The final chapter of Dorothy Hodgson's powerful new book Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture begins with a scene in 2010 in which 1,500 Maasai women gathered to renounce their membership of Tanzania's ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or CCM (the ‘Party of the Revolution’) and return their party membership cards. They returned to their villages singing ‘We are not for CCM, which sells our land’ (133). They spoke a language of rights, but not of individual human rights. Instead, they drew on and adapted an older mode of collective protest called olkishoroto to meet new political needs. They justified their action in terms of relationships, and specifically their role as mothers. As Hodgson writes, ‘[t]he collective nature of their actions expressed and reinforced the value of social connections and relationships rather than individual autonomy and rights’ (149).
Hodgson contrasts this dramatic exercise of collective protest with another campaign, also couched in the language of rights, but which took as its focus aspects of Maasai culture. In the 1990s, campaigns by international and national feminist organisations transformed understandings of the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) from being an issue of health concern to being one of human rights. In 1998, FGM was criminalized in Tanzania. This legal change produced pressure on Maasai women's groups to adopt as a central part of their agenda the fight against FGM. Yet some women were reluctant to embrace this cause, arguing, as Nanyore, a member of the Maasai Women Development Organisation (MWEDO) put it to Hodgson, that these issues were ‘not our priorities’ [emphasis in the original] (120).
Drawing on many years of ethnographic fieldwork among the Maasai of northern Tanzania alongside extensive archival research, Hodgson is able to set these two campaigns in a deep historical context. She shows how the construction of ‘culture’ as unchanging and in need of reform, of rural women as in need of ‘protection’ from culture, and of law as the means of achieving both of these aims — all themes which feminist organisations used in their attempts to encourage Maasai women to join the fight against FGM — built on discourses and practices rooted in the colonial era. The initial reluctance by members of national and international feminist organisations to listen to the concerns of Maasai feminists and address the structural inequalities which they identified as a more pressing concern than those of forced marriage and FGM is in part, Hodgson shows, a legacy of this history. As Hodgson's conclusion makes clear, this historical dynamic has far-reaching implications for those concerned with ‘gender justice’ and human rights in the Global South, whether as scholars or practitioners (161).
The book is also a major contribution to the history of rights in Africa. The global history of human rights is a burgeoning field, and this volume joins a growing body of recent work which has sought to tell this story in relation to Africa. However, in contrast to studies such as Bonny Ibhawoh's 2018 book Human Rights in Africa, Hodgson approaches the problem through a historical case study, rather than through a general survey. The rewards of doing so are rich.
With great sensitivity and nuance, Hodgson shows when and why languages of rights gain traction and when they do not. The second chapter of the book takes as its focus the 1971 Law of Marriage Act, which provided Maasai women with legal recourse against forced marriage. While marriage practices were certainly not static, Maasai women relatively rarely appealed to the Law of Marriage Act to resolve disputes. Yet some did. Hodgson writes movingly of the experience of Aloya who in 1992 used the Law of Marriage Act to take her father to court and prevent what she understood to be a forced marriage. The court explicitly recognised the case as a conflict between Maasai customary law and Tanzanian national law. The court followed the Law of Marriage Act, but the local community was shocked by Aloya's actions.
Recent work is beginning to show that languages of rights in general and, after 1948, a vocabulary of human rights more specifically, have been used more widely in twentieth-century Africa than was once thought. Yet Hodgson's book joins research by anthropologists of other parts of Africa in reminding us that we should also think carefully about when and why people in the past may have consciously chosen not to employ transnational languages of rights as a weapon of political struggle. At times they turned to other languages of rights, or they rejected a language of rights entirely. While few historians will be able to match the ethnographic depth which Hodgson's thirty years of work with Maasai men and women brings to such a project, the challenge of thinking carefully about how, in practice, languages of rights are used, or not used, is one which should surely be taken up.
