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One of the most difficult issues in global indigenous politics involves settling the definition of who is "indigenous." The question is especially problematic on the African continent. There has been a broad understanding that if there ever was an "indigenous question" in Africa, it was permanently resolved through the decolonization process that unfolded from the 1950s until the early-70s. When white Europeans were forced to relinquish control of the colonies they had seized in the nineteenth century, Africans celebrated the close of an ignominious chapter of dispossession and exploitation, and they claimed to have re-established control over their own destinies through the construction of modern states. African liberation movements were universally founded in terms of the right of indigenous people(s) to live free from the domination of alien political powers. However, there is now a new movement of African indigenous peoples whose claims to the right of self-determination are directed against other Africans, and the entire continent is seething with the tensions which result from that claim.
It was understood in the context of colonialism that "aliens" were exclusively white Europeans. In the current context, there is no such exclusivity. Ironically, since the early 1980s, as the current indigenous rights movement has developed, post-colonial African states have faced increasingly thorny questions about whether they themselves have taken on the role of colonial oppressors, this time around in domination of the peoples that state-makers would prefer to regard as "tribes," "ethnic groups" or "minorities." Most African statists are reluctant to acknowledge the existence of indigenous peoples within post-colonial state territories. They justify that reluctance largely with arguments to the effect that since all black Africans are indigenous to Africa, distinctions made by "groups" that complain of colonialist exploitation and oppression are totally irrelevant. Due to this resistance, which is in part an ideological product of the powerful Organization of African Unity (OAU), it has been very difficult to raise the "indigenous question" in the African context. Nonetheless, African indigenous peoples have found their way into the forum provided by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (UNWGIP) in growing numbers, and the claims they make there are inevitably similar to the claims made by indigenous peoples from every other part of the world.
One of the most recent arrivals in the UNWGIP is the Maa Development Association (MDA), representing the Maasai of Kenya. The Maasai are one of very few African "tribes" that, for many observers, exemplify what African indigenous peoples are supposed to look like, if they are acknowledged to exist at all. They, along with the "Bushmen" of Botswana and Namibia, the "Pygmies" of Zaire, and other "tribal" and/or "primitive" peoples scattered across the continent, have long been favorites for study by cultural and social anthropologists, who share some of the credit (or blame) for making the "indigenous question" the political controversy that it has become today. The Maasai quality of steadfast adherence to cultural form and tradition makes them understandable as the perennial subject of cultural survival questions. The Maasai case is thus relatively well-accepted, but it is not very well understood, especially as it has become entwined within the broader human rights questions that trouble Kenya today. This article therefore attempts to address the material that the MDA has recently presented before the UNWGIP, and to explain that presentation in the context of the "Majimbo" ideology that is in the forefront of Kenya's political dilemmas at the present time (as discussed below).
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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