Saw this in the Sunday Times as I got home from work this morning. Take a look, it's a long article and tell me what you think about it. Ill be back later with my own thoughts.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...753256,00.html
Masai-chists! The African folly of a white tribe
The antiques dealer who wants to be a Masai is only the latest example of an unhealthy British obsession with noble savages, says AA Gill, who has drunk bull's blood with the best of them.
The Ngorongoro Crater is a great extinct volcano that contains the highest density of super mammals in Africa. It is a wonder of the world and an alpha tourist attraction popular with honeymooning couples and Japanese tours, who drive slowly round its tracks hoping to come across gory death.
The only mammalian bipeds allowed to walk through the vigorously wardened spot are the Masai, who follow their bony cattle to waterholes and salt licks, lean ruminatively on their lion-killing lotus-bladed spears, and generally pretty up the place in their red togas, muddy punk hairdos and elaborate jewellery.
To tourists they look as if they belong, timelessly in character. The implication is that they are exempt from human laws of progress because they are somehow more part of nature than the rest of us.
When Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, decreed there would be an end to tribalism and a single language for the sake of national unity, he specifically excluded the Masai. Some say this was because they were too proud to conform; others that he realised they’d be jolly useful for the tourist industry.
The Masai traditionally straddle the Kenya-Tanzania border wandering over the Serengeti and Masai Mara game reserve. They are Africa’s Beefeaters, its morris dancers. They have also wandered through the English imagination. The English have always had a patronising, sentimental and colonially romantic fondness for these tall, bouncy cattlemen.
And now we have a Masai chief of our own in the West Country, 57-year-old Graham Pendrill, an antiques dealer. He is wandering around in traditional robes carrying a knop kierie and wishes to be known as Siparo (“Brave One�), particularly serendipitous for a middle-aged white bloke who fancies walking into a Bristol pub dressed in beads and a knee-length tartan frock.
Pendrill’s anthropological epiphany came on a sightseeing holiday in Kenya when he gave a gaggle of hardy warriors a lift because it was raining. Back at the village they got talking about cows, he swigged a little bull’s urine, they made him an honorary chief and one thing led to another and now his 12-bedroom house is on the market and he is off to live in Cow Pat Castle. Yes, he’s going to build these nomadic herdsmen a 20-room pumice castle. I bet they’re thrilled. Apparently when he went back the first time they were already expecting him: “It’s a bit like dogs who can tell when their own is coming back before they see him.� Nicely put, Siparo. And good luck to him. People should get out more.
He is just another in a line of westerners who decided to go native with the Masai. True, most have been women of a certain age and weight who take the romance of the native literally for at least a couple of weeks, occasionally a bit longer. One Swiss Masai missus, Corinne Hofmann, has got four books and a feature film out of her stint. There was famously, possibly apocryphally, a public school classics master who took early retirement to go and become a Masai wife.
What is it about the Masai that is so alluring for the English in particular? You get the feeling that if Pendrill had given a lift to a hitchhiker in Switzerland, he would have been less likely to have donned leather shorts and taken up yodelling. There is apparently a timid noble savage lurking in every English provincial shopkeeper and, more rampantly, in his wife.
I first came across the Masai while writing a travel story. I asked my guide if I could dine with them. He ummed and ahhed and said they didn’t encourage tourists to interfere with the immemorial ways of the men in skirts, except through the special shops, performing villagers and laid on hotel ceremonies and dancing, but he would see what he could do. So at dusk I was led to a kraal where an extended Masai family greeted me with great hospitality and a selection of decorative beaded goods.
We had a few moments of “nice weather we’re having� chat before my hosts said: “Shall we go through?� and we filed into the dining room — or cattle byre — where, ankle deep in slurry, a bony cow not much bigger than a labrador had a tourniquet round its neck and a young man fired a blunt arrow into a bulging vein. Blood spurted; half a pint was collected in a gourd, which was vigorously stirred to prevent lumpiness and the sticky stick passed to an ecstatic child like mummy’s cake spoon.
The pot smelt as rank as a prep school laundry bag. It was passed to me. “I thought you mixed this with milk,� I said weakly. “Sometimes we do,� said mine host, “but as you are a special guest we thought you’d like it neat.� Gingerly I tipped the gourd and got a mouthful of warm, thick blood. It was, of course, delicious, like a steak smoothie and the first time I’ve been able to thank a cow for the meat. Later I asked my guide if he’d ever drunk cow’s blood. He pulled a face: “No, my tribe would never do that. Do you know what they rinse their gourds with? Bull’s piss.�
The Masai will be familiar even if you’ve never set foot in east Africa. They appear in adverts for four-wheel-drive cars, airlines and banks, and feature in fashion shoots and in celebrity holidays in Hello! magazine. The English have always loved them. A couple of warriors in the back of the Land Rover were essential Happy Valley accessories, like a pair of gundogs in Gloucestershire.
