Maasai

Maasai religion centres on one God, Enkai, and the most striking thing about that God is a duality held within a single figure rather than divided between two.

Enkai is spoken of as black and as red. The black God is benevolent, associated with rain, with grass and with the wellbeing of cattle and people; the red God is associated with drought, with anger and with what destroys. These are aspects of the same deity rather than opposed powers, and a tradition that puts the whole moral range inside one God rather than distributing it across a pantheon is doing something structurally distinct from almost every other entry in this atlas.

There is no divine society below Enkai. No assembly, no ranked offices, no succession between generations, and no roster of subordinate deities to enumerate. Prayer is addressed to Enkai directly, frequently, and often collectively.

Cattle are central to the relationship. In Maasai tradition the cattle were given by Enkai to the Maasai, and that gift underwrites both the pastoral economy and a claim about the world's proper order.

There is no route by which a human being becomes divine. The office of the oloiboni, the ritual expert and prophet, is a human office held within lineages, and its holder is a specialist in the relationship rather than a participant in the divinity.

Maasai religious knowledge is transmitted orally, within age sets, families and the lineages that hold ritual office, and it was not written by those who held it.

The outside record begins with nineteenth-century European travellers and missionaries in East Africa and expands under British colonial administration, which had a practical interest in Maasai social organisation because it was governing and displacing Maasai communities. The age-set system, the office of the oloiboni and the prophecies attached to it are documented from that period, in accounts written by people whose administrations were reducing Maasai land.

The Maasai also became, and remain, one of the most photographed and most commercially represented peoples in Africa. That has produced an enormous popular literature which is about an image rather than about a religion, and a reader looking for the tradition has to get past it.

Twentieth-century anthropology produced serious work on Maasai social and ritual organisation, and from the later part of the century Maasai scholars and community organisations have written about their own tradition and about the land and rights questions inseparable from it.

The religion is living and is practised alongside Christianity by many Maasai today, in combinations that vary by family and by community. The atlas describes the structure of the tradition and leaves what is held within lineages and offices with them.