Maasai

The Maasai are an indigenous African ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. They are well known due to their distinctive customs, red and purple dress and residence near the many game parks of East Africa. This is the tribe who live on the Ngorongoro crater rim.
 
Cattle are central to Maasai economy. They are rarely killed, but are accumulated as a sign of wealth and traded or sold to settle debts. Young men are responsible for tending to the herds and often live in small camps, moving frequently in constant search for water and good grazing lands.
 
The Maasai have very elaborate "coming of age" traditions. Boys are circumcised in their early teens in a ceremony attended by the entire village. Any boy who flinches during this procedure brands himself as a coward and disgraces his family. Once circumcised, the young man becomes a member of the warrior class - a moran.  He must live apart from the village with the other warriors until his late teens or early twenties, when he is chosen to become a junior elder, earning the right to marry and return to live in the village.
 
Maasai community politics are embedded in age-grade systems which separate young men and prepubescent girls from the elder men and their wives and children. When a young woman reaches puberty she is usually married immediately to an older man. Until this time, however, she may live and have sex with the youthful warriors. Often women maintain close ties, both social and sexual, with their former boyfriends, even after they are married. In order for men to marry they must first acquire wealth, a process that takes time. Women, on the other hand, are married at the onset of puberty to prevent children being born out of wedlock. All children, whether legitimate are not, are recognized as the property of the woman's husband and his family. The man may have several huts each housing a different wife.
 
For centuries the Maasai have hunted the lions, both as a test of manhood and to protect their cattle. The lions have learned to recognize the red robes and spears and instinctively keep their distance. It is quite common to see the Maasai and their cattle walking amongst the wild animals on the crater floor.

    Maasai Village    	    Maasai warriors    	    Maasai warriors    
    Maasai women    	    Traditional jumping dance    	    Maasai must jump high    
    Joining the villagers    	    Haji, our tour guide    	    Maasai hut    
    Shoes made from old tyres    	    One hut per wife    	    Maasai women and huts    
    Maasai are cattle farmers    	    Inside the school    	    school children    
    children at play    	    Making a fire with sticks    	    making a fire from dung