The Masai embodied everything the English yearned to believe about primeval Africa; they were tall and slender and handsome, noble savages who looked the part, brave to the point of foolishness, peerless hunters and trackers. Every Masai boy had to kill a lion as a prelude to manhood. They wanted nothing from the modern world, simply the right and the space to follow their cows and continue their simple and deeply spiritual pastoral ways. Lions would give even the small boys a wide berth. The Masai believe they are the rightful owners of every cow on earth and sweetly sent the Americans 14 after 9/11. For some reason westerners think that is achingly touching. But if Dutch dairy farmers had offered 14 friesians in lieu of 2,000 dead it would have been viewed as horrifyingly tasteless.
The truth is that they are nothing like as utopian as we want to believe. They dip in and out of the modern world as often as they change in and out of traditional dress and are as likely to be barmen in Mombasa as herdsmen on the Serengeti. Romantic westerners sigh: what a shame their colourful robes are made in China, their beads plastic. Their beads were always plastic. And before their tartan was made in China it was made in Lancashire and before that by client tribes.
The Masai think it is beneath them to do any work but herd cattle, but will happily do a bit of male escort work at the weekend and the photo shoots. As overgrazing erodes the pasture they are coming into conflict with farmers and game reserves and are hiring lawyers. Like most pastoralists they have a robust loathing for anyone who farms. They have a violent, arrogant self-belief and disdain for their neighbours that if it were espoused by anyone in the West would swiftly put them in court, are innately racist and organically fascist. They were proud, pretty, arrogant and vainly fearless. All attributes the English would like to have awarded to themselves.
The Masai were, they thought, nature’s raw Englishmen. Pre-colonial Africa had been an uneasy balance of farmers and herdsmen. When the English turned up they despised the poor peasant subsistence dirt grubbers and took to the bullies. They despised the men and women who washed their clothes, tended their gardens, made their beds and looked after the children but admired the aggressive, arrogant nomads. So they took to the Masai and the Zulus and their cousins the Matabele in Zimbabwe.
Colonialists like their savages savage in a romantic mould. There is a streak of masochism in having your material world dismissed by people who have little but vanity and some sick cows. Colonialists want to believe their subjugated people were worth conquering.
The unpleasant, syrupy, simplistic Third World eugenics has continued with people like the late John Aspinall getting all moist about the ubermasculine Zulu ideal and Anita Roddick and assorted Greens ahhing over Amazonian hunter-gatherers with 30 endangered species in their hair. The Rousseau romance has a wooden heart, and the fallacy of all this is the belief that the people who know the least magically have the most to teach us. Being backward and impervious to progress and resistant to change excuses a culture from responsibility for its behaviour and belief; infant mortality rates, draconian tribal justice, witch doctor hokum, superstitious violence, subjugation of women and wilful ignorance are all excused in the name of natural cultural purity.
The colonialists favoured bullies over the bullied, the tall and thin over the short and fat, the light skinned over the dark. This wasn’t true just in Africa. The English exploited the Indian caste system and anyway preferred Muslims to Hindus because they were proud and militaristic and not passive vegetarians. The smart regiments in the Indian army were the guys with the Lancers and the Gurkhas. For 100 years our Foreign Office was justifiably accused of being stuffed with homoerotic Arabists yearning to be Lawrence of Arabia.
The unpleasant, irrational and unfair choosing of favourites was one of the most insidious sins of empire, storing up resentment and shaming legacies. The Belgians always preferred the tall, pale Tutsis to the short, black Hutus, exacerbating a tribal animosity. Today it is the Matabele in Zimbabwe who are particularly suffering under Mugabe’s Shona. The messy and murderous partition of India wasn’t helped by Mountbatten’s sympathy for Muslims. The romance of the noble savage and the pristine simplicity of dung huts continues with both sides of the cultural divide being selectively blind to the motives of the other.
So Pendrill seems like a harmless fool and the lonely women going to find Masai husbands are only a little sad and embarrassing. But there is a more important and fundamental issue: it is how the West sees modern Africa. Judging the Masai to be perfect examples of a happy, naturally balanced Africa is like saying the Amish are ideal Americans. Africa is a poor continent trying to get a little richer, not a lost continent that needs to be pushed backwards into some fraudulent patronising daydream.
East Africans are ambivalent about the Masai. They are a valuable tourist attraction but as a symbol of real Africa they are a distracting fraud. How would we feel if everyone who came to England expected us to all be morris dancers?Mind you, a lot more of us might be if there were busloads of African women turning up wanting a shag.
When I finished my blood dinner, the headman walked a little way with me in case there were lions. “You know herding isn’t my only job,� he said. “I’m also a schoolteacher. I teach English literature. Are you by any chance acquainted with the works of James Hadley Chase?�
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28-08-05, 10:03 AM
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