is characterized by face-to-face
relationships, mediated through institutions and processes that people know
and understand. Regarding the macro-level, Barth originally conceptualized
this as including only the state. However, this should be expanded to include
transnational institutional structures such as the United Nations, the World
Bank, multinational corporations, and international NGOs. This level is
characterized by bureaucratic structures that operate according to rules, regulations,
and funding priorities. Actors at this level control money and
information that are often crucially important to indigenous communities.
They also generate ideologies and discourses such as nationalism, free markets,
democracy, and indigenism. Knowledge and effective use of these discourses
are often a prerequisite for gaining access to money and information.
Through colonialism, capitalist expansion, and state formation, indigenous
communities around the world became more and more restricted, less and less
self-sufficient, and more and more dependent on macro-level structures. Furthermore,
micro-level institutions were usually not suited to the articulation of
local communities to global networks. Median-level structures emerged in
response to this need. In many cases, Europeans imposed these structures in
their efforts to render indigenous communities more amenable to ‘rational
administration’. In others, they emerged from the efforts of indigenous activists
seeking to engage with macro-level structures. Sometimes, both occurred
simultaneously. Median-level structures include tribal governments, other
kinds of local government structures, and indigenous NGOs. Median-level
actors are often under significant pressure to simplify the complex problems of
their constituent communities in terms that make sense to macro-level actors.
Because of the linkages that this level provides between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’,
its role in African indigenous politics is extraordinarily important.
Barth’s model is especially useful for conceptualizing the central role of
indigenous leaders faced with the task of mediating between the ‘grassroots’
26. Thomas Spear, ‘Introduction’ in Spear and Waller (eds), Being Maasai ( James Currey,
London 1993), pp. 1–18.
27. Fredrick Barth, ‘Enduring and emerging issues in the analysis of ethnicity’, in Hans
Vermeulen and Cora Govers (eds), The Anthropology of Ethnicity (Het Spinhuis, Amsterdam,
1994), pp. 11–32.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 407
and macro-level structures. The possibility of people ‘becoming indigenous’
in Tanzania reflects a convergence of events at both the micro- and macrolevels,
which called forth new types of median-level structures that were
initially accessible to local people and amenable to international lobbying
and fund-raising activities.
Before turning to the specifics of these histories, a final aspect of Barth’s
work needs to be noted here. Several of Barth’s students, influenced by his
ideas of ethnic reproduction, came to see indigenous activism ‘as a subject for
research and action’ in the late 1960s.28 Several went on to found the International
Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) — thereby becoming
part of Barth’s macro-level. The IWGIA played a central supporting role in
bringing indigenous activism to the world stage in the 1970s, leading to the
creation of the UN Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003. The IWGIA is
especially significant in the context of African indigenous movements.
According to its own literature, one of the organization’s central missions is to
‘stimulate indigenous self-organization’.29 In 1993, representatives of Maasai
NGOs participated in a workshop organized by the IWGIA and funded by
the Danish foreign ministry. The purpose of this workshop was to ‘explore
the status and meaning of “indigenous peoples” in an African context’.30
Significantly, definitions and criteria of African indigenous peoples that
emerged from this exercise are substantially similar — if not identical — to
the definitions and criteria used by African indigenous activists and their
Western supporters to the present day. This would be unproblematic if
these exercises were a neutral process of helping certain African groups to
recognize their own indigeneity and to organize around this definition
according to international standards and legal mechanisms.31 Unfortunately,
this emphasis on international standards and universal human rights
misses out on the production and reproduction of inequalities and social
classes that are specifically African — and the role that the ‘stimulation of
indigenous self-organization’ might play in these processes. Understanding
the dynamics of the Tanzanian indigenous people’s movement requires
examining the roots of identities that are currently considered indigenous.
Micro-level histories
The historical and anthropological literature on the emergence of Maasai
identity — and its close association with a ‘pure pastoralist ideal’ — illuminates
a great deal about the prominence of Maasai leaders in the Tanzania
28. François Morin and Bernard d’Anglure, ‘Ethnicity as a political tool for indigenous peoples’,
in Govers and Vermuelen (eds), The Politics of Ethnic Consciousness (MacMillan Press,
London, 1997), p. 161.
