The Staples Trust has funded the Living Cultures Project since early 2019, with grants totalling over £200,000.
The Living Cultures Project is one of The Staples Trust’s proudest achievements. Its ground-breaking work has fostered understanding, trust and collaboration between the Maasai community and UK museums, with a more respectful and accurate representation of Maasai culture.
Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum reports the achievements of this project can be referred to as “an exceptional historical feat”, which would not have been possible without the vision and commitment of The Staples Trust and Jessica Sainsbury, personally.
The project began in 2017 when Samwel Nangiria, a Maasai community leader, human rights activist, and Director of the Pan African Living Cultures Alliance visited the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of an Indigenous Leadership programme organised by InsightShare. The Staples Trust got the project off the ground through seed-funding, and by helping shape Living Cultures’ objectives.
Over the next three years, Maasai representatives from Kenya and Tanzania made further visits and gave guidance on 188 Maasai objects contained in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, along with other British museums. During these visits, the delegates expressed concern about five objects in the collections: a ceremonial necklace, earrings, a bracelet, and head/neck ornaments.
From a Maasai spiritual perspective, the disconnection of these hereditary objects from their rightful owners has caused ongoing suffering to their descendants. Without spiritual intervention, their continued presence in Oxford would cause great concern.
Therefore, traditional Maasai healing and reconciliation ceremonies took place in the summer of 2023, in Kenya and Tanzania. These included meetings with the families, to whom the Museum each gifted 49 cows.
These ceremonies were highly significant. They brought together the Orkiaama – the council of leaders of the Maasai nation’s 25 sections, representing around 1.2m people – for the first time in over a century. Women have also been included in this leadership structure for the first time. Most importantly, it brought peace for the five families.
Following the healing ceremonies, the Trust has awarded a further grant for InsightShare to facilitate gatherings in 2024. In the words of Mokompo Ole Simel, Maa Nation Spiritual leader, “Without truth, justice, and healing, there can be no genuine reconciliation…. Reconciliation is not about closing a sad chapter of the Maasai community’s past, but about opening new healing pathways that are forged in truth and justice.”
It is difficult to overstate what Living Cultures has achieved so far – nor indeed what its potential is in the future. It has been a model project to show how Trusts can act beyond funding to be active stakeholders in bringing communities, ideas, and peoples together.