Hello Friends!

We’re at the end of our month-long examination of how different African peoples have fought back against extractive and exploitative industrial and commercial practices, often at the hands of multinational companies.

In the first episode, we discussed Kenya’s Chonyi people’s successful bid to preserve their land and the caves to which they go to commune with their ancestors. In the second episode, we examined how industrial fishing practices like bottom trawling complicates the relationships and practices of artisanal fishing communities on Ghana’s Atlantic coast. For the third and final episode this week, we turn to the Maasai of East Africa and examine what their folklore reveals about their relationships with the land they call home.

Tanzania’s Maasai people are currently locked in a fight to retain control of their ancestral land in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. It is the standard issue story of foreign investors working with national governments to implement initiatives that will benefit indigenous people only marginally, while taking over land and stripping away much of what holds the people and their communities together. What is interesting about this case is that this has led to some Maasai elders seeking to remove the Ngorongoro Conservation Area from the UNESCO list of world heritage sites. This is quite unprecedented. I look at the land through the eyes of the Maasai people themselves to see what they believe they are losing.

“We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.” - Wangari Mathai, Kenyan Environmental Activist and Nobel Laureate

References

* Maasai Cattle Songs

* Inkishu : Myths and Legends of the Maasai by Kioi wa Mbugua

* Hey, that’s our stuff: Maasai tribespeople tackle Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum

* Mount Oldoinyo Lengai

* Can UNESCO Accommodate Both Preservation and Human Rights?

Meanwhile…

The Watkins Book of African Folklore (…or The Mythological Africans Book) is out!

The Watkins Book of African Folklore contains 50 stories, curated from North, South, East, West and Central Africa. The stories are grouped into three sections:

* Creation myths and foundation legends

* Stories about human relationships and the cultural institutions they created

* Animal tales (with a twist…the folktales are about some of the most unlikely animals!)

I thoroughly enjoyed digging into the historical and cultural context out of which the stories, their themes, and protagonists emerge. There is something for everybody!

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