East Africa’s most iconic people, the Maasai are the real reason I’m doing this walk. Over the past two decades I have spent a lot of time with the Maasai. I’ve walked with them and their cattle across the savannahs, chatted with them in the towns and slept in their villages. And now I want to take it a stage further by spending a full month in their company walking with a trusted Maasai friend across the heart of Kenya’s Maasai lands, talking to as many Maasai as I can and staying in as many Maasai villages and farmsteads as possible.
Who Are the Maasai
A Nilotic people originally thought to come from the area that is today South Sudan, the Maasai, with their red robes and spear in hand, are for many the definitive symbol of Kenya. The Maasai homeland is a great swathe of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania that incorporates most of the more famous national parks (the Masai Mara and Amboseli in Kenya and the Serengeti and Ngorongoro in Tanzania). For this reason many tourists coming to East Africa, and whose time is mainly dedicated to this area, come away with the impression that the Maasai are one of the larger ethnic groups in Kenya. This is far from the truth. In Kenya they comprise only around 2% of the population, but politically and in the business world their influence is great. Another common misperception is that the Maasai have inhabited these savannahs and hills forever, but in fact they are thought to be a fairly recent arrival to East Africa migrating down from what is today South Sudan in the 17th Century.
Traditionally a semi-nomadic, pastoral people who lived by herding goats and cattle many Maasai now work in tourism, security and wildlife conservation. An increasing number even work in the agricultural sector – something that would traditionally have been unthinkable for a people who until just a few years ago (and in many cases still do) considered farming with utter disdain. Even with these changes many Maasai do still try to live as traditional lifestyle as is possible in 21st Century Africa.
Cattle remain integral to Maasai life. Succesful Maasai businessmen who spend the week in a suit and tie in Nairobi often return to the manyatta (farmsted) at the weekends to tend to their cattle. As is common with almost all cattle herding pastoralists in eastern Africa cattle means wealth. The more cows a man has the richer and more powerful he is. The Maasai are so proud of their cattle that they traditionally believe that their god, Engai, created first the Maasai, then all the cattle in the world which he gave to the Maasai and only then did he create all other humans. In the past cattle raiding from other tribes was common and the Maasai could justify it by saying that the cows were theres anyway as all the worlds cattle belonged to the Maasai. Today cattle rustling is much rarer (though for the, non-Maasai, tribes of northern Kenya cattle rustling remains very common). Not just were cows considered wealth but they were also once a main food source except that the Maasai never killed and ate a cow or goat, but instead lived on a diet of milk and blood.
Walking with the Maasai 