Maasai Warriors

Today the Maasai of northern Tanzania are asking for help online to save the lions of the Serengeti. This fact got me thinking. The Maasai are of course a famous nomadic ethnic group (‘tribe’) of East Africa who used to roam up and down the rift valley through what is today Tanzania and Kenya. They almost exclusively consumed cow blood and milk; and famously they had a rite of passage for boys to become men that required the killing of a lion without the use of a gun. The age mates (boys born in the same year) had to work together to outsmart the lion into some kind of fatal trap before they could be considered to be men. But this was back in the old days, as in my own age-mates probably had to do that. But not anymore, now the lions are too rare.

In Kenya, the Maasai are still notorious as warriors. An older Kenyan friend of mine once said “all Kenyans are scared of the Maasai, even of the women” Legend has it that they used to show up at the farming Bantu ‘tribes’ lands and say something like “Our cows will be eating your crops tomorrow. So, you can either leave to let us stay and fatten the animals, or you can fight us”. The other tribes often chose to leave because they decided not to risk war.  Nairobi proper was historically a fighting land between the Maasai and the Kikuyu for example. In fact, 100 years ago, the British wanted to name Kenya “Maasai Land” because of their respect for these no nonsense warriors, but the 51 other tribes that make up Kenya didn’t like that idea so much.

Well as it happens – Even the Maasai have now noticed that lions are endangered, and they don’t want them to disappear completely. Worthy adversaries are hard to find after all.

I am no expert on the Maasai but today’s email made me remember my first interactions with these famously proud nomads. It was during a pivotal time in my life – unequivocally, the best year of my schooling.  I thought I might share my story here.

When I was 15 years old my pregnant mother and her second husband with their two year old daughter took me and my 11-year-old sister to Dar-es-Salaam Tanzania for Oscar’s work as an economics professor. This was pretty exciting for us because we had lived a couple years in Ghana and aside from my tropical health issues we had loved West Africa. So East Africa was gonna be great: I studied up on the Serengeti, on the Maasai and the Kikuyu, the Great Rift Valley and the ancient Mombasa slave trading routes. I even tried to learn a bit of Swahili. Dar-es-Salaam means peaceful harbor in that language of trade and we could immediately see why.

At the time Tanzania was run by a communist president named Julius Nyerere and Kenya was run by a capitalist president named Jomo Kenyatta. It was fascinating to see the differences between the two but that is the stuff of another blog. We got to stay for our first month at a luxury beach resort that was largely populated by South African Freedom fighters – but that will have to be part of the other story.

This blog is about after we moved onto campus. It was in time for Oscar to start teaching classes. But it turned out that the International School of Dar-es-Salaam didn’t have any school for kids my age. Whoops! Mom and Oscar thought perhaps I could go to secretarial school and take French at the Alliance Francaise, but I would have none of that. I would not be appeased. I wanted to go to school. Tanzanian secondary schools were all full but boarding schools existed in Kenya. They were few and far between but they at least still kept the boarding school tradition alive from their colonialist past in Kenya.

My parents contacted some old friends we had known in Ghana who were working at the University of Nairobi and asked about boarding schools. “Sure” we were told – they had set up an ad hoc mother’s cooperative to house us girls at a school (which was not actually a boarding school) twenty miles out of Nairobi in the town of Thika “but I would have to bring my own bedding and my folks would have to pay extra for my room and board of course”.

It was decided that I would go to boarding school in Thika (famous in my mind from ‘The Flame Trees of Thika’- a book written about the idyllic colonialist life there) which had been made into a movie. My mom and sisters put me and Oscar on a bus to get to Nairobi where we could find these old British friends who went to this Thika School. But this was all happening in the time of Idi Amin in Uganda and unbeknownst to us the East African Community was falling apart as we rode the bus.

Our ‘luxury’ bus had plenty of leg room and it even had seat-belts but it certainly had no bathroom on board and my seat wouldn’t even lean back, without falling into the lap of the man sitting behind me. So I leaned forward. Luckily, I awoke in the middle of the night in the intense blackness of an African savannah when the bus stopped for some reason. I went twenty paces away from the bus and squatted behind a bush to pee where nobody could see me (or anything else)….it was spooky but I had a full bladder so I braved ‘deepest darkest Africa’ to relieve myself.

It’s a darn good thing I did that too because when we stopped in the morning we were on a flat empty plane with no shelter anywhere and no bushes for women to hid behind….the men got off the bus and just faced away but the handful of women stayed on the bus and crossed their legs. This was when I learned my life long lesson to always wear big flowing skirts while traveling. My mistake had been to assume that the gas stations would have toilets. Hahahaha! There were no gas stations, there were no toilets, there was nothing. It was a really vacant five hundred miles ride across Tanzania.

