Kenya's Masai people have adapted their semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle to suit their arid, fragile landscape, but the effects of the changing world on their cattle threatens their economy as well as their culture, writes FINTAN O'TOOLEin Enkaroni, Kenya
KOOYIAN NKARO is around 78, but the devilment in her eyes is that of a 12-year-old. She is standing in her compound – two wooden huts and a small pen for the animals – in Enkaroni, a small settlement in Masai country, south-west of Nairobi. She has a memory from her own parents of that city before it was one of Africa’s major capitals. On the way down here, we had regularly passed young Masai men with their herds of bony cattle, walking along the road to the city. When I asked her why all the men from around here were going to Nairobi, she replied, with a twinkle in her eyes but a tone of defiance in her voice: “Because it’s ours.”
All the open rangelands from the Serengeti up into southern Kenya used to be Masai land. Nairobi was “the place of cool waters”; high, well-watered ground where the cattle could be fattened. Perhaps, at some level, the young men remember this too, and it is this that is drawing them towards the streets and office blocks, as if the grass that is gone from the range might somehow still be growing in the place of the cool waters. Kooyian has an explanation for what is happening to the world around her, where the rains have become shy and capricious. The Masai used to be able to predict them – the short rains in April; the dry spell until September; then the long rains in the African spring; then another dry spell. They managed their herds to make sure that no calves were born during the dry season.
They learned to read the landscape and to be alert to the movement of the clouds.
Now, all that they know is failing. Since the turn of the century, rain has been rare and unpredictable. There was an almost complete drought in 2005 and 2006, which killed half of the cattle, and since then the rains have not returned to normal. Kooyian has never known anything like it in her long life.
“The world has changed,” she says. “It could be some wrong that people are doing. When I was a girl, we got up early to pray and sing songs of praise. When there was an eclipse of the moon, we knew that it signalled a bad time, so everybody had to sacrifice. Then they brought in other practices we do not understand. Now we’re told to clap hands.”
She does a very funny, contemptuous little impression of people clapping hands, rolling their eyes and singing Christian hymns. (I was told later that clapping hands is a bad gesture in Masai tradition, like dusting off something nasty.) “Maybe we are praying to the wrong gods. We are lost.”
Whatever gods the Masai are praying to, much of what you see in the Kajiado district is almost Biblical. You see cattle skulls and ribcages on the dusty, grey-brown earth. (“This is the baddest drought,” says Brian Kereto in his mission-school English, standing over one stark sculpture of bare white bones. “I’ve lost 50 cows in the last few weeks.”)
You see men and boys walking stoically along dusty paths, wearing red, orange and purple shukas (the long, straight pieces of cloth that most Masai still wear), carrying spears or sticks and driving thin, humped zebu cattle for mile after mile in search of grass. You see men pumping stagnant water out of hand-dug wells, driven deeper and deeper into the parched earth, and lines of people passing water up the unstable sides to women with donkeys who will carry it, perhaps, for 20 miles home.
The Masai measure the depth of a well by the number of people in the line to pass water to the surface. Usually, there is a two-person well. At Mile 46, a huddle of tin shacks that gets its name because it is on the single-track railway line, the people are drawing water from a six-person well. They tell me that 10 people have been killed in recent times when wells that had been dug too deep collapsed in on them.
KAJIADO IS PARTof the large belt of arid and semi-arid land that covers most of Kenya, and supports about a quarter of the population. This is a fragile landscape, and the Masai's semi-nomadic lifestyle has evolved to cope with it. Pastoralism, which was once the way of life of most Irish people, is not just their economy. It is their culture.
Kenny Matampash, a 55-year-old Masai elder, runs a development organisation in Kajiado in partnership with Concern Worldwide. He is highly educated and sophisticated: when he was a boy he was too small to be a warrior, so he was taken off to school. (“I was picked out by the administration police. They used a shotgun to measure us. If you were taller than the gun, you had to go to school. I was exactly the height of the gun, so I went.”) Yet even he can’t imagine living without cattle. He has 30 cows, and in the days I spend with him, he is regularly on the mobile phone, checking with his brother to know whether they have found grass.
“Cows,” he explains, “are part and parcel of our being as Masai. A Masai without a cow is like nobody. You can be driving a Mercedes Benz and owning a big estate, but you have no cow – we don’t see you as anybody. If you have two cows or three cows – that is a man, he is connected with nature.” For the Masai, cattle are the main source of food, but they are also crucial for the sacrifices and rituals of traditional religion, and for marriage dowries. Social prestige is entirely defined by the number of cattle a man has.
BUT THE CATTLEare dying. In Enkaroni, there only the women, the children and the elderly, because the men have taken the cattle on desperate searches for grass, or have given up and gone to find casual labour in the city. A 38-year-old woman, Kimeriai Parsetian Nakuni, who has 12 children, tells me that two years ago, she and her husband had almost 40 cows. Now, she has only goats and sheep. Her husband and sons are in Nairobi, looking for work. She and her children live on the milk, and by selling off the male goats. But it is a buyer's market. In good times, a goat could be sold for 2,000 or 3,000 shillings (€20 or €30). Now, the going rate is 600 to 900 (€6 to €9). "It's like giving them away." Now, a cow hardly fetches what used to be the price of a goat. "You are not really selling a cow, you're selling a hide." Even when a Masai woman sells an animal and buys maize and peas, she cannot just feed herself and her children. "Food," Kimeriai told me, "is not a gift. It is an obligation. Food is sharing. You can't eat if I'm not eating. If I know that another family has not eaten, I cannot eat."
