The Enemy Is Us: Eponymy in the Historiography of the Maasai

Abstract

A major theme in the historiography of the Rift Valley region of east Africa has been the series of raids and wars during the nineteenth century between groups of Maa-speaking peoples who dominated the plains from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. Since the 1840s European and African observers have tended to divide the combatants into two factions, usually called the Maasai on one hand and the Iloikop (or Kwavi) on the other. Since the 1880s European administrators and western scholars have tended to designate the groups they have called Maasai as “pastoralists” or sometimes “pure pastoralists” and the groups they have called Iloikop/Kwavi as “agriculturalists” or “semi-pastoralists.” According to this interpretation, the “Iloikop Wars” or the “Wars between the Maasai and the Iloikop” of the nineteenth century pitted agricultural Maa-speakers against pastoral Maa-speakers. In surveying the relevant literature and in analyzing the European descriptions in light of explanations of my Maasai informants, it became clear that this orthodox dichotomy rests on a mistakenly static perception of socio-economic groups and denies the precariousness of pastoral life in the Rift Valley. Scholarly acceptance of the Maasai-Iloikop (Kwavi) dichotomy as the basis of interpretation of nineteenth-century Maasai history has resulted in a serious distortion of that history and an avoidance of more complex and important issues. In this paper I will review the literature on the “identities” of the Maa-speaking peoples -- identities attributed to them by outside observers -- and subject those interpretations to the perceptions and explanations of the Maa-speaking peoples themselves.