Who are the Masai?
The Masai are a very famous warrior tribe in Kenya and Tanzania whose lives center around herding cattle. The image most people have of the Masai warrior is one of a tall and lean man clutching a spear in one hand with his red cloth wrapped around his waist or over his shoulders. The Masai are also famous for piercing and stretching their earlobes and for wearing large metal hoops at the tops of their ears. Both males and females do this.

Diet:
With a staple diet of milk and blood, cattle provide the daily requirements for the Masai, who eat meat only on ceremonial occasions. In order to get the blood, men shoot an arrow in the jugular vein in the cow's neck. The blood spills into a gourd and is stopped with a wad of dung and mud applied to the arrow hole. The Masai believe the blood makes them very strong.

Cattle:
The Masai believe that when God created the earth, he didn't have time to keep cattle, so he asked the Masai to do his herding for him. They believe that all the cattle in the world belong to them (even all the cattle in Texas -- he told us!), even though some may have temporarily found themselves in the possession of others. Consequently, their wealth is measured by the number of cattle they have acquired. Thus, the Masai are always justified in raiding their non-Masai neighbors in order to "return" the cattle to the rightful owners.

Women:
Masai women and girls have a variety of chores besides building the dung hut. They are expected to milk the cows and fetch water, however far that may be (perhaps 36 miles in some cases). They must pick calabashes or gourds from vines and clean the insides of the gourds as well as decorate them with leather and beads. Milk, blood, water, honey, and cornmeal are stored inside these gourds. Women also spend much time doing bead work. They decorate animal hides, gourds, and make beaded jewelry including arm and leg bracelets and amulets.

The Village:
The Masai live in small settlements of eight to fifteen huts per boma (village). Their settlements are surrounded by a thorn bush fence as an added form of protection. The 2" long thorns of the thorn bush are as sharp as barbed wire. The men are responsible for tying branches together to form the fence.

The huts take seven months to build by the women of the village. They are built of branches, twigs, grass, and cow dung and urine formed into a plaster and applied to a branch frame. When the mixture dries in the sun, it's as strong as cement and doesn't smell.

The family sleeps on beds of woven branches cushioned with dry grasses and animal skins. Small animals are brought into the hut in the evening to help protect them from larger and more dangerous animals as well as the cold. The homemade tools we saw were made out of bone, stones, sticks, etc.


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