Samburu People - in Western Popular Culture

In Western Popular Culture

Samburu have been widely portrayed in popular culture, ranging from Hollywood movies, major television commercials, and mainstream journalism. Such portrayals make good use of Samburu’s colorful cultural traditions, but sometimes at the expense of accuracy. One of the earlier film appearances by Samburu was in the 1953 John Ford classic Mogambo, in which they served as background for stars such as Clark Gable, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner.

In the 1990s, 300 Samburu travelled to South Africa to play opposite Kevin Bacon in the basketball comedy The Air Up There, in which Samburu are portrayed as a group called “The Wonaabe” whose prince is a potential hoops star who would propel Bacon to a college head coaching job. Sometimes Samburu extras are used to portray members of the closely related, but better known, Maasai ethnic group as in the film The Ghost and the Darkness, starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. The 2005 film The White Masai—about a Swiss woman falling in love with a Samburu man--similarly conflates the two ethnic groups, mainly because the authors and directors believed that no one would have heard of Samburu. Dancing Samburu were included in a MasterCard commercial. Samburu runners were famously misportrayed in a late 1980s Nike commercial, in which a Samburu murran’s words were translated into English as the Nike slogan “Just Do It.” This was corrected by anthropologist Lee Cronk, who seeing the commercial alerted Nike and the media that the Samburu murran was actually saying; “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.” Nike, in explaining the error admitted to having improvised the dialogue and stated “we thought nobody in America would know what he said.

A similar lack of understanding of both traditions and cultural dynamics is sometimes exhibited in misrepresentations by mainstream media who write articles in popular news outlets after only a short time among Samburu. For instance, CNN recently portrayed the Samburu practice of young men giving a large number of beads to a particular girl as tantamount to rape, and erroneously stated that no research exists on the tradition despite the fact that anthropological portrayals based on long term studies show it to be largely akin to the U.S. practice of “going steady.” In a 2009 article MSNBC took readers on a tour through imaginary places purported to be in Samburu District, while asserting that ethnic conflict between Samburu and the neighboring Pokot was the result of both sides starving because they had more cattle than the rangelands could support, although the reporter did not indicate how having too many cattle could make people starve.