The subdued nature: reading Henry Ole Kulet’s Vanishing Herds through Eco-Marxist lenses

ABSTRACT

Modernity has come to be identified with industrialization and the changes that accompanied the then-emerging industrial societies. One major effect of modernity is the rise of the capitalist society on which Karl Marx’s matrix of economic theorization is founded. Building on Marx’s critique of the capitalist society, this article aims at critically reading the relationship that exists between the project of capitalism and the environment in the context of the Kenyan Maasai community. As Herbert Marcuse posits, capitalist production is inherently expansionist and therefore encroaches on natural space thereby subjecting nature to violence of exploitation and pollution. For him, ‘ecological struggle comes into conflict with the laws which govern the capitalist system’. The Maasai community has been affected greatly by agrarian capitalism that dates back to colonialism and which has been extended by subsequent postcolonial regimes. This article argues that the tragic journey across the Maasai plains undertaken by the two main protagonists in Henry Ole Kulet’s Vanishing Herds is representative of the effect that capitalist modernity has had on the Maasai ecosystems. Henry Ole Kulet tells a tragic story of the loss of Maasai land to commercial agricultural practices, tourism and settlements, all of which have profoundly eroded his people’s indigenous identity and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Maasai
• modernity
• capitalism
• accumulation
• environment
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Following Lonsdale and Berman (1979), this essay understands the colonial state as a variant of the capitalist state. For Lonsdale and Berman, colonialism changed the structure of the Africa’s ‘pre-capitalist’ societies by making them become ‘part-economies, externally orientated to suit the dynamics of a capitalism which had been imposed upon them from outside’ (488).

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Notes on contributors

Mugo Muhia

Mugo Muhia teaches African literature and Literary Theory in Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya.