Maasai warriors hold on proudly to their traditional way of life but as ELISE RANA finds out, they are not untouched by the tourist dollar.
The sound is like a lion’s roar: a thousand tones in one. Closer and closer they come, the rhythmic chant growing louder and louder until we feel their breath hot on our skin, wooden staffs scraping through the red dust to point at our feet as they encircle us. It’s quite a welcome, leaving me feeling as terrified as I do honoured – which is probably the point.
Of the many diverse tribal groups that make up the Kenyan and, indeed, East African population, the Maasai are perhaps the best known. Others, such as the Westernised Kikuyu, may rank higher in terms of number and influence but their adherence to tradition makes the Maasai stand out – they are the striking image of Africa that lingers longest in the mind.
We had entered the Maasai lands the day before. As Nairobi’s grim urban sprawl petered out into vast horizons, herdsmen appeared in the distance, amid the elephants, zebra and giraffe dotting the grassland. Staff resting on shoulders like a milkmaid’s yoke, the distinctive red shuka cloak bunched around the body, these solitary figures stalk through the brush on long, lean legs. When our truck stopped at the gates of Amboseli National Park, Maasai women besieged us with armfuls of carved animals and the beaded jewellery that plated their arms, shins and collarbones.
Now here we are, meeting the Maasai face to face in the small village, or enkang, of Olintiyiani. Escorted inside the thatched perimeter, the welcome to the village is a spectacular experience. The women, seated to our right in a mass of bright, beaded colour, raise their voices high in the traditional song of greeting as the circle of young warriors to the left take turns to leap high in the air to show their strength and agility. When the close-quarters finale has us suitably awed, 24-year-old Daniel and 20-year-old John show us around their village and try to answer our many questions.
Daniel and John are ‘age-mates’, having made the most important in the life transition of a male Maasai. With circumcision, a boy becomes a junior warrior, taking up a spear, sword and club with the responsibility of looking after the animals and the village. Although illegal, if their herds are threatened they still hunt lions, although the fight is, at least, fair – it can take up to 50 men to bring down a lion, and a few deaths are expected. If a warrior chickens out in the attack, the others have the right to kill him for endangering them.
The young men are coy about the tradition that requires a warrior to kill a lion in order to be eligible for marriage. Both are, as yet, unmarried.
“Is there a girl you like?” we ask, “A lion you’ve got your eye on?” What they will tell us is that they must marry outside of their enkang, and that their first, ‘head wife’, is chosen by their parents – the rest are their own choice.
Sexual etiquette is very community-minded, even then: if a man goes to his hut to see an age-mate’s spear stuck in the ground outside, he knows not to disturb – just to go and plant his own spear elsewhere.
Maasai women are hard-working – to them fall the tasks of cooking, fetching water, raising children and building the houses that Daniel is showing us. Each hut takes a couple of weeks to construct, with wet cow dung for the walls baking hard in the sun and covered with a roof of sticks, grass and rocks. Inside, the huts are dark and smoky from the central fire, light from the small windows falls on the beds of stitched cow-hide.
For these semi-nomadic pastoralists, their cattle are everything, their only source of wealth and food. A modern predilection for sugar notwithstanding, the Maasai diet traditionally consists mostly of milk, meat and blood – the latter drained from the jugular of a passing cow which is then patched up again and sent on its way. Maasai believe that technically, all the world’s cows are theirs, safe-keeping having been granted them by their god Ngai.
This symbiotic, almost mystical, relationship means the Maasai must often follow the rains in search of better pasture, criss- crossing of the Tanzanian border seen as little obstacle as the two countries are considered as one. This practice is not without its problems, however. Following two years of weak rains, Kenya was one of the countries worst affected by the drought afflicting east Africa from late 2005 until earlier this year. As livestock starved and inter-tribal fighting broke out over water and grazing resources, many people have been forced to seek other means of subsistence.
Although the traditional way of life continues to be maintained, in the face of such encroaching change the Maasai, too, are adapting. As their imposing appearance and fearsome warrior reputation make them an endless source of fascination to Western visitors to Kenya, many are happy to cash in on this ‘Maasai-itis’. Upscale safari lodges often wheel in some tribesmen for a ‘cultural evening’ or employ a few warriors to wander their grounds giving impromptu archery lessons. Our village visit, too, has come at a price.
Whether these proud people are selling their dignity by chasing the tourist dollar or just adapting to survive is an ongoing question. What we’re left in no doubt about is who’s calling the shots. Enchanted by the insights into the world of the Maasai, our experience is brought swiftly back to reality when the tour ends at a swiftly-constructed marketplace behind the village. Like cattle to the slaughter, we are expertly herded into an arena of handicraft stalls, where the village women, singing so meekly just half an hour earlier, reveal sales tactics as mercenary as any in Cairo, Bombay or Shanghai: “What’s your name? Where you from? This is my family shop – you come, you look!”
A stack of dollars lighter, a carved giraffe or six heavier, we bid them a defeated farewell, feeling as overwhelmed as we were by their welcome. The warriors have won.”
