Meeting the Maasai

The plains were still arid, stretched taut between the hills on the horizon like a pale yellow towel that had been wrung dry and laid flat to bake in the sun. If it were not for the entrance gate, I would not have known that we had passed from the Serengeti National Park into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The wildlife did not seem to know either.

I scanned the grasslands, a lingering habit from three days of safari, spotting an ostrich here, a group of gazelles there. Then, a dozen cattle trailed by a lone man. Though the heat waves tried to conceal his identity, I knew he was Maasai; he was tall and slender, wore a bright red shuka around his shoulders, and carried an engudi, straight as an acacia thorn. He tapped at a dawdling cow with his engudi and stared at us as we drove past.

The savanna of Ngorongoro Conservation Area, just outside of Serengeti National Park.

Grasslands turned to savanna, a thin forest of umbrella trees and whistling thorn. Between the trees, a circular hedge was twisted around a collection of little huts that camouflaged perfectly with the beiges of the savanna. It was a Maasai village, called a boma. My safari guide, Lobulu, told me that the Maasai use a particular type of thornbush around their bomas that makes the bad animals go blind. In a land of oral tradition, I took the fact with a grain of salt. But on closer inspection, the spiny bramble did seem effective in keeping the dangerous animals out, keeping the precious livestock in.

Lobulu veered the Land Cruiser off the main road toward a boma. For a small donation, we would be allowed to see a glimpse of the Maasai’s way of life within the thorned walls. Having seen several Land Cruisers with safari-themed wheel covers parked outside other bomas along the way, I figured that there would be some level of curation for tourists in this experience. But I was curious, nonetheless.

Four Maasai men lean against their traditional herding sticks, called engudis.

An elder Maasai man sits against his enkaji, a house made of wood, cow dung, and mud. When it rains, the enkajis require continuous fortification with additional mud.

I stepped out of the car, into torrid air, onto dust that invariably made its way into my nose and lungs. A group of Maasai greeted us in song. It was not like any song that I knew, though. It was a chorus of guttural hums and melodical exhales that rose and fell with the beat of clinking necklaces. They led us into the boma where twenty houses, called enkajis, rose up from the dust, their walls of cow dung and mud holding tenuously to wooden frames. Some had already surrendered to the heat, revealing a tight patchwork of sticks beneath.  

The group thinned into a line, women on the left, men on the right. The women swung their shoulders back and forth in a way that bobbed their broad necklaces, swung their stretched earlobes. On the right, one man stepped forward and began to jump. As he rose higher, he tucked his feet beneath his yellow shuka and for a moment, he was suspended in the air. This was the signature Maasai dance of the warriors. I was later told that Maasai men perform this dance at ceremonies, practiced it in the bush with their friends, and on certain occasions, jumped to demonstrate their merit to prospective wives.

Maasai women wearing blue and purple shukas, broad necklaces, and heavy earrings. A mother with a young baby carries him on her back, held tightly with her shuka.

Maasai men watch as one of them performs the traditional jumping dance.

One woman crossed over to where I was standing, looped a necklace over my head, and grabbed my hand. She led me to the line but did not let go. I bobbed my shoulders awkwardly as I held onto her hand and thought about how out of place I must have looked in this line of Maasai.

Once the dance concluded, a young man named Elerai led me to his enkaji. He ducked his head and slipped between the cracked mud walls, where the light could not follow. Inside, I could not see anything. Elerai told me to sit, and I cautiously lowered myself onto a cowhide sheet suspended between the beams. It was the bed that he shared with his mother and four of his siblings. I wondered how they could be comfortable in such a small bed, and he told me that they prefer it this way. I focused on the tiny rays of sunlight caught in the dust, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness as he told me about his life.

Elerai posing in front of the enkaji that he shares with his mother and four siblings.

Lacking electricity, the inside of this single-room enkaji was completely dark, except for a small amount of light coming in from the entrance and holes in the wall.

Elerai was the son of Sara, who was the third wife of the chief. The chief had twelve wives. In total, over one hundred people lived in this boma, all related to Elerai in some polygamous way. The boys tended to the livestock, the girls tended to everything else: building the enkajis, raising the children, cooking, making jewelry and collecting firewood to sell. Historically, the Maasai were exclusively pastoralists, which inspired creativity in the transfer of energy between cow and Maasai. Elerai told me that from healthy cows, they draw blood every few weeks. “That is how we become strong warriors,” he said, “from drinking the blood of the cow.”

I asked about the scars on his cheek, a collection of tally lines. I had heard that some Maasai believe that fussy children are tormented by a bad spirit, so the cheek must be cut to release it. Elerai, with surprising nonchalance, gave another explanation: a child that is cut will be too scared to cry again. Different logic, same result.

After our conversation, Elerai escorted me to the sprawling table of souvenirs in the center of the boma, piled with miniature elephants carved from ebony, salad tongs with zebra stripes, Maasai jewelry, kitschy safari items. In realizing that I did not intend to buy anything, Elerai said with a tinge of annoyance, “Nothing? You are supporting my family if you buy this.” I, uncurable people-pleaser, could not say no.

He then led me outside of the boma to a wooden structure with a neglected roof that did little against the equatorial sun. “This is our school,” he told me. A throng of children greeted me from behind two desks, then one small boy marched to a chipped black board. In a rehearsed fashion, he slapped a ruler at numbers 1 through 10 while the other children shouted the numbers back in unison. Then, he pointed to the large donation box in the center. Elerai suggested that if I felt inclined to support the children, I could leave a donation here. My skepticism began to grow.

The school outside of the boma. The wooden frame was exposed and the roof was unfinished, unlike the other enkajis in the boma.

It was a scene you might expect a humanitarian aid organization to tout in a commercial: twenty African children in dirty clothes, crowded under a dilapidated school building. Most had running noses, one had a serious eye infection. But I was suspicious of the school’s authenticity. All of the enkajis were well-constructed with roofs impenetrable even to sunlight, so why was the school an exception? Also, I had learned from locals that children were required by law to attend school, public or private, six days a week. Public schools, especially in a tourist-heavy area like Ngorongoro, may have even received additional funding to put on an appearance of prosperity. It was conceivable that these children went to a local public school and used this structure solely for tourist visits.

Even with this brief, somewhat curated experience with the Maasai, I was captivated by their unique culture and its insulation from Western influences. Of course, there were the superficial differences: they wore shoes cut from tires, had earlobes that dangled to their shoulders, and dressed in colorful shukas that contrasted brilliantly against their dark skin.

Sara, the mother of Elerai. She wore traditional Maasai earrings, including a metal weight in her earlobe.

There were the grimmer differences too, like male circumcision, a procedure that boys proudly endure without anesthetics or pain relievers as a way of proving themselves as unflinching, brave warriors. And female genital mutilation, which, to my understanding, did not garner quite the same level of respect as the male counterpart, despite being much more invasive and dangerous. Tanzania outlawed the practice in 1998, but centuries-old cultural practices are hard to erase.

I was determined to learn what was real and what had been fabricated to pull at the heartstrings (and purse strings) of tourists. So the next day, I bought a bus ticket to Loliondo, the unofficial capital of the Maasai.