OUR AFTERNOON WITH THE BEAUTIFIUL MASAAI WOMEN

It was time to leave ‘glamping’ heaven today.  The glamping side for me was being able to get Wi-Fi in my tent!  What a luxury!  If you ask Jimbob, glamping would be the cold beers, if you ask the ‘glampers’ it would be sleeping anywhere but the tent, if you asked the big guy and Evie they have the glamping down pat with proper pillows and a blow up mattress that they bought along the way-with an air pump and all.  Yes glamping can mean different things to many people, either way it was time to leave Crayfish Camp and head to our ‘basic’ camp tonight in the Mara, which Dan was painting a very basic picture of with drop toilets, cold or no showers and a camp fire (which we were all excited to hear about) and get into some ridgy didge camping.  If you had of known me 3 years ago, you would not recognise the ‘camper’ in me today.  Until my African overland trip 2 years ago I could count on one hand the amount of times I had spent in a tent in all my **36 cough cough years** and now here I am refusing the upgrades and liking the fact of being in the middle of nowhere.  I am still a little precious about the ‘toileting’.  If I can, I prefer to have a flush toilet and I am not ‘wild’ about wild camping-but there is not much you can do when mother-nature calls and you just have to suck that part of camping up and I am lucky I am not a person that has to go to the toilet 10 times a day. 

We were up at 6.30am to pull down out tents for a 7am brekkie and an 8am departure.  Not before I got to say goodbye to King Jools and get a few pictures snapped to be able to show the crew who I stumbled across quite randomly which is really an amazing piece of random luck!  We also had to say goodbye to the geese who were surprisingly not too noisy, the other 4 legged friends we had made an also Eddie (Frasier’s dog) who seemed to have charmed us all, even with the animal tongue that he bought to camp last night!  I have to say I am LOVING my new sleeping bag and last night was the mildest night that we have had to date.  Even though it was as cold as a freezer on our first night in Nakuru, the upside to that is all the nights following that have seemed mild…..  Some of the guys found out that there were going to be an additional 14 people joining them on the next section of the trip, which makes a total of 22….. the poor buggers.  I hate split tours at the best of times, but to go from a group of 12 to 22 is going to change the whole dynamic of the trip and it is not always a bad thing if you have a sucky group, but when you have a good group it takes a little more work to accept the ‘newbies’.  I would also hate to be the new 14-there is something off putting joining a group that has been together for a week already, even if they are losing 4 FANTASTIC people (just ask us who are leaving). 

We were only on the road for 40 minutes before our first stop this morning for a coffee break (the weather was crap) and it was also an opportunity for the guys to have a bit of a shop at the Masaai curio shop.  I am always up for a shop, and there were some nice pieces in the shed come shop, but a lot of it I know I can firstly get in Nairobi at the Masaai Market and secondly the prices that they were asking for stuff was INSANE.  Like totally CRAZY prices and I just had to walk out and leave people to work out for themselves what they were getting told and 90% of people after getting the prices and working out the exchange left empty handed as they really were Mzungu prices.  Some people did buy some things and I wasn’t going to ask the prices they paid as I know it was too much, but if they are happy with what they paid then who is anybody to argue with that.  Maybe I have a bit of a blasé attitude as I know that I can just go to the Masaai Market on a Friday and get whatever I want, where these guys may not see another shop and they head home in 2 weeks’ time.  I know what that feels like and you need to shop when you can.  I do always check the shops as there may be a piece that may just jump out at you and if that happened and I got a good price I would jump at the chance, but 90% of the stuff is found everywhere and I don’t want to buy too much more ‘Kenya’ stuff until I come back from West Africa as I reckon I may just shop up a storm there!  The one good thing that did seem a good buy were the Masaai blankets that our driver Alex was snapping up, so we knew they were good quality and a good price and after a few cold nights, some people stocked up on them, otherwise we were back on the road after 40 minutes for our next stop in Narok for Susan to do some food shopping for the next few days.  As we were ‘camping’ tonight in the true sense of the word, we were told there would be no bar (what!!) and we should stock up while in Narok.

