Emma-Jean Weinstein
HS 103-04 Honors Writing Symposium
Professor Lauren Sarat
28 April 2011
Maasai Girl in the Modern World: How Educational Opportunities for The Maasai
Women of Kenya Will Lead To Environmental Sustainability
Kakenya Ntaiya was born in Enoosaen, rural Kenya. At the age of five she was engaged to be married to her six-year-old neighbor. Most fathers in Kakenya’s Maasai community decide their daughter’s education will end once they hit puberty at around age thirteen, an event signified by female genital circumcision. Any expression of physical pain during the “operation” brings shame upon the girl’s family; the girls begin their own families soon after the ceremony ends. In this community, where only eleven percent of girls move past primary school (“Ntaiya, Educator”), Kakenya negotiated with her father to allow her to finish high school. She agreed to complete the ceremony if he promised to postpone her marriage and allowed her to finish school (“Vital Voices”). After graduating high school, Kakenya was accepted at a teachers’ college in Kenya and a University in the United States. However, her father was ill so her poverty-stricken family had even less money to send her to school. Despite being initially shunned for attempting to go to college, something even few boys were able to do, Kakenya approached every peer of her father’s in the village, as custom said they were all her fathers now that her own was sick.
According to Maasai tradition, one who visits the house before sunrise is said to bring good news and must not be told, “no.” So, after approaching each elder, morning after morning, with the request to go further with her schooling, the community came together

Weinstein 2 to send Kakenya to college in the United States. Now, Kakenya has completed her Ph.D. in education and is directing the school for girls she launched in her hometown of
Enoosaen. She is married, but to a man that she chose.
As students of Kakenya’s Center for Excellence complete fourth grade and move onto fifth, the village elders have begun to understand the importance of educating their daughters. In a short video, National Geographic journalist, Boyd Matson, visits
Kakenya’s school. The village chief of Enoosaen describes changing attitudes in an interview, “The Maasai never knew the benefit of a girl. They only knew that a girl is to grow and be given out for cows. But now, the position is changing. Girls are very good, they can help the community, more even than the boys.” The elderly Maasai woman beside him, wearing a traditional Shuka (a sash worn by Maasai people) and colorful, beaded jewelry, smiles and claps her hands in enthusiastic agreement (“School Visit”).
As Maasai women are slowly accepted as individuals who require schooling and consequently contribute to the local economy by starting small business and local community groups, Maasai understanding of women’s roles will transform. It is this shift in Maasai thought that will encourage young girls to complete high school and even move onto college.
The lives of the Maasai are centered on the age-old structure of their community.
Similar to most cultures, young boys and girls are taught to behave respectfully by their parents and love songs are shared between romantic partners, but there are also vast differences. Girls as young as thirteen are expected to marry elders often over sixty years old, because younger men serve as warriors. Men are also expected to showcase their virility by obtaining several wives (“Maasai”). Traditional Maasai thought must transition

Weinstein 3 to conceptualize a shift in the belief that girls do not require a complete education. In
Louis Althusser’s text “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” he explores why both individuals and communities maintain specific, and often unwavering, ideologies.
He defines ideology as “a set of practices and institutions that sustain an individual’s imaginary relationship to his or her material conditions of existence” (Althusser 693).
Simply, rituals performed by individuals reinforce their understanding of their surroundings. That understanding, however, is imaginary. Without the practices that reinforce an ideology, that ideology does not exist. For example, common Maasai thought perpetuates the notion that women should not take pleasure in sexual intercourse the same way that men do, and cannot be trusted to safeguard their virginity until marriage. However, the ceremonial female circumcision reinforces that ideology. If that ritual were somehow altered, women would have an opportunity at equality in their community. By upholding such practices, however, the community sustains an imaginary awareness of women’s roles.
In his text, Althusser provides an example of his theory by discussing the priests and despots of the 18 th century. They convinced men to obey God, but really the men were obeying the priests. Althusser philosophizes that something must universally provoke the transposition of ideals into rituals and ceremonies. “That cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their imaginations” (Althusser 694). The domination conducted by priests and despots are echoed in the domination of many male elders within Maasai cultures. The elders are not necessarily ill intentioned, they are

