Interaction and Identity on the Periphery: The Trans-Mara Maasai

This paper has a double purpose. It follows the contrasting fortunes of three Maasai sections up to the end of the period of their resettlement and adjustment in Trans-Mara; and, at the same time, it explores the interaction between Maasai on the periphery of Maasailand and their neighbors in Western Kenya. In the first instance, events roughly common to all Maasai are examined from three differing sectional perspectives. In the second, the paper addresses two larger questions: the impact of external change on the network of relations between and within communities living astride the Maasai frontier; and the related issue of the development of ethnic identities in the colonial period. As Iliffe has pointed out, the creation of tribes was often a consequence of the imposition of colonial boundaries. These were mapped out as a means of administrative control and involved the designation of social units as well as of districts. They created a new set of distinctions and a new framework for social organization which African societies then embraced. Colonial ethnicity was an extension of boundary maintenance, but it came to have its own form and logic. This was often at variance with the essentially fluid nature of relations between societies in the past, in which the identity of groups and individuals was based primarily upon their modes of subsistence. Difficulties and tensions arose when ethnic boundaries, which had previously been left conveniently vague or at least negotiable, became contentious and were invested with a new significance. African societies espoused the exclusive rhetoric of ethnicity and mobilized their members to resist encroachments upon the integrity of their boundaries with the result that communities on the frontier and especially those