After a long period of idleness brought about by cancelled meetings, vanishing bosses and events like presidential visits and primary school track and field which brought the community to a standstill, we’ve spent the last two weeks doing genuine, sometimes exhausting and frequently frustrating work. It’s been great. The plan is to bring a VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) to Dol Dol to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and get people tested. It seems like everywhere else in Kenya has had one of these campaigns, but Dol Dol’s never had one and it’s a definite need.
Looking at surveys we conducted in the targeted areas, one of the most glaring things that pops out is the amount of unprotected sex that’s going on. In a place like North America, high levels of unprotected sex would imperil some individuals, but because the norm is serial monogamy, the spread of HIV would be relatively slow. Here, where the culture favors polygamy, and for the unmarried to have lots of sexual partners during the same period, the introduction of even one infected person into the web of sexual relationships would imperil the whole community in a matter of months. This underscores the importance of testing, of course, but it’s also gotten me thinking about the relationship between culture and development.
It can be seen as heresy to say that culture is restraining the Maasai’s development, because in a sense their culture is the Maasai’s greatest asset. Maasai culture is marketable and has been since the arrival of the British colonists and the anthropologists who followed them, but it continues today. The Maasai make up 1.4% of the country’s population, but inhabit a much more important place in the world’s consciousness than the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, Akamba and the dozen other more numerous tribes which you’ll never hear about unless Kenya falls into a civil war. Down on the coast and in Nairobi, Maasai morani pose for tourists’ pictures for $1. In Nanyuki, prostitutes dress up in Maasai garb to attract the attention of potential clients. A Maasai I met from the diplomatic police corps complained that the Toronto Metropolitan Zoo had shamelessly ripped off Maasai culture in designing its exhibits. Maasai culture is big business, but very rare is the prosperous Maasai village. I can’t help but think that other elements of the culture, some of the deeply-held values and traditions, rather than the dances and jewelry and warriors slaying lions, are playing a bigger role in shaping the course of development.
When I got here and found out that the Maasai measure status and wealth by the size of their herds, not their cash holdings, I thought that was kinda cool. Then I looked around. In a bid to show their status and wealth, many Maasai have assembled mega-herds, which the land cannot sustain. The contrast is stark between the privately owned ranches, where the animal-to-land ratio is kept low and there is a thick cover of knee-high grass, and the Maasai group ranches, where the grass has been grazed into oblivion and the soil is left unprotected to be washed away by every rain. Then, of course, when a drought inevitably comes and thins out the herds, people lose a quarter or a third of their wealth, money which could have sat safely in the Barclay’s Bank in Nanyuki earning interest. But hey, that’s the culture here.
Likewise, the Maasai disdain for farming and fishing costs them dearly. Two weekends ago, work took me to a village on the east side of the division. Here the land had originally been occupied by the Maasai, but migrants from elsewhere in the country, who brought their agricultural traditions and expertise with them and knew good land when they saw it, moved in. A farmer on a small plot can make $800 or so in an average year; by contrast, a herder would have to sell about 70 goats or 20 cows, more than many herders even own, to earn that much. But the Maasai consider themselves herders, and as I said, if they sold off their herd to get some (literal) seed money, they’d risk losing status. By the same token, Laikipia’s streams are stocked with big, tasty trout that the Kikuyu and others profitably sell, but the Maasai don’t like to eat fish and don’t see the point in fishing. At the workshop, when I sat down with some fried tilapia, I was asked why I was eating snake.
The cultural norms that marry off girls at a young age, deny them education and then shackle them at home all day with domestic duties deprive the Maasai of half of their potential productive workforce. Most of the shops in Dol Dol are run by women, but all but a few are non-Maasai migrants. Because their mothers are undereducated and overworked, most children are not read to, are not nurtured, the boys sent out to play with each other and the girls put to work in the house as soon as they’re physically able. And of course, the family patterns put the community at grave risk for HIV and other STDs.
Certainly, aspects of Maasai culture can be harnessed for development. In two areas of the division, the close-knit nature of the group ranches has allowed for community-based eco-tourism projects that have brought significant income to the residents. The traditional system of age-set oversight and elder adjudication of behavior has kept order and maintained low crime rates in the absence of much formal law enforcement. And the cultural trappings of Maasai life have bound together a small group of people, spread from Mukogodo to central Tanzania, into one coherent group.
At the same time, many people here, especially of my generation, are much more adamant than I am about the fact that old values are impeding development. These Young Turks of Mukogodo at least pay lip-service to the ideas of diversifying income, empowering women, and practicing monogamy, but it remains to be seen whether they will bring change in the community, and sometimes I’m skeptical. When one of the youth groups showed me their new, collective farm, I was excited; then I learned that they had put a Kikuyu in charge of running it. So it goes.