Weinstein 4 following millennial-old traditions. To alter any sort of tradition is inherently frightening, especially those that create an intrinsic understanding of the roles played by men and women. However, young Maasai girls are enslaved by such falsified and outdated representations of the world; their imaginations are taken hostage.
Maasai education in Kenya and the environmental sustainability of the Maasai lifestyle are dramatically intertwined. For one, developing countries like Kenya have the highest fertility rates in the world, putting pressure on the planet’s already waning resources. If the rapid increase in world population (which has already hit over six billion people) continues, the impact on the world’s natural resources will be devastating.
According to estimates by the United Nations, the world population will reach 8.9 billion by the year 2050, which is over three and a half times what the population was in 1950.
“In addition to shortages of food, fuel, and minerals, the UN now predicts that overpopulation will lead to serious degradation of the environment.” This rising tide can only be stemmed through education, health care, and contraception (“overpopulation”). It has been proven time and again that the education level of a woman is directly correlated with the number of children she brings into the world. “The support and encouragement for women and men to enter and complete formal education is essential in bringing about a cultural and social change in attitude towards the economic and social value of family planning…. Education can address the imbalance in decision making about contraception and the role of women in society generally” (Beekle 269). By receiving a formal, complete education, women would not only have more opportunity to develop a career of their own, but they would become empowered to discuss family planning and contraception with their partners.

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The way in which resources like land, water, firewood and livestock are managed is also largely determined by the complex power structure between men and women in
Maasai culture. According to the BBC News article, “Maasai ‘Can Fight Climate
Change,’” pastoral communities like the Maasai pass on survival skills because they have had millenia to learn to farm the deserts and scrublands they inhabit. These skills can help them cope with the continent’s rapidly rising temperature. However, “In rural Kenya, hierarchies of class and gender interact significantly in regard to resource issues”
(Thomas-Slayter 809). The key resource issues in most Maasai villages are soil erosion and water availability. While women have achieved some success when it comes to soil management, most Maasai villages are still in desperate need of water. For example, areas such as the village of Katheka contend with sand scooping, sand exportation from rural riverbeds and streambeds during the dry months for construction in Nairobi. This has brought the riverbeds to bare rock and ruined the dry-season water source for the local residents. Poverty-stricken and uneducated women have little status within their communities and so it is nearly impossible for them to organize opposition to such practices.
Given the opportunity to complete high school and possibly even move onto college, Maasai girls would be able to participate and even lead the transition towards environmental sustainability. They would contribute to the local economy and bear fewer children. They would have the opportunity to serve as key figures in finding solutions to issues like water shortage and overwhelming poverty. Overall, a shift in Maasai thought that would lead to basic rights for Maasai girls, such as education, would create environmental sustainability for those communities.

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The majority of Maasai girls in rural villages are treated as objects of exchange when it comes to marriage. Animal husbandry in Maasai culture is structured around male dominance. The system gives men singular control over productive resources such as livestock and labor power. Thus, women lack autonomy not as a result of their lack of ownership, specifically of livestock, but because Maasai thought maintains that women only deserve the rights of a minor (the right to do what they’re told). Thus, they lack property rights and are given away as objects in marital transactions (Robertson 152).
Women are excluded from several other daily processes in Africa, such as farming. For example, a group of Yoruba women, a West African ethnic group, were surveyed during the harvest season. Although they are not a Maasai community, Yoruba women endure similar struggles with education and marital rights; the Yoruba people are almost always isolated in rural African villages. Though most of the women daily spent four to eight hours fetching water, lugging harvested crops and cooking for other farm workers, eighty-five percent of them described themselves as traders, and a mere sixteen percent described themselves as farmers. Trading, of course, works as a reason to exclude these women from the profits of their farming (Robertson 86). Seeing as husband and wife virtually always have separate incomes and expenditures (Pellow 193), women must remain dependent on their husbands.
Women are also expected to maintain a certain demeanor around men, and young girls are taught to obey this unspoken law at a young age. This is exemplified in the memoir My Maasai Life in which Robin Wiszowaty leaves the suburbs of Chicago as a twenty-two year old to live with a Maasai family in rural Kenya for a year. “I could see that as a young woman - and particularly as a young, unmarried woman, I would be