We arrived into Narok just after 11am and we were dropped off at a petrol station, shown where the supermarket and banks were and had an hour to explore the town.  You could see this was a launching point for tour operators to the Masaai as there was a mass influx of tour jeeps, 4WD, minivans and safari trucks.  After driving through it, it really didn’t look like there was much to see and when people were getting off the truck, I was able to pop into the shop at the station and buy a six pack of cans, and get back on the truck again before Alex drove away to fill up Eddie (our truck).  Narok is a town west of Nairobi that supports Kenya's economy in south-west of the country, along the Great Rift Valley.  Narok has a population of around 40,000 people which are mostly Masaai.  The elevation of Narok is 1827 metres in altitude and is the last major town when travelling by road from Nairobi to Masaai Mara National Park and Keekorok Lodge. The Narok town stands as a centre for services, business, and finance. For decades, Narok's economy was controlled by Asian and non-Masaai communities.  The main economic income is the tourism sector, which brings an estimated 10 billion Kenya Shillings (114 million USD) annually, as well as wheat farming, which is done both in large and small scale. The entrance of big supermarkets, banks and other companies seems an indication of things to come.   As I didn’t need anything else besides the beer, I stayed with the truck as Alex drove to the edge of town to fill up and then by the time we got back to the meeting point there were people ready to come back on the truck.  I had some internet access here and this is when I saw that JKIA had caught fire, which was just shocking, and then the repercussions of some of my fellow travellers sunk in about their flights out of Kenya in 4 days’ time.  Hell, I was thinking selfishly about my own flights in 4 weeks’ time. 

We had a lunch stop, that happened to also coincide with another Masaai curio shop and then we pushed on after lunch to our final destination, Loita Hills.  The Loita Hills are one of Kenya's last remaining true wilderness areas. Rarely visited and as a result it is widely believed that the most traditional Masaai culture exists here.  The low-lying mountain range is located south of Nairobi and northeast of the Masai Mara. There are pockets of remote forests, wide open plains surrounded by the stunning hillsides and dotted with roaming wildlife. This isn't an area for viewing big game, but more somewhere to enjoy the scenery, walk with the local Masaai and learn more about their culture and communities.  As we had now left the paved highway, even though we were still on a main road, it was now the loose fine powder road and it was getting a little dusty from this point on and to put it nicely we were offered a free ‘African massage’.  The road was so bumpy at times, that Dan walked around and asked us all to put on our seatbelts, the esky was tied down and anything that was close to falling from the overheads did and resecured for the bumpy, um I mean African massage.  The scenery also changed now-there were flat dusty plains, hardly any trees and if any the short acacia shrub trees and in the middle of nowhere Masaai men herding their cattle in all directions and really a surreal thing to see as there is nothing around for miles and there are these men that roam the country side with their cattle so they have something to eat during the dry season.     

We then pulled off the main road passing what looked to be a small Masaai community, and we are now really in the thick of Masaai territory.  There are the manyatta’s that they live in dotted in the small village, cattle and small stalls of clothes and food that were being sold in this dusty little village.  We stopped once more before camp at a water well to fill up Eddie’s water supply and we happened to interrupt a woman washing her clothes using the water from the tap.  I felt a little bad for her as this massive truck pulled up loaded with wzungus all staring at her as she hand washed all her clothes, but after cagily looking at us, she didn’t seemed to disturbed about it and set back to work washing.  A laborious job that she did standing up bending from her back; it makes you appreciate having a washing machine.  20 minutes later we were now filled with water, we tried to move and we had got a wheel stuck in the muddy section surrounding the tap.  UH OH, the last time I got stuck in an overland truck was in a coffee plantation in Colombia and after 4 hours we were unable to get it out and had to get another mode of transport until they were able to free the truck the following morning.  But we were lucky there was a small tray back truck with a few Masaai sitting in the back and with Alex getting out the tracks to help with grip we were free after 10 minutes and finally on our way to camp. 

