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

From Spiritual Leader to incline Milk Maid Colonialism and Maasai Wo men Before Western imposition of the nation reconcile, Maasai men and women maintained overlapping positions of power and social prestige among varying historic period groups. For centuries, there was no clear, gendered distinction between the domestic and the public/ semipolitical domains, or among social, economic and political activities (36). Yet with the untried colonial parameters of manly Maasai power beget from Western social systems, the Maasai embraced new modes of control and confidence, befitting something that might be called patriarchal (16). In this new pastoralist system, ethnic variances were disregarded, individualistic profit drove foreign-native relations and Maasai women lost the place of honor and authority within Maasai conceptions of being Maasai. Prior to colonial contact, married women were significantly much influential than commonly supposed. In terms of wealth and economy, marri ed women unplowed a size fitted crop of her own cattle with exclusive rights to milk and byproducts of her herd and maintained links with neighboring agricultural groups, craft additional milk, hides, smallstock and even donkeys for the needed grain and food stuffs (30). Women traditionally traveled to markets and trading settlements, visited friends and relatives at neighboring homesteads (27) and were free to take lovers prior to and after marriage, so long as traditional household duties were not neglected (31). Moreover, women were able to lobby judicial proceedings and mediate 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 disease, and established the practice of raise regulating (37). Conforming the Maasai to colonial, and then national, agendas of p rogress, the assertion and expansion of call forth power reordered Maasai lives and livelihoods to suit Western needs (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 control through co-optation (61) and instituted colonial taxes upon the men, disrupting cattle ownership among men and women (69). horizontal in the 1960s, continuing a potentially lucrative source of state revenue, foreign organizations spent millions of dollars on the development of Maasai productivity, only the programs held no cultural sensitivity and flopped.