“Now is not like before. The world has changed.”

“Maasai Education in Cultural and Historical Context,” focuses on how ideas about “being Maasai” and “being educated,” beginning in the colonial period and extending into the formation of the postcolonial state, are dynamic. Schoolgirls, mothers, and teachers see education as a powerful antidote to historically produced ethnic otherness, marginalization, and endemic economic insecurity. Schoolgirls, mothers, and teachers explained that as “the world has changed,” so have Maasai attitudes about education. This chapter historicizes and therefore politicizes contemporary Maasai attitudes about education in the case-study communities, within and against still salient ideas in the Kenyan social imaginary about Maasai as people who “hate” education, by showing how Maasai have come to see themselves as people who “love” education for all children, including girls.