Maasai group decides objects can remain at Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford U.K. holds 188 Maasai items from Kenya and Tanzania. The seven-year Living Cultures project brought a new approach to decolonisation and repatriation through creating equitable partnerships with Indigenous peoples and facilitated visits to the museum by Maasai representatives.

For the final stage, the representatives of five families from whom the culturally sensitive objects were taken visited the museum to reconnect with those artefacts and identify the next steps.

The delegation was led by two women, one from Tanzania and one from Kenya, to reflect the role of women as cultural custodians and the fact that women made all the artefacts in question. For the families whose artefact was for women, a female delegate came, and for those whose artefact was for men, a male delegate came.