MASAI TRIABLE

Masai, East African nomadic people speaking Maa, an Eastern Nilotic language. The Masai (or Maasai) are nomadic to provide grazing and water for their cattle. Cattle are the center of Masai life, providing their food (milk, blood, and meat), their materials (skin for clothes and dung to seal their houses), and their only recognized form of wealth. Each family marks its cattle with a unique brand and ear slits to identify them. The Masai live in small clusters of huts (called kraals or bomas) made of sticks sealed together with cow dung; these kraals also include enclosures for the cattle. Masai males are rigidly separated into five age groups: child, junior warrior, senior warrior, junior elder, and senior elder. Both boys and girls undergo circumcision ceremonies, which initiate them into adulthood. Marriages are often arranged, and polygamy is practiced. The Masai believe in a supreme god, Engai, who blesses them with children and cattle. Prior to European colonization of Africa, the Masai herded their cattle freely across the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. They first encountered Europeans in the 1840s. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Masai experienced severe droughts, famine, and disease, including smallpox, which was probably due to European contact. The Masai cattle herds were decimated by rinderpest, a highly infectious febrile disease. The weakened Masai fought against the encroachment of the Europeans but were defeated. The Europeans wanted farmland, and acquired large portions of Masai land in the treaties of 1904, 1911, and 1912, which confined the nomadic Masai to reserves and gave the Europeans fertile land. Today the Masai, who number approximately 250,000, live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. Despite government efforts to settle them, most are still nomadic.