Noosim Naimasiah is a member of local and Pan-African social movements and libraries that use political education, community organizing and self-reliance to organize for freedom politically based on Ujamaa, Ecofeminism and Pan-Africanism. Her academic work currently focuses on the political economy of sand within pastoralist communities.
Award Information
The history of capital in Africa is told predominantly from the perspective of peasant communities as delivered from a pre-capitalist pre-colonial past, through colonialism into a neoliberal present. This research therefore seeks to interrogate the history of capital from the perspective of the pastoralist Maasai. If age-set structure, the identities of Section and Clan, as well as the keeping of cattle speak to the continuation of political organization and modes of production antithetical to capitalist modernity; the crisis of land sales and the need for money in the Mashuuru district of Kajiado County in Southern Kenya typify the narrative of post-SAP neoliberal Kenya. What this research intends to understand, through a materialist history of the Maasai present is how ethnicity, gender and age-sets restructure the normative history of capital and class formation and consequently provide alternative perspectives on resistance. Ethnography and archival records will form the primary sources for this research.
