This elegant lady is one of the Samburu tribe, close cousins of the Maasai. We visited this tribe in Kenya just after crossing the equator (the first time I've done that on foot). The Samburu and Maasai are a fascinating people, bursting with apparent contradictions as they search for their unique place in modern Kenya and Tanzania. A proud tribe with a long history, they continue to mostly live quite simple lives. They inhabit basic, but very practical villages, relying on acacia thorns and dogs to keep away lions and leopards at night. They graze cattle (and goats), their primary measure of wealth, and until recently lived as semi nomads, subsisting primarily on milk and blood bled from their precious cattle. They retain a strong sense of community, and what wealth they have appears to be largely shared amongst the village, rather than individually owned. They are polygamous, and largely follow arranged marriages with dowries. However, their lives are changing. They are abandoning their nomadic lifestyle, and settling in one location, so that their children can be schooled in math, English and Swahili, as well as their tribal language. Some now go onto higher education, others work in the tourist or conservation industries. A Maasai chief's son we met in Tanzania was studying to be a doctor, although he still preferred living in a dung roofed hut with no electricity or water, as opposed to his student dorm. Their traditional, and somewhat controversial rites of passage, that involved both ritual circumcision, and for the boys temporary exile into the bush and hand to hand, to the death combat with a lion have been modified by conservation legislation. No longer allowed to kill lions or other wild animals, they instead hold a contest to see who can jump highest. Compared to killing a lion with their bare hands, this struck me as a little anticlimactic, although I suspect the circumcision without anaesthetic, and 'exile' into the bush would still be somewhat challenging for your average Ivy League graduate, and still separates the Maasai from urban dwellers. Likewise, abandoning their nomadic lifestyle has left them relying increasingly on tourism to subsidize their lifestyle, and the education of their children. It has also led them to embrace a more varied diet. It's still a puzzle to me how they avoided scurvy and other nutrition deficient disease living only on blood and milk, but they seem to have done well on it, perhaps supplemented by plants and herbs? They are extremely tall, fit, and able to walk great distances at surprising speed. Obesity is not a problem, yet (I only saw 1 overweight Maasai in all of our travels through Kenya and Tanzania). Neither, according our young doctor in training is heart disease, and cholesterol levels are apparently a fraction of those found in western populations. I fear the next generation may face these problems as they adopt more western diets, but meanwhile, maybe we should consider adopting a fresh blood and milk diet? Forget the South Beach diet, Black Pudding and a milk shake anyone?