29. IWGIA, ‘Editorial’, Indigenous Affairs 3 (1998), p. 4.
30. Veber and Waehle, ‘Introduction’, Never Drink, p. 5.
31. Report of the International Commission, p. 101.
408 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
indigenous peoples’ movement and even in regional indigenous initiatives
for eastern and southern Africa.
The ideal of people living exclusively from livestock keeping has always
been difficult to achieve and tenuous to maintain. Nevertheless, it remains
an essential element of Maasai identity, especially as projected to outsiders.
Significantly, definitions of indigenous Africans always stress that they are
pastoralists and hunter/gatherers. In Tanzania, especially, there can be no
doubt that the pastoral ideal dominates the movement, even though
increasing numbers of Maasai now practice agriculture — and many have
for generations. Although hunting and gathering are also invoked in definitions
of indigeneity, hunter/gatherers are not well represented in the movement
(discussed below).
This pastoral ideal emerged in the regional cultural economy of East
Africa some time in the late eighteenth century. The possibility of specialized
pastoralism appears to have emerged during this period through innovations
in weaponry and social organization.32 These innovations gave
some groups advantages in controlling coveted pasture and water resource
in the central Rift Valley. It also allowed them to launch successful raids
against neighbouring groups, thereby continuously increasing the size of their
herds.
It is likely that Maasai identity began to emerge in the context of these
struggles, as struggles between Maa-speaking groups culminated in a series
of conflicts remembered as The Iloikop Wars.33 Four central alliances
(Kisongo, Purko, Loitai, and Kaputei) emerged victorious from these struggles.
By the time of European contact, these central alliances had emerged
as a single ethnic block known as the Maasai.34 Maa-speaking groups
excluded from the Central Rift had been consigned to the dubious category
of agro-pastoral Iloikop.35 Tanzanian descendents of the Iloikop
include the agro-pastoral Arusha, who occupy the lower slopes of Mount
Meru, and Parakuyo pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, who occupy the
margins of the Rift Valley as far south as the Tanzania–Zambia border.36
The Barabaig, meanwhile, paraded their status as ‘pure pastoralists’
under a different ethnic banner. As such, they represented an alternative
locus of the pastoral ideal, beyond the control of the dominant Maasai.
This unique position earned them the special status of Il Magnati (enemy),
32. J.E.G. Sutton, ‘Becoming Maasailand’ and John Galaty, ‘Maasai expansionism and new
East African Pastoralism’, both in Spear and Waller, Being Maasai, pp. 3–60; 61–86.
33. Richard Waller, ‘The lords of East Africa: The Maasai in the mid-19th century’
(Cambridge University, unpublished PhD dissertation, 1976), p. 277.
34. Ibid, p. 115.
35. Galaty, ‘Maasai expansionism’.
36. The distinction between ‘pure’ Maasai and Iloikop remains a point of contention within
the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement. This is somewhat ironic, because Kisongo
groups, who have come to dominate the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement, have
become increasingly dependent on agriculture.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 409
a situation that culminated with the near extermination of the Barabaig by
the Maasai in the nineteenth century.37
At the time of European contact, in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘pure
pastoralism’ represented the epitome of wealth in East Africa and livestock
represented the central currency of exchange in the regional cultural economy.
38 The Maasai had emerged as one of the most militarily and economically
dominant groups in the region. Influential men from agricultural
groups strove to accumulate cattle and redefined themselves as Maasai
through intermarriage or interethnic trading networks.39
This situation resulted in what Spear has termed Maasai cultural hegemony.