Weinstein 7 expected to assume a very specific role in the family and in the community as a whole”
(Wiszowaty 49). She goes on to explain that behaving casually around men, or overly enthusiastic would imply that she was an “easy” woman. “Men were the centre of attention, while women were meant to keep conversation going while sitting in very careful poses. Women maintain a humble demeanor, always staying vigilant of the family’s needs” (Wiszowaty 49). Of course, at the water source where there are no men nearby, Robin sees Maasai women freely gossiping and joking at ease. Even in most public Kenyan schools, girls are expected to build the fire and collect water, allowing learning to drop to the bottom of their list of priorities. Meanwhile, boys are given much more freedom to learn (“School Visit”). The expectations of the community for women to
“behave” are reinforced by an imaginary relationship to their rapidly changing world.
Female genital mutilation is a symbolic example of the way in which Maasai girls are limited by the community’s accepted ideology. Ceremonial female genital cutting mostly takes place within Maasai cultures when young girls reach puberty. However, there has been a progressive lowering of the age at which girls are circumcised. The ceremony is meant to impart the skills a woman will need to fulfill her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Whether a clitorldectomy (the removal of the clitoral hood) or an influbation (removal of all of the external genitalia, including the labia minora, and stitching of the vaginal opening) is performed, the mutilation is meant to reduce a girl’s sexual desire and secure her virginity until marriage (“Razor’s Edge”). Communities continue to carry out ceremonial circumcisions because some believe the clitoris is
“dirty,” and others say that, “the clitoris would grow like a penis and hang between the legs if it is not removed” (Parmar 139).

Weinstein 8
As Kakenya notes in the short animated video about her life story, young girls and boys are not supposed to cry during the ceremony (“Vital Voices”). Boys, too, are expected to be “strong men” and not betray their fear during the “operation.” Doing so would bring shame to their family (Waszowaty 101). Such masculine and feminine ideals are reinforced daily by the community. Few eligible men would contemplate marrying a woman who has not gone through the ceremony; enduring the circumcision makes a woman socially accepted. “In traditional societies that offer women few options beyond being a wife and mother there is great pressure to conform. Women who lack the education to seek other opportunities are doubly restrained in terms of the choices open to them” (“Razor’s Edge”). However, few girls are allowed to continue with their education once their ceremony is completed and most end up married within the year. Such a lack of understanding of young members of Maasai communities is detrimental to future
Maasai generations.
Extreme complications during childbirth are often caused by female genital mutilation. Labor becomes longer and more painful with each subsequent birth. Such immediate physical problems can arise such as hemorrhaging, post-operative shock, damage to other organs, infections, and urine retention. Also, the circumcision ceremony typically takes place one day a year when all eligible girls are expected to go through the process together. They are all cut with the same instrument, without sterilization, risking exposure to HIV/AIDS (“Razor’s Edge”). When Wiszowaty asked several elder women about the experience, “the physical pain was long forgotten, but they still retained the pride of being accepted as an adult by the community and to be seen no longer a child”
(107). However, when she asks one Maasai man, a development worker from another

Weinstein 9 village, about the process he defines it as “barbaric.” One new alternative to the mutilation is “circumcision through words” in which girls are offered similar honors in addition to information about their human rights, without the surgery being performed.
However, Wiszowaty asks an important question as an outsider, “Was I doing my fellow women a disservice by not raising objections – ‘sanitizing’ the idea in my mind? Whose role was it to sanitize those wounds in society?” (109). This raises the question, whose responsibility is it to lead the shift towards educational opportunities for Maasai women?
For progress to take place, Maasai thought must shift from within Maasai communities.
According to Wiszowaty, “An aggressive approach wouldn’t prevent women from circumcising their daughters, and it wouldn’t create healthy dialogue between cultures. It seemed to me that, to have an impact, development workers would need to understand communities at an intimate, personal level before introducing ay solutions” (111).
For progress to take place within the Maasai culture, change must happen at the grassroots level. For outsiders to impose their perspective without an in-depth knowledge of the Maasai people would be a mistake. Even in more developed, urban areas of Kenya, women’s rights are limited. Women are almost completely excluded from the upper ranks of the political system. While women activists have sought divorce legislation, the benefits of such efforts would have reached a fairly small number of women. The pursuit of equal pay and extended maternity leave excludes the majority of Kenyan women who live in rural villages, working informally as wives, mothers, or subsistence farmers. “That women pursue class politics is revealed as much in the issues they do not pursue as in those they do” (Robertson 202–204). Women in urban centers exclude women of rural villages (many Maasai) from their attempts at activism. Even in the case of sand scooping