About 45 minutes from the Kenyan boarder, as we were skirting Mount Kilimanjaro, we stopped no where in particular and picked up about ten Maasai men and women. This was my first (and so far last) road trip through the Serengeti and I was more entranced than fascinated by the miles of nothing. The feeling of wilderness slowly seeped into my spirit – no home, no people, nothing comfortable – aloneness was permeating my bones.

Here’s what really surprised me about those Maasai: these proud people were all completely naked. They had lots of jewelry on but no pants. Their ears were pierced into big loops that hung down to their shoulders and were lined with red and brightly colored beads. I actually thought how vulnerable that loose flesh looked. They had tons of necklaces on, and they had even been painted with the red ochre clay on some of their faces. But they had no shirts. A couple of them may have carried those now famous red plaid blankets – but mostly they had no cloth to hide their bodies. No shoes either.

Nowadays the Maasai have made a nod towards western mores, and they usually wear clothes, or at least that blanket over their shoulders. But back in my day they didn’t. It is reported that the Maasai’s distain for clothes goes so far as for them to have a saying  “clothes are just to hold one’s farts in”. This may be true. But shoes they now also wear; often flip-flops made of old tires. A few years ago, I paid top dollar for a pair of shoes called ‘Maasai Barefoot Technology’ – They were good shoes, but they weren’t even made of old tires.

East Africa was having a drought when we did this road trip across the Serengeti, and Oscar and I saw some amazing ‘dust devils’ (me for the first time in my life). They were like small tornadoes swishing around on the dry earth and bouncing off of rocks or the road’s black top. There were no tumbleweeds so these really were just tiny dust funnels. The Serengeti felt alien and inhospitable to me even though we saw the large animals at a distance (wildebeest, buffalo, zebra even maybe a giraffe or an elephant). I was scared as I went to pee alone at night. I had visions of hyena’s pouncing me, but I guess Oscar and I must have brought bottles of water because I don’t remember being thirsty. And there was certainly no water for sale anywhere.

It was still early morning when we got to the border with Kenya and by then it was closed. Maybe it had been closed before but the bus company hadn’t told us. Anyway, the bus wasn’t allowed to cross into Kenya. Oscar and I may well have been the only foreigners on the bus. But back in those days there was always a currency problem for everyone crossing these arbitrary national borders that the Brits and Germans had established fifty years earlier: You couldn’t take Tanzanian Shillings out of Tanzania and you couldn’t buy Kenyan Shillings until you were in Kenya. Luckily Oscar had brought a twenty dollar bill to trade for Kenyan Shillings. Unluckily that was more money than the border police had access to so they couldn’t give us Kenyan Shillings. To put this in perspective $20 was about what it cost to take four people to dinner in the USA at that time. So it wasn’t a vast sum of money.

We had bought our bus tickets (on this luxury line) all the way to Nairobi. But we were left at the border to Kenya with no currency and no transportation. We couldn’t walk to Nairobi so Oscar thought of the only logical thing to do – hitch hike. Now remember I was a skinny 15 year old girl, and white at that. So, it was clearly my thumb we used to attract attention to our plight. Oscar hid behind me in a ditch and when the van stopped to pick me up, I didn’t get in until he had.

We were lucky enough to be driven right into the heart of Nairobi in a near empty van: the poachers who picked us up hadn’t caught anything so they had plenty of room. Of course, they demanded payment —— probably the whole twenty dollars

Oscar called his old friends from Nairobi and they came and got me to drive me to Thika. But as it turned out the bedding we were supposed to have brought with us, was not just sheets (which we had) but blankets and pillows, towels and in fact a mattress. Oscar and I had to go buy all that but he had spent all his money to get us to Nairobi. I don’t know how he managed but I distinctly remember that this was tricky proposition. We had to hire a cab (at what felt like a fortune) to go to different street markets in different parts of Nairobi to get what we needed.

It is still the custom in Kenya that when you go to boarding school (and all the cool kids go to boarding school) you bring all the furnishings you will need for your four years of life in hell (but that’s Kenya today and another story all together). This was not actually a boarding school even, But it was a wonderful opportunity for me.

All that year – 1977 I think – I saw the naked Maasai herdsmen with there cattle in the middle of the green and verdant boulevards of Nairobi. The cows were eating the bougainvillea and the men were not covering their farts. The government who, under the British had kept almost all Blacks out of the main city center until fifteen years earlier, now let the Maasai denude their green and fertile highways with their massive herds of cattle because nobody messed with the Maasai. They did what they wanted to do.