The Maasai and the Lion King: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Globalization in African Tourism
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Out of Africa Sundowner Kichwa Tembo Tented Camp is described in the brochure as "luxurious enough for even the most pampered traveler," with private sleeping tents, electricity, insect-proof windows, a veranda, and an indoor bathroom with hot showers.10 So much for roughing it in the African bush. The camp is located near the Masai Mara National Reserve, which is an extension of the Serengeti. The main attraction at the camp is game viewing from safari vehicles, but the Maasai are also prominent. There are Maasai at the private airport welcoming the incoming tourists, Maasai dancing at the camp, a scheduled visit to a Maasai village, and a briefing on Maasai culture by a Maasai chief, who began his talk to the tour group I joined by saying in English, "I think all of you must have read about the Maasai." I choose, however, to discuss the Out of Africa Sundowner party held on the Oloololo escarpment on the bank of the Mara River. This performance introduces a new note into ethnic tourism in Kenya. The Sundowner is basically a cocktail party with buffet on a river bank in the bush. The Kichwa Tembo staff set up a bar, with a bartender in red coat, black pants, white shirt, and bow tie. The attraction is called the Out of Africa Sundowner, from the 1985 Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, based on Isak Dinesen's (1938) book about colonial days in Kenya. Out of Africa (1985) was also shown to the tour group on the airplane en route to East Africa. The brochure from the tour agency describing the Sundowner says, "Standing at the precipice of the escarpment, the sun setting low amidst an orange and pink sky, it is easy to see why Africa so inspired Karen Blixen and Dennis Finch-Hatton." The brochure invites the tourists to experience the Sundowner, not from the point of view of the movie or the actors, or the book or the author, but rather from the point of view of the main characters in the story. It is all make-believe. At the Sundowner, waiters serve drinks and food to the tourists standing in groups or seated together in clusters of folding chairs. Then the Kichwa Tembo employees form a line, singing and dancing for the tourists, and the Maasai men begin their chanting and dancing (see Figure 10). The performance is remarkable in a number of respects.11 During the dance, individual Maasai dancers come among the tour group, take the hands of tourists, and bring them into the line, to dance with them. The other Maasai dancers smile in approval and visibly express their appreciation of the dance steps now also performed by the tourists. The remaining tourists laugh and comment; most nod in sympathy and enjoyment. A few of the dancing tourists look uncomfortable but make the best of the situation, while others rise to the occasion, dancing away, swinging about wildly, improvising, introducing dance steps ordinarily seen in an American disco (see Figure 11). After the dance, the Maasai again mix with the tourists, this time passing out free souvenirs--a necklace with carved wooden giraffes for the women and a carved letter opener for the men. These curios are given as if they were personal gifts, but actually the tour agency at the camp buys these items for distribution at the Sundowner. It is all smiles and politeness. At the Sundowner, the Maasai warrior has become tourist friendly. Gone is the wildness, or the illusion of wildness, or the performance of wildness, to be replaced by a benign and safe African tribesman. In Mayers Ranch, the particular appeal was precisely the tension between the wild Maasai and the cultured Englishman, but at the Sundowner that binary opposition is dissolved. At the Mayers performance, the tourists moved between two distinct spaces, the Maasai manyatta and the Mayers's lawn, the African space and the English space, the wild and the civilized. The Maasai did not enter the Mayers's area, for to do so would be a violation and would destroy the touristic illusion. At the Sundowner, however, the two spaces have merged--there is no separation between the Maasai and the tourists, but only one performance space where the two intermingle. By breaking the binary, ethnic tourism in Kenya is structurally changed (Sahlins 1981). During the dancing at the Sundowner, the camp employees begin to sing a Kenyan song called "Jambo Bwana," written in the mid 1980s by a musical group called "Them Mushrooms."12 The song was first performed in a tourist hotel in Mombasa, became an instant hit, and is still known throughout Kenya. Them Mushrooms moved from Mombasa to Nairobi, established their own recording studio, and have performed abroad. The message of "Jambo Bwana" is that tourists are welcome in Kenya, which is characterized as a beautiful country without problems. One tour agent in Nairobi said it is now the "tourist national anthem" of Kenya, as it is so popular with foreign tour groups. Prominent in the song is the Swahili phrase "Hakuna Matata," which in one version is repeated four times and means "no worries, no problem." The phrase