Corruption Junction, What's Your Function?

While Kenya is seriously lacking in rain right now, it is certainly not lacking in corruption (or dead cow carcasses everywhere).

We spent this entire morning and afternoon interviewing group ranch and government officials about cultural manyattas in Loitokitok Town. Our first three interviews were with group ranch officials, with whom we spoke about the way the manyattas work, from the management structure to how they earn money to whether they preserve the culture or not, and about the new association (kikundi) that they are forming to regulate the manyattas in the Amboseli region.

It is just so sad to see how tourists are completely duped in all senses of the word when they visit these manyattas. When we went to one earlier in the semester they told us that Maasai do not use any modern technologies whatsoever, explaining that every morning they make a fire for the entire manyatta to use by rubbing sticks together to ignite it since they do not even use matches. They told us how all Maasai are polygamous, and that the only things that their diet consists of is a mixture of cow's milk and blood. These were all versions of the truth, but really failed to capture how the modern culture is changing and adapting to development and contact with the West.

I don't know a single Maasai who only eats cow's milk and blood, and in fact, blood is only really drunk during ceremonies. Also, because of Christianity, many Maasai men are giving up polygamy. But funniest of all is that Kenneth, my tour guide through the manyatta when we went as a group for class two months ago acted as my translator when we did our first day of interviews, and every so often an interview would be interrupted by the sounds of his American pop ring tone on his cell phone. So much for no matches.

But no matter how disturbing this fudging of the truth was, it was nothing compared to the corruption involved in all levels of this business. Firstly, the thing that our study has focused on a lot is the fact that tour drivers take 97% of the entry fee that the tourists pay to the manyatta. They get away with this because of the fact that pretty much the only way for the manyattas to get tourists in the first place is through the drivers, and at least if tourists are there they can still manage to make money by selling their goods to them.

In speaking to the three group ranch officials, they really delved into these issues with the tour drivers, which is one of their chief concerns with the cultural manyattas. Then, we spoke with a fourth official about how people register manyattas. The conservation at first was very technical about that process of registration, but then from him we finally received a truthful answer: HIV/AIDS and prostitution are problems in the manyattas.

All other officials we had spoken to, from the management committees of the manyattas themselves to the group ranch officials had said that they had addressed the problem of HIV/AIDS through education and that prostitution was not an issue because all men came to the manyattas with their wives--and yet, in interviews with manyatta members we found that many of them had their family living outside of the manyattas to take care of their livestock or shambas (farms). While the education programs had certainly helped to alleviate the severity of the problem (one manyatta was completely wiped out by AIDS), this official informed us sexual promiscuity and spread of STDs is still a problem.

And he went further. He explained how all of the corruption among manyatta committees in taking larger shares of communal money for themselves stems from the corruption of the group ranch officials themselves, in other words, the very three officials with whom we had just spoken. He explained how group ranch officials ensured close relationships with manyatta management, and how money from the manyattas went into election campaigns for group ranch officials. We sat there and listened, questioned, fascinated at what was actually going on, outraged at how many lies we had been told.

After this last man left, we sat around exclaiming about the corruption in this country, something we had always heard about, but which we had never personally experienced in this way. Our teacher came in after he had seen this man off, and entered our conversation. He told us that this in fact was the man he had mentioned before to us who gave out multiple registration permits to the manyattas, because he made more money that way. He told us that the real reason that this official was against the formation of a manyatta association was because he would lose personal power, and his system of corrupt actions would crumble.

The spit just hit the fan.

DR

It's directed research time at the center. This means that for ten days, we are out in the field collecting data, which in my case means interviewing about ten people per day about conservation issues and Maasai cultural manyattas. It is just amazing because we basically walk around all different areas in the Maasai group ranches of southern Kenya talking to people in their homes or bomas, out in agricultural fields, or just under trees in the dry, hot rangelands.

One of the coolest interviews that I've had came when we were walking in Mbirikani Group Ranch from one boma towards a clump of trees just visible over a hill with no other development in sight. It was about lunch time and we were planning on going over to those trees to eat our packed lunch, but as we were walking, two Maasai men in their traditional blue and red shukas came walking over to us from a laundry washing area (i.e. a hole in a water pipeline had led to a small patch of green grass among the barren, dead, dry, and dying rangelands in this time of drought; people were taking advantage of the water as a place in which to wash their clothes).

Anyway, the elder of the two, a man over fifty and a Maasai senior elder, after conversing with our guide and translator led us over a sparse, low-hanging tree to let us interview him. In the heat of the day, he crouched low to avoid the pointy branches, and half knelt, half sat while leaning against the trunk of the tree throughout the entire interview. It was a position in which I have seen many Maasai men sitting as they converse and meet with each other under the slight shade of the twiggy trees, and I couldn't believe that now I was a part of one such gathering. He was the first man whom I had interviewed in the past three days who was not a Christian, and practiced no form of modern religion. It was just so cool!