• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Eco­Tourism & Local Involvement Among Southern Kenya’s Maasai: Adapting to a Shrinking World Sateesh Daniel April 2011 Submitted to the Department of Environmental Studies of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors Faculty Advisor: Jan Dizard Faculty Readers: Katherine Sims, Joe Moore 1 Acknowledgments I would not have been able to complete this project without the help of Professsor Dizard, who was a great help both in general editing and in steering the direction of the paper. Likewise Professor Sims was extremely helpful during the fall semester while I was working to get this paper off the ground. Much of my writing here has been an extension of the work I did for the School for Field Studies in Kenya and Tanzania. I would therefore like to thank Salaton Tome, my fellow students, and every one of our guides, translators, and drivers. The local Maasai and key informants who were willing to take time to talk are the only I reason I have any understanding—however bare—of their situation today. I can only apologize for the inadequacies of this paper. After a semester of study in Kenya and a year of writing, I feel that I have put onto paper only a small portion of my own understanding of the struggle between the Maasai and their national park neighbors. That understanding, it goes without saying, is incredibly limited in itself. I hope that I have been able to convince the reader that the small picture I have presented is factual, relevant, and intriguing. 2 Table of Contents Introduction 4 Chapter 1 Gradual Constraint: The Maasai From Pre­Colonialism Onwards 6 I. The Pre‐colonial Maasai 6 II. British Impact 9 III. Independence 12 Amboseli National Park 14 Kenya Wildlife Service 16 Group Ranches & Shifting Livelihood Strategies 18 The Future of Group Ranches? 23 IV. A Tightening Rope 24 Chapter 2 Where to Turn? The International Boom of Nature Tourism in the Developing World and its Relevance to the Maasai People 25 I. Introduction 25 II. Why Nature Tourism? An International Perspective 26 III. Tourism & the Maasai 31 Chapter 3 Help and Hindrance: The Local Political Economy of the Maasai Today 34 I. Introduction 34 II. District & County Councils 35 III. The Group Ranches & Collective Management 37 IV. How Do Failed Institutions Affect Participation in Tourism? 43 Chapter 4 Culture & Participation in Tourism 48 I. Introduction 48 II. Remaining “Traditional’ for Profit? 50 III. Education & Employment 52 IV. ‘Traditionality’, Stereotype, & Employment 60 V. The Limits of Cultural Tourism 66 Chapter 5 In Conclusion: The Future of Amboseli’s Maasai 68 I. Introduction 68 II. Adaptation & Group Ranch Facilitation 68 III. The Future of Cultural Tourism 71 IV. An Uncertain Future 72 3 Introduction: The Maasai are a group of nomadic pastoralists spread throughout Northern Tanzania and Southern Kenya. Their traditional livelihood strategies depended upon moving large herds of cattle over open rangelands, using their access to a wide area of land to mitigate the effects of drought and regional catastrophe. During recent years, however, the Maasai have found themselves increasingly constrained—by a growing population, the immigration of outsiders to their region, and government‐held National Parks which completely limit human access to large areas formerly used for grazing. All of these factors have meant that traditional pastoralism as a practical way of life is rapidly vanishing, forcing Maasai to look for other ways to make a living in a ‘modernizing’ world. Because of the unsuitability of regional agriculture, many Maasai have looked for answers to the industry that has played a large part in making pastoralism unrealistic. Eco‐tourism is dependent upon the complete exclusion of Maasai from huge areas of parklands. Many of these safari parks—Maasai Mara, Amboseli, Nairobi National Park—are world famous. They attract a large yearly influx of visitors from wealthy Western nations, and have facilitated the growth of a large and lucrative tourist industry. By offering employment opportunities for local people, this tourist industry also has the potential to reconcile the longstanding battle between poor rural villagers and pro‐conservation initiatives. Unfortunately, employment by actual Maasai in the tourism industry is staggeringly low and primarily concentrated in low‐level, low‐paying capacities. These capacities include 4 ‘cultural tourism’, through which Maasai present themselves ‘traditionally’ to tourists for small tips or trinket sales. My thesis is based on two ideas. First, that the traditional Maasai way of life is being gradually infringed upon by the eco‐tourism industry and other factors, leaving employment in that industry as one of the few practical remaining livelihood strategies. Second, that genuine participation and benefit from eco‐tourism is prevented by a combination of local political and cultural realities. Local political institutions, including Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘Group Ranch’ system, have failed to adequately represent their communities. Meanwhile, a tourism industry that encourages ‘traditional’ behavior from Maasai uses that same behavior as justification for discrimination in employment.. There are many other external factors that are limiting Maasai participation in tourism, such as large foreign investment and financial leakage. I chose here to focus primarily on factors that are internal, i.e. related directly to the Maasai community itself. 