itself has a history. In the 1970s, there was political turmoil in Uganda and in the states surrounding Kenya. During this time, "Hakuna Matata," although always part of coastal Swahili language, came to be widely used as a political phrase, to say that Kenya is safe; it was reassuring to refugees as well as to the citizens of Kenya. After Them Mushrooms wrote "Jambo Bwana" in the mid 1980s, the phrase "Hakuna Matata" became more associated with tourism. "Hakuna Matata" is familiar to tourist audiences as the title song from the Hollywood movie The Lion King (1994), with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. The lyrics repeat the phrase "Hakuna Matata," defining it as follows: Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase Hakuna Matata! Ain't no passing craze It means no worries For the rest of your days It's our problem-free philosophy Hakuna Matata!13 The hotel employees at the Sundowner then sang "Kum Ba Yah," an Angolan spiritual, popular in the United States as a folk, protest, and gospel song. Despite its African origins, "Kum Ba Yah" is now established in U.S. popular culture and has taken on new American meanings. The phrase "Hakuna Matata" has been similarly appropriated and is associated with The Lion King (1994). At the Sundowner, the performers present "Kum Ba Yah" with a Jamaican reggae rhythm, a musical tradition that, to many North Americans, equates good times, blackness, dancing, and Caribbean vacations.14 In other words, Africans have taken a phrase and a song originating in Africa and have performed it for the tourists with a New World Caribbean reggae beat. This musical tradition and the songs themselves, "Hakuna Matata" and "Kum Ba Yah," have been widely interpreted in American popular culture as expressions of "Africanness" and "blackness," and then have been re-presented to American tourists, by Africans, in Africa. What is new is not that transnational influences are at work, that a song or an aspect of culture flows around the globe, as ethnographers are already familiar with these processes. Nor is it new that a global image of African tribesmen is enacted for foreign tourists, as this is also the case at Mayers. What is new is that, at the Sundowner, the Americans, who have presumably made the journey in order to experience African culture, instead encounter American cultural content that represents an American image of African culture. The Americans, of course, feel comfortable and safe, as they recognize this familiar re-presentation and respond positively, for it is their own. This is globalization gone wild: Paul Gilroy's (1993) "Black Atlantic," transnationalism as a Lacanian mirror image, and Appadurai's (1991) "scapes" as a ping pong ball, bouncing fantasy back and forth across the Atlantic. A reggae Lion King in the African bush. Points of origin become lost or are made irrelevant. Old binaries are fractured. The distance is narrowed between us and them, subject and object, tourist and native. Ethnography is transformed into performance, blurring the lines between genres in ways that go beyond Geertz (1983). What is left are dancing images, musical scapes, flowing across borders, no longer either American or African but occupying new space in a constructed touristic borderzone (chapter 7; cf. Appadurai 1991) that plays with culture, reinvents itself, takes old forms and gives them new and often surprising meanings. The colonial image of the Maasai has been transformed in a postmodern era so that the Maasai become the pleasant primitives, the human equivalent of the Lion King, the benign animal king who behaves in human ways. It is a Disney construction, to make the world safe for Mickey Mouse. Presented in tourism are songs that have African roots but that in North America and probably globally are pop culture images of Africa and blackness. Black Africa in the American imagination has been re-presented to Americans in tourism. At the Sundowner, tourists receive drinks, food, a good show, an occasion to socialize, a chance to express their privileged status, an opportunity to experience vicariously the adventure of colonial Kenya, and a confirmation of their prior image of Africa. As post-tourists in a postmodern era, they may also revel in the incongruity of the event, of dancing with the Maasai, of drinking champagne in the African wilderness. But what do the Maasai receive? The answer must be seen against the backdrop of what the Maasai received at Mayers and receive at Bomas. The Maasai performers at Mayers received a small daily wage for each performance in which they participated, a measure of ground maize, and a pint of milk a day. They derived additional income from the sale of their handicrafts and from the tips they received by posing for tourist photographs. They were wage laborers, as are the performers at Bomas. The Maasai on the Mara, however, are part owners of the tourist industry and receive a share of the profits from safari tourism, but this is neither readily apparent nor ordinarily disclosed to the tourists.15 The tourists see only what is exhibited to them in performance, but there is a vast behind-the-scenes picture. The Maasai receive 18 percent