Warriors in the City

The Modernization of Maasai.

By Jon Rosen | Swahili Coast Magazine | May/June 2009

As he sits at an upmarket café in Zanzibar, Gabriel Sakita Mollel is anything but a relic of disappearing tribal Africa. Sporting stonewashed jeans and a fashionable button-down shirt, his only jewellery is an oversized silvery wristwatch, which glistens in the tropical sun alongside his Motorola mobile phone. His English and Swahili impeccable as we chat over bottles of Coca Cola, his air is one of 21st century African sophistication. Yet a closer look suggests his origins lie elsewhere. With branded cheeks and elongated earlobes, Gabriel is unmistakably ilkisongo — a member of the northern Tanzanian section of Maasai. Back home, he admits, you'll find him speaking Maa, wearing beads and red and purple toga. "If you go back to my village," he says, "I'm a Maasai guy."

Maasai. They are a handsome, radiant and stubborn people; once feared as ruthless warriors, now fêted as icons of a disappearing tribal Africa. Spread across the arid steppes of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, they are arranged in sixteen geographical sections, totalling approximately 800,000, though it's hard to know for sure, as most are averse to modern census. Descended from Nilo-Hamitic pastoralists that wandered into present-day Kenya towards the end of the first millennium AD, they made the best of their military prowess and knack for keeping cattle to become East Africa's most dominant tribe by the mid-19th century. Cattle, Maasai believe, were a gift from god to them and them alone; a commodity, therefore to be plundered from any and all rivals.

Yet for the last 140 years, Maasai have been on the defensive. Beset by drought and civil war in the 1870s, Maasai herds were hit with a crippling outbreak of pleuro-pneumonia in the 1880s followed by a near doomsday bout of bovine rinderpest, which reduced Maasai stocks by as much as 90% and forced their once unassailable proprietors to survive by eating donkeys and hides. Then came the colonial era. Though initially drawn into alliance with the British who viewed them as too formidable to forcibly subdue, they were soon coerced into signing away much of their best land. Through the Anglo Maasai Agreements of 1904 and 1911, Maasai living in British East Africa (today's Kenya), were removed to what were known as the "southern reserves," the semi-arid districts of Narok and Kajiado where maladies like rinderpest, malaria, and tsetse flies were rampant. The move paved the way for British settlement of the so-called "white highlands." "As a matter of principle," explained British colonial administrator George Elliot, "I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of their large tracts. I have no desire to protect Maasaidom. It is a beastly bloody system, founded on raiding and immorality, disastrous both to the Maasai and their neighbours. The sooner it disappears and is unknown except in books of anthropology, the better."

A century later, Elliot's abrasive yearnings have failed to materialize, yet with every passing day the Maasai way of life is increasingly imperilled. Having already lost large swaths of land to colonial powers, Maasai were anything but vindicated at Kenyan and Tanzanian independence, as both governments chopped off large chunks of one-time Maasai terra for agricultural schemes, game reserves, and big man politicians and their henchmen. In Kenya, the "white highlands," were given back not to Maasai, but to prominent loyalists of new president Jomo Kenyatta.

In the land that's left on both sides of the border, pastoral life has been a continuing struggle. Described "as sterile and unproductive in the extreme" in 1886 by Joseph Thomson, the first European to traverse Maasailand, the climate of the region has only grown harsher since. With rains becoming shorter and less predictable, some herders have been forced to leave home for many months at a time to find suitable pasture and water. Climate change, combined with decades of agricultural encroachment, has drastically reduced the land available for grazing, and thus the number of cattle in the typical Maasai homestead. As a result, a once proud and self-sufficient society is facing rising levels of poverty and a fundamental dilemma between maintaining traditions and succumbing to the sway of modern life.

Increasingly, young Maasai are turning to cities for an answer. Arriving in urban centres like Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, many put their reputation as dreaded warriors to practical use as security guards or night watchmen — positions in high demand as a rise in violent crime means a growing number of middle class locals and expatriate residents living in gated compounds. Others flock to beach destinations like Mombassa and Zanzibar, where they etch out a living braiding hair, selling trinkets, or pursuing exotic romance.

13 years ago, Gabriel was among them. In 1996, after 22 years on his family's traditional compound, he caught a bus to Dar es Salaam, hoping to find work to help support his family.

