In 1896 the colonial state in Kenya began the construction of the Uganda Railway, a haphazard project that critics called the “Lunatic Express.” The lunacy of the project notwithstanding over the next five years, the railway hungrily gobbled up land so that what Maasai laibons, or seers, referred to as the “great serpent” could chart its course from Mombasa to Lake Victoria.

This was a period of profound ecological transformation in the region. Sustained drought caused by an El Niño cycle, led to a conjuncture of overlapping crises—what Jason Moore has referred to as “capitalism as world ecology.” To drought was added rinderpest, famine, and smallpox, which ravaged African communities. Particularly devastated were the pastoral Maasai, who lost up to 95% of their herds. These cattle were central to Maasai modes of subsistence, but were also intimates, what Julie Livingston has referred to as “inter-speciated familiars.” The outlay of capital required to construct the railroad left the colonial government in considerable debt to the Treasury, convincing the state of the fiscal wisdom of white settlement. In 1904the Maasai were dispossessed of grazing lands that they had transformed over generations of shifting pastoralism, practiced forms of care which had made them “sweet.” While the colonial state tacitly conceded that these historical practices had augmented the environment, human and extra-human collaborations that rendered these lands ideal for cattle-raising, they reframed these lands as “waste”— a sleight of hand that paved the way for land seizure and subsequent commodification. Taken together, this reflection argues for a materially grounded understanding of care, one which pays close attention to how the political economic dynamics and ecological conditions of this period worked to foreclose Maasai economies and ecologies of care, ushering in the minimal and productivist forms of care that grounded (settler) colonial capitalism.

The Ecological Conjuncture, or Capitalism as World Ecology

The first thread in this conjunctural moment was drought. The late-nineteenth century saw a climactic event of truly global and truly devastating proportions:  El Niño. While ENSOs have been occurring for thousands of years, data suggests that there is a connection between anthropogenic climate change and the increasing frequency and intensity of El Niño events, which cause drought conditions across much of what capitalism as a world-making force has produced as the Third World. The acceleration of El Niño events in the late-1800s does, indeed, seem to map onto the acceleration in greenhouse gas emissions that scholars have linked to both the industrial revolution and nineteenth-century imperial expansion. 

The colonial state would ultimately take advantage of these conditions to facilitate white accumulation. But El Niño alone did not facilitate these wholesale transformations. 

Which brings us to our second thread in this conjunctural moment: rinderpest. While not unknown on the continent, it was only in the late-1880s that rinderpest, along with increasing European incursions, made inroads south of the Sahara. The devastation was as tremendous as it was fast. Within months, the virus had traveled nearly3,000 kmfrom the coast of the Horn of Africa inland. Scholars speculate that the rapidity of the virus’ spread was linked to drought conditions of the El Niño cycle, which reduced rainfall and water levels across the region. As animals exhaled aerosol droplets, and released nasal and eye secretions, and bodily excretions, the virus found new hosts. By the water sources that animals hoped would relieve them of their dehydration—caused both by the virus sucking their vitality and by drought—infection and death proliferated.

Pastoral communities, reliant as they were on cattle for their sustenance, were the most vulnerable to the virus. Historic economies of care are embedded in the Maasai word en-kishu, which means both cattle and the people, troubling any neat boundary between humans and extra-human natures. Within this epistemology of life and mutuality, cattle were more than mode of subsistence; they were “inter-speciated familiars.” These inter-speciated relations grounded Maasai responses to the devastation—they refer to this period as emutai, because it “finished off completely” Maasai herds, which were both mode of subsistence and way of life.

By 1892, rinderpest had claimed the lives of approximately 50 percent of the herds on the land. But conjunctural conditions were poised to get worse.

Which brings us to our third thread in this conjunctural moment: famine. The desiccation caused by drought produced famine conditions across the region. Under these conditions, neighboring agricultural communities simply could not provision for their pastoralist neighbors, practiced forms of care that historically grounded relations among pastoralists and agriculturalists. Death and wasting proliferated.

But it was not death by famine that caused the bulk of the devastation.

Which brings us to our fourth thread in this conjunctural moment: smallpox. As the virus made energy out of the body of its hosts, it grew stronger as their vitality withered.  The Maasai were particularly vulnerable, transhumance ensuring diseases like smallpox did not become endemic. And these deaths were prolonged and painful—“skin barely holding together the framework of bones which protruded at every angle, feet swollen, eyes sunken, flesh devoured by loathsome sores.”

Structuring the Conjuncture

So extreme was the devastation of these years that when Europeans proceeded inland they found great tracts of vacant land historically occupied by the Maasai. Administrators quickly set to work trying to structure this conjunctural moment. Through a discursive and epistemological sleight of hand, they argued that Africans only “owned” land if they occupied it. Once they had moved off the land—a seasonal strategy of mobility pursued by the pastoral Maasai, one coercively forced into being in extreme ways by the devastations of these years—it became “waste.”  Officials argued that the government should claim title to these “waste” lands and open them to European settlement. Waste, evidently, was an elastic category. With a little legal engineering, waste could be commodified and rendered a source of value. If fictitious capital had funded the construction of the railroad, fictitious commodities would be violently conjured into being to pay down colonial debts.

The assessment of this land as waste was cynicism at its worst.  It was precisely the slow cultivation of cared for landscapes born of Maasai systems of rotating pastoralism that made the lands of the Rift Valley “sweet” and ideal for grazing. Humans and stock had produced this landscape, an inter-speciated collaboration necessary to sustain and maintain the welfare of each, and to produce and reproduce the land as a viable and reliable source of sustenance. It was precisely this quality of cultivated “sweetness” that made these spaces desirable to aspiring white cattle ranchers.

In 1904-05 remaining Maasai were forcibly removed from their grazing grounds and relocated to two reserves. Settlers were quick to lay claim to these “sweet” (“waste”) lands, applying for holdings in historic Maasai grazing regions. This marked a radical rupture in the form, content, and purpose of stock raising. Aspiring ranchers seized these lands, but for an entirely new purpose. With land commodified, what the Maasai considered their inter-speciated kin would be raised as commodities for market. One set of relations premised on historic practices of inter-speciated care was replaced by another founded in law.

By the 1910s, the colonial state had, with some measure of success, managed to structure this conjunctural moment, leveraging African suffering of the late-nineteenth century as it worked to commodify land, a process deemed necessary to pay down the metropolitan debts from which it was born. Enclosure worked to foreclose historic practices of care that had sustained Maasai interspeciated lifeworlds, as Europeans appropriated the “sweet” lands that were born of inter-speciated modes of care in pursuit of profit.

The image (a modified pic from the National British Archives) and the blog post are by Emma Park, NSSR, parke@newschool.edu. The image is in fair use.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.