Yuning "Anona" Yang

2019/12/05

The car was running wildly in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya towards the heart of the endless African prairie, while I sit by the car window excitedly, waiting for stunning views of animals to appear. Minutes later, we arrived at a primitive Masai village. The tiny village was hidden deep inside the woods, hardly to be seen from a distance. Crowds of Masai people flowed out of the skinny doorway; the leading Masai man talked to our guide and charged each of us sixty dollars as an entrance fee before allowing us to walk beyond the circular wall made of mud and soil. The wall was much higher than the average height of a human; inside of it, a dozen of houses, small and low-roofed, scattered around sporadically, being completely separated from the outside.

As we were entering, Masai women stepped out of their homes and joined their husbands dancing and singing. I felt quite warm and welcomed at first until another group of tourists came and were welcomed in the exact same process as what the Masai just performed for us. It was not hard to imagine countless tourists paid their visits to look around in this tiny little place and were all welcomed in the formulated manner. Before we left, the Masai people led us to a curio shop filled of handmade souvenirs and tried to sell them to us at ridiculously high prices. Through the windows of the curio shop in distance, I saw tourist’s cars parked in neat lines outside the village wall, just like in a parking lot built outside a zoo.

The orderly rows of cars reminded me that these native people were actually living in the fenced national reserve with animals. My assumption was that they were living here to preserve cultural traditions and keep a natural intimidate relationship with the animals. But the truth seems more complicated: by selling tickets and souvenirs, they were turning their own living environment into a commercial tour spot that displayed their cultures and even themselves for tourists to observe. The village was like a small zoo inside the large zoo of the national reserve that consisted of both animals and humans. How could something like this happen?

The Masai Mara National Reserve was initially established in 1948 (Expert Africa). At this time, Kenya had just entered its modern era under colonization as the crown colony of Kenya, being administered by a British governor, while large proportion of wild animals and also the livestock herded by Masai people were dying because of an imported livestock disease in 1891 (BBC; Expert Africa). The reserve was meant for wildlife sanctuary, but in a way, humans used fences to separate humans and their cities away from the nature where animals live (Expert Africa). The native people who “needed” to live in the nature with animals forced themselves to be separated from the human population and left in the fenced reserve for travelers to tour around. But don’t the Masai people hold the keys to their own cage? The doorway of the village was always open and connected to the outside, all they needed to do was walk out. Why didn’t they choose to come out of the reserve at the beginning, or actually at any time, to try to blend into the Kenyan population, but instead insisted on living inside the wall? What barrier from the outside or what necessity from the inside came up to block their way of living out of the village? And why did the native people essentially exploit themselves to sell their culture traditions for money, especially when the reserve was meant for wildlife sanctuary but not gaining profits? Why do our tourists want to travel such a long distance to see this weird combination of modernism and primitivism, this culture in a cage?

As the travelers were observing the Masai people with curiosity towards their culture within the cage of village wall, they were also observing the travelers with the curiosity towards modern society outside the cage. A lady who traveled in the same group as me brought bags of candy; she distributed those to the Masai kids and the kids ate carefully with eyes shining the light of longing towards her after they finished eating. I remembered that I worried at the sight. When two opposite things come to an encounter, which in this case are the candy from the modern world and the kids in the primitive Masai village, problems would always happen due to the incomprehensible nature of contradiction brought by both sides. The candy could be a seed planted unconsciously but deeply in the children’s hearts, which would later become the desire of breaking the cage of cultural primitivism and adapting into the modern society when they grew up.

Adapting into the modern world may be hard for them, or even violent, or undesirable in a broader sense. As phrased by John Berger, these native people were “rendered absolutely marginal.” (24).  Masai people were traditional cattle-herders; they had virtually no proper education so that they would be neither able to find a proper job in a global marketplace nor had enough money to send their children to schools, which could be the wall restricting them from leaving—they actually couldn’t control their own keys to open the “zoo” gate. Berger would probably continue to say that these Masai people were putting themselves in a theater setting with real “props” to “constitute the living monument to their own disappearance” since their own culture was diminishing as modernism urged them to leave or prepare to leave their traditional way of living behind and accept the embrace from the modern society (Berger 26).

