Samwel Nangiria Taresero, a Maasai community leader, and the Curator of the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) recently visited the RAU to exchange ideas about the precarity of community land rights both in England and Tanzania.
“...from a Maasai perspective, mapping is not about making borders. It is about understanding and building relationships with nature around you, including how to live together with nature…’ Samwel, Maasai community leader, Cincester, 19.09.2024
Figure 7 Samwel and Atenchong during his visit to the RAU, Cirencester, UK. 17.09.2024
Details of Samwel’s visit can be access here https://merl.reading.ac.uk/blog/2024/10/finding-common-ground/
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2025; Community, Food, Land, Nature; Local and Global Perspectives https://orfc.org.uk/book-orfc-2025-tickets/
From community allotments and farms of the UK to the rangelands of Maasai homeland, access to land, or exclusion from it, determines how communities function, how we produce food, eat, and our ability to situate ourselves in nature. This panel explores the intersection of land rights, nature, community, and food. We explore how traditional Maasai cultural resources have been used to resist enclosure of shared land, how perspectives from the Global South might help shape community land management in Scotland, how allotments serve as mechanisms for providing utopic city spaces, and how English farming has an important role to play.
Chair: Dr Ollie Douglas (chair), Museum of English Rural Life (The MERL), University of Reading
Panellists: Samwel Nangiria Taresero; Dr JC Niala (Postdoctoral Affiliate, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford); Dr Atenchong Talleh Nkobou (Royal Agricultural University); James Norman (Path Hill Farm).