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The Native School that Caused all the Trouble: A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa

events and places – from the production and negotiation of indigeneity at the UN, to attempts, not always successful, to deal with gender and generational conflicts at local meetings. Her approach, drawn from ‘nodal anthropology’, enables Hodgson to move from one level or node to another along the connections between them, thus tying the global, the national, the regional and the local together in a single account. An emphasis on strategic ‘positioning’, whether in relation to issues or other actors, helps us to see how groups respond to changes in what is a very fluid field. All this is put in the context of a continual struggle to survive when grazing is lost to ‘development’ and livestock to disease. Maintaining the older pastoral economy is no longer a viable option for many residents. ‘Getting by’ involves engaging with modernity to find alternative sources of subsistence and income, new resources of power and new ways of being. Although Being Maasai is thus firmly grounded in Northern Tanzanian pastoral realities, the richness of observation and the nuances of argument raise wider questions. One concerns the process of ‘becoming indigenous’. The concept originated in places like Australia and Canada, where there were obvious differences between dominant immigrant groups and the indigenous communities whom they had subjugated and dispossessed. To apply it to African groups requires a change of definition away from the essential to the structural. Indigeneity might ultimately have to be a matter of self-definition. Yet, as Maasai activists have discovered, even a broad definition of ‘indigenous’ may be quite divisive and hard to defend locally. In a nation where ‘everyone is indigenous’, how could some be more so than others; and what were the implications for the notion of equal citizenship? Again, does the claim to indigeneity privilege Maasai over other Northern Tanzanian identities such as Barabaig and Hadza? A shift from land to livelihood at risk would potentially be more inclusive and would also enable activists to challenge the dominant development paradigm that assumes that pastoralism and hunting are neither economic nor sustainable. A related, comparative question concerns the impact of indigeneity elsewhere. In Kenya’s Maasailand, for example, the defence of indigenous land rights, manipulated by national politicians in the name of ‘cultural survival’ and political accumulation, has led to sweeping assertions of ethnic exclusivity and, at times, to ‘ethnic cleansing’. Elsewhere indigeneity spawned the violence of autochthony. Why were Tanzanian Maasai able to pitch their claims to recognition to avoid both the violence of ‘political tribalism’ and the primordialism of autochthony? The discovery of indigeneity and the intersection of the local and global are no longer new; nor is the study of NGOs and development. But few accounts are as ethnographically informed and assured – and readable and absorbing – as Hodgson’s.