Enkaji conversations: getting to know the Maasai

Francisca's auntie carrying her young boy in a shuka.

Counting the pitstop to change the tire, the bus ride to Loliondo only took ten hours, which seemed to be a record in comparison to the other volunteers’ experiences. I hopped off the ancient school bus, decorated in gaudy blues and dust, at a lively little town called Wasso, just a mile short of my final destination: Bright English Medium School.

The Bright School was a donation-funded NGO that was created in 2009 as a solution to some of the challenges that the Maasai face in getting an education. In Tanzania, all children are legally required to attend school, however, public school, while free, requires students to wear uniforms, which cost money. This was a challenge for many Maasai families, owing largely to their barter society: cattle are currency, but cattle can’t buy things like uniforms. There were other problems, too. Public high school is taught in English, but public elementary schools are often taught in Swahili. Understandably, students without a strong foundation in English are at a disadvantage when they reach high school and may fall behind or drop out.

The Bright School sprang up to encourage attendance of Maasai children by catering to the local way of life, allowing families to pay for education with goods and services and providing all students with uniforms, free of charge for those who could not afford it. It also opened its doors to as many students as possible, offering full room and board to all students, even those who lived within walking distance. As a result, the dorms were over capacity, with three or four kids sharing a bed.

But when I arrived to help out with grading and school chores, the classrooms were empty. As it turned out, my timing had lined up perfectly with exam week for the 4th and 7th grades and break for all others. That meant that the school’s normally lively dorms were now fairly empty, with only about 80 kids remaining.

I wandered around the school, a lovely collection of colorful buildings, and examined the educational murals on its walls: a map of the world, the anatomy of a flower, a diagram of the heart. The property was nestled between two peaks that I couldn’t quite tell decide whether to call hills or mountains. Either way, they bowed at the middle into a wind-whipped valley full of houses with tall pointy roofs, painted pleasant colors and surrounded by fences that were planted, not built.

There was a fire pit to burn trash next to the dirt soccer field, though one night it became the site of a bonfire that students crowded around to try s’mores for the first time. On the perimeter that bordered corn fields, clothes bounced on a line and some clothes were stretched out on the field to dry in the sun. On one occasion, I watched a student shoo a zebra that had stepped on a pair of pants. On another occasion, zebras graced the courtyard, though the pleasant surprise was also a reminder that more nefarious animals could be visitors too. For that reason, students were not allowed to go outside at night. A Maasai watchman patrolled the grounds too, spear in hand. Just in case.

A clothesline just outside the courtyard and two visitors about to trample some clean clothes.

Though the school had progressed significantly in recent years, like the construction of a boy’s dormitory to accommodate the kids who had been sleeping in the classrooms, some buildings were still in need of work.  The youngest grade’s classroom lacked desks and chairs. It was a single-roomed structure made entirely of tin sheets that rocked and creaked like a cartoon haunted house in the wind that constantly swept through the valley. It served other purposes too; on one occasion, a young Maasai herder had unknowingly let his goats graze on the school’s corn. In response, the teachers had wrangled the herd of 50 goats into the tin classroom in confiscation until the boy’s father could pay for the damages. From the look of the Maasai men who had gathered to negotiate, the boy was in big trouble.

Other than the goat incident, the school was quiet while the students studied for the exams. In their free time, they filled in coloring books, made bracelets, played soccer, did chores. Throughout my week there, some of those children graciously invited us to visit their bomas. As a newcomer, I was thankful to be included and so happy to see them proudly show off where they were from.

First, we went to the home of Francisca, a student who lived on the other side of the valley. We left in the early afternoon, climbing through the trunk of a comically decrepit minivan; the windows, radio, and door handles were broken, though that was more of an inconvenience than a real problem. The faulty fuel gauge was a real problem.

Waiting for help when the old minivan ran out of gas.

Francisca’s boma was divided by an impassable rift that cut deep into the orange earth, an impressive reminder of the wet season’s power. But now the air was dry, and orange dusted all that did not move. Some of Francisca’s young relatives danced around the boma, striking poses and giggling when I pointed my camera at them, then immediately rushing over to zoom in on their faces on the tiny screen.

