There
have been some developments in Loliondo that I need to blog about when I’ve got
enough information, but first I have a book to write about.
A book of great interest to this blog has been
published: Selling the Serengeti: The Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism by associate
professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the
University of Washington Bothell, Benjamin Gardner. In spite of the title, the focus of this book is
exclusively on the Loliondo Maasai and the different “investors” that are
using, and in the worst case, claiming ownership to Maasai land.
Selling the Serengeti is not a report about what has
happened, but rather something like an analysis of how the different actors are
presented, or present themselves and their relation to the land, and how it
affects the Maasai’s struggle to control their land. The book situates this in
relation to earlier research, like that of Rod Neumann, Doreen Massey and
Stuart Hall (which makes the list of books I need to get hold of longer and
more expensive). Some important pieces of the story are left out, while others
are closely examined.