In the introduction to Being Maasai, he argues:
The symbolic opposition (between pastoralism and other livelihood systems) inherent
in establishing Maasai cultural hegemony represented more than a simple means of
identifying and reinforcing pastoral values; it also represented a way of controlling
limited pastoral resources and the ability to manage them.40
Significantly, this control also depended on access to resources and
people outside the pastoral economy. It might be necessary to cultivate
relationships with neighbouring groups for trade purposes and the recruitment
of additional warriors. During a downturn in the pastoral economy, it
might also be necessary to be absorbed by agricultural and hunter/gather
groups. As such, the maintenance of ‘Maasai cultural hegemony’ depended
on cultural exclusion and social inclusion: ‘Hegemony and homogeneity
thus operated hand in hand; the one controlling access to resources within
pastoral society the other facilitating access to resources from outside’.41
The arrival of Europeans in the 1890s marked a major change in the
micro-level dynamics of East African identity politics. Colonial policies of
indirect rule profoundly transformed pre-colonial identity categories by
segregating Africans into rigidly bounded ‘native reserves’.42 Control of
natural resources became increasingly dependent on connections to powerful
outsiders, whereas the importance of natural resources dwindled over
time as they became overshadowed by other resources doled out by the
colonial state and the bureaucracies of international aid. Struggles within and
between ethnic groups increasingly became struggles over the connections
necessary for access to these kinds of resources. The relative position of
37. Charles Lane, Pastures Lost (IIED, London, 1996).
38. Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya (Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT, 1980).
39. Alan Jacobs, The Irrigation Agriculture Maasai of Pagasi (Makerere Institute of Social
Science, Kampala 1968) and Richard Waller, ‘Acceptees and aliens’, in Spear and Waller,
Being Maasai.
40. Spear, ‘Introduction’, Being Maasai.
41. Ibid.
42. Robert Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1979) and Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors.
410 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
ethnic groups in contemporary East Africa therefore reflects to a large extent
their effectiveness (or lack thereof) of pursuing strategies of extraversion over
time.
In the 1920s, influential Maasai elders used their positions in the Maasai
Native Authority to gain access to colonial water projects. Controlling
these projects also allowed them to control other natural resources and to
enrich themselves in the process.43 Towards the end of the colonial period,
elders groomed promising youth to become government leaders. One of
them, Edward Sokoine, went on to become prime minister of Tanzania in
the early 1980s.44 As a member of parliament Sokoine wielded considerable
power through the $23 million Maasai Rangeland Project, which protected
his constituents from the kind of gross displacement experienced by
other ethnic groups during villagization in the 1970s.45 Most recently,
NGOs have become a new institutional vehicle for protecting natural
resources and engaging in strategies of extraversion.46
The Barabaig, by contrast, were not well situated to engage in strategies
of extraversion. Because of their defeat at the hands of the Maasai, they
were neither attractive allies nor a potential threat to colonial administrators.
Consequently, the Barabaig were excluded from the ethnic bureaucracy
set up by the British when they took over in 1916. Colonel George
Wilson observed that this placed the Barabaig at a disadvantage:
Unlike their brother pastoralists, the Maasai, the Barabaig have no vast area protected
and preserved for them by the government. This is obviously due to their wide scattering
and lack of indigenous political organisation, which the Maasai have through
their age-sets and Laibons (prophets).47
This situation continued after independence. While the Maasai were targeted
for a multi-million dollar rangeland project, the Barabaig had their
land taken over by the Tanzanian government for large wheat farms that
were funded by the Canadian government. In 1967 and again in 1976,
they were subject to collective punishment, under which hundreds of Barabaig
were incarcerated without trial solely on the basis of their ethnicity.48
During villagization, they were resettled, their houses were burned, and
according to one Barabaig leader, people ‘were beaten like donkeys’.49
43. Personal communication from anthropologist Alan Jacobs. Jacobs worked with the
Maasai in both Kenya and Tanzania, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, including as
senior anthropologist for the Maasai Rangeland Project. Also Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors.
44. Sokoine died in a car accident in 1984. Foul play is still widely suspected.
45. Alan Jacobs, personal communication.
46. For a full account, see Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’ and Igoe, ‘Scaling up’.
47. George Wilson, ‘The Tatoga of Tanganyika, Part One’. Tanganyika Notes and Records,
1952, p. 43.