The camp site was actually quite cool.  There was a purpose built wooden structure that Intrepid had erected and was 90% completed with a kitchen section and then the other section to set up chairs and to eat meals.  Dan even mentioned about FLUSHING toilets, but if they failed he pointed out where the traditional drop toilets were if needed.  After helping Susan get what she needed off the truck, we were able to set up our tents about 100m from the structure.  We had to walk across a 20m wooden bridge to get us across a small ditch that looks like it would fill with water when it rained.  There were a few Masaai walking around (they were from the village that we would be visiting this afternoon) and I am sure they were enjoying the spectacle of mzungu’s erecting their mzungu tents and loading our tents with our mattresses and sleeping bags.  Once we were all settled we had 1.5 hours before we were to head to the Masaai Village to meet the women and to see a manyatta and ask to hear and ask any questions of the Masaai way of life.     

We were collected at 5pm from a few members from the local Masaai village that happened to only be 50m away from our own campsite and we were greeted by about 8 small children before we were lead into an enclosure in the centre of the village where the animals are stored late in the afternoons to keep them safe from wild animals.  When we had ducked through the acacia made fence we were greeted by a line of around 15 women singing for us.  The Masaai women chant lullabies, humming songs, and songs praising their sons.  When many Masaai women gather together, they sing and dance among themselves and it was amazing to hear them and what a welcome!!!  We got to have a great look at the women in their beautifully coloured clothes and beaded jewellery and we were also given the green light to take as many pictures as we wanted!  SWEET.  The Masaai began to replace animal-skin, calf hides and sheep skin, with commercial cotton cloth in the 1960s.  Shúkà is the Maa word for sheets traditionally worn wrapped around the body, one over each shoulder, then a third over the top of them.  The Masaai women regularly weave and bead jewellery and this bead work plays an essential part in the ornamentation of their body.  Bead working, done by women, has a long history among the Masaai, who articulate their identity and position in society through body ornaments and body painting.  Most of the women also had the stretched earlobes.  The piercing and stretching of earlobes is common among the Masaai and various materials have been used to both pierce and stretch the lobes, including thorns for piercing, twigs, bundles of twigs, stones, the cross section of elephant tusks and empty film canisters. Fewer and fewer Masaai, particularly boys, follow this custom. 

I am not normally a great fan of these ‘village’ visits as I generally find them to be set up for tourists and a little ‘fake’ for want of a better word.  But I go the distinct impression that we had walked into a ‘proper’ Masaai village, a working village and there was no plomp or fakeness about it all.  Once the women had finished a few songs they then came over the women of our group to pull us into a few dances and songs.  I declined the initial invitation, but then thought why not?  I have come all this way, why not join the line of ladies.  We were each placed in between a Masaai woman and then were involved in the singing and dancing of a few more songs.  It was tough work, like an aerobics workout and I was happy to hear that the Masaai lady next to me sounded out of breath as well.  I was happy that I had given my camera to Jimbob and he took some great photos of our 30 minute interaction with them.  Once we had finished the dancing we were given 10 minutes to be able to speak to the women, get some photos and for them to ask us some questions.  It really was a great experience and they seemed genuinely happy to have us there and were super friendly to us all. 

From the animal enclosure we moved to a manyatta where all 13 of us squeezed into and with us all taking seats on benches and with me sitting on the bed with the wife of the house and her small children, Steven (our Masaai) guy then talked about his culture and his tribe.  He started with the housing.  As a historically nomadic and then semi-nomadic people, the Masaai have traditionally relied on local, readily available materials and indigenous technology to construct their housing. The traditional Masaai house was in the first instance designed for people on the move and was thus very impermanent in nature. The Inkajijik (houses) are either star-shaped or circular, and are constructed by able-bodied women. The structural framework is formed of timber poles fixed directly into the ground and interwoven with a lattice of smaller branches, which is then plastered with a mix of mud, sticks, grass, cow dung and human urine, and ash. The cow dung ensures that the roof is water-proof. The enkaj is small, measuring about 3x5 m and standing only 1.5 m high. Within this space, the family cooks, eats, sleeps, socializes, and stores food, fuel, and other household possessions. Small livestock are also often accommodated within the enkaji.  Villages are enclosed in a circular fence built by the men, usually of thorned acacia, a native tree. At night, all cows, goats, and sheep are placed in an enclosure in the centre, safe from wild animals.

