But Where Are the Cattle? Popular Images of Maasai and Zulu across the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Images of the Maasai and Zulu have served to represent alternative sides of the Other in popular depictions of Africa. The printing and marketing of collectable trade cards and stereographs at the end of the nineteenth century until the release of popular films and coffee-table books at the end of the twentieth century has ensured that this pattern of representation/misrepresentation of Maasai and Zulu culture continues to be taught and reinforced. Within the generalized categories of "exotic," "native," and "tribal," the Maasai are noble, the Zulu savage. That both groups are pastoralists, or that cattle play or have played a crucial role in their existence, is but a footnote or merely more evidence of a backward, uncivilized existence. This is further elaborated by examining some stereographs (stereoscopic slides) of Maasai and Zulu taken and published during the first years of the twentieth century, and the further manipulation of these images by the later addition of text panels, which bestow authority and reinforce the relationship between primitive and civilized, naked and clothed, dark and light.