48. Lane, Pastures Lost and Igoe, ‘Power and force’.
49. Charles Lane, ‘Alienation of Barabaig pasture land’ (PhD, University of Sussex, 1991),
p. 50.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 411
In 1981, Barabaig leaders filed an unsuccessful suit against the Tanzanian
government in an effort to assert their land rights against the expanding
wheat farms. In spite of this activism, the Barabaig initially lacked the
necessary connections and resources to establish their own NGOs.50
This brief history presents an example of two groups who are today culturally
distinct, but whose distinctiveness has emerged from very different
historical experiences. Because of their position, the Maasai were sometimes
able to use their ‘cultural distinctiveness’ to advantage in strategies of
extraversion, while for the Barabaig it has always been a liability. In fact,
culturally distinct groups, such as the Barabaig and the Hadzabe, have
depended heavily on Maasai connections in defining themselves as indigenous
over the past 20 years. As the following section will demonstrate, this
situation represents significant continuity in Maasai strategies of including
members of other ethnic groups in their fold in order to gain access to
important outside resources.
Before turning to median-level histories, it is important to re-acknowledge
the large numbers of people who fell through the cracks of the colonial
project to pigeonhole Africans into ethnic boxes. These were usually
people who were displaced by private estates and government development
schemes, a process that continues today. According to non-Maasai elders
in my research areas, members of these groups frequently wound up working
for the Maasai in colonial public work projects. Maasai elders would
pay them a wage to do their work for them, which reinforced the perceptions
of colonial officers that the Maasai were noble and that non-Maasai
peasants were of little account.51 This legacy of this historical displacement
has been the proliferation of ethnically mixed landless or land-poor communities.
These people lack the language, connections, and ‘cultural distinctiveness’
that would mark them as indigenous, but by no means are
they ‘modernized’ or ‘assimilated’.
Macro-level histories
In order to understand how all of these processes and trends culminated
in the emergence of the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement, and
why this movement includes some people but not others, it is necessary also
to examine macro-level structures and how they have changed over time.
Colonial policies of indirect rule and assimilation armed select members
of colonized groups with knowledge of the ideas and institutions that
defined the terms of their colonization. Stung by the obvious contradictions
50. Igoe, ‘Power and force’.
51. Cf. Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors. This arrangement continues to the present day, as
Maasai in ethnically mixed communities contribute money instead of labour to village development
projects.
412 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
between Western ideals of citizenship and legal rights, on the one hand,
and the treatment of their people by European settlers, on the other, these
‘native intellectuals’ lobbied distant imperial authorities to resolve these
contradictions and secure a better position for their people in emerging
colonial societies.52 What makes African groups unique in this respect is
the pervasiveness of extraversion and aid dependence in African politics,
the types of median-level structures they have used to access the global
indigenous peoples’ movement, and the fact that they have only recently
become part of this movement.
The global indigenous peoples’ movement itself is in large part the product
of persistent lobbying of international bodies by indigenous activists
throughout the twentieth century. In the years following World War II, this
lobbying influenced the creation of international laws designed to promote
indigenous sovereignty.53 In 1974, indigenous leaders from North America,
Greenland, Colombia, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand converged
at a conference in Guyana that spawned The World Council of Indigenous
Peoples (WCIP), the first of 11 indigenous NGOs with official UN
consultative status.54 These groups were instrumental in establishing the
Permanent UN Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003 as well as the International
Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994–2004).
African and Asian groups were notably absent from these early events
and activities. According to the official history of the WCIP, African and
Asian groups were ‘omitted for practical organizational reasons’ from the
events that created this organization.55 However, the leader of a team representing
indigenous interests in the UN also noticed a ‘disinclination by
indigenous peoples in the Americas to recognize that tribal peoples in Asia
share many of their demands’.56 That African indigenous identity was not
even on the map at this time reflected the very different trajectories of
African activists during the formative years of ‘indigenous internationalism’.
African activists directed their efforts towards international audiences, but
towards different ends.
This difference in trajectory is illustrated by the careers of Jomo Kenyatta
and Julius Nyerere, the first presidents of Kenya and Tanzania, respectively.
Throughout the 1930’s, Kenyatta presented African grievances to
the British government. He also wrote numerous articles in British newspapers,
as well as his influential ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya, in which he
argued that his ethnic group, the Gikuyu, was ready for self-government.57
52. Douglas Sanders, Background Information to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples
(Fourth World Documentation Project, Lethbridge, 1980).
53. See Niezen, Origins.
54. Sanders, Background.
55. Ibid, p. 200.
56. Burger, Report, also Niezen, Origins, p. 167.
57. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (Secker and Warburg, London, 1937).
