We almost didn't visit the Masai. I get shivers when I think of it.
The second day of our safari was mostly driving: a long day in the jeep going from Tarangire to the Serengeti, a trip which takes you via the top of the Ngorongoro Crater. The one highlight of the day was to be a stop at Olduvai Gorge, the site where the Leakey Expedition discovered the earliest human remains. My father-in-law is a biologist, and the rest of us are interested in science, so we were very excited by the idea of getting a good look at the Gorge. We toured the museum, which costs an outrageous $10 per person extra, but contains casts of the famous footprints preserved in volcanic ash which the Leakeys discovered about forty miles away, as well as early hominid tools, a timeline of human evolution, and an extensive exhibit on the lives of the Leakeys themselves. It was all very well done, and we were delighted with it -- until we learned that by touring the museum we had missed our chance to hike down into the gorge itself, which it's only possible to do before 3:00 PM. This made us grouchy and resentful, and we piled back into our jeep feeling that our guide, Yusuf, hadn't understood what we were after. So when we pulled up a few miles away at an impenetrable-looking fence made out of thorn bushes, where Yusuf told us that we should pay another $10 each to a wizened old man in a red shawl to tour a Masai boma, we felt that we were being taken for a ride and almost didn't go in--it was a funny combination of reluctances, because we didn't want to be exploited but also felt that we were probably exploiting the Masai.
But I've studied the Masai, and my mother-in-law isn't one to miss a chance to see a new culture, so four of us decided to take the tour. We paid our money to the ancient headman, which he stowed somewhere under his red robes; he was in his seventies, entirely bald, and wore several bead bracelets along with an enormous digital watch. He brought us into the boma, explaining what we were looking at in Swahili, which Yusuf translated.
The boma consisted of two large circular thorn fences (that's eight-foot piles of thorn bush made into a fence), one within the other. The larger one was the perimeter of the village; the inner one was to contain the village cattle, although since we were there during the day all the cattle were out grazing, tended by the young boys. Between the two fences were the houses: oval structures about six feet tall, and made out of sticks plastered with a mixture of earth, ashes, and cow dung. The chief invited us into his: it was separated into four rooms with screens of woven sticks. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, and an entryway -- all in a space about six feet across. We sat in a circle around the fireplace, each in a different room but all within arm's reach of each other.
We asked the chief about what changes he'd seen during his lifetime. His answer: he learned about cloth for the first time when he went to school; before that the Masai wore skins. Salt, sugar, and tea were also innovations. We noticed that there were two plastic washing tubs and four metal bowls in the house; other than that and the plastic beads the Masai had woven into necklaces, there was nothing to tell us we hadn't slid back six thousand years. (Well, nothing but the fact that the Masai only came to Tanzania about 200 years ago.)
When we entered the boma, the villagers all gathered to sing to us. (They'd clearly been doing this routine for a while.) The women -- about fifteen of them, with blue capes over their red cloth wrapped around them as dresses, and wearing enormous, elaborate padlock-shaped bead earrings and necklaces which stood off their necks like the rings of Saturn -- formed one group, singing a ululating music and dancing a bobbing, ducking sort of dance, which they invited first me and then my mother-in-law to join. Meanwhile, the young men -- only about five of them were around, tall, draped in one piece of red cloth, with elaborate matted hairdos and carefully chosen bead jewelry -- formed a smaller circle and began their music and dancing, a deeper bass singing punctuated by occasional sudden, very tall solo leaps straight into the air and a loud thump on landing.
Who knows how long we stayed looking. Who knows what year it was when we were there. Who knows if it will ever change. It was tremendously moving; OK, it was put on for the tourists, but it felt amazingly authentic. It was exactly the dances as they’re described by the early European colonists; the dogs asleep in the small shadows were the same dogs; the flies (which were everywhere, on everyone’s faces) were the same flies, the smell of earth and wood smoke and age was the smell that has always been there.
The final piece of the tour was the village school, a thatched hut with nothing to seal the walls – just sticks holding up a roof, filled with wooden plank benches, with one ripply blackboard on a wall. We spoke with the teacher, who told us (via Yusuf) that he taught preschool, teaching the kids the alphabet and some simple phrases in English and Swahili (their native language is Masai). Although it was a Sunday, some kids were rounded up to perform for us: they shouted a welcome in English and sang the alphabet song, then craned their necks curiously to watch us as we asked questions: how long do they spend at this school? (Ages 5-7.) How long do they go to the next school? (ages 8-9, usually; it costs money after that.) What do they do for books? (The children are issued or buy books; they have them at home now.) Would you like these pens, and hey, we have some simple books in Swahili we bought to teach ourselves with, would you like those too? (Yes, please, thank you.) It was terrifying to think of how impossible it would be for one of these children to get a decent education, but on the other hand there was an exhilarating sense that here was a traditional tribe succeeding preserving its way of life. Goodness knows what the individuals would prefer; they didn’t tell us and we couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask.