Story courtesy of: VICE Netherlands | Photography by: Sarah Waiswa
Twenty East-African photographers prove that Maasai culture involves a lot more than the spears, beads and brightly coloured clothing Western photographers tend to capture.
The Maasai people are an ethnic group living in East Africa – mostly in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. Thanks to the tribe’s brightly coloured traditional clothing, elaborate jewellery and tendency to carry around spears, they’re very popular among Western tourists hoping to capture their idea of the “authentic” side of the entire continent of Africa. The way Maasai people are usually portrayed fits the stereotypical idea of the continent being devoid of modern technology, with tribesmen and women living in mud huts and spending their days chanting and hunting wild animals.
My Maasai will next be exhibited at the Lagos Photo Festival
in Nigeria from the 24th of November to the
15th of December, 2017.
The new book My Maasai aims to portray Maasai people in a less clichéd way, and is a collaboration between East African photographers Sarah Waiswa, Mohammed Altoum and Joel Lukhovi, Dutch photographer Jan Hoek and Kenya-based writer, Karanja Nzisa. “Representations of this diverse tribal group are almost always manifested in jumping warriors and bare-chested women struggling to look past a swarm of flies into the camera lens, while balancing snotty-faced tots on their hips,” Karanja Nzisa writes in the introduction of the book. “[The Maasai] must be recorded truthfully and fairly for the world today and for posterity.”
To read the full article, visit Vice.