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 413
His efforts contributed significantly to the national movement that brought
about Kenyan independence in 1964.58 In neighbouring Tanganyika,
Julius Nyerere was also busy lobbying distant international bureaucracies.
Educated in Britain like Kenyatta, Nyerere was also a master of convincing
international audiences that his people were capable of running their own
affairs. He directed his efforts to the UN, which granted Tanganyikan
independence in 1961.
Kenyatta and Nyerere were a source of inspiration to nascent indigenous
movements emerging in North America in the 1960s. Leaders of these
movements looked to newly independent third-world countries as beacons
of hope for colonized peoples everywhere. George Manuel, president of the
National Indian Brotherhood of Canada, travelled to Tanzania in 1971 as
a guest at the country’s tenth anniversary celebration.59 He then became a
founder of the WCIP and a key figure in the global indigenous people’s
movement.
Manuel enjoyed a personal audience with Nyerere and was profoundly
influenced by his ideology of Ujamaa (familyhood). Ujamaa strongly influenced
his conceptualization of an ‘indigenous fourth world’, which lies at
the heart of the global indigenous peoples’ movement. ‘Neither right nor
left’, this world represents a unique path built exclusively on indigenous
values and ideas.60
It is ironic therefore that Ujamaa’s imperative of national unity did not
extend to the very Tanzanians who would later be recognized as indigenous.
Manuel’s visit to Tanzania coincided with the displacement of the
Barabaig from their traditional homeland at the hands of the Ujamaa government.
Although these actions clearly violated Nyerere’s doctrine of
equality for all Tanzanians, they were essentially invisible to outside
observers.61
The invisibility of the Barabaig struggle in the early 1970s is indicative of
a global ideological zeitgeist that looked to nation-states as a ‘new source of
identity, power, and dignity’.62 However, it was actually the decline of the
Tanzanian state that opened the doors for the internationalization of the
Barabaig struggle63 and the later emergence of the Tanzanian indigenous
peoples’ movement.64 By the early-1980s, growing concern over the apparent
ineffectiveness of third-world governments was moving international policy
away from state-centered development. These changes were reflected in
58. Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (Hill and Wang, New York, 1967).
59. Sanders, Background, p. 14.
60. Raging Blakkindian Dub, Understanding the Connections between Black and Aboriginal
Peoples (The Fire Next Time, Toronto, 2002).
61. Lane, Pastures Lost, and Igoe, ‘Power and force’.
62. Niezen, Origins, p. 17.
63. Igoe, ‘Power and force’.
64. Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’ and Igoe, ‘Scaling up’.
414 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
new policy agendas, which brought significant pressure on the Tanzanian
government to abandon Ujamaa in favour of free market capitalism. This
shift simultaneously opened Tanzania’s economy to foreign investors in
ways that accelerated the alienation of land from local communities, while
also opening new political spaces that allowed Maasai and Barabaig leaders
to mobilize local people to resist land alienation. This resistance became
the foundation for the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement.
The rise of the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement from the ashes
of Ujamaa was therefore much more than the spontaneous expression of
some sort of essential indigeneity. Rather, it represented a shift in the articulation
of long-standing strategies of extraversion with a rapidly changing
geopolitical context. This process was also facilitated by changes in progressive
development theories that were abandoning ideas of the liberating
state in favour of new social movements paradigms, which looked to
diverse and scattered grassroots movements for the liberation of the
world’s marginal peoples.65 Finally, it was ultimately made possible by the
transformation of median-level structures, as aid to Africa became contingent
upon the promotion of local NGOs.66 These changes coincided with a
flourishing of Maasai and Barabaig NGOs in the early 1990s.67
Median-level histories
Africa’s recent NGO explosion has created a new type of median-level
structure, which is often more decentralized, accessible, and flexible than
previous ones. In direct contrast to Nyerere’s imperative of national unity
and sameness, NGO structures allowed for movements based on conflict
and diversity. ‘Cultural distinctiveness’ gained new currency in East African
identity politics, as Western donors lined up to fund initiatives that were
clearly outside the realm of the state.68
Because they are so clearly outside of the realm of the state, however,
Tanzanian indigenous NGOs are also at odds with the idea of indigenous
nations. Leaders of indigenous NGOs in Tanzania are for the most part
self-selected. They are not popularly elected and are usually not traditional
leaders. As such, they do not officially represent specific peoples in the
same way as the indigenous representatives who founded the UN Forum
on Indigenous Issues.69 Furthermore, they are not demanding special nationto-
nation relationships with the Tanzanian government. Unlike indigenous
leaders from most parts of the world, who are demanding special treatment
65. D.H. Sheth, ‘Alternative development as political practice’, Alternatives 12 (1987),
pp. 155–71.