We were then told about more of the Masaai culture and the following topics were covered or asked by us as we sat in the small 3x5 building made of cow dung and was warm as toast thanks to the small fire that was burning low.  The Masaai are a Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. The Masaai are among the best known of African ethnic groups, due to their residence near the many game parks of East Africa, and their distinctive customs and dress.  The Masaai population has been reported as numbering 841,622 in Kenya in the 2009 census, compared to 377,089 in the 1989 census.  The Tanzanian and Kenyan governments have instituted programs to encourage the Masaai to abandon their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle, but the people have continued their age-old customs.  The Masaai and the Samburu tribes are pastoralists, and are famous for their fearsome reputations as warriors and cattle-rustlers.  According to their own oral history, the Masaai originated from the lower Nile valley north of Lake Turkana (Northwest Kenya) and began migrating south around the 15th century, arriving in a long trunk of land stretching from what is now northern Kenya to what is now central Tanzania between the 17th and late 18th century. Many ethnic groups that had already formed settlements in the region were forcibly displaced by the incoming Masaai.  The Masaai territory reached its largest size in the mid-19th century, and covered almost all of the Great Rift Valley and adjacent lands.  Raiders used spears and shields, but were most feared for throwing clubs (orinka) which could be accurately thrown from up to 70 paces (appx. 100 metres).  The period of expansion was followed by the Masaai "Emutai" of 1883–1902. This period was marked by epidemics of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, rinderpest and smallpox. The estimate first put forward by a German lieutenant was that 90% of cattle and half of wild animals perished from rinderpest. German doctors in the same area claimed that "every second" African had a pock-marked face as the result of smallpox. This period coincided with drought. Rains failed completely in 1897 and 1898.  By one estimate two-thirds of the Masaai died during this period.  Starting with a 1904 treaty, and followed by another in 1911, Masaai lands in Kenya were reduced by 60% when the British evicted them to make room for settler ranches.  More land was taken to create wildlife reserves and national parks including Amboseli, Nairobi National Park, Masai Mara, Samburu, Lake Nakuru and Tsavo in Kenya; and Manyara, Ngorongoro, Tarangire and Serengeti in what is now Tanzania.

Masaai society is strongly patriarchal in nature, with elder men, sometimes joined by retired elders, deciding most major matters for each Masaai group. A full body of oral law covers many aspects of behaviour. Formal execution is unknown, and normally payment in cattle will settle matters.  A high infant mortality rate among the Masaai has led to babies not truly being recognized until they reach an age of 3 moons.  For Masaai living a traditional life, the end of life is virtually without ceremony, and the dead are left out for scavengers.  A corpse rejected by scavengers, mainly spotted hyenas, is seen as having something wrong with it, and liable to cause social disgrace; therefore, it is not uncommon for bodies to be covered in fat and blood from a slaughtered ox.  The government is slowly trying to change this ceremony and more and more of the dead are now getting buried. 

Traditional Masaai lifestyle centres around their cattle which constitute their primary source of food. The measure of a man's wealth is in terms of cattle and children. A herd of 50 cattle is respectable, and the more children the better. A man who has plenty of one but not the other is considered to be poor.  The men in the Masaai tribe are born and raised to be warriors. They don‘t marry when they are young but instead they stay in the woods. This is the reason why there is much age difference between husbands and their wives, because they are not allowed to marry until they are 25 (when they have become elders), while the women marry when they are young.  Maintaining a traditional pastoral lifestyle has become increasingly difficult due to outside influences of the modern world.  Over the years, many projects have begun to help Masaai tribal leaders find ways to preserve their traditions while also balancing the education needs of their children for the modern world.

A question that had us all intrigued was about the women’s circumcision.  Young women undergo excision (female circumcision or female genital mutilation) as part of an elaborate rite of passage ritual which is a ceremony that initiates young Masaai girls into adulthood through ritual circumcision and then into early arranged marriages.  The Masaai believe that female circumcision is necessary and Masaai men may reject any woman who has not undergone it as either not marriageable or worthy of a much-reduced bride price.  To others, the practice of female circumcision is known as female genital mutilation, and draws a great deal of criticism from both abroad and many women who have undergone it.  It has recently been replaced in some instances by a "cutting with words" ceremony involving singing and dancing in place of the mutilation. However, the practice remains deeply ingrained and valued by the culture and female genital cutting is now illegal in both Kenya and Tanzania and this particular village was trying hard to break the cycle and be guided by what the government was stating for the health of their women.  The Masaai are traditionally polygynous; this is thought to be a long standing and practical adaptation to high infant and warrior mortality rates.  Polyandry is also practiced. A woman marries not just her husband, but the entire age group.

