A Samburu herder shakes acacia pods from a tree.
maasai community of laikipia
photographs by tom rankin
In July I traveled to Kenya with Wend Wendland of the World Intellectural Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva and Guha Shankar of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress to continue our project to assist the Maasai community of Laikipia in documenting their own culture. Working with the Maasai Cultural Heritage, we spent nine days training Maasai to document their own community, producing new images and audio recordings that will help preserve and protect Maasai creativity and history. The fundamental goal of the project is to build an archive about the Maasai by the Maasai, supplementing and countering the many ways in which the tribe has been “pictured” by others.