Weinstein 10 in villages like Katheka, the few opportunities rural women have to access water are swept up from under them by the powerful forces of corporations from Nairobi, many of which include urban women.
In Audre Lorde’s article, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining
Difference” she writes of American white women, “They ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of
Color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and traditions is too ‘alien’ to comprehend” (856). This applies not only to women of color, but also to homosexual women, elderly women, et cetera. Lorde posits, “We sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals… This can mean new paths to our survival”
(859). The feminist movement in the United States would be stronger if women of every creed came together as one for equality. This American example can be compared to the dilemma raging between Kenyan women. While women in cities like Nairobi certainly have a right to demand equal pay and government-subsidized nursery programs, they take their wealth for granted and see the traditional Maasai woman as an “other.” Thus the wealthy woman of the city does not take into account the fact that a young Maasai girl forfeits her education and is married off to a sixty-year-old man every day. If these women were to come together, they would build a stronger force and have the opportunity to achieve educational opportunities for all young women.
The contrast between women in cities such as Nairobi and those in rural Maasai villages is shockingly vast, and becomes increasingly more drastic. In her dissertation entitled “Constructing the Post-Colonial Woman in Kenya: A Textual Analysis of

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Nairobi’s Daily Nation ,” Nancy Worthington explores how wealthy women are portrayed in Kenya’s urban mass media, compared to those of lower class, rural areas. “Both the language and the visual layout used in the two articles stress the class-related divisions among Kenyan women. Discussions about wealthier women are framed in terms of their increased access to the political arena while poor women’s status is linked to their paid labor force participation” (Worthington 9). Not only do urban women struggle to achieve rights that would only apply to their wealthy minority, but mass media encourages their generally narrow-minded worldview. With the case of sand scooping in Katheka, the interests of the two groups come head-to-head. “With external agents seeking sand, urban class interests have become paramount. The wealthy urban contractors and the lorry drivers they employ operate at will and have succeeded not only in removing thousands of tons of sand but have also eliminated any hope of sustainable dry-season water”
(Thomas-Slayer 825). One of the main factors contributing to Maasai girls’ inability to attend school is their duty to fetch water for households. When water is made even scarcer, a girl’s chance at a high school education becomes even less likely. Because women have little voice in the rural communities, partly because they do not have the support of wealthy women of the city, their resources continue to run dry.
Maasai girls lack the wealth that many girls of urban centers have. Gender bias compounds the obstacles already facing these young women, who lack much of the knowledge provided for students at elite private academies in urban areas. Such gender biases include Maasai girls’ instinct to behave quietly and subdued around men. In My
Maasai Life , Robin observes the behavior of the other women in her host family when the patriarch of the household arrives. The previous chatter comes to a halt when he enters.

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“Seeing Mama and Faith’s dutiful demeanor in Baba’s presence, I felt myself also tighten up” (Wiszowaty 56). Maasai girls habitually invert their personality and leadership skills around men, and thus become immediately withdrawn in co-educational settings. “As students, girls are significantly affected by overcrowding. Under the assumption girls will withdraw, teachers tend to neglect girls and favor boys. Teachers show reluctance to spend limited resources or time on girls, failing to push them to learn enough to pass the national exams required in Kenya for secondary school enrollment” (Ntaiya). Not only are Maasai girls up against their families who are hesitant to dole out the money required for a complete education, but once in the classroom they are at a disadvantage still, due to the ideology surrounding the Maasai community and the inequality between girls in urban centers and those in rural areas.
Educational infrastructure in Kenya is extremely fragile. A recent combination of poor harvests, international bio-fuel competition, high energy prices, and blockage in global trade is driving up food prices worldwide, leading to the worst global food crisis since the 1970s (“This Series”). More than one hundred schools in Kinango and Kwale could close in the immediate future. Already, students miss class two or three days a week to search for water (Kibirige). For the examination term, public schools have already used the funds meant for lab chemicals in science exams to pay for the school’s food and electricity (Muiruri). The Kenyan government also employs too few teachers, overall. In Nkoyet-niaborr, only six teachers have been hired to educate over 350 students
(Wiszowaty 112). Despite all of this, it is extremely important that girls be equally included in the educational system. Environmental sustainability and economic progress will be impossible without the involvement of women.