Francisca's young cousins playing around the boma.

Francisca (right), her mother Mary (center), and relatives.

When she was not in school, Francisca lived with her mother and other siblings in an enkaji like the one that I had visited in Ngorongoro. We chatted outside the enkaji that had partially succumbed to the heat, revealing a neatly woven stick frame underneath. Mary warmly gestured for me to come inside. I never got used to the transition, the disorienting switch from blinding brightness into the darkness of the enkaji.

Like Elesairu, all of Mary’s children slept in a bed with her. That was customary in Maasai society: the father gets his own bed, the mother and children sleep separately. But here, there was no father. Through spotty translations, I gleaned that Mary’s husband had passed away some time ago. I knelt by the pile of shukas on the cowhide sheet and examined the rest of the room that functioned as both kitchen and living area, pots and pans piled up against the walls. Mary lowered herself onto a makeshift stool, stretched her hands over the fire pit to show me what it was like to cook, and gave a smile.

Mary demonstrating what it is like to cook in her enkaji. When feeling ill, some Maasai mix the soot on the ceiling with hot water, which essentially acts as an activated charcoal elixir.

The inside of a traditional enkaji– the one-room structure serves as the dining, living, and sleeping area.

I wanted to ask her all the questions that were bubbling up, but she didn’t speak any English and I didn’t speak any Swahili, except for “Coco anenenepa tumbo,” which meant “Coco is getting fat.” I didn’t think that was relevant here.

I pressed my palms into the cowhide sheet, watching as Mary swatted at a rooster that was tiptoeing into the entrance. And I was gripped with these feelings that were hard to understand.

One of the other volunteers called it culture shock. I was reluctant to label it that way, to give weight to the idea that I was not unflappable when it came to travel and seeing new cultures. Because rationally, I was aware that different cultures existed. But seeing it in a photograph was far different than sitting on the floor of the house that Mary had crafted by hand from the environment around her, this house with stalactites of soot growing from the ceiling beams. It was a mild disorientation, an inability to determine where the Maasai fit into my worldview. Not that the Maasai needed me to fit them into my worldview, but the instinctual human urge to categorize new information into familiar boxes was not something that I could easily ignore.

This was a common conversation theme in the volunteer quarters, especially when the differences between cultures appeared subtly, blatantly, in every way in between. Like with the nightly dance parties in the girls’ dorm before bed– they bobbed their shoulders in a mechanical, traditional Maasai dance and giggled when we failed to replicate it. And the circular scars on some of the kids’ cheeks, a symbol of belonging.

A few days later, a schoolboy named Sendero invited the volunteers to his boma. This boma, 15 miles away in an area that was not labeled on the map, was considered ‘deep Maasai’. Sendero’s older brother, Emerson, picked us up in yet another old minivan, though this one’s main defect was a nauseating aroma of gasoline. For the hour that it took to travel the 15 miles, I tried to ignore the fumes by focusing on the road ahead but mostly, I stared at the light within the pencil-sized hole in Emerson’s upper earlobe that had been pierced and stretched by an acacia thorn.

Sendero and Emerson’s boma sprouted up from a grass field that had withered from the long dry season, a dry season that had some Maasai tossing around the word ‘drought’. Emerson led us past rectangular enkajis with tin roofs and electricity, into one particularly large, traditional round enkaji with an entryway, walls separating the beds, and a raised firepit.

We all huddled around the fire, sharing stories and asking questions. A man named Kasino joined us, one of Emerson’s cousins who made sure to let us know that his name was spelled with a K. Kasino brandished a long gourd that served as a natural milk carton and began to shake it rhythmically, pumping air into the milk within so that it became like Kefir. It was yet another fermented milk, but this one was almost as thick as yogurt. He poured me a cup, filled to the brim. I feigned enthusiasm and began to sip, thankful that Mongolia had prepared me for these types of scenarios.

Kasino leaning against an enakji in the early stages of construction, when thin sticks are tightly woven through wooden beams. Later, Kasino's wife will seal the walls using a mixture of mud and cow dung.