Surprisingly, John Berger actually used the above description in his article “Why Look at Animals?” to discuss the reason behind the disappointment people had towards the animals in the zoo: the artificial space “isolated” the animals “from each other and without interaction between species;” their central interest became “a passive waiting for a series of arbitrary outside interventions” and treat anything around them as marginal with indifference (21, 25-26). Masai people were similar to the animals in the zoo, isolated from human population, and had limited freedom in the limited space of “cage”—the village, or even the fences of sanctuary together with the animals in the reserve; the only interaction they had with the outside world was travelers’ visiting. During my visit, tourists asked the Masai people to show them around the place, including Masai people’s own houses, and took pictures of whatever they saw as if we were touring around inside a museum or zoos treating the surroundings as objects with no life; Masai people had been exposed without privacy.

But different from the animals whose fate was controlled by humans’ power of intelligence, the Masai knew that they could get out of the cage. Although indifference was written on the parents’ faces after putting up the welcome performances repeatedly, I believed, their hope was hidden within the seeds inside their children’s hearts as they were trying to learn some English little by little so that they could communicate with the outside world and having their children sitting on the ground to contact with the visitors. That dominant role humans were playing on animals’ fate is achieved by the physical power of technology and the mental power of human language that animals cannot speak. Language has the power to connect people from different countries under different culture backgrounds, like our tourists who can speak English were able to talk to the Masai people and ask questions to know more about them. But the barrier of language can be hard—or impossible—to overcome so that the indifference human play with animals can be exerted onto the people who aren’t able to speak the universal language well into the state of marginality and reification.

Kenya was a country influenced greatly by British colonization. As a leftover, the official language of Great Britain—English—has led the native people to abandon their mother tongue. (As told by my guide, although Kenya had two official languages, Swahili and English, people who can speak English got hired a lot more easily and earned a much higher salary than others, so after time English had become the “only” official language in Kenya.) If these Masai children were to enter the modern society, they would have to go to school and learn how to speak English. According to Thiong’o, the spoken and the written language serve as a tool for a culture to  “transmit or impart images of the world and reality.” (15). At school, the Masai kids would learn about the world from a history that was written and defined by English; and they would see through what they have learned to understand the world in a way that English history wanted them to understand. Not only about the world outside the reserve, they would also learn about their own culture in English. These colonial children were “made to see the world and where he (they) stands in it as seen and defined by or reflected in the culture of the language of imposition.” (Thiong’o, 17). But how could the Masai children learn about their own culture, perceive their own identities, and understand the relationships between their culture and the world by a foreign language instead of their mother tongue, the Masai language? This is ridiculous.

It seems the Masai language was also trapped in a cage locked by English. Ngugi wa Thiong’o mentioned in “Decolonizing the Mind” of his own experience as an African writer who wrote in English, he was invited to the meeting of African writers at Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda, qualifying “on the basis of only two published short stories,” while many other greater writers such as Shabaan Robert and Chief Fagunwa couldn’t qualify only because they wrote in other native languages (Thiong’o 5-6). This phenomenon of English is superior than native languages defined by the society made him think about the definition of African literature: does it need to be written about African or written by Africans or written in African languages (Thiong’o 6)? He finally gave a conclusion using a quote from Obi Wali: “the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium for educated African writing is misdirected, and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture.” (Thiong’o 24). The colonization results in a hierarchy of cultures distinguished by their roles of dominating or being dominated, in other words, modern or primitive, while the language of the dominating culture becomes the tool of ruling. But which modern culture isn’t born to be primitive? Why do people treat the dominated cultures with such an indifference?

The Masai children were quite different from the children who were similar to them but lived in slums in the modern city. They wouldn’t chase after us to ask for more candy, and they wouldn’t grab fiercely from our hands as if seconds later there would be no candy left; all they would do was sit quietly, spreading their palms, and waiting for us to walk over. They were too pure and too naïve, as in their primitive culture there were no technologies nor complex minds as in modern culture did: among the woods with wild animals and on the prairie with cattle herds, no one would come to play tricks on them. However, how to maintain a peaceful relationship with wild animals (they rarely hunt) and how to live on cattle herds were not something that could be written in English textbooks (Expert Africa); what was written in the English textbooks about the local culture either didn’t exist or contained misperceptions observed by people who spoke English but not grown up in Africa. To understand the environment they had lived during their childhood, the Masai children needed their own literature, which should be only written in Masai language, to explain their culture in a familiar way. By learning English as their primary language, the Masai children were actually abandoning their precious Masai culture inherited through their native language generation after generation on the wild African prairie until now. When Masai people are all out in the modern society and are speaking English instead of the native language, the Masai literature wouldn’t advance anymore; slowly, the identities of native Masai would begin to fade and Masai children would no longer understand and embrace their own culture. The vibrant and colorful Masai culture would only be trapped inside the wall where the kids would grow up in with no way of getting out.