of the gross receipts of the "bed nights," the cost of accommodations at Kichwa Tembo per night per person. This can be a considerable amount as there are 51 units at the camp and the cost per night could be US$300 to US$400 in high season, or over US$100,000 per week with full occupancy (Kichwa Tembo 2000). There are a total of 22 camps and lodges on the Mara, some even more luxurious and expensive than Kichwa Tembo. The entrance fee to the Masai Mara Reserve is US$27 per person per day, and Maasai receive 19 percent of that fee. The percentages of 18 and 19 (odd figures) were the result of a long process of negotiation. The funds are accumulated and given to two county councils, and in one of these, the Transmara Council, where Kichwa Tembo is located, the funds are divided among the "group ranches," each based on one of the ten Maasai clans that own land on the reserve. The Maasai ownership of most of the land on the reserve, as well as the land on which the camps and lodges are built, is the basis of their receiving a share of the gross receipts. Philip Leakey (a brother of Richard Leakey) reports that before the 1980s, Kenyan elite and foreign investors derived almost all of the income from international tourism (personal communication, February 19, 1999; see also Berger 1996). As a result, most Kenyans including Maasai were indifferent or even hostile to tourism, as they did not profit from it. Further, there was considerable poaching in the game parks. The depletion of the wildlife on the East African reserves posed a danger to the national heritage of Kenya and to the natural heritage of the world, not to mention that the deterioration of game threatened the entire tourism industry and with it a key source of foreign exchange. Things changed in the 1980s, as it was widely recognized that the way to gain the support of the Maasai for tourism development was to give them a stake in the industry, which the Maasai had argued for. Since then, there has been a drastic reduction in poaching on the reserve. The Maasai, who do not usually eat wild game, now have a financial interest in protecting the animals and in stopping poaching. Further, a new law was passed stipulating that anyone caught poaching in Kenya may be killed on sight. The Maasai profit from tourism on the Mara in other ways. There are 170 park rangers on the reserve, and all are Maasai. The Kichwa Tembo package includes a visit to a Maasai village, where the villagers receive the US$10 per person admission fee as well as the profits from the sale of handicrafts. One day I counted 80 tourists, for a total income of US$800. When the Maasai perform their dances for tourists, they receive compensation. One group consisting of about 15 Maasai received US$163 per performance. Again, tourists are not usually aware of these financial arrangements. Some Maasai on the Mara are wealthy by Kenyan standards, but that wealth is not visible to the tourists. Most Maasai have used their income to increase their herds of livestock--cows, sheep, and goats--which are kept away from the tourist routes. Maasai are employed at Kichwa Tembo not only as waiters, chefs, and security guards, but in management positions as well. Yet, the tourists do not "see" these employees as Maasai. In the hotel context, the Maasai waiters are reserved and deferential in their white uniforms, avoiding eye contact with tourists and speaking only when spoken to. If waiters were to overstep the bounds of appropriate service behavior they would be reprimanded, whereas if the same Maasai performing for tourists as warriors behaved deferentially, they would be a disappointment to the spectators. All parties understand the behavior appropriate in each position, for it is a mutually understood symbolic system, and each party to the drama performs an assigned role. Within the lodge, the tourists are usually polite to the waiters but are disinterested, for they are perceived as service employees. Kichwa Tembo camp is a space that provides the comfort, luxury, and safety on which upscale tourism depends. In contexts in which the Maasai are performing as "Maasai," on display for tourists, it is tourist time. The Maasai men, adorned with red ochre, wearing red robes, beadwork, and sandals, and carrying sticks, change their demeanor--they become warriors. In performance, in these contexts, the tourists become voyeurs--there is a cornucopia of visualization, and the simultaneous clicking of many cameras. Ironically, on the same day a single individual might be a deferential waiter in the hotel during the serving of a meal, but a Maasai warrior, one of the "Lords of East Africa," during performance time in the evening. The Maasai, of course, are well aware of the discrepancy between their own lifestyles and their tourist image, and they manipulate it, but there are many complexities in the situation. Some Maasai, who have in effect become performers in the tourism industry, display themselves for tourists, to be observed and photographed, and if asked, they reply that they do it for the money. They play the primitive, for profit, and have become what MacCannell (1992) calls the ex-primitive. This is the case for