Maasailand: A Study in Community Activism is an 12-credit field studies program offered to students of Prescott College during summer semester. The program is taught by Meitamei Olol Dapash, Mary Poole, Kaitlin Noss, and a number of Maasai colleagues. The program is the result of a close collaboration between Prescott College and the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC.) This program strives to create for U.S. students the opportunity to work with Maasai activists, and to share educational resources to support struggle of the Maasai community for justice, and for political, economic and cultural survival.
Curriculum
- Learning from members of the Maasai community about challenges it faces through the forces of globalization, neocolonial economics, and national political marginalization. These challenges include: achieving equal access to education, spreading the benefits of tourism to local people, developing community owned businesses and cooperatives, achieving fair political representation in the government and justice in the courts, and recovering stolen land.
- Learning from the Maasai community about collaborations with outside entities, especially NGOs doing development and conservation work in Maasailand, and analyzing the effectiveness of different approaches.
- Studying different theories of root causes of inequality between the global west and south, and the perspective offered by Indigenous land rights activism.
- Participating in land rights research.
Course activism and research products
The course content varies each year, as it is developed by Maasai and Prescott College leadership around a current, pressing need within the Maasai community.
Research products from this course can be viewed on the Research Results Page.
- 2005: Students conducted research into the impact of the tourist industry on Maasai communities.
- Research was conducted by interviewing lodge managers and employees, tourists, Maasai leadership, tour operators, and undertaking a literature review of related work.
- Final article was presented to the Narok County Council, Kenyan Wildlife Services Community Partnership program and the country’s Public Prosecutor on completion.
- Articles were written for publication in East African newspapers. The first an expose on the exploitative practices of tour operators in Maasailand, and the second on positive efforts by Maasai leadership to manage the Maasai Mara Game Reserve.
- 2006: Maasai leadership in Amboseli requested research into the history of the government’s assumption of the Amboseli National Park, traditionally part of Maasailand, in the wake of renewed administrative interest in handing the park back to the management of Maasai communities.
- Research largely based on interviews and archival research.
- Final paper was presented to members of parliament and the Kaijiado County Council, and contributed to the furthering park management agreement.
- 2007: Students wrote biographies and children’s books, telling the life stories of two Maasai activists/community leaders, for publication and distribution to Maasai primary and secondary schools.
- We are currently seeking funding to publish and bind copies of these texts for wider distribution.
- 2008: Prescott College students conducted historical research into the history of a 30,000 acre piece of Maasailand, in an area known as Mau Narok, to inform the efforts of the Maasai community to recover the land, first taken under British colonialism and then redistributed under the Kenyatta administration. Students presented the research in August, 2008, and several days later 700 Maasai community members organized a protest on the land. The research formed the basis of a law suit filed in Kenyan court in December, 2009, to recover the land, paid for through fundraising efforts by students.
- 2010: Students conducted further research to support the ongoing Mau Narok suit including research on successful Indigenous land rights in other former colonies. They researched two additional potential Maasai land rights cases, in Kinangop and Magadi, and developed a library and archive focused on land rights. This work was presented in Narok on August 7, 2010, to the Mau Narok legal team, Letengule and Associates, Nairobi, community members from Mau Narok, and Maasai leadership. Members of the Prescott College board were also in attendance.
- 2011: Students this summer continued further research into the Mau Narok land rights case and supported the community’s activism with presentations on media coverage of the case, context for specific government initiatives, and the impact of Kenya’s new constitution on civil rights of Maasai people involved in the movement for land rights at Mau Narok.