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Presently, it is still complicated to provide a complete high school education for a
Maasai girl. It is a disadvantage for women to not receive an education because they will be less capable of competing with men in the few wage-earning jobs available. However, if they do decide to join the small number of girls who complete high school, it
“encourages their removal from the labor force both as children and adults and [could potentially] promote their [financial] dependence on men” (Robertson 92). Maasai women are valued almost exclusively for their reproductive capabilities and their domestic housework, neither of which requires an extensive amount of schooling. So most girls, especially those of poverty-stricken or illiterate parents, are not given educational opportunities. These socio-cultural norms that presume girls do not require the same level of schooling that boys do stunt young women’s scholastic opportunities. It is nearly impossible for them to do their reading outside of class, complete daily homework in the evenings, and volunteer for oral expression in class. Because most women are married before they turn twenty, including those in urban areas, it is considered unrewarding to educate a daughter because a woman’s labor efforts profit her husband and in-laws, and not her own blood relations (Njogu 147).
Not only does the cultural stigma regarding education for women work against
Maasai girls, but there are also several immediate, daily obstacles. A complete education for a young Maasai girl is a short-term financial detriment to her family. School is expensive, both in terms of actual tuition and the lack of labor power at home during the day. The Kenyan federal government recently adjusted their educational policies; an economic reform suggested by the World Bank and IMF. A cost-sharing strategy was implemented which places the financial weight of education on the shoulders of parents,

Weinstein 14 one that few are able to afford. Some have resorted to selling their property for the sake of their children, but such a sacrifice is less likely for a daughter, who is likely to get married or leave school because of pregnancy (many schoolgirls get pregnant accidentally, with a lack of sex education). In rural areas, it is mostly women who bear this burden. Over eighty percent of Kenya’s rural population consists of women. And in economic crisis, most families cannot afford to educate and feed two children due to the high cost of school fees, so the choice is to educate a son (Khamasi). In Wiszowaty’s memoir, Robin approaches the father of her host sister, Faith, who recently became pregnant out of wedlock, and tries to convince Faith’s father to allow her to complete her high school education, despite the new baby. He tells Robin, “Sending children to school is expensive, both directly with school fees, uniforms, pens and paper, and also indirectly in hiring others to tend our cattle when my children are too busy to perform this chore themselves” (Wiszowaty 198). In poverty-stricken rural Kenya, children are relied on for household work, for farming and the herding of livestock. Most families do not have the financial means to hire outside labor.
Despite all of these challenges, a change in Maasai thought is possible. However, change will be much more likely if it happens from within the Maasai community. If community development workers attempt to transform Maasai life and traditions without the involvement of both key leaders and those who are rarely spoken for (women, the poor), change will not be effective. In the village of Kitui, an international nongovernmental organization stepped in to find solutions to the local water shortage. The water, however, was pumped out of the ground in a non-sustainable way. Boreholes were equipped with diesel-fuelled generators to pump the water, and twenty liters of this water

Weinstein 15 cost four cents, a relatively high cost for a Maasai village. Community-members were not involved with the construction or organization of water acquisition, so they were not motivated to be involved with the maintenance of the project, or even make use of the new water access. “Projects led by outside organizations could only succeed with a full understanding of the community and its issues. This particular organization, while meaning well, had entered Kitui with its own agenda, failing to ask the community what they really wanted and needed” (Wiszowaty 126).
Though projects initiated by outsiders may fail easily, women who feel their actions can improve their quality of life will fight to empower themselves and their daughters. In several Maasai villages, merry-go-round groups have formed. Merry-gorounds are practiced by local women’s financial cooperatives to assist families with domestic needs. Women periodically receive funds from the collective pot, which is generated by each woman’s contribution. The woman receiving funds for the week has the opportunity to buy blankets, dishes, or goats for her family. Each woman takes a turn reaping the benefits of the merry-go-round, so the community benefits as a whole. Robin
Wiszowaty says of the merry-go-round, “[It] was a brilliant, practical way of pooling resources in a place of scarcity. And the women were running it themselves – you could see how empowered and proud that made them feel” (Wiszowaty 138). After visiting various classmates working throughout Kenya, Robin comes to a realization. “Programs could be powerful when designed on the grassroots level. This, to me, seemed the true hope for rural Kenya” (Wiszowaty 131).
Both male and female members of Maasai communities face challenges when it comes to farming. The influence of western farming practices have encouraged Maasai

