Current Institutional Affiliation
PhD Student 5th year, University of the Western Cape

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

Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa: Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship 2018
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
University of the Western Cape
Being Pastoralists In Neoliberal Times: The Story of Capital From The Maasai Of Mashuuru

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.

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