performers at all three sites, at Mayers, Bomas, and the Sundowner. Tourism for them is their livelihood, a source of income. On the other hand, I knew one Maasai business executive who assumed "ethnic" Maasai traits only during his nonworking hours. He dressed in Western clothing with shirt and tie during the work week in Nairobi, where he spoke English, but on most weekends, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and speaking Maasai, he would return to his native village to become a pastoralist to attend to his extensive herd of livestock. On ceremonial occasions, he would wear traditional Maasai clothing and dance and chant in Maasai rituals. To put it another way, what touristic or ethnographic discourse characterize as Maasai "ethnic" traits, may, in tourism or in life, be displayed situationally, depending on the context, which is probably the case universally for all ethnicities. Identities are not given, they are performed by people with agency who have choices. But boundaries are elusive. As de Certeau (1984) suggests, spatial patterns are not composed of rigid unbreakable regulations, flawlessly executed, but are spatial practices, characterized by transgression, manipulation, and resistance, as individuals appropriate space for themselves. I give two examples. While watching the dancing at the Sundowner, I noticed one man, a waiter in black pants and white shirt, who picked up a club and began dancing along with the red-robed Maasai. He was out of place, apparently a Maasai waiter who decided to join his fellow tribesmen, but it was a broken pattern. At Kichwa Tembo, one of the tourists, an African American woman, had taken an optional nature walk with Maasai guides. During the walk they came upon a pride of 12 lions. The woman reported that she had never been so scared in her life, but the Maasai guides urged calm and slowly moved the group away from the lions without incident. After that dramatic encounter, while resting and chatting, the woman showed the Maasai guides a picture of her grown daughter, a strikingly beautiful woman. One of the guides announced to the woman that he wanted to marry the daughter, but the woman passed it off and they continued on the nature walk. Later, back at the camp, the Maasai man came to the woman with his father, a marriage spokesman, and offered 25 head of cattle for the daughter, with the implication of a still larger offer, a huge bride-price. The father urged the woman to consult with her own marriage brokers, and then to meet again to negotiate--a Maasai practice. When the woman told me about this incident, I playfully suggested that the least she could have done would have been to transmit the offer to her daughter and let her make her own decision. But the woman replied that her daughter was finishing her studies at a prestigious law school in California, was very driven and ambitious, and would not want to be the second wife of a Maasai villager. Boundaries are not rigid--tourists and natives do move into each other's spaces. Maasai then are incorporated into the safari tourism industry on the Mara in a dual capacity. First, they are part owners, possibly partners, and certainly beneficiaries. Second, they are also performers in a touristic drama, a secondary attraction to the wild animals on the reserve, but clearly objects of the tourist gaze. As the Maasai receive a share of the profits and a stake in the industry, the question may be asked, to what extent do they control the images by which they are represented? My observations suggest that if the Maasai now have economic and political power, they do not exercise it to influence how they are presented in tourism. As the Maasai say, they are performing for the money and are willing to play into the stereotypic colonial image of themselves to please their clients, the foreign tourists. As one Maasai explained to me, the European and American tourists do not come to Kenya to see someone in Western dress, like a Kikuyu. The Maasai put on the red robes and red ochre and carry clubs so the tourists will be able to recognize them as Maasai. Who is producing the Sundowner Maasai? Kichwa Tembo tented safari camp was built by the tour agency Abercrombie and Kent, but was recently sold to another company, Conservation Corporation Africa. Regardless of the particular company involved, the Out of Africa Sundowner is produced by tour agencies and, by extension, by international tourism to meet a demand. Tourism is marketing, selling a product to an audience. The production is skillful because the hand of the tour agency is masked in the presentation of the Maasai. It is the Maasai dancers who distribute gifts directly to the tourists at the Sundowner (with gifts provided by the tour agent), it is the Maasai chief who collects the $10 fee to enter the village (but it is the tour agent who selects the village), and it is a Maasai (hired by the tour agent) who provides explanations of Maasai culture. At Mayers, the entrance fee was given to the Mayers or to their staff, and the staff provided the commentary on Maasai lifeways. It was apparent at Mayers that white Europeans were explaining and producing Africans, with all its