Ms Eliza Johannes

Department of Educational Policy Studies,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

E-Mail mjohanne@uiuc.edu

Vanishing Spheres and the Romanticization of the African Pastoralists: Interrogating the Representation of the Turkana Women of Northern Kenya in the Media

Abstract

The Turkana people are found in Northern Kenya . They are the second largest pastoralist group in Kenya after their Maasai. Turkana is one of the hottest spots in Kenya . As a result, people tend not to wear a lot of clothes. Turkana women do not therefore cover their breasts. The fact that they do not wear bras has made them so susceptible to peeping lens of western photographers that often pry on their nakedness. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to interrogate the cultural and social parameters that media often ignore and parade Turkana women in the media, particularly Western media, as if that was natural, without pointing out the mitigating factors for Turkana women. The media often portrays the women bodies as unproblematic, as natural and therefore happy. My argument is that foreign photographers, especially white ones exercise racism and exert hegemonic overtures in their photographic projects on Turkana. I demonstrate that through these media representations, the Turkana women are exploited, disempowered and dishonored. I argue that Turkana women are double victims, of their own patriarchal society that undermines women while privileging men, and also victims of the Northern media that violates the privacy of these women, by constantly gazing at their nude bodies and thereby exercising power over them. I argue that since Turkana women are helpless, they are victims of the media. In its analysis and interpretation, the paper deploys globalization theories and neo-liberalism, as represented by scholars such as Derek Walcott, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Noam Chomsky and Homi Bhabha, where power is essentialized in instruments such as cameras, with the wielder of the camera being powerful, deciding what and what not to capture. The paper seeks to correct scholarly ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes that have dominated the representation of Third World women, such as Turkana.