Maasai Mara

 Maasai Mara

Myth

The Maasai creation tale begins when God gave his three sons three sticks as gifts. The third son, ancestor of the Maasai, was God's favourite because he gave him a long herder's stick and a rope by which cattle slid down to earth from heaven.

Settlements

The Maasai Mara are an ethnic tribe group in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.The houses are either circular or loaf-shaped, and are made by women. Their villages are enveloped in a circular Enkang (fence) built by the men and this protects their cattle at night from wild animals.

Language and Religion

The Maasai people are monotheistic, and their God is named Engai or Enkai.Today,most of them are Christian and some of them are Muslims.The Maasai speak a language known as Maa.

Maasai Diet

The traditional Maasai diet consists of six basic foods: meat, blood, milk, fat, honey, and tree bark. They drink both fresh and curdled milk.More recently, the Maasai people have supplemented their diet with farm crops such as maize meal, rice, cabbage among other food crops.

Maasai Culture

Traditional Maasai people's lifestyle concentrates on their cattle which make up the primary source of food. Amongst the Maasai the measure of a man's wealth is in terms of children and cattle. 

Maasai Warriors

The men are trained to be warriors from childhood.They boys would hunt lions in groups to prove their manhood and worthiness to be called warriors. When there is an increased lion population ,the boys are expected to go lion hunting solo.They mainly used spears with stone splints and wooden branches.A skilled Maasai spear thrower could throw spears up to hundred metres.The famous warrior dance is how high you could jump.If you jump higher you are a better warrior.

Maasai Music and Dance

The Maasai didn’t have instruments.The Women sang and the Men performed an acrobatic dance called Adumu which included high jumping and other acrobatic showcases.

Problems that the Maasai face in Modern Day

In Tanzania, the Maasai are evicted from their land in the name of wildlife protection and tourism. According to UN experts, some 150,000 people are at risk of being displaced without their free, prior and informed consent.The Herders are facing problems like land encroachment, poverty, limited resources, loss of grazing lands, and cultural erosion.Currently the Maasai population is estimated to be 900 000.

Maasai Clothing

The Maasai identity is often defined by colourful beaded necklaces, an iron rod (as a weapon) and of course, red shuka cloth. While red is the most common colour, the Maasai also use blue, striped, and checkered cloth to wrap around their bodies.Clothing varies by gender, age and place. Young men wear black for several months after their circumcision. The cloth used to wrap around the body is called Shúkà in the Maa language.The Maasai women regularly weave and bead jewelry, which plays an essential part in the ornamentation of their body.

Hierarchy

Maasai society is organized into male age-groups whose members together pass through tests to become warriors, and then elders. They have no chiefs, although each section has a Laibon, or spiritual leader, at its head.

Medicine

The Maasai people tend to use the environment when making their medicines due to the high cost of Western treatments. These medicines are derived from trees, shrubs, stems, roots, etc. These can then be used in a multitude of ways including being boiled in soups and ingested to improve digestion and cleanse the blood.] Some of these remedies can also help in the treatment of diseases.