The Maasai
According to their own oral history, the Maasai people’s origins are
in the Nile Valley region of what is now South Sudan, before they moved
south around 300 years ago, conquering other tribes and living as
nomadic pastoralists.
In spite of many interventions, the Maasai have retained their
traditions and remain a proud and indomitable people, with their tall
stature, red shukas, rungu sticks and ornate beadwork
among their hallmarks. Maasai society is strongly patriarchal – the
women are responsible for the construction of the homestead manyattas, made from mud, stick and dung, and the men build the surrounding engang of thorn branches to keep livestock safe within the home compound.
The actual population of Maasai is not clear, but there are perhaps
half a million living in various sub-tribes unified by the Maa language,
and many of East Africa’s most famous wildlife reserves are in Maasailand,
including the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara and Amboseli. As
pastoralists, Maasai life is centred around cattle, which are a both a
measure of wealth and the primary source of food – the soft, rhythmic
tinkling of cowbells is a sound that you will quickly become attuned to
at Angama Mara.
Women forms a great party of maasai community development.They are responsible for all family aspect from child development to making their husbands behave and be a part of a community. This is witnessed during olng'eher ceremony of transforming from warriorhood.
The Serengeti life and ecosystem.
Typically defined by the annual movement of over two million
migratory wildebeest – these seasonal wanderers are just one element of
the greater Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. Numerous distinct habitat types
exist, with soil type and rainfall being the main influences.
The
ecosystem is driest in the southeast (where the Crater Highlands form a
‘rain-shadow’) and wettest in the northwest – the Mara Triangle.South of the Kenyan border, Tanzania’s Serengeti consists of various
types of woodland and grassland. It is on the ‘short-grass plains’ – an
area of shallow, volcanic soils west of Ngorongoro – that the
wildebeest’s story begins.
Here, they give birth to young calves every
January and February. These plains flush green with highly nutritious
grass after the rain, but are grazed flat and dry-out completely by
March when the herds trek north. Their destination is the Maasai Mara,
which is still blanketed with nutritious grass when the rest of the
ecosystem has dried out.