Weinstein 16 villages to move toward non-sustainable farming practices, putting the traditional practices that have kept communities afloat at risk. In an article in The Guardian, George
Monbiot discusses the risks that come with the genetic modification of crops, a practice that agricultural corporations such as Monsanto are slowly but surely implementing in developing nations such as Kenya. “This has devastating implications for food security in poorer countries… Some of the grain it exports to southern Africa will be planted by farmers for next year’s harvest. Once contamination is widespread, the governments of those nations will no longer be able to sustain a ban on the technology.” If Maasai farmers begin to buy genetically modified seeds which degrade soil more quickly than non-genetically modified seeds from western corporations, it will be impossible to harvest non-genetically modified crops in the future. The sustainable Maasai farming traditions that have worked for millennia will no longer be relevant. Such examples not only exemplify one of the many obstacles facing Maasai people, but also clarify that when changes from the western world are plopped onto Kenyan soil, they will simply not be effective in the long term. A positive change in Maasai thought will come only from the Maasai, themselves.
The water shortage and drought that plagues the majority of Kenya’s land, especially those rural villages where most Maasai tribes reside, has a devastating impact on the day-to-day lives of women. For example, in Katheka, where sand scooping has been a prevalent issue, the water table has declined in one man’s well from ten feet below the surface to over twenty feet below. In another instance, a woman who had previously retrieved her water from the sands of the Kalala (a waterhole) during the dry season is now forced to travel by foot to the Athi River to get water for her family. She makes the

Weinstein 17 five-hour round-trip trek daily for two months. Many community members work to cutoff drains and check dams to preserve water, while others escalate the destruction of the water source for financial gain outside of the community (Thomas Slayer 822). It is traditionally a woman’s job to retrieve the water for the household, and the longer it takes to do so the less opportunity there is to be involved with the community’s economy; whether through working to build a business or to receive a diploma. Upon beginning her new life as a Maasai woman Robin explains, “Drought is a regular and troubling reality for Kenya. Since water is vital to all components of daily life… Scarcity [of water], common during the regular seasons, can utterly devastate the population. Even if a family is well-off enough to afford adequate supplies of ugali flour and other staples, without the water with which to cook, they can’t eat” (Wiszowaty 50). Despite the fact that further devastating the water supply may make a small number of people a short-term profit (as in the case of sand scooping in Katheka) no amount of money will ensure safety if water runs dry.
Maasai have historically been capable of adapting, but their knowledge and history of effective resource management has been undervalued. Eighty percent of the
Kenyan population lives in rural areas and is dependent upon agriculture as a means of surviving. “Rural areas form the backbone of the Kenyan economy” (Thomas-Slayer
811). However, historical colonization and attitudes of the federal Kenyan government have subdued the effectiveness of the Maasai herding and farming lifestyle. “All too often the direct economic value generated by pastoralists is not retained in their communities, and the indirect value is unrewarded and even unacknowledged by decision-makers… Pastoralists had been adapting to changes in climate for millennia, and

Weinstein 18 these skills could help them cope with the continent’s increasingly hot weather”
(“Climate Change”). Most Maasai communities are in desperate need of material resources. School supplies, infrastructure for water access, educators, et cetera. Maasai success will not be possible without support from both urban areas and the federal government.
Kenya was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to see drastic population growth as a serious impediment to the nation’s economic prosperity according to
NOVA’s investigation “World in the Balance.” The Kenyan government was then the first to establish a national family-planning campaign in the late 1960s. The average number of children per woman dropped from eight to four. However, replacement level fertility, “that level of reproduction in which each mother has enough children to keep the population in which she lives stable” (“Replacement Level”) is only two children, so the population continues to double annually. Contraceptive use has grown in Kenya from seven percent in 1978 to over thirty percent today. However, that is still not enough to achieve a manageable population level (“Population Campaigns”). In rural Maasai villages, tradition places a high value on fertility. Having many children is seen as a form of wealth, instead of a cause for poverty. Because such villages are dependent on lowlevel agriculture, children are seen as an extra source of manpower rather than a drain on familial resources. “Such factors have led some analysts to conclude that high birth rates are more often a product of poverty than its cause, and argue that the real solution to overpopulation lies in sustained economic development” (“Overpopulation”). As Maasai ideology surrounding girls in the classroom shifts, so will the community’s understanding

