WUNRN
The Masai/Maasai
are an indigenous African ethnic
group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai
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By Scott Calvert
March 2, 2008
Arusha, Tanzania
One night when Neema Laizer was 14, her father announced that she had to go
live with her new husband and his two wives the next day. Nobody asked the
seventh-grader how she felt; it did not matter.
But Neema, sensing her life was about to end, refused to submit. With help from
her courageous mother and an uncle who was a priest, she fled her family's
rural compound that night. Driven over bad roads to this city near Mount
Kilimanjaro, she ended up at a center that places girls in schools and keeps
them safe from forced marriage.
"I wanted to study, maybe go to university and be a doctor," she said
recently, days after graduating from a high school she never would have seen
had she been married off four years ago.
Neema is a member of the Masai, a proud people from northern Tanzania and Kenya
known worldwide for the lanky, spear-clutching male warriors in red garb. For
ages, their semi-nomadic ways have centered on cattle, simple living - and
deeply chauvinistic traditions.
But some Masai say it is time to end certain gender-based practices. Ritual
female genital mutilation is common despite laws against it. Culturally
sanctioned promiscuity raises fears that AIDS could ricochet nightmarishly
through Masai communities. And girls as young as 12 are forced into polygamous
marriage.
Old traditions die hard, though.
Consider genital mutilation, also called female circumcision. "A woman
does not recognize herself as a woman without circumcision," said Edward
Porokwa, a college-educated Masai who runs a nonprofit agency that lobbies for
pastoralists such as the Masai. "A man will not marry a woman who is not
circumcised."
Porokwa agrees with the government's ban of the practice, in which the clitoris
is excised in pubescent girls. The challenge, he said, is to persuade Masai to
make the coming-of-age rite symbolic and to keep the useful aspects, such as
guidance on how to take care of one's family. Otherwise it will continue
indefinitely, he predicted, law or no law.
The practice has strong defenders among Masai, including some young men. Paulo
Kikondo, 23, left his family's rural home a decade ago and works in Arusha as a
night watchman for $1 a day. It is the only job he can find with his
second-grade education. A woman spared mutilation "is nothing," he
said, and will be spurned by Masai men.
Kikondo also defended promiscuity. He said it is traditional and therefore
proper to let a same-age male visitor sleep with one's wife. "No
problem," he said, so long as the visitor does not take the wife away.
The phenomenon of multiple concurrent partners has accelerated AIDS' spread
across sub-Saharan Africa. But Kikondo declared himself unconcerned: "AIDS
cannot get us because we have medicine," namely herbs that he said prevent
infection. Told that any doctor would label that dangerous nonsense, he
shrugged.
Porokwa shook his head when he heard about Kikondo's comments. Masai, because
they seldom have relationships outside their ethnic group, have not been
ravaged by HIV/AIDS. In neighboring Kenya, for instance, the HIV rate among
Masai is 2.5 percent, half the national average.
But Porokwa said more and more men are moving to urban areas in search of work
and are interacting with non-Masai. "It is a very dangerous environment
for the Masai," he said. "Once [AIDS] gets there, everybody will be
bombed."
Six hours from Arusha by truck, in the heart of rural Masailand, it seems as if
time stands still. In the pre-dawn stillness, cowbells clang softly like wind
chimes, heralding the start of a new day at one compound, or boma, where a
dozen families live.
Soon there is action everywhere. Girls and women, their heads shaven and ears
weighed down by pendulous earrings, milk the cows and goats. Parents dress
their babies, and families drink morning tea in the soft light. Before the sun
rises far over the ridge, young men are leading several hundred head of
livestock out to pasture.
The rhythms are ancient and unchanging. This scene unfolds much as it did
yesterday, and the day before. It is how inhabitants, particularly the elders,
say it should be. They say they like living in the circular homes made of wood
frames coated in mud and cow-dung plaster. They don't covet electricity or
running water. They like their picturesque location, near a lake and a smoking
volcano Masai call the Mountain of God.
Not everyone appreciates this life. Noosotwa Loshipa, 27, ticked off her long
list of daily duties, from child-minding and cooking to milking and fetching
water. True, she said, young men and boys herd the animals, but the division of
labor is unequal. "The men are just loitering. We're keeping quiet, but
it's not fair," she said, giggling nervously.
"If a man goes to buy corn flour, the woman carries it on her head. A man
is proud, can't carry anything on his head or back." She said her gentle
complaints have made no difference. "They keep pressing us down. We are
used to it. There is no alternative. We are living here."
About the only concession to modernity that the boma's octogenarian leader
seems inclined to make is on education. Schooling is a fraught proposition for
Masai, since those who get it may abandon the old ways. But patriarch Lyangiri
Sadira, who has four wives and 18 children, is proud that three boys and a girl
are in high school. He insists it is possible - maybe vital - to blend deep-set
ways with modern knowledge.
"It's better to remain like this," he said, "but I need to know
what is happening in the world. If you have your thousand cattle and you are
educated, you will know how to take care of your cattle and look for
markets."
Sadira, wearing the red wrap-like garment that is typical of male attire, said
he would like to see the current high school students, the girl included, move
on to a university. To an extent, women's roles in bomas like this are set once
they finish seventh grade, if they get that far: They are married off,
sometimes before the legal age of 14, and begin bearing children.
That was the life Neema Laizer wanted none of growing up in another Masai area.
Now 18, she has learned English and finished high school at a boarding school
paid for by the Emusoi Center for Pastoralists Girls. After two years of
"A-level" courses, she plans to study medicine so she can help her
fellow Masai, especially women.
The center, formed in 1999, sponsors 450 girls in various schools. Their
families are asked to help with the cost, but some cannot and others will not.
The center relies on private donors, many of them American.
Neema and about a hundred other girls spent the recent school holidays on the
center's quiet grounds because of the risk that they could get pregnant or be
married off if they returned home to the rural areas.
Mary Vertucci, a Maryknoll sister who directs the center, said she hopes that
as more boys and girls go further in school, Masai culture will evolve without
losing its traditional essence. "My hope is to see girls who have
professional training - teaching, say - go back to Masailand and make a
positive impact."
Neema, an ebullient young woman with a hearty laugh, shares that goal.
"Women have no rights," she said. "They just sit with the
children and cook." But she sees glimmers of change. Her father beat her
mother so badly for helping her flee four years ago that she needed medical
care. But even he turned up at her graduation.
While she managed to escape a life she did not want - forced marriage, early
child-bearing, genital mutilation - she knows that others have been less
fortunate.
"Many men now are being educated; many girls are being educated as
well," she said. "When they go home, they must bring changes."
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