Maasai

The Maasai are a Nilotic speaking pastoralist people of the Rift Valley grasslands of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, organized traditionally through an age set system in which boys become morans, warriors, and later elders, in ceremonies that mark each stage of life. Cattle stand at the center of Maasai livelihood and belief: Paul Spencer's ethnography of ritual among the Matapato Maasai records the conviction that Engai gave cattle to the Maasai alone at the beginning of the world, a charter that long justified raids on neighboring herds and still shapes how wealth and marriage payments are reckoned.

British and German colonial administration pushed the Maasai out of much of their best grazing land from the early twentieth century, formalized in the 1904 and 1911 Anglo Maasai agreements that confined communities to reserves, and the same pattern of displacement continued after independence with the creation of the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, both carved from land Maasai herders had used.

Naomi Kipury's collection of Maasai oral literature records the age set songs, praise poetry and prayers through which this history and the Engai charter are still transmitted. Today Maasai communities in Kenya and Tanzania combine cattle herding with wage labor, tourism and, increasingly, permanent settlement, while contesting continued restrictions on grazing inside protected conservation areas.

Maasai religion centers on Engai, a single divine being whose nature Naomi Kipury's collected oral literature and Paul Spencer's fieldwork both describe as holding two aspects: Engai Narok, black and benevolent, associated with rain and blessing, and Engai Na-nyokie, red and vengeful, associated with drought, lightning and misfortune. Prayer is addressed to Engai directly by elders and by age set groups rather than through a separate priesthood for most purposes, though the laibon, a ritual specialist and diviner drawn from particular lineages, blesses warriors before raids, interprets omens and is consulted in times of drought or epidemic; Spencer's study of Matapato ritual describes the laibon's authority as advisory and spiritual rather than political in the way a chief's would be. Engai is asked above all for rain and for the health of cattle, the two conditions on which Maasai life depends, and prayers, songs and the color symbolism of black and red recur through blessings given at birth, circumcision, marriage and the passage between age grades.

Christianity, chiefly through Catholic and Protestant missions established from the colonial period onward, has become the professed religion of a large share of Maasai in both Kenya and Tanzania, typically held alongside continued address to Engai and continued observance of the age set ceremonies rather than displacing them outright.