One of the most telling passages in that interview is when she singles out the Maasai and Somali as her favorite natives; not, for example, the Gikuyu who she had most contact with (because they did all the labor on her farm), but the natives who could be described using “noble savage” tropes and analogies to “Red Indians.” The laboring natives she prefers not to think too much about; the ones that exercise her imagination with their beautiful nobility are the ones.

[…]

Someone like Dinesen, in other words, is likely to regard the natives on whose labor she’s dependent differently than how she regards the people on whose land she’s dependent. One of the things that’s complicated about colonial Kenya was that while the Maasai were categorically displaced from their land and romanticized as “the Cherokee of East Africa” — precisely because they could be imagined as being utterly unwilling to be assimilated (and therefore safely and happily doomed to tragic extinction) — the Gikuyu were a laboring population on which the white settlers were parasitically dependent. To analogize to the American context — as the founders of the Kenyan settler state explicitly did — the Maasai were like the Plains Indians (who were imagined to sort of magically disappear as soon white people rolled up), while the Gikuyu were more like the way African-Americans looked to post-civil war white Americans: good to have around for working on plantations, but kind of creepy when they started wearing suits, getting educated, and getting anywhere near “our women.”

People like Dinesen loved the Masai; if you imagine them as a doomed pastoralist people who are intrinsically unable to adapt to modernity, then you don’t need to feel bad about taking their land. It’s just Darwin and stuff, right? They’re just too different than you and I. Pity they’ll have to go, but that’s the Law Of Nature. But while the Maasai supposedly had no desire to modernize, the Gikuyu were quite keen to take up education, progress, modernity, and all that stuff, which bugged the shit out of people like Dinesen and had to be suppressed and forgotten. […] Read More

via zunguzungu