from Africa Today Volume 51, Number 2

Excerpt from

City Work in a Time of AIDS: Maasai Labor Migration in Tanzania

Ann May and J. Terrence McCabe

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Around 1997, Tanzanian Maasai began seeking city jobs in noticeable numbers, due to intensifying poverty. Having limited knowledge of cities, elders were ill-equipped to advise their brothers, wives, and sons about migration, which has ostensibly diminished “traditional” elder authority. Ethnographic research between 1999 and 2001 revealed confusion and lack of accurate knowledge about the mechanisms of HIV/AIDS. Perceptions of Maasai “backwardness” perpetuate negative reactions, and there is little assistance or support in cities. Increasing impoverishment and migration from some areas, and misunderstandings about HIV/AIDS, are combined with customary Maasai polygyny and inability to rely on elders' guidance. This suite of circumstances puts Maasai labor migrants at particular risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. Health-education programs are critically needed to avert a catastrophe in Maasai communities

Introduction

The current labor migration of Maasai pastoralists to cities, although having a longer history in Kenya,1 has not to our knowledge been documented for Tanzania. Rural to urban labor migration is not a new form of economic diversification by any means; but in the Tanzanian context, it is a form increasingly inhabited by new groups, including unaccompanied children and youth, and now pastoralists, who about 1997 began in large numbers-informal estimates are in the thousands-to seek city jobs as security guards and night watchmen (Swahili mlinzi sing., walinzi pl.). As Portes, Castells, and Benton have noted, “An old form in a new setting [or with, as in this case, new players] is, in fact, new[,] since all social relationships can only be defined in their specific historical context” (1989:13).

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