UK offers cattle to Maasai people as reparations for injustices during colonialism
UK delegation offers cattle to Maasai people as reparations for injustices meted on them during colonialism
UK delegation offers cattle to Maasai people as reparations for injustices meted on them during colonialism.
Four Maasai families in Kenya and Tanzania received 196 head of cattle from a UK team as restitution for the injustices and crimes committed against them during the colonial era.
According to Maasai culture, these rituals are typically performed when someone who has slain a member of the community visits the grieving family and asks for forgiveness and peace.
Each family received 49 cows as part of the cleansing and peacemaking event that took place at Morijo-Loita in Narok County.
After that talks commence to establish how ‘sacred community objects’ ended up in Museums in the United Kingdom.
The reparation gives critical evidence of the negative impact colonialism has had on many of the Maasai families for generations now, and according to the community, the artefacts found in the museum belonged to members of their community killed during the colonial era.
The delegation from the Oxford University based in Pits Rivers Museum travelled to Kenya to award reparations to the families whose artefacts were stolen and exported to the United Kingdom over 100 years ago.
Prof Dr Laura Van Broeckhoven, the Director of Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Museum Studies, Ethics and Material Culture at the University of Oxford, led the team of scholars and goodwill Ambassadors from the United Kingdom in an event aimed at kicking off talks with the local indigenous Maasai whose ‘sacred artefacts and ornaments’ were stolen and exported to the UK under unclear circumstances.
After the cleansing ceremony, the two sides will now discuss the return of artefacts to the affected families and the community and possible compensation for the loss of lives.
The four affected families, Sulul and Mpaima families in Morijo Loita, Sayialel family in Naikarra village in Narok West, and the Moseka family in Nothern Tanzania were identified as the owners of the objects found in the museum following the guidance of the Maasai chief Loibon Mokombo Ole Simel.
“After we learned that we have some objects that were problematic, our next stage was to work with the Chief Maasai Oloibon to steer the way forward on how we can reconcile with the Maasai community and heal the situation, and we aped their tradition of handing over 49 cows to the affected families to allow talks to start on how the ornaments reached our library and how they can be returned and possible compensation,” said Dr Laura during the ceremony.
“Many of the objects in our museum were collected during the colonial times, many of them were gifted and are okay, but some are problematic because they were never supposed to have been in the museum, and records about them were not clear on how they landed there,” she added.
She said several videos and consultation with elders proved that the objects originated from the Maasai people living in Kenya and Tanzania and along the way many of the owners might have been killed during the process.
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“There were several objects that were recognized by Mukombo (Olaibooni). He helped to identify the families which the objects originated from,” she said.
The objects were discovered after a group of Maasai visited Oxford in 2017 as part of an effort to retrieve sacred objects held by the Pitt Rivers Museum.
This is after the Pitt Rivers Museum contacted indigenous peoples directly among them the Maasai about restoring articles as part of the Living Cultures project which works to represent the history and narratives behind artefacts held in museum collections, relating the impact of the colonial past to the present.
The Maasai visit came after the Director of a non-governmental organization Pan Africa Living Culture Alliance Samuel Nangiri, a Maasai from Tanzania, visited the Pitt Rivers during a culture conference.
“When I came across the Objects, I asked hard questions on the labels attributed to some of the objects in the museum, like what does ‘collected’ meant? Like when you find something in a forest, so not donated, and not robbed? And how did these sacred ornaments reach here, who brought them,” said Nangiri during the event.
After his visit to the museum, Nangiri returned back to Tanzania and Kenya and consulted the elders on his findings before leading a delegation of seven representatives of the Maasai community to Oxford at the invitation of Laura, director of the Pitt Rivers and Insight Share organisation, to determine where and when the objects were taken.
Among the delegation was the son of the chief Loibon, Lemaron Ole Parit, a spiritual leader with mystical powers and out of 188 Maasai artefacts in the museum, Parit identified five ornaments he thinks are “culturally sensitive enough to warrant a return.”
“The identified artefacts are important to the Maasai because they represent the continuation of a dead person’s life like a member of the community dies, the artefacts are won by the family and are as equally as important as a dead body,” said Amos Leuka, a member of the delegation.
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