5 Chapter 1: Gradual Constraint: the Maasai From Pre­Colonialism Onwards I. The Pre­Colonial Maasai— The Maasai originated in the dry, arid climate of what is now Northern Kenya, near Lake Turkana. Before colonists ever arrived in East Africa, they had spread through the rest of Kenya and were spread broadly across both Kenya and Tanzania (Dowie, 2009). The Maasai have always been primarily known as a pastoralist people. Dorothy Hodgson notes that while Maa‐speakers did exist as farmers, hunter‐gatherers, and agro‐pastoralists, many were assimilated through conquest into purely pastoralist culture. There is a point at which the term ‘Maasai’ came to refer exclusively to pastoralists, with other terms for the few remaining Maa‐speakers with alternate livelihood strategies (Hodgson, 1999). A pastoralist livelihood is primarily centered on the herding of cattle. As they are today, cows have always been integral to Maasai life. Cattle are rarely killed for beef. Instead, they are depended upon for milk and blood, both of which are ingested for protein. Though they are clearly used as a resource for survival, cattle are far more valuable to Maasai than as a simple source of food. They have a social importance that includes status as a source of currency—because they can be traded for other items, but also because owning a larger herd of cattle is the greatest signifier of social status, as money is in much of the Western world. (Dowie, 2008). Perhaps the second greatest indicator of status is the accumulation of wives and children. Maasai men are polygamous, living with multiple wives, many 6 children, and other dependent family members (Grandin, 1999). Even today, there are particularly successful Maasai men with as many as fifty children (Salaton Tome, 2010). The enormous size of many of these families naturally requires an equally enormous herd of cattle, so these two forms of wealth—cattle and children—go hand in hand with one another. It also means that Maasai populations have been growing exponentially for quite some time, putting greater strain on local natural resources. Through the pre‐colonial era until very recently, Maasai lived in village‐like compounds called ‘bomas’, formed by a series of six to twelve households (Jacobs, 1965). Each family lived spread throughout a number of huts, roofed with thatch and walled with cow dung. The use of cow dung even for living quarters is one indication of just how fully and creatively the Maasai have always depended on their cattle for survival. Bomas were naturally clustered relatively close to water sources, necessary for sustaining both the people and the animals they depended upon (Grandin, 1999) A group of bomas within a kilometer of one another would make up what Grandin refers to as a ‘neighborhood’, a series of which would in turn make a ‘locality’. These localities would control a large area of land that included water and grazing areas for both wet and dry seasons (Jacobs, 1965). In many ways, a ‘locality’ would be a model for the group ranch system put into place after independence. Each of these units of social organization would contain different levels of interconnectedness and ownership. Cattle would be owned at a household level, natural resources managed by a neighborhood or locality. Individual households were highly mobile and might split apart and reconnect seasonally for cattle‐grazing 7 purposes. The Maasai at large, spread over a vast area of rangeland over what are now two sovereign nations, also shared bonds with one another. The language of Maa and specific cultural practices were and are a source of pride and connection across East Africa. During particularly severe droughts or wars, different groups of Maasai might share access or grazing lands (Grandin, 1999). These connections of ethnic identity persist today; during the devastating recent drought of 2003, many Kenyan Maasai brought their cattle across the border to greener Tanzania for grazing (Kisui, 2010). In fact, it is rare that any contemporary Maasai person will identify himself as Kenyan or Tanzanian; he is simply “Maasai”. It is easy to speculate at land and wilderness use practices from the information we know about Maasai culture today. Local plants and trees are of course still used for traditional medicine and for building of fences. As today, wildlife would have been an occasional antagonist for pastoralists, since Hyenas, Lions, and Leopards will kill and eat cattle.

Load more

  79

Copy Link