colonial overtones. At Kichwa Tembo, however, Maasai explain Maasai culture, but briefly, as most tourists are not really interested in a deeper ethnographic understanding. In Maasai tourism generally, at Mayers, Bomas, and the Mara, there is a master narrative at work, but it is usually implicit, a background understanding. On site, textual content is less prominent than evocative visualizations, songs, dance, and movement. In a sense, the producer is more important in Maasai tourist attractions than the writer. At the Mara, a casual observer might say that the Maasai are producing themselves, but I believe it more accurate to say that the tour agents are the primary producers, with the Maasai at best relegated to a minor role. The role of the tour agent is concealed, which is part of the production. If the Maasai at the Mara are behaving in accordance with a generalized Western representation of Maasai and of African pastoralists, then tourism in a foreign land becomes an extension of American popular culture and of global media images. The startling implication, for me, is that to develop a new site for ethnic tourism, it is not necessary to study the ethnic group or to gather local data, but only to do market research on tourist perceptions. I know these statements are somewhat conjectural, but is it too speculative to contemplate that the Maasai will eventually become (rather than just appear as) the pop culture image of themselves? I do not believe in the homogenization of world cultures caused by globalization, for local cultures always actively assert themselves, and I would argue for the long-term integrity of the Maasai. But the issue is raised, how well will the Maasai continue to compartmentalize themselves and separate performance from life? The line separating tourist performance and ethnic ritual has already become blurred in other areas of the world with large tourist flows, such as Bali. The Balinese can no longer distinguish between performances for tourists and those performances for themselves, as performances originally created for tourism have subsequently entered Balinese rituals (chapter 7; Picard 1996). Where does Maasai culture begin and Hollywood image end? Writing Tourism and Writing Ethnography Mayers presented the tourist image of the African primitive, Bomas presents the preservation of a disappearing Kenyan tradition, and the Sundowner an American pop-culture image of Africa. The tourists at Mayers sat on logs facing the performance area in a reconstructed Maasai village, at Bomas they sit in tiered auditorium seats facing the stage, and at the Sundowner on folding chairs on the escarpment as the performance evolves around them. The performance and the setting were concordant at Mayers; are detached at Bomas; and at the Sundowner, the most global message is delivered in the most natural setting, along a river bank in a game reserve. Mayers served English tea, Bomas serves drinks at the bar, while the waiters at the Sundowner pour champagne. The binary opposition at Mayers is between the African primitive and the civilized Englishman; at Bomas it is between traditional and modern Kenyans; and at the Sundowner, the binary is dissolved because the performance presents what the tourists interpret to be their own transnational media image of Africa. The master trope at Mayers was tourist realism, at Bomas it is undisguised nationalism, and at the Sundowner it is a postmodern image. Mayers, Bomas, and the Sundowner differ in many respects but all three sites combine tourism, theater, and entertainment. All take simultaneous account of the prior colonial status, local politics, national forces, and global international requirements. I have emphasized globalization at the Sundowner site, but there clearly are global dimensions to Mayers and Bomas. Mayers (as tourist realism) and Bomas (as national theater) are examples of transnationalism, and both arose in Kenya as an extension of the postcolonial condition, one for foreigners and the other for locals, for as Oakes (1998:11) says, both authenticity and tradition are themselves modern sensibilities. In the 1960s, Mayers reworked a 19th-century colonial narrative for foreigners, and Bomas is a recent variant for domestic tourists of public displays of living peoples. Such displays have a history dating back to European folk museums (Horne 1992), World Fairs (Benedict 1983), and even earlier (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:34-51; Mullaney 1983). Bomas most resembles the ethnic theme parks of contemporary China (Anagnost 1993), Indonesia (chapter 8; Errington 1998; Pemberton 1994a), and other nations (Stanley 1998). Viewed historically, the three tourist sites parallel three different forms of ethnographic writing. Mayers Ranch can be likened to ethnographic realism--it strived for an aura of authenticity based on a prior image of what was believed to be the authentic African pastoralist. When Mayers was opened in 1968, colonialism was gone in Kenya, a thing of the past, but there were still many British expatriates and a worldwide longing for a colonial experience--an enacted imperialist nostalgia--that Mayers produced for the expatriate