THE TRIBE

MAASAI

GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION.

The Maasai people of East Africa live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania along the Great Rift Valley on semi-arid and arid lands. 

The Maasai religion traditions and costumes

Maasai Ceremonies and RitualsThere are many ceremonies in Maasai society including Enkipaata (senior boy ceremony), Emuratta (circumcision), Enkiama (marriage), Eunoto (warrior-shaving ceremony), Eokoto e-kule (milk-drinking ceremony), Enkang oo-nkiri (meat-eating ceremony), Olngesherr (junior elder ceremony), etc. Also, there are ceremonies for boys and girls minor including,Eudoto/Enkigerunoto oo-inkiyiaa (earlobe), and Ilkipirat (leg fire marks). Traditionally, boys and girls must undergo through these initiations for minors prior to circumcision. However, many of these initiations concern men while women's initiations focus on circumcision and marriage.  Men will form age-sets moving them closer to adulthood. Women do not have their own age-set but are recognized by that of their husbands.  Ceremonies are an expression of Maasai culture and self-determination. Every ceremony is a new life. They are rites of passage, and every Maasai child is eager to go through these vital stages of life. Following is where a boy's life begin in the Maasai society.

milk plays a huge role in a traditional Maasai diet. Drunk raw (or soured), drunk in tea, or turned into butter (which is especially important as a food for infants), milk is a part of almost every meal for Maasai herders.

Raw beef is also consumed, but much more fascinating (and possibly a little off-putting to the western palate) is the tradition of drinking raw blood, cooked blood, and blood-milk mixtures.

FOOD

Maasai food

The Maasai clothing The Maasai peoples are pastoral nomads, living in the Serengeti Plains. Their wealth, livelihood, and religion all revolve around cattle. The Maasai have also cleverly adapted to increasing globalization. They charge a fee for any photographs taken of them, using Western curiosity about traditional African cultures to their advantage. The main garment worn by the Maasai is the shuka, which is a basic piece of fabric that can be worn in a variety of ways, depending on the personal style of the wearer. It was initially made out of animal skins, mostly cowhide but never elephant skin, but cotton is now the main material. The fabric is rubbed with color or dye to make it red, becoming a sort of camouflage with the red dirt of that part of Africa. In the dry grass plains the shuka can be white to camouflage with the grain

The daily life of Maasai MEN    The men have the job of protecting the enkang, which is the Maasai word for village.  They make a fence out of acacia thorns that surrounds the enkang.  The fence keeps the predators outside the village.  It also keeps the cattle inside the village at night so they will not wander away.    The men must also herd the cattle.  They protect them from predators, like lions.  They also search for better pastures and watering holes for their cattle.    The men do not steal cattle from other tribes like they once did, which means being able to fight is not as important as it used to be.  Even so, the Maasai warriors need to be trained to fight so they can protect their cattle from predators. WOMEN    The women have many different jobs.  They feed and milk the cows.  They also make houses.  Maasai homes are called Inkajijks, and are built with sticks, cow dung, cow urine and mud.  Another job that the women have is to cook.  They also find water and firewood and make clothes and beaded jewelry.

The Maasai arts and crafts The Maasai (Masai) could be the most known Kenyan tribe outside Kenya especially for tourists The Maasai (Masai) are more commonly associated with Kenya, but they've been a presence around the Ngorongoro Crater of Tanzania for over a 150 years and are the area's main residents. They are predominantly a warrior tribe whose lives revolve around herding cattle. They believe the rain God Ngai entrusted the cattle to the Maasai (Masai) people when the earth and sky split, and wealth is measured in number of cattle. Since cattle was given to the Maasai (Masai), they believe its okay to steal from other tribes. They are predominantly a warrior tribe whose lives revolve around herding cattle. They believe the rain God Ngai entrusted the cattle to the Maasai (Masai) people when the earth and sky split, and wealth is measured in number of cattle. Since cattle was given to the Maasai (Masai), they believe its okay to steal from other tribes

