Cosmopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the State: The Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa 1

This chapter presents an ethnohistorical case study of Maasai activists in Tanzania to explore the centrality of the state to both indigenous rights and neoliberalism, and the consequent challenges to their political struggles. It traces and explains three phases of the relationship between Maasai and the Tanzanian state. First, a deeply modernist, paternalist postcolonial state that treated Maasai as ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’, and left little space for Maasai political engagement. Second, the emergence and embrace of indigenous rights and transnational advocacy by Maasai activists in the 1990s. Finally, a recent shift by Maasai activists from discourses of indigeneity to discourses of livelihoods, from international to national advocacy, and from calling themselves non-governmental organisations to civil society organisations. The first period of the relationship between Maasai and the Tanzanian nation-state, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, corresponds to independence and President Nyerere’s forceful efforts to build a Tanzanian nation premised on the socialist principles of ujamaa.