It seems that the candy stirred Masai people to open the cage, but they weren’t equipped with skills such as universal language and proper education in order to survive in modern society. However, they still wanted to come out. So, they tried so hard to participate in the economy of modern world, which is consisted of English speaking or comprehensible countries, by exploiting themselves to become expert safari guides and camp managers to sell their culture for money; but when they realize their dreams of getting into the modern society, they would very likely end up with losing their culture and language due to not able to advance their literature under the colonization of English language (Expert Africa). In this war happened in Masai village between modernism and primitivism, the modern culture seemed to win without question: the primitive cultures want to evolve and adapt new forms of practices as the global society advancing in the path of science and technology. But does the primitive culture need to evolve? Why does it need to evolve? Why should it be assimilated?

In this awkward circumstance of primitive modernism, our tourists came with a natural feeling of superiority and looked down upon these cages containing primitive cultures with indifference since we were living in a much more advanced modern culture than theirs and had the money to travel around to different cages just for pleasures. For us, the so-called primitivism is only some random passing sceneries during the trip, but for the Masai, it is the only lifestyle they know and the content of their entire lives. It is our tourists presumably saying the primitivism will eventually be assimilated into the modernism under the misperception of language’s power. But we so easily forget that our ancestors were once living in a similar primitive way just like the Masai and maybe one day in the future the culture we are now embracing would also fade away due to a new age of modernization.

It seems that we might all forget to notice the possibly true reason we are continuously attracted to these tour spots. The primitive culture is so different from our daily lives, and the gap between modernism and primitivism, or to say the present and the past, draws significant attention from people to have a look at the primitive culture. The primitivism works as a lens that leads us into our past. People all have deep connections with their origins; though Masai culture may not be our physically origin, if we take all cultures into account of the entire human history, all human beings are the same. Naturally, we want to know more about the life in the past and the ancestors to comfort the nostalgia towards the past, think about our own identities and search for more depth in the modern culture.

For human evolution, we preserved our past in the cage of museums, occasionally taking it out. In line with Winston Churchill, “those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” (Johnson cited Churchill). People in the modern society should perceive the primitivism as something valuable with respect, and instead of indifference, people should keep the curiosity of learning towards the mental treasure our ancestors left for us. Although the primitivism is locked in the glass cages of museums, they continue to inspire modernism. In the short movie “Ice Age” in the series called “Love, Death & Robots”, the two characters Gail and Rob moved into a new apartment where they found an refrigerator containing a whole civilization (Miller 2019). They watched it growing from prehistorical age to modern age in a time-dilated speed, and finally it went back to ancient times; the whole civilization started to rebuild (Miller 2019). It is truly a possibility that when the culture develops forwards until a certain level, it may go backwards to the very beginning. Maybe now we are not able to give a clear answer to the question of culture development order, but it’s definitely an issue human want to think deeper about what we want the society to be like and the meanings of the developments we are making while controlling the direction of the future of all human beings. Not all developments are meaningful and not all setbacks are definitely bad. It is time to take a rest from hurried economic developments and think about how the whole society might be locked in a cage of so-called developments made by ourselves.

WORKS CITED

Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?.” ABOUT LOOKING.

1977. Print.

Johnson, Jim. “Be Responsible; Don’t Repeat Mistakes.” Columbia Daily Tribune, Columbia

Daily Tribune, https://www.columbiatribune.com/article/20120610/Lifestyle/306109802.

“Kenya Profile – Timeline.” BBC News, BBC, 31 Jan. 2018,

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13682176.

“Maasai Mara National Reserve.” Maasai-Mara-National-Reserve | Kenya | Expert Africa, Expert

Africa, https://www.expertafrica.com/kenya/maasai-mara-national-reserve.

Miller, Tim, director. Ice Age. Love, Death & Robots, Netflix, 15 Mar. 2019.

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. “The Language of African Literature.” Decolonizing the Mind.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data, 1986. III-V. Print.