The Maa speaking peoples of East Africa believe that at the beginning sky and earth were one, and the Maasai did not have any cattle. God (Enkai) then let cattle descend from the sky along a bark rope (or leather strap or firestick), and the Maasai received all cattle that currently exists in the world. The Dorobo (Ildorobo people), a group of hunters and gatherers, did not receive any cattle, and therefore proceeded to cut the rope, producing a separation between heaven and earth, and stopping the flow of cattle from God. From that belief, it follows that there is a direct link between God and cattle, and that all cattle in the world belong to the Maasai. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest that already at the beginning of the second millennium (CE), there were Maa speaking groups south-east of lake Turkana, who had separated themselves from other Nilotic groups that moved into Uganda and the Sudan. However, it is not till the 1800s that age-sets taken place, and from that point of view, the history of the Maasai points to a constant re-creation and assimilation of groups, rather than to a single group moving across Kenya into Tanzania. The first expansion occurred at least 300 years ago, possibly earlier, when Maa speaking peoples moved from northern Kenya into the Nakuru area of the Rift Valley. The second expansion took place in the 18th Century, when Maasai moved out from Naivasha-Nakuru, south-westwards to Loita, Mara, and Serengeti, and south-eastwards to Ngong, and across the plains to Kilimanjaro. After 1900 though, and the establishment of colonial rule, the era of expansion came to an end, and imprecisely drawn boundaries were hardened and became policed borders. To that effect, the demarcation of reserve boundaries that took place before the First World War, meant that as early as 1902, Maasai districts were considered closed, and non-Maasai could not move in, while Maasai could not move out. This was one of the historical factors accounting for the preservation of Maasai religion, which basically remained unchanged till Kenya's independence in 1963. From their myth of origin, and throughout their main religious festivals, Maasai stress the symbolism of cattle. Cattle are the gift of God to man, and thus symbolize and substantiate the qualities of God. In the same way, the meat-eating and milk-drinking rituals are sacramental meals, due to the fact that they symbolize the unity of God, and man, through cattle. Therefore, at birth, circumcision, marriage and all the great age-set ceremonies livestock is ritually killed, and the meat (blessed by elders) publically consumed.All those ceremonies take place at ritual villages, that are constructed in order to enact rituals that symbolize and make possible the continuity of Maasai. Houses and objects in those ritual villages reproduce fundamental cosmological concepts, and inform the organization of space, colours and shapes in the homestead. For example, the warrior village is organized according to the clan system, while the eunoto village allows processes of circumcision to take place, symbolizing the 'planting' of a new age-set of senior warriors. In the case of the coming of elders the same spatial and symbolic construction takes place, and cattle sticks are blessed as symbols of wisdom and elderhood.

Maasai Religion

One of the most immediate threats to the Maasai comes from game hunters in the Loliondo region of northern Tanzania. Here, Maasai villages have been burnt to the ground by the authorities, and thousands have brutally evicted to provide a company, Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd (OBC), with more access to land for game hunting.

The Loliondo Maasai are now homeless, and without access to water and grazing land their cattle are dying. Most of what used to be Maasai land has already been taken over, for private farms and ranches, for government projects, wildlife parks or private hunting concessions. Mostly they retain only the driest and least fertile areas.

The Maasai problems

The main solutions to the problems plaguing the Maasai tribe is that the governments should secure prior informed consent from the communities that exist in these areas before beginning a development project, and then give them more control over the implementation of the project. The former, according to Roy Taylor of the North American Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Project, should be "decisions based on knowledge about both the pros and cons of development…We are tired of hearing about the ‘enterprise concept’ which usually promotes only the benefits of ‘development’ and we need to know the potential downside too. That is the hallmark of informed consent (Pera, 4)." Local control would give back to the community and would lessen the impacts of development because the locals would have more interest in preserving something they are actually benefiting from. However, with all the tour companies that exist today, local communities do not have the political or economic force to compete with these other corporations and their government (Schaller, 2).

An example of this kind of control occurred in 1999, when the Maasai people of Ololosokwan leased some of their land to Conservation Corporation Africa (CCA) for $34,500. The CCA has exclusive use of hundreds of acres in the Serengeti as well as the use of a tourist camp built in 1926. With this new 15-year lease, the Maasai will receive 40% of the profits and pay local taxes, whereas they previously received only about 7%. The Maasai of this area will still be able to graze their herds and gather water on most of this land. Now, the Maasai are much less doubtful about dealing with outsiders, like travel agencies and the tourists that visit the area. They also received a health clinic, a market for the Maasai women to sell their goods to tourists and a wild honey industry (Associated Press, 1). The benefits of this transaction are invaluable to both sides.

The Maasai solutions