Maasai tribe

The Maasai are a Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. They are among the best known of African ethnic groups, due to their distinctive customs and dress and residence near the many game parks of East Africa. They speak Maa, a member of the Nilo-Saharan language family that is related to Dinka and Nuer, and are also educated in the official languages of Kenya and Tanzania: Swahili and English. The Maasai population has been reported as numbering 453,000 in Kenya in the 2009 census, compared to 377,000 in 1989 and 400,000 in 2000.
The Tanzanian and Kenyan governments have instituted programs to encourage the Maasai to abandon their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle, but the people have continued their age-old customs. Recently, Oxfam has claimed that the lifestyle of the Maasai should be embraced as a response to climate change because of their ability to farm in deserts and scrublands. Many Maasai tribes throughout Tanzania and Kenya welcome visits to their village to experience their culture, traditions, and lifestyle.

How do they live?

For the Maasai, cattle are what make the good life, and milk and meat are the best foods. Their old ideal was to live by their cattle alone – other foods they could get by exchange – but today they also need to grow crops.

They move their herds from one place to another, so that the grass has a chance to grow again; traditionally, this is made possible by a communal land tenure system in which everyone in an area shares access to water and pasture.
Nowadays Maasai have increasingly been forced to settle, and many take jobs in towns. Maasai society is organised into male age-groups whose members together pass through initiations to become warriors, and then elders.
They have no chiefs, although each section has a Laibon, or spiritual leader, at its head. Maasai worship one god who dwells in all things, but may manifest himself as either kindly or destructive. Many Maasai today, however, belong to various Christian churches.

What problems do they face?

One of the most immediate threats to the Maasai comes from game hunters in the Loliondo region of northern Tanzania. Here, Maasai villages have been burnt to the ground by the authorities, and thousands have brutally evicted to provide a company, Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd (OBC), with more access to land for game hunting.

The Loliondo Maasai are now homeless, and without access to water and grazing land their cattle are dying.
Most of what used to be Maasai land has already been taken over, for private farms and ranches, for government projects, wildlife parks or private hunting concessions. Mostly they retain only the driest and least fertile areas.
The stress this causes to their herds has often been aggravated by attempts made by governments to ‘develop’ the Maasai. These are based on the idea that they keep too much cattle for the land.
However, they are in fact very efficient livestock producers and rarely have more animals than they need or the land can carry. These ‘development’ efforts try to change their system of shared access to land.
While this has suited outsiders and some entrepreneurial Maasai who have been able to acquire land for themselves or sell it off, it has often denuded the soil and brought poverty to the majority of Maasai, who are left with too little and only the worst land.
The most immediate threat to the Maasai is against those from Loliondo, an area in northern Tanzania. Here, Maasai villages have been burnt to the ground, and thousands have been evicted, allegedly to provide a safari hunting company, Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd (OBC), with easier access to hunting land.