The Branding of The Maasai and Bob Marley
by Kaya Omodele @TheAbeng
Before I read Johnna Rizzo’s Culture Stock (National Geographic .@NatGeo – the Dec., 2013 issue) a couple days ago, I didn’t even know that there are over 80 products labeled “Maasai” without this people’sconsent. Oh, and many of these products are luxury items, by the way- cars, jewelry, etc. The whole thing (branding without the Maasai’s permission) got so bad that the people started the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative (MIPI) to corral the exploitation and blatant disrespect.
Isaac ole Tialolo of the MIPI says, “As the cultural owners, we want respect. We want to protect our heritage.”
The MIPI’s plan of action was to screen any future product branding requests and examine the market for current products bearing the Maasai brand name.
So now, all this had me meditating on the whole commercialization of people’s culture, again. My mind hopped back to the Snapchat filter, the Bob Marley-dreadlocks fiasco. Then, remember back in the day when the Marley estate did copyright protect his name and image? Nuff people saw this as some “babylon business,” that somehow this was incorporating Rasta, fetching it to market, moving it to commerce. (Maybe I was even one of them, I was younger and more idealistic then)
But if you really stop and give the idea a firm meditation, somebody, somewhere, would’ve been capitalizing off of Bob by now, riding donkey dollars, piling up mounds of English pounds, or stacking mountains of Yen. That is for certain. So, it was a sound and practical decision by the Marley estate, one that prevented exploitation of that man’s legacy before the fuckery even started. And we all know the saying, “Prevention better than cure.”
Bless up yourself, don’t bother stress up yuhself.
