Why Does the US Fund Feminism in the Maasai Mara?

Imperial religion shapes all corners of our planet.

The Maasai Mara is a beautiful game reserve in south-west Kenya. It reaches to the border of Tanzania, where it connects with that country’s Serengeti Reserve. But there is no real border between the two. Together, the two reserves make up over 6000 square miles across the two countries.

Both reserves are famous for their rolling green hills and plains, their abundance of the Big Five (lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo, and leopard) and playing host to the Great Migration, in which millions of animals, led mostly by wildebeest, go on an epic, circular journey for water and grazing after their calving season.

Both parks are also traditional homelands of the Maasai people, who have been living in the region for centuries, and are known for their height, the red cloth they wear, and a culture and economy which centres around cattle.

Traditionally, the Maasai believed that all the cattle in the world belonged to them as decreed by God. They resist all other forms of creating wealth and have fought to maintain their traditional ways.

One of the great advantages to my new life in Kenya is the proximity of ‘the Mara’. Last week, my family spent three nights in the Reserve. In a reception area, a magazine published by one of the leading Mara NGOs caught my eye:

The Maasai are very traditional. They have resisted attempts to move them away from their pastoral life which includes a natural division of labour and duties between men and women.

This seemed strange to me - this notion of women reshaping the future. First of all, why must the future be reshaped, and how can you reshape something not yet in existence, anyway?

And why would one gender be doing the reshaping? Of course, there is also the reference to our ‘unprecedented times’ - the times of covid.

If you believe we are living in unprecedented times of pandemic, why would your focus then be on female empowerment and not the pandemic itself?

It all seems so very strange… until you look down at the bottom left of the cover page. What do you see there? The sponsor of the magazine and of the Mara at large - USAID, the official foreign aid organisation of the United States government.

Even the staid and conventional US Foreign Policy magazine admits that USAID is basically a CIA front. Kenya itself accused the aid agency in 2014 of fomenting anti-government protests.

Yet here is USAID, in the midst of covid drama, funding promises to reshape life in the Maasai Mara, in ways to reflect their own apparently thriving and healthy egalitarian society.

If you go to the website of this organisation, the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association (MMWCA), you find their relatively small team has one member devoted to ‘Youth and Gender’ who ‘is responsible for mainstreaming Gender into Natural Resource Management across the membership working hand in hand with regional coordinators to ensure conservancy governance structures are gender sound.’

Who decides what ‘gender sound’ means? Is ‘mainstreaming Gender into Natural Resource Management’ meant to make sense?

If you page through this magazine further, you can read about efforts to keep the community ‘safe’ during these unprecedented times.

And the area was even graced by a special visit from the head of USAID, John Barsa, who being very clean himself, did not have to wear a mask while sharing his higher knowledge, despite his non-speaking listeners having to do so.

Kenya, like many African countries, under western and Chinese advice, responded in a very draconian fashion to covid. Curfews were put in place. Inter-provincial travel was banned. Tourism ground to a complete halt.

The Maasai were forbidden to take their cattle to market, or to trade or meet with their brethren across the Tanzanian border.

(Intriguingly, neighbouring Tanzania initially resisted western and Chinese lockdown models, stating they could not afford to do so. The former president, who had a Phd in Chemistry, also suggested he would not accept vaccines from white countries who had failed to find a vaccine for HIV after decades of trying. He would disappear and then die, and be succeeded by a pro-covid vaccination woman.)

And in the midst of all this chaos, as in every other part of the world, the local people are being lectured about a great reset, a great reshaping, a grand re-building.

As I sat and read this strange magazine, I recalled a phrase belonging to the otherwise reliably liberal Pope Francis - ‘ideological colonisation’. According to the Pope, ideological colonisation is when foreign aid from developed nations is made dependent on accepting modern values concerning abortion and sexuality. Culture is deleted. And so is faith. (Today, most Maasai are Christians.)

The next day, my family and I were offered the opportunity to walk through the bush with a Maasai guide. This was in the wild. Some herd-boys would walk past us with their cattle, but they complained that the day before two heads of cattle had been taken by lions.

Our Maasai guide, who had a Christian name, carried a club and a spear in case we came across predators. He also explained that the red cloth (or shuka) he wore, acted as a deterrent for lions and leopards after centuries of men clothed in such fashion having used the same weapons to protect their cattle.

I asked him about covid, whether many had become ill in his community. He said they had been locked down with no tourism, but that he did not know a single person who had been sick from covid. They would have known nothing about covid if they had not been told about it or forced to adopt novel restrictions to their daily life.

We got to the top of a hill and he showed us the hills of Tanzania in the distance.

I am no believer in some notion of preserving all the old ways of life, of returning to nature and nomadic, pastoral life. I would tip our guide using the Kenyan M-Pesa app we both had on our smartphones.

But, nevertheless, I wondered, what possible good can come to these people from the philanthropy of the west, in these strange days?

Did they want to be kept safe from a virus which we all caught anyway? This is a people who spend their life in the warm sun and fresh air, who traditionally live on blood, meat, and milk. Are the great covid overlords healthier than they are?

As we drove out the Mara, you can see the Maasai communities, still herding their cattle, still living fairly traditionally. But plastic litter is strewn about the dust roads. Children walk to and from school in western style uniforms.

No man or culture or people is an island. There is no going back.

But surely there must, and can be, some resistance to a neo-colonialism of gender theory, plastic masks, and experimental genetic vaccines?