masai tribe essays

masai tribe essays The Masai have always been different from other African tribes. Their bright red robes set them apart visually. With a spear in hand, they are calm and courageous regardless of the danger. The armed British troops who drove the Masai from their lands in the late 19th century had a great respect for the Masai. In common with the wildlife with which they co-exist, the Masai need a lot of land. Unlike many other tribes in Kenya, they live by herding cattle and goats. They believe Engai (their chief god) gave them all the cattle in the world. They referred to the neighboring tribes of farmers and hunter-gatherers as Ndorobo, meaning poor folk. This is because the Masai measured wealth by the number of cattle, so people without cattle, or those who eat the meat of wild animals are considered poor. The Masai dont have fixed ranches with permanent buildings. Instead they construct a boma (village) for a group of families. The boma is a circle of huts,one per family, enclosed within a circular fence of thorn bushes. the women of each household construct the hut from cattle dung and clay. Periodically, the group will abandon their boma and construct a new one in an area with better water and grazing. The Masai tribe are East African nomadic people speaking Maa, which is an Eastern Nilotic language. Like other tribes, they are a nation only in the sense that they speak one language, follow a common way of life, and observe the same customs and beliefs. They have a barely sufficient, yet fairly homogeneous traditions of immigration, beginning with an ancestor called Maasinda who made a gigantic ladder which enabled the forefathers of the tribe to climb up the long cliff from the Rudoph basin to the Uasin Gishu plateau north of Kitale. From there they deployed in six main sub-tribes over the central part of the Kenya highlands and southwards, down the line of the Rift Valley, into Tanganyika. The Masai went into a...