66. Igoe and Kelsall, ‘Introduction’, in Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
67. Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’.
68. Igoe, ‘Scaling up’.
69. See Niezen, Origins.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 415
for their peoples, indigenous NGOs in Tanzania are seeking equal treatment
for their people as Tanzanian citizens.70 At the international level, by
contrast, indigenous NGO leaders do receive special treatment as a result
of their ‘cultural distinctiveness’. As such, they are able to bring crucial
resources to local land struggles. NGOs have allowed Tanzanian indigenous
activists to pursue strategies of bypassing the state directly to the
international level.
As they gained recognition from Western donors, however, indigenous
NGOs in Tanzania began to change. Urban workshops and international
activism moved NGO leaders away from their communities. More and
more of their time was taken up with grant writing, accounting, and managing
increasingly large, bureaucratic NGOs. Local people complained
that they were no longer connected to the NGOs that were ostensibly
working on their behalf.71 As a result of this dynamic, the self-identification
of NGO leaders at the international level has not translated neatly local
perceptions of ‘being indigenous’ in the sense that Western human rights
activists understand the term. This raises a fundamental question of
whether people can be members of a ‘self-ascribed polythetic class’ without
knowing it exists.
Furthermore, Western donors were looking to scale-up indigenous
NGOs in order to make them more effective at what they did and easier to
fund.72 NGO leaders also felt that they would be effective if they joined
forces in their fight for community control of natural resources and cultural
autonomy.
In 1994, Maasai and Barabaig NGO leaders established a forum known
as PINGOs, which they described as a ‘loose coalition of like minded pastoralist
and hunter/gatherer community based organisations’.73 Donors
responded enthusiastically, funding the construction of a PINGOs advocacy
centre in the city of Arusha. The centre became the main venue for
meetings and donor visits. Barabaig leaders initially joined the Tanzanian
indigenous peoples’ movement as a branch of an established Maasai NGO.
It was not until 1994 that they were able to establish an independent
Barabaig NGO outside of Maasai control, the same year they joined PINGOs
Forum. The Hadzabe, also members of PINGOs, had even more difficulty
establishing viable independent NGOs.
Barabaig founders of PINGOs expressed concern that Maasai NGO
leaders needed them in PINGOs in order to establish the forum as a ‘legitimately
indigenous’ coalition but that this coalition was not an equal one.
70. Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’. The situation is also slightly different in Kenya, where
Maasai leaders demanded the government recognize their treaties with the British.
71. Igoe, ‘Scaling up’.
72. Ibid.
73. PINGOs, ‘Minutes of the session’, 5 March 1994 (PINGOs, Arusha).
416 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
They complained that Maasai NGO leaders made a superficial show of
interethnic harmony and participation, while dominating PINGOs and its
activities. They felt that a handful of Maasai NGO leaders monopolized
PINGOs’ funding and communication with donor organizations. Finally,
Barabaig leaders were dismayed to learn that the PINGOs newspaper was
to be called Voice of the Maasai.74 PINGOs has since been revamped and,
by all accounts, is now more inclusive. However, Barabaig leaders still
complain of their marginal position within the forum.75 If Barabaig leaders
felt themselves to be marginal in PINGOs, Hadzabe leaders were virtually
absent. Observers of Hadzabe NGOs have expressed concern that Maasai
leaders are exploiting these organizations to bolster their marketability as
indigenous peoples.76 San hunter/gatherers in Namibia have also complained
of Maasai dominating regional indigenous events.77
Ironically, it has actually become possible for indigenous elites to expropriate
the marginalization of other groups to their own ends.
