From Spiritual Leader to English Milk Maid: Colonialism and Maasai Women :: Essays Papers

From Spiritual Leader to English Milk Maid Colonialism and Maasai Women Before western imposition of the nation reconcile, Maasai men and women maintained overlapping positions of power and societal prestige among varying age groups. For centuries, there was no clear, gendered distinction amongst the domestic and the public/political domains, or among tender, economic and political activities (36). but with the new compound parameters of male Maasai power beget from Western social systems, the Maasai embraced new modes of control and authority, becoming something that might be called patriarchal (16). In this new pastoralist system, ethnic variances were disregarded, capitalistic profit drove foreign-native relations and Maasai women missed the place of honor and authority within Maasai conceptions of being Maasai. Prior to colonial contact, married women were significantly more influential than commonly supposed. In monetary value of wealth and economy, married women kept a sizeable crop of her experience cows with exclusive rights to milk and byproducts of her herd and maintained links with beside agricultural groups, trading surplus milk, hides, smallstock and even donkeys for the needed grain and nutrition stuffs (30). Women traditionally traveled to markets and trading settlements, visited friends and relatives at neighboring homesteads (27) and were free to purport lovers prior to and after marriage, so long as traditional home duties were not neglected (31). Moreover, women were able to lobby judicial proceedings and halfway relationships between Maasai and God, thus expressing moral authority and power (33). However, beginning in 1890, Western colonialism reshaped the Maasais perception of who they should be. Though the German colonialism was uneven and limited, it weakened the Maasai through and through disease, and established the practice of state rule (37). Conforming the Maasai to colonial, and then national, agendas of fall out, th e assertion and expansion of state power reordered Maasai lives and livelihoods to suit Western involve (275). Subsequent British rule in the 1900s expanded on state authority with tribal relocations and new heads of households, enforcing neat alignments of ethnic identity with territorial identity on a mobile and nomadic people. Frustrated Westerners created a political hierarchy of Africans to ruled through co-optation (61) and instituted colonial taxes upon the men, disrupting cattle ownership among men and women (69). Even in the 1960s, continuing a potentially lucrative source of state revenue, foreign organizations spent millions of dollars on the development of Maasai productivity, yet the programs held no cultural sensitivity and flopped.