1206+kg+Ancient+Civ+Report

Don’t you hate being treated like a child? Aren’t you excited to celebrate each new birthday, knowing that you’re becoming more mature? Every year in America, millions of parents host parties for their children to celebrate their maturity: Sweet 16’s, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, birthdays, quinceaneras, and confirmations. Getting a drivers license and graduating high school are two other examples of rites of passage, or event marking an important growth stage in life. In a similar way, the Massai of Africa prove that they are mature enough by having special initiation ceremonies.

According to archaeologists, the ancestors of the Maasai lived near the Nile as late as the 1400s, and only then began moving to their present homeland. Southern Kenya and northern Tanzania are preserved property where most of the Maasai live. Most Maasai continue to live without electronics, food markets, and electricity, choosing to live a traditional lifestyle. And for them, an important part of this tradition is the boys’ coming of age, the girls’ coming of age, and food and survival.

The Maasai boys learned to become warriors by traditional means. At about age 13, the boys have a initiation ceremony called the emorata, later the junior warriors leave their village home with their mothers and girlfriends to join the older warriors in a manyatta. Both the young women and the young men get piercings in their earlobes to show beauty. For the next ten to fifteen years after the ceremony, the warriors live in the manyatta and learn with other warriors. Warriors spend long hours braiding their long hair and decorating themselves with beaded jewelry. The Warriors enjoy living carefree lives in the manyatta and enjoy the eating food, playing games, and practicing their herding s kills. Although traditional Maasai men had to kill a lion to prove they were warriors, modern law prohibits killing lions in Kenya and Tanzania, so the warriors cannot prove they are a true warrior.

Maasai girls spend lots of time at home and they have an easy life unlike the warriors. The girls have it easy because they have most of their work done at home. The Maasai mother has to participate in every major event and phase of her son’s life. After the initiation ceremony, women soon wear a special head dress that shows they aren’t ready to marry yet. Girls spend a lot of their days in the manyatta, they mostly play with the warriors or make beaded jewelry for them. They become very attached to the warriors but they never marry them. A Maasai girl is not allowed to marry before she is initiated. The Maasai girls are only allowed to marry warrior elders, in which their parents pick the elder they marry.

The last thing that is very important to the Maasai group is food and the way they survive. When the cow is milked, the Maasai farmer collects some of a bull’s or cow’s blood (which contains lots of protein and nutrition) to be mixed with milk, but they don’t kill the cow. The Maasai only eat their cattle on very special occasions, but it is very rare for the Maasai to eat their cattle. They farmed, too, because the cattle can be hard to raise. They grew rice, beans, and ugali, (corn like plant). Unlike today, the Maasai culture doesn’t go and get their food from a supermarket, they are like today’s farmers except they grow different crops and they have a different way to grow it.

The modern Massai continue to follow some of the ancient culture. They continue living without electricity, raising cattle the same way, farming the same way, and celebrating the same way. During the 1900s life of the Maasai changed a lot, many people left their villages to join universities, or take jobs in the city. In doing this, they became teachers, game wardens, businessmen, and politicians. With every generation that comes, more and more Massai people move to the cities for these things. The Massai can teach us not to be so spoiled after all. Today, we get everything we want if we ask for it, and teenagers today can’t live without their phones or internet. They should experience what the teenage Massai go through, it will change many American lives.

Glossary

archaeologists- the study of the ancient and recent human pas t

emorata- a Massai men's initiation ceremony

initiation ceremony- a rite of passage marking an entrance

Manyatta- a separate settlement for warriors outside their home village

Sources

"Culture of the Masai." Culture of the Masai. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2014.

McQuail, Lisa. The Masai of Africa. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2002. Print.

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. Maasai. New York: Rosen Pub. Group, 1994. Print.