Conclusion
Like other indigenous peoples around the world, groups such as the
Maasai and the Barabaig have experienced discrimination, displacement,
and the loss of land and natural resources on which their cultural identities
depend. At other scales of analysis, however, the description of these
groups as part of an ‘international underclass or underethnicity’78 becomes
more problematic. For example, it cannot account for the internal dynamics
of median-level structures, where ideological ‘package deals’ of Tanzanian
indigenism are produced and where some groups are more indigenous
than others. It also cannot account for historical processes of ethnocide,
which have created marginal groups who do not appear as indigenous. In
short, it does not account for the complex interplay of difference and inequality
in contemporary Tanzania, because those who lack a clear ethnic
identity cannot even claim membership in an international underclass.
Some proponents of African indigenous peoples’ movements argue that
this type of analysis is destructive, because it undermines African indigenous
struggles over land, identity, and self-determination. Unfortunately,
this position obscures fundamental dynamics of power and inequality,
especially the central importance of extraversion and aid dependence to
74. Igoe, ‘Ethnicity, civil society’.
75. Cf. Hodgson, ‘Precarious alliances’.
76. Ndagala and Woodburn, personal communication. Daniel Ndagala is the Commissioner
of Culture for the Government of Tanzania. James Woodburn is an anthropologist
who has worked closely with the Hadzabe Survival Council of Tanzania.
77. Personal communication by James Suzman, an anthropologist who has worked closely
with San activists in Namibia. Also see James Suzman, ‘Kalahari conundrums’, Before Farming
4 (2002), pp. 1–10.
78. Niezen, Origins, p. 11.
BECOMING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 417
politics throughout the continent. The most fundamental inequality in
Africa is between the small minority of elites who are able to access structures
of international aid and the vast majority of people who cannot. This
class division, which frequently cuts across ethnic differences, is best conceptualized
as the divide between development insiders and development
outsiders, whose ‘expectations of modernity’ have been dashed to the point
where they are no longer tenable.79
While the value of cultural difference in East African identity politics has
waxed and waned according to historical circumstance, effective strategies
of extraversion have remained consistently important. Having the traditions
and connections necessary to engage in strategies of extraversion has
allowed the Maasai to turn their cultural distinctiveness into political and
symbolic capital whenever the opportunity has arisen.
Significantly, however, Maasai have also been effective at gaining access
to state structures, even during periods when cultural distinctiveness carries
little political currency. Often this access is negotiated by strategically
invoking the idea of Maasai as people who embrace modernization.
Edward Sokoine, prime minister of Tanzania in the 1980s, is one example.
Across the border in Kenya, in the late 1990s, two Maasai held prestigious
posts in the presidential cabinet: Vice-President George Saitoti and
William ole Ntimama.80 It is important to note, however, that the success
of individuals at gaining access to these structures does not benefit all — or
even most — of the members of their groups.
Dichotomies invoked by strategies of extraversion effectively exclude
large numbers of African people, while obscuring the divide between
‘development insiders’ and ‘development outsiders’. In such a context, categories
like ‘indigenous peoples’ do little to address, and sometimes exacerbate,
relationships of power and inequality. Obviously, there are no
simple solutions to such complex problems. However, addressing them will
begin with choices that run counter to institutionalized relationships of
dependency, hegemony, and exploitation. These will require more
nuanced understandings of identity and inequality that may potentially
undermine the kind of strategic essentialism that lies at the heart of indigenous
politics and NGO fund-raising. Nevertheless, such understandings are
a prerequisite for local control of decision-making structures and natural
79. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,
1998).
80. Professor George Saitoti, although raised in a Maasai area, is of mixed descent (Maasai
and Kikuyu). As the historical material presented in this article illustrates that, however, many
people who consider themselves culturally Maasai are not ‘pure’ Maasai. Saitoti’s ambiguous
ethnic status has been periodically used against him by Maasai politicians — including ole
Ntimama. However, Ntimama was quick to support Saitoti in 2001, when it appeared that
Saitoti would succeed Moi as president of Kenya. Both men are still actively involved in
national politics.
418 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
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of the global indigenous peoples’ movement.
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closely tied to strategies of extraversion and ‘cultural distinctiveness’