community and foreign tourists. Authenticity has figured prominently in tourism scholarship since Boorstin (1961) and MacCannell (1976). Boorstin characterizes tourist attractions as pseudoevents, which are contrived and artificial, as opposed to the real thing. MacCannell sees modern tourists as on a quest for authenticity, which is frequently presented to them as "staged authenticity," a false front that masks the real back stage to which they do not have access. For both Boorstin and MacCannell, there is a real authentic culture located somewhere, beyond the tourist view. Contemporary anthropologists would not agree with the early work of Boorstin and MacCannell, for as anthropologists now know, there are no originals, and a single "real" authentic culture does not exist. Of course, all cultures everywhere are real and authentic, if only because they are there, but this is quite different from the concept of "authenticity," which implies an inherent distinction between what is authentic and what inauthentic, applies labels to cultures, and values one more than the other. There is no one authentic Maasai culture, in part because Maasai culture is continually changing and there are many variants. If one were to identify, say, a 19th-century version of Maasai culture as the real thing, one could then look further, back to the 18th century or to a more distant region, as the locus of the really real Maasai. It is an impossible quest. The same vision is apparent in ethnographic realism (Marcus and Fisher 1986; Rosaldo 1989; Tedlock 2000), the basic mode of ethnographic writing until the 1960s. The classic monographs in Africa (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940) did not describe what the ethnographers actually observed at the time of their fieldwork but was a construction based on the prevailing anthropological vision of a pure unaltered native culture. As in anthropology, where the hypothetical ethnographic present was discredited and colonialism criticized, so too was Mayers Ranch disparaged and eventually closed. Mayers existed historically before either Bomas and the Sundowner, but it was an anachronism, doomed from the beginning. An effort to influence the political culture of Kenya, Bomas emerged in response to those forces that led to political activism within anthropology during the 1970s, the epoch of the civil rights movement and the emergence of new nations. The genre is ethnographic activism. Bomas depicts traditional Maasai culture as fast disappearing, requiring that it be preserved in museum archives or in artistic performance. As a collective past, Maasai culture as represented at Bomas becomes part of the national heritage of postindependence Kenya. Bomas is a response to the intense nationalism that characterized many newly independent multiethnic Third World countries. The basic problem for the nation was how to express ethnicity yet simultaneously to contain it, a problem not yet resolved in many African states. The Sundowner is an outgrowth of global media flows, electronic communication, and pervasive transnationalism. It is for foreign post-tourists, produced in the style of postmodern ethnography. Unlike Mayers, it rejects the realist genre. Unlike Bomas, it rejects nationalist rhetoric. Postmodern ethnography describes juxtapositions, pastiche, functional inconsistency, and recognizes, even celebrates, that cultural items originating from different places and historical eras may coexist (Babcock 1999). Contemporary ethnographers no longer try to mask outside influences, nor do they see them as polluting a pure culture (Bruner 1984c, 1986a). In performance, the Sundowner is more playful. It intermingles elements from the past and the present, is less concerned about points of historical origin, and does not strive for cultural purity. The comparison is not quite that neat, however, as the Sundowner tourists do occupy a colonial position and do want to view "primitive" Maasai; nevertheless, there has been a shift in the stance of the audience. Post-tourists at the Sundowner are willing to dance with the Maasai and joke with them, and they are not that fastidious about authenticity. But postmodern tourists, and ethnographers, have not entirely overcome the contradictions of their modernist and colonial pasts. Many postmodern ethnographers, it must be recognized, still struggle with an inequitable colonial relationship and vast differentials in wealth and power between themselves and the people they study. Further, ethnographers, as those who write, control how culture is represented. That the three sites correspond to different genres of ethnographic writing is not unexpected as both tourism and ethnography are disciplinary practices, products of the same worldwide global forces. Ethnographers are not entirely free from the dominant paradigms of their times. Tourist tales have their counterpart in ethnographer’s tales. As an ethnographer studying tourism, ethnographic perspectives are reflected back to me by the very tourist performances that I study. The predicament, of course, is not restricted to an anthropology of tourism; it is inherent in the ethnographic enterprise (Bruner 1986b). |