THE MASAI

                                               Interesting Culture

 

One morning after breakfast  we visited a Masai village in Amboseli, Kenya.  The huts are built in a circle enclosing a community central area. Brambles, similar to tumbleweed but with thorns, surrounded the outside of the village to keep intruders and animals out. Only nighttime is spent in the hut. We entered one of the small, round, thatched roof huts. They are simple inside with little more than a bed and dirt floor. They live pretty simply and primitively. Men build the pole foundation of the home and the women are responsible for filling the spaces with a mixture of clay and cattle dung.  When this mixture dries it becomes hard like cement. The structure is no taller than the woman can reach. Masai live in arid desert areas, much of it in the rift valley.

The first house on the right of each village belongs to the chief. Being a nomadic peoples when they move all usable materials are taken with them and then the remainder of the village is burned to prevent anyone else from using it.

Several children were happy to perform some dances for us. The Masai chief, in full native dress, was most accommodating posing for pictures.

   Masai girls are still spoken for as very young girls with the parents making the match. This means that often the wife is many years younger than her husband. The Masai culture  practices circumcision of both sexes. Women are circumcised just before marriage. Every ten years there is a male circumcision  ceremony for all males over 14, so the age gap could be 14-24 as all males are circumcised at the same time. At this point the boys become morans. Each right of passage is marked by ceremony , dress, etc. One can read much about a female from the beaded necklaces she wears and about the males by the color of their hair. The culture is not monogamous; most Masai men have several wives.

A Masai woman is not supposed to have a child until the youngest child is able to tend the goats which they deem to be age 5. So the spacing of children with the same wife is generally five years. A man can offer his wife to a good friend, and she in turn can have an affair with a lover as the first wife, being an arranged match, is seldom a love match. Divorce is extremely rare. The wife raises the children. Masai men are not ‘family men’ as we know the term.  

Masai men tend to be tall and slender. Masai men wear typical tribal garb of red blankets. The tribe moves about with their cattle and goats for more fertile feeding grounds on the plains. None of the local tribes eat wild game. Goats are a staple of the Masai diet and they eat it like we eat chicken. Their diet is really very simple consisting of goat, beef, milk, and cheese. Many Masai have very bad teeth, most often with several missing. They seem to have a mutual understanding with wild animals, each leaving the other alone. The men do a jumping dance/ competition and many of them can jump really high.

With the changes in the culture some villages are becoming more permanent with concrete block buildings. Twenty percent of park fees now go to the local people living in the area. This allows the Masai people to be a little less dependent on their goats and cattle. All employees in the lodges are local people and as a result the Masai culture is slowly changing. There are not enough Masai women for wives so some Masai men are marrying Kikuyu women

            It is an interesting culture and it was most interesting to visit with them.