We peppered Emerson and Kasino with questions about their lives. Kasino said that he had two wives, and that was plenty. Emerson, on the other hand, had no wives, but said that five sounded like a good number. They spent most of their days grazing their cattle, fueled only by a Kefir breakfast and opportunistic hydration from rivers and ponds, using their shukas as a water filter. They explained that some boys have other tasks: for two months of the year, boys of a certain age class isolated themselves to a boma separate from the women. During that time, they kill five cows and revert to a strict carnivore diet to grow strong, to prepare for the hardships of the dry season. He smiled cheekily and said, “if a boy sneaks away to sleep with a woman, all the meat will turn bad.”

I wondered about the origin of that belief, but I mainly wondered about the woman involved. I asked Emerson what happens if a man sleeps with another man’s wife. He said that it is not a big deal, but that if she becomes pregnant, then that man must give the husband a cow. But his answer only raised more questions: but what about the woman? How does she feel about that arrangement?

I couldn’t blame Emerson for speaking from his own perspective, but I wanted to know more about the women’s opinions. It had been difficult to find Maasai women that spoke English well enough to answer my questions, a side effect of girl's education being considered less important. But most of what I knew about gender dynamics had come from a man’s mouth, which had both explicitly and implicitly made it clear that women held little power in Maasai societies. The head of Bright English Medium School, fondly called Mama Bright, explained: “This is tradition of the Maasai: men make decisions, but not the women. The women, they are not important to get the education because they are going to grow another family.”

Gender inequality seemed to manifest in a number of ways. For example, a man could take many wives, like Elesairu’s father, who had 12. The limit, it seemed, was determined by a man’s ability to obtain between 15 and 20 cows (~$2000), the typical trade for a wife. And still, though illegal and scientifically debunked, female genital mutilation (FGM) often continued under the guise of being a hygienic procedure that may also facilitate an easier birth. But more grimly, I had heard that it was mainly used to control female sexuality, to discourage a woman from being unfaithful.

One person who sternly opposed this practice was Barbara. I met Barbara, an Austrian nurse, at a hospital in Wasso where she had been volunteering for almost a year. Believers of traditional medicine, the Maasai only resorted to hospitals in extreme cases; Barbara saw the worst of it. She told me young mothers, only 13 and 14 years old, came to the hospital with pregnancy complications, often premature births due to their young age. She saw countless cases of delivery complications when FGM was involved. Unsurprisingly, Barbara was far less sympathetic to the Maasai way, seeing only the adverse side effects of these customs.

But to say that Maasai women are helpless would be a gross misrepresentation. At Sendero and Emerson’s boma, we came across a colorful, cheerful scene under the shade of an acacia tree. A dozen Maasai women, dressed in shukas of every color, sat in circle around an orange chest with smiles on their faces, weaving bracelets and earrings and necklaces. They were a part of the Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC), an organization designed by women, for women. It sought to empower Maasai women and girls by providing them with an avenue to gain financial stability and advocating for women's rights in Maasai societies.

Women of the PWC assembling for their weekly meeting to make jewelry and deposit a portion of their earnings in the lockbox.

A group of PWC women of Emerson's boma.

Maasai women at the weekly market, browsing for jewelry supplies.

Despite bearing the brunt of domestic labor, like building the enkajis, cooking, and raising the children, women had little discretion in their husbands’ finances. The PWC aimed to overcome this problem by helping women form community banks. Each week, they locked away a portion of their earnings in the orange lockbox – earnings from selling firewood, honey, and jewelry at local markets. This money could be used for microloans, purchasing cattle, and to cover emergency expenses like medical care.

Back in the enkaji, Emerson insisted on giving us a goat as a gift for the visit. Convincing him that we were not equipped to care for a goat was a tiresome debate, which concluded with a downgrade from goat to chicken. He let one unlucky chicken out of the coop, which immediately trigged a frenzy as a dozen children chased the poor bird until it lodged itself between the poles of the cattle fence. Emerson tied the legs together and passed it to one of the kids, who held it close to his chest like a plush toy.  

With that, we piled back into the gasoline-scented minivan and began the hour journey back to the Bright School, chicken in tow.