Changing times pose a dilemma for Maasai morans

Resplendent in red shukas and shiny ornaments, Danson ole Yenko is a proud man.

At the relatively young age of 23, he is already the paramount leader of his age set. His area of jurisdiction straddles several counties — from the border of Narok and Nakuru to the north, the border with Bomet to the west, and the plateau where Kenya touches Tanzania to the south.

Among his duties are presiding over certain ceremonies in the region and settling disputes among the 700 fellow young Maasai men who will this Easter graduate from boyhood to manhood at Olkeri, 20 kilometres outside Narok town.

Mr Yenko has another feather to his cap. Despite keeping to the age-old Maasai tradition, he has not missed a step with the demands of modernity, having graduated from Narok High School in 2009 with a mean grade of B-.

“I will join the University of Nairobi in September, where I will pursue a Bachelor of Commerce degree,” he told Saturday Nation early this week in his office, a low mud hut in the necklace-shaped manyatta that has been the morans’ home for the last seven months.

“I was appointed in 2008 while in Form Three, and I felt honoured as it is a life-long position. For this reason, I suspended my education in order to organise the current training, which will culminate in a graduation next month,” says Mr Yenko.

Unlike his ancestors, however, Mr Yenko has not, and will most likely not kill a lion by the time he and his colleagues graduate in a ceremony that will be attended by the who-is-who in Maasailand.

Killing a lion used to be a highly celebrated undertaking of courage, which was crowned by the hero wearing the mane back to the manyatta to the reception of song and dance.

Not any more. Strict wildlife laws, as well as awareness in the community, have reduced this ritual to isolated cases of human-wildlife conflict.

Further afield, on the edges of Naimina Enkiyio forest overlooking Loliondo Hills, a Saturday Nation team encountered another unlikely sight — a moran in full regalia diligently tilling the land, an activity virtually unheard off in the area a mere 20 years ago.

In years gone by, Mr Koileken Kitikoi would have been herding his father’s cattle and then return to feast on roasted meat and highly potent soup known as motori, made of milk and blood.

But with the wind of change sweeping across this land, he has turned to farming and schooling (he is a Form Three student at Loita High School) even as he clings on to the age-old culture that has been practised by his ancestors since they descended the Kerio Valley (a Maasai phrase that means since the beginning of time.)

Unlike Mr Yenko and Mr Kitikoi, many other young men drop out of school to undergo moranism, a situation that has left them in a time warp and disadvantaged them in the competitive modern world.

Unable to fit into society, they troop to cities where they while away the nights in the cold, working as guards.

“Incidentally, some of them have left many heads of cattle at home, but because of ignorance and the mindset of employment, they subject themselves to demeaning labour,” says Mr Sironka ole Masharen, a cultural researcher and author of the Maasai Pioneers.

The institution of moranism has gone through turbulent times in recent years.

In the 1990s, at the instigation of the government, and with the support of elders, many morans were forcefully shaved and some taken back to school.

Morans who killed lions were arrested and jailed.

Yet the culture has stubbornly refused to die. It is still widely practised in remote areas, where the cultural values of the Maasai are still held dear.

This has prompted local leaders to call for a balance between cultural and development activities to prevent the Maasai from lagging behind the rest of the country.

“In 1944, as mordernism became a reality with the entrenchment of colonialism, representatives of the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania met at Monduli, near Arusha, to explore ways of reducing the length of stay in the manyatta.

Today, 68 years later, no official meeting has been held to review this culture,” says Mr Andrew ole Sunkuli, the chairman of the Mara Education Trust.

He called for the establishment of a cultural council which would harmonise moranism with school term dates as well as introduce cultural education.

“The Israeli, Chinese and Japanese have done it and prospered and we in Kenya can do it, too,” he said and added that moranism was a key heritage which had helped market Kenya abroad.

While acknowledging that moranism, female circumcision and early marriages have negatively affected education, Mr Sunkuli said a proper balance between the two would be more beneficial.

“We don’t have to choose between the spear and the pen. It is possible to carry the two with proper planning and harmonisation to ensure they don’t interfere with school term dates,” said Mr Sunkuli, echoing novelist Henry ole Kulet’s 1971 novel, Is it Possible? 

Taleng’o ole Kiptunen, a community elder, agrees.

He says the moranism culture should be adopted to suit the present-day life while maintaining the original goal of instilling discipline, courage and perseverance.

“They should be taken through an alternative rite of passage as they do with girls in places like Pokot,” says Mr Kiptunen, adding that the community and the country would be the poorer if moranism was eradicated.

