During my research safari, I had the opportunity to be introduced to the Maasai ethnic group. There were several Maasai villages located in the corridor between the Amboseli Park and the Mount Kilimanjaro, where I was studying elephant movements. In fact, it is the human – elephant conflicts which is a significant part of the study.
As additional villages are created, it becomes increasingly difficult for the elephants to make their trip to and from the Park and Mountain without intercepting a farm field or people. Occasionally elephants kill people, and occasionally the Maasai spear an elephant.
The Maasai are used to dealing with relatively wealthy tourists who frequent nearby luxurious hotels. It is not possible to take pictures freely. They will demand payment or try to confiscate the camera. I paid about $100 to them for the tour of their village and the right to take unlimited pictures for the day. My guide was named Kisioki.
The Maasai have their own language called ‘Ma’. Here are some common Ma phrases (spelled phonetically)
- soapa epa = hello
- ashe olana = thank you
- ole sari = good bye
An average Maasai village is a circular arrangement of homes made of cow dung. (See photos here.) The men build a fence made of cut bushes with spines on them to help keep out the lions and hyenas. The women then build about 20 houses. One house takes a group of women about 1 week to make. About 150 people live in a village. Within the circle of homes, there are smaller enclosures for goats. The Maasai are nomads making a living by herding cows & goats. Each night, they herd the cows and goats into the center of the village in order to protect them from lions and hyenas. Warriors are on guard throughout the night no only to protect the animals from the predators, but also to protect them from groups of neighboring village warriors.
It is customary for warriors from one village to raid another village to steal their animals. Spears and bows & arrows are used as weapons. The warriors can come to harm. But if anyone uses a gun, it is seen as clearly going beyond the intention of theft, with the intention of killing someone. At that point, the Maasai ask the Kenyan police to come in and apprehend the culprit. Stolen animals are used to eat, to trade for other goods, and to buy wives. In this way, it is possible for the original village to own the cows to have their cows returned.
One wife costs about 15 cows. There is no legal limit to the number of wives that a man can have. Only his wealth is the limiting factor. The medicine man in fact has a special mixture to help the man have the fortitude to ‘satisfy’ many wives. Other remedies include bone and muscle aches, feminine problems, childbirth, and elephant & lion attacks. The medicine man did say that for the attacks, the subject would also be brought to the regional hospital, with varying degrees of success.
Because the Maasai are nomads, they periodically demolish their village and move to another location. After they demolish a village, one would not know a village existed in that location. That is their intention, because they want the savannah to recover fully and again offer grazing ground for their cattle and goats.
I also visited the local school, which was located centrally between many of the villages. It has 210 students between the ages of 8 – 15. Not all children continue with school after that, but Kenya does provide free education beyond 15 years of age. There are 3 terms in a school year. In general, there is 1 book for every 2 students. One half of the families believe in the value of education, the rest do not. Therefore children often drop out of school to earn money for family, sometimes dancing at hotels for the tourists. The principal referred to this as ‘child labor’.
Historically, girls are married off around the age of 13. Seeing this is as a problem, a European group has made money available to send all girls age 13 and over to a boarding school with the intention of allowing them to stay in school and not get married so early. I think that the social impacts of this aid would be an interesting study and discussion.
I asked the principal what his biggest problem is. Without hesitating, he said that the biggest problem was the elephants and lions that regularly keep the students & teachers from attending school. The animals routinely walk near and in the school yard. The principal thought that the answer to this problem would be an electric fence around the school. However, the chief wildlife ecologist on the project disagreed. He said that elephants will routinely overwhelm a fence by stepping on the fence posts to walk over the fence. It becomes a continuing war of minds then to maintain some sort of barrier. The elephants continue to learn and overwhelm a barrier, and the humans continually innovate to create another form of barrier.
The ecologist mentioned that as real as the threat from the elephants and lions is, that wild animals generally distinguish young from adult humans. Furthermore, whereas a lion or an elephant will attack an adult human, they will generally NOT attack children.
So what is the best response to the problem of the increasing human / elephant interactions? The NGO that I was supporting wants to document the elephant movements by gathering data over a year or 2, then request funding from the European Union to help the Maasai move their villages north and out of the elephant movement corridor. There are very dedicated Kenyans working on this project, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to share their work with them.