Maasai

Hi, my name is Bakari Hurundi, a 10 years-old Maasai boy from Tanzania. Welcome to Black Africa, a land of savannahs and baobabs...

Maasais live between the towns of Narok and Namanga, between Kenya and Tanzania. We used to be warriors, but nowadays we work the land and have become nomads: bovine, sheep and goat stockbreeders.

Even though we have adopted Christian beliefs, most of us keep our traditional religion, and our spiritual leader is also the chief of bomes, also known as settlements. Cows are sacred, as much as the land and all the elements that surround our herds, because out of the herds we get most of the things we need to survive: milk, blood and meat are part of our diet; leather and leather-skin for our clothes.
We speak an ethnic language that comes from the subgroup Nilotic, although we use Swahili as the common language.

Our cultural life is full of celebrations that begin with the birth. Due to, probably, our culture's warrior condition, our society is rather masculine. We organise in groups of certain age that begin in the early childhood, then go to the minor warrior (Moran), then the greater warrior, afterwards the minor adult and finally the greater adult. Every generation of men becomes a group that goes through every grade of age. After every circumcision, boys have to go through initiation rituals to become warriors. In the old times, we had to hunt a lion. Luckily, nowadays things have changed...