According to Mr Kulet, Maasai culture has helped them coexist with flora and the fauna for centuries, helping conserve the country’s environmental heritage.

“For example, there is a forest near Mau known as Medung’i, which means ‘never cut.’ It was believed that if you cut a tree in the area, blood, and not sap, would ooze from it,” he told Saturday Nation.

“You would also hear wails of mourning as if in real death. It is this cultural belief that has kept the natural environment largely intact in Maasailand,” said Mr Kulet.

He pointed out that moranism, which prohibits the eating of game meat, has helped to conserve the Maasai Mara, Amboseli and Serengeti national parks and reserves.

“Given the significant contribution of tourism to the GDP of Kenya and Tanzania, we have the Maasai culture to thank,” he said.

But there are those who fault the use of the Maasai for tourism. In a strongly-worded article for the travel journal Safarimate, the late humourist  Wahome Mutahi attacked the commoditisation of communities as dehumanising.

“Merchandise is put in shops for display and that is why there are Maasai carvings in curio shops. Real Maasai are merchandise and that is why they are displayed at the entrances of some hotels as an attraction,” said Mr Mutahi in the article ‘The Maasai, Tourism and the Kenyan Culture.’

“Culture, as a fusion of a people’s way of life, is not a commodity. It is an expression of a totality, and when taken otherwise, it is hard to tell the difference between them and wildlife.

“The Maasai has the same camera value as a buffalo since their lives begin when the camera begins to whine and ends when it is shut down,” he wrote.

Moranism has also lately come under sharp criticism with questions emerging as to whether some criminal gangs have hijacked the once celebrated culture.

Last November, some Maasai morans stormed a girls’ school in Narok South district and attempted to abduct the girls.

It took two hours for elders, teachers and the local chief to calm down the amorous young men, who were complaining that life had become difficult without wives.

They reluctantly trooped back to their manyatta, but not before they added the rider that they would return if they were not given girls to marry.

This incident, which occurred as the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations got underway, shocked the country and brought to the fore the clash between modernity and culture in a community that has kept its customs largely intact over the years.

In recent months, the media have also carried reports of young men beating up residents of Ewaso Nyiro and Narok towns as well as the nearby trading centres.

“They also disrupted repair works on the 56-kilometre Narok-Maasai Mara road which has been a problem for a long time,” said Narok South DC Chimwaga Mongo in an earlier interview with Saturday Nation.

He said because elders could no longer restrain the young men in their camps, the government would treat the matter as ordinary crime and take legal action.

But local leaders have defended moranism saying these were isolated incidents.

“That is not really true moranism. The difference between moranism of old and today’s is that elders used to have a strong control and even the warriors had a code of conduct which was adhered to strictly. But today’s morans have become a law unto themselves,” lamented Mr Kulet.

He explained that the morans’ role was to defend the community from external attacks and from marauding animals. They never turned on the community.

Outgoing Narok South District Education Officer Nicolas Obiri asked the Provincial Administration to assist in ending the practice of children being forced out of schools by their parents either to be married off or join moranism. There have also been concerns from some quarters that moranism was helping spread HIV.

Critics claim the young men are given a leeway to engage in sexual orgies.

But Mr Saino ole Ng’oshosh, a traditional chief, says the claims were unfounded.

“There are rules governing the conduct of the young men. The claims that our young men can engage in careless sex is wrong,” he said.

He instead said the culture helps solve the problem of early marriages as men are kept in manyattas for long periods as they are inculcated with life skills.

The Maasai also have a reputation for dispensing effective herbal remedies to treat physical ailments, and ritual treatments to absolve social and moral transgressions.

While this was traditionally reserved for the Laiboni, ritual and spiritual leaders whose authority is based on their mystical as well as medicinal powers, morans can today be found peddling their knowledge and herbs in major towns, opening the way for imposters.

Moranism, female circumcision and early marriages have hurt education in Narok North and South districts, which got its first A grade in KCSE only last year.

The region has one of the highest dropout rates in the country with Ololturot Primary School, which was established in 1988, registering its first Kenya Certificate of Primary Education candidates this year.

There were only four candidates.

Even with free primary school education since January 2003, only 48 per cent of Maasai girls enroll, and only five per cent of them will go on to secondary school.

Mr Yenko thinks that he and his colleagues who have gone to school hold the key to this dire situation.

“You see the modern moran is an educated man. Indeed they (the elders) choose only the very learned as leaders. Only we can promote education among our people,” he says.