Weinstein 19 of childbearing. As Maasai communities become more economically self-sustaining, social principles will change.
If Maasai women are educated and respected within their communities, if they are able to contribute to the local economy, their voices will be heard when it comes to family planning.
“Spousal discussion about family planning and the number of children [women] want to have demonstrated a significant association with certain sociodemographic characteristics of the women. Literate women and those who have better educational achievement were more likely to discuss family planning with their husbands than those who were illiterate. Women’s monthly family income was also observed to promote discussion about family planning” (Beekle 275).
When Maasai girls are educated, they are empowered to take steps toward family planning and thus lessen the impact of Kenya’s population on its resources. Women do not just need a high school education, but one that will lead to financial sustainability and independence. It is possible to achieve such financial success through microfinance programs. One of the most popular microfinance websites, kiva.org, defines microfinance as “financial services to low-income individuals or to those who do not have access to typical banking services” (“About Microfinance”). In short, any individual with an internet connection can access kiva.org, browse people and business plans from any continent, then that individual can lend any amount of money, five or five hundred dollars, to the person profiled on the website. The lender can expect to receive their money back within the next six months. This phenomenon has been an extremely important component to women’s rise out of poverty. Access to financial services improves women’s statuses in both families and communities. Those women consequently become more assertive and confident. With this economic development, women can own assets such as land and housing, and they will play a bigger role when it

Weinstein 20 comes to decision-making. Kiva’s website offers a quote from Rose Athieno, a produce reseller in Uganda. “I’m a very respected woman in the community. I have come out of the crowd of women who are looked down upon. Due to the loan that I received…you have made me to be a champion out of nobody” (“About Microfinance”).
Women are not the only demographic struggling as Maasai people of the modern age. Men are also straining to find their place as the world moves at a faster pace. Many are driven to self-destruction, thinking they will soon lose their role as leaders of the community. Community elders complain that the young Maasai men only concern themselves with money, and pay little attention to the farm and the cattle (Hodgson 42).
During her time with her Maasai family, Robin Wiszowaty gets to know a man named
Samuel, one of her twenty-two year old peers. He tells her about his alcoholic father, who was absent for most of his life.
“Like many Maasai men of his generation, [he] drank because he bore the brunt of the social change the community had experienced during his lifetime. Modern developments, along with heightened periods of drought, have led to herds that are much smaller than in decades past. Men don’t need to lead migrations to find water and grazing land for their cattle. Men are no longer needed to protect the community from cattle raids and other dangers that were so present in the past.
Women increasingly bear greater responsibility for supporting families. As a result, men feel they have lost their purpose” (Wiszowaty 68).
Samuel, however, grew up with an unchanging desire to attend school and receive an education. His father was determined that Maasai were not meant to attend school, but to follow the traditional ways of the community. As his father lost control over his family due to alcoholism, Samuel managed to support his family as well as receive an education, even as he started the first grade at eighteen years old.
Such traditional Maasai rituals as female genital circumcision, the slaughter of a lion that every man must lead to become a Moran (a warrior), and other ceremonies are

Weinstein 21 nothing more than material rituals that uphold gender biases in the community. Althusser proposed that the material practices that make up our ideology also give us our identity.
“Ideas are…material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (Althusser 697). Althusser’s theory does not determine the case of the Maasai woman hopeless. By making it clear that individuals’ ideas lead to rituals that lead to an entire ideological framework, it is clearly possible for Maasai girls to grow into a better future. As long as ideas change, ideological framework can change. Though many Maasai rituals are productive and should be maintained, it is important that others shift to offer equality to all members of Maasai communities.
At Kakenya’s Center for Excellence, Kakenya ensures that girls focus not only on academic success, leadership, and women’s health but that those elements of Maasai culture that have made them a successful community, overall, are maintained. On the website for the Center for Excellence Kakenya writes, “ In addition to academic and leadership instruction, the school also promotes the preservation of non-destructive cultural and domestic values. Girls are taught the life skills of their villages so that their connection to their homes is maintained and strengthened, contributing to family traditions and productivity” (Ntaiya). The center is an example of a platform through which Maasai girls can receive an education, contribute to their local economy, and lead
Maasai communities toward environmental sustainability. Ignoring the positive attributes of Maasai communities would be as devastating as turning a blind eye to a Maasai girl’s need for education. Maasai ideals will transition if changes come from the grassroots level, within the community. Kakenya Ntaiya drastically altered the way her community

Weinstein 22 views their young girls. She took action by demanding her right to an education from a young age. Ideals will shift as Kakenya’s beliefs takes flight.
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