So what do they eat in such an arid landscape?  Traditionally, the Masaai diet consisted of raw meat, raw milk, and raw blood from cattle. Today, the staple diet of the Masaai consists of cow's milk and maize-meal. The former is largely drunk fresh or in sweet tea and the latter is used to make a liquid or solid porridge. The solid porridge is known as ugali and is eaten with milk; unlike the liquid porridge, ugali is not prepared with milk. Animal fats or butter are used in cooking, primarily of porridge, maize, and beans. Butter is also an important infant food.  Soups are probably the most important use of plants for food by Masaai. Acacia nilotica is the most frequently used soup plant. The root or stem bark is boiled in water and the decoction drunk alone or added to soup. The Masaai are fond of taking this as a drug, and is known to make them energetic, aggressive and fearless. Masaai eat soup laced with bitter bark and roots.  The mixing of cattle blood, obtained by nicking the jugular vein and milk is done to prepare a ritual drink for special celebrations and as nourishment for the sick.  However, the inclusion of blood in the traditional diet is waning due to the reduction of livestock numbers.

It was all very interesting and after exhausting all our questions, we were ushered back outside to watch the cattle come home for the night from the days walking, the bull, who made a small charge at one point in the enclosure and was promptly tied to a tree and then lastly we saw an older Masaai women show us how they milked their cows at the end of each afternoon.  It was now 6.30pm, and it was time for us to leave and walking the short distance back to camp I really really enjoyed the afternoon and still felt like it was not a tourist trap and we did see their everyday of life-it was a snap shot into their village and life and nothing was ‘staged’ as such for us.

Dinner was at 7pm, a delicious meal of spaghetti and I have to say that we are not really sticking to the roster that was set up on the truck on Sunday.  We have been super lucky that Susan has done 99% of the prep work, Alex and Dan have done all the pot scrubbing to date and I think there maybe truck elves that have been sweeping the truck or at least keeping it clean each day.  The great thing about it all is that everyone chops in for all the other jobs that need to be done and the washing up each night is done in record time with us all washing and flapping-I reckon our group would have set a record with us all pitching in.  It really is a great feeling when everyone is happy to do their thing and pull their weight, it makes a BIG difference to a trip and trust me I have been on tours where there are lazy arse people and it just brings a bad energy to the whole group.  I just happened to be in Team D and in memory of my roster team of my previous Africa trip, I decided to call our team Team DikDik which my other 2 fellow team members were happy to run with and just for the record we were the ONLY team to dedicate a name……..      

After dinner, a camp fire had been set up over near the tents, so with chairs taken across the bridge and a few beverages, we settled in to hear Steve tell us some more of his culture and an open forum again for us to ask questions, and everything was asked and answered in a free and open forum and Steve answered all our question to his honest ability.  We found out that if a murder is committed the ‘fine’ is 399 sheep and if the culprit doesn’t have that many sheep his family and friends have to help him get them.  Before the warriors marry at age 25 they are allowed to have ‘temporary’ loves and when we asked about mobile phones, Steven replied back that they are allowed to have them, but he doesn’t know anyone with one-so who would he call and to buy one he would sell some of his cattle and when you weigh up the value of phone over cattle, cattle is a far more bigger commodity than a phone, especially if no one else you know doesn’t have one.  It really is like another world with the customs and heritage that they have had and currently live by and there is a small struggle now as the modern world seems to be closing in on them slowly with education becoming a big dilemma and the government over ruling some of their cultural actions that have been happening for hundreds of years.  I think it is a fine line on who says what is right and what is wrong of a custom/culture and I sometimes wonder if we really should have the authority to butt into their business.  It was a great way to end a great day and after again we had exhausted our questions an hour later all but 3 (the glampers) retired to bed an hour later to fall asleep to the shrieking baboons we could hear in the distance and had been re-assured that they don’t move at night time and if you needed to go to the toilet at night (Anne) you would not be accosted by them.