This strong social ethic has become ever more of a necessity. “Everybody is poor now,” she says. “All are equal. The worst part is this: in other bad years, you could go to a relative to seek help. Now, as you are going to them, you meet them on the way to seek help from you. The world is ending.”
For the Masai, the effects of climate change are exacerbated by the loss of their grazing land. As they see it, they made an agreement with the British in 1904 that the foreigners could use the land but that it would revert to the Masai when they left. Instead, after Kenyan independence, the land was granted to elite landowners. Remaining Masai areas have been subdivided into individual plots, which Masai, having no real concept of land ownership, often sell on. Kajiado, which is on the main road from Kenya into Northern Tanzania has been particularly vulnerable to the spread of water-hungry flower farms and chicken ranches.
Yet the Masai are not going gently, but are using their traditional adaptability in the struggle for survival. At Mile 46, Concern is helping to fund a project designed in consultation with the local people. The agency has pioneered in Kenya the simple and effective idea of transferring cash to people through mobile phone accounts, but at Mile 46, a system of vouchers (€2 per family member) is run through the tiny local shop: the women get to choose what goods they need. I ask 70-year-old Pusaren Narmat whether he minds that his wife has this power. He puts a brave face on it: “We don’t do that kind of work, and anyway, men can’t carry things.” The women listening to him roar with laughter and call out, “Tell the truth – men can’t be trusted.” This subtle shift of power means, perhaps, that the cattle are even more important to the men. They will not give up their cows while they have any hope.
ON THE ROADinto Nairobi, I talk to two young brothers, Oseur Simintei and Oseur Koipa, who have been walking their cattle towards the city for five days. They have no idea what they will find when they get there.
When I ask what will happen if there is no grass in the city, they shrug. “We’ll have to go somewhere else.”
In Nairobi, I find a group of Masai families living on the land beside the runway of Wilson airport. They came here from Kajiado 10 years ago, when there was a previous drought. They were living in galvanised huts with rubber tyres holding down their roofs. They tell me they had trouble with their cattle in the city. Some got killed by traffic. The city council fined them if the cattle soiled the pavements. Their life seemed bleak and displaced. The children show the obvious signs of eye infections and rickets.
But they are surviving. They sell milk to the city people, and cattle dung for fertilising urban gardens. The men get work as watchmen or slaughter men. The women raise chickens and make Masai bead crafts to sell. They have built their own church from galvanised sheets and the elders now call themselves pastors. Pastor Benjamin, the leader, tell me that the world has changed and that the Masai must change too. “It is hard for the Masai to be without cattle, but with the drought, we have to think about something else. Maybe if the children can go to school, they can think about a different life. Maybe they will be able to choose.”
‘It’s skewed and narrow to think we can protect the Masai way of life’
FOR THE Masai, climate change has brought to a head the epic choice that faces all indigenous cultures in the modern world: to conserve or to adapt, to hold on or to integrate. In a dingy roadhouse in Kajiado, over a plate of chicken and a bottle of beer, two Masai leaders debate.
Both Leina Mpoke, who is programme director with Concern, and Kenny Matampash (pictured right), are highly educated men, with fluent English and a sharp knowledge of the outside world. “Kenny and I,” says Leina, “we are in the frontline . . . People look at us and they see the future.” This, they agree, is a burden, not least because they have come to very different conclusions about what that future should be. In unscripted drama, they argue gently about the way ahead.
Leina:I strongly believe Masai can integrate, and press on to contribute to national development, to have a voice. And you cannot do that when you close yourself in and put a fence around yourself. The Masai-ness in me is not the Masai-ness that was in me as a child. I have transformed into a more useful person, not just to the Masai but to the rest of the country. I can contribute to a national debate. To me it's skewed and narrow to think we can protect the Masai way of life or thought and talk so emotionally about feelings of the past. We have to see the dynamism and contribute to that, picking the good things of our culture.
Kenny:It all depends on: what does a person want? What is enough? The cow is enough for us. You may say, why? You are educated, you have seen many things, you have seen the other world, and you still think a cow is enough. But that's the way it is. Why? Because to us, it is not just an animal, it is a connection. It is deep. It is an attachment between us and the cow and Mother Earth and nature itself.
Leina:I understand where Kenny is coming from: Masais are kept in the same category as wildlife. Even when tourists come to look at wildlife, without the Masai next to a giraffe or a Masai village near the lions, it's not complete. I refuse that kind of consumerism where the Masai is rated the same way as a beast. But the Masai man of the old time is not the same as today. The Masai warrior insisted on facing his enemy man-to-man and believed that even arrows were for cowards. And they got killed.
Kenny: At times, I look at what is happening in the western world, the pressure and the tension, and I wonder is the world gone mad. For us Masai, we may be seen to be very backward, but we have the happiness of the soul. We can talk, we can communicate. And we have something to tell the First World: the life you lead of consuming, consuming, with no end, is not happiness. Why should we adapt to that?
Monday:Nairobi's vast shanty towns
Fintan O’Toole was in Kenya with Concern Worldwide