"My plan was to buy some t-shirts, bring them back to Arusha, and start a business," he says. Yet, on his first day in the city, he was mugged in broad daylight and robbed of everything but his shirt and trousers — even as bystanders passed unflinching. This came as a shock to a man accustomed to a tight-knit community, where justice is swift, and a helping hand is readily offered.

"I went to the police, told them what had happened, and said I was stranded with no money to get home," he recalls. "But they said they couldn't help me, that guys like me were not their problem." A practicing Christian (many Maasai have been converted), he then went to a Church, but left with a similar response. "I realised then that the city is a completely different life," he says. "I couldn't believe that no one would help me. I thought to myself, 'even animals can be better than these people.'"

Though scarred by this first urban experience, Gabriel did not let it thwart his long-term aspirations. In the years since, he's become a successful entrepreneur, operating a business that sells Maasai jewellery and handicrafts in Dar es Salaam and the US state of Ohio, where he's travelled to attend entrepreneurial workshops and teach schoolchildren about Maasai culture. Additionally, he is the vice chairman of Emburis Engai Tanzania, a Dar es Salaam based non-profit organisation that helps young migrants from Maasailand adapt to the challenges of city life.

"So many young men are migrating here from the rural areas," he says. "Many, like me, want to start businesses, but they have no idea what that entails. I'm trying to share with them what I have gained — the entrepreneurship education."

"The city brings so many difficulties," he adds, citing language barriers, pay as low as $40 per month, and lack of HIV awareness as foremost challenges. "Sometimes bosses will not even pay salaries. Many Maasai, even those employed, wind up sleeping on the streets, eating only one meal per day. In Maasailand, if I don't have food, I can come and eat at your place. But in the city I cannot."

Difficulties aside, the fact remains that plenty of Maasai have moved away from pastoral life to significant positions in academia, government, and commerce (Titus Naikuni, a Maasai, for instance, is the CEO of Kenya Airways). Many, like Gabriel, are happy to oscillate between a sophisticated urban lifestyle and traditional life on the family homestead. Others are not.

"Sometimes, I meet Maasai in Dar es Salaam," he says, "and when I greet them, they pretend not to be Maasai, they refuse to speak Maa (the Maasai language). They think Maasai are like animals, living in the forest."

With the prevalence of such attitudes, the question remains whether the adoption of one world inevitably means the disappearance of another. For starters, Maasai culture has eroded substantially already. In Kenya, the famed Maasai warriors (ilmoran) are forbidden from carrying their spears in towns or wearing their traditional long braids caked with fat and ochre. Many have bowed down to a government that has long encouraged them to replace their robes with trousers, go to school, and take up farming — long taboo in a society centred upon pastoralism. Killing a lion, once a critical rite of passage for all young ilmoran, is now largely a relic, except in the most remote areas. Emanyatta, elaborate warrior camps of 49 cow-dung huts where ilmoran would once spend years in group isolation, are now all but history.

Perhaps nothing has caused these traditions to wither more than the arrival of formal education, which sits at the fulcrum of the current Maasai dilemma. Long spurned by Maasai elders, as girls were expected to marry early and boys to herd their father's cattle, schooling is now mandatory and increasingly en vogue, even in the most traditional parts of Maasailand. More and more, Maasai elders echo the views of Kayongo Kipepete Letaiyok, a father of ten from Elerai village, northeast of Arusha.

"I want all my children to go to school, even university," he says. "This will bring us a better life. For our people to survive, we need to be educated."

Ironically, Gabriel — who admits he would never have succeeded without formal schooling — sees things differently. "Education," he says, "is the poison of Maasai culture. If you study, you don't want to live the rest of your life in the village. You go to the city and adapt."

For better or worse, this is the path that increasing numbers of young Maasai will continue to take — the consensus gradually emerging that cultural adaptation is critical for ethnic survival.

"We do not have to accept disgrace and the disappearance of our race," wrote Maasai author Tepilit Ole Saitoti almost 30 years ago. "We must adapt to new situations in order to survive. Our spear points are now like the teeth of infants, but we must survive. We must not follow the way of those races of men who have vanished from the surface of the Earth. All we need is determination, and jointly with all other African peoples we will not only survive but multiply and prosper."

Gabriel, however, bottle of Coke in hand, is more cynical. "I love my culture," he says. "But it's just running away."