Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna

My father made his signature sound: Hhehh! Every man has a signature, a sound he makes when he wants to be known. Right now, if I came to my mother’s hut in the middle of the night and I wanted my mom to identify me, I would make this sound: Harumph. And my mom would say, “That is my son.” Even if it’s after ten years. So my father made his Hhehh! and he said, “Yes, another herder is coming.” And my mother and my brothers? They were mad, because they knew that now they’d have to work a little harder to bring a little more wood and water.

My mom thanked the Creator all the same, and all these women came and started singing. When a baby is born in the village, it’s a big celebration. But there was a complication. Although it was the rainy season and everything was green, there was disease in the area, and people were worried about the cattle. A few days before I was born, the village had held a meeting and agreed that, with grass and water everywhere, it would be a good time to move. Now, the village can’t move the day after a baby is born, so they had to call another meeting of the elders.

“Hey, you know Lekuton’s wife has given birth to a baby boy,” they said. “It’s a blessing, and we must postpone a day or two. And then we have to move.” They talked and decided that in two days they’d move.

Another problem was that I refused to breast-feed. I didn’t want anything to do with it. For us, as in America, it’s known to be healthy to breast-feed. But I just couldn’t do it. So one woman said, “Oh! Lemasolai!” “Proud one.” That’s how I got my name: Lemasolai. He’s proud, he refused to breast-feed.

They tried every trick. They tried offering me cows: Our people believe even an infant understands about the cattle. “Take that cow!” my father said. “I’ll give you that cow! And I’ll give you that other one, too, if you breast-feed!” But I didn’t listen.

At the time, there was a little cow that had lost its mom. It slept in the hut with us and some of the little goats. My father had made a leather bottle to feed the calf with, and one woman said, “Hey, why can’t he share with the calf?” So I grew up drinking from the same bottle as that little cow. A lot of kids made fun of me, and I put on a lot of weight because I got a lot of cream from the cow instead of getting milk from my mom. But my family gave me that cow. It was the first one I owned.

Two or three days later, the village moved. I was put in a special carrying case made of cowhide and bamboo and placed on top of a donkey. My mother walked beside me. We traveled for a whole day to another area. So really, my life as a nomadic child started when I was three days old.

Chapter 3

Cows

My roar is like thunder.

My cows have nothing to fear.

Fear rests with the cowards,

The cowards of the enemy camp.

MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of sitting outside our hut. I was probably three and a half or four. It was a sunny day, and around me the women were busy breaking camp. My mom was taking down our hut, getting ready to move. I was playing with rocks. I was just starting to learn the names of our cows, and I was lining the rocks up and calling them in, the way my father and brothers did with the real cows. There was a knife lying on the ground. I picked it up to play with, and all of a sudden—blood! It didn’t bother me—there was no pain, just lots of blood. Then someone saw me. “Hey, look at Lekuton’s son!” My mother came running over. She started crying, and then of course I started crying, too. The wound healed—my mother treated it with some herbs—but I still have the scar, under my right eye.

Cows are our way of life. They give us milk and blood and sometimes meat to eat and hides to wear. They’re our wealth. We don’t have money; we have cows. The more cows somebody has, the wealthier he is. My mother has lived her whole life in a hut made of sticks and cow dung, and you could put everything she owns on the seat of a chair. She lives entirely on the cow. For her, there’s something wrong with someone who doesn’t have cows. It’s just not civilized.

With cows comes respect. The more cows a man has, the more respect he gets. A man with a big herd will be listened to by the others in the village. But if that man loses his cows because he doesn’t care for them properly, or is too lazy to take them to better pastures, no one will pay attention. The respect goes with the cows; a poor man does not have a voice. The reason? We know someone with a lot of cows has worked hard, taken risks, brought his cows to where there is grass and water.

We have three criteria for judging a cow. Number one is the color. The best color is white with a lot of black spots, like an Appaloosa horse. To us, that is the most beautiful cow. Number two is the horn. We like a male cow to have big, even horns. And number three is the personality of a cow. A good cow is always at the front of the herd. If the cow is always late, if he’s always behind all the other cows, he’s not considered a good cow. We do not care about how heavy a cow is. Never. Just the beauty of its color, the size of its horns, and how active it is.

We name our cows. Each cow has a name, like a person, almost. My brother knows the names of all his cows, all of them. At night when he walks home after taking care of his cows, he will stand on raised ground and look down at them.

The cows all belong to different cattle families, and those in the same family look alike. My brother knows how many cows are in each family, and he’ll name the families as they pass: Mongo, Muge, Narok, and so on. And he’ll know if each family is complete. The Mongo family is all there, the Muge family is all there, the Narok family is all there, and so on. That’s how we count. In a few minutes he’ll know who is there and who is missing. And that’s hundreds of cows.

Our cows do not die of old age. We either sell a cow or butcher it. The only exception is a blessed cow. Right now, one of our cows—it is my brother’s cow, a bull—is blessed. It doesn’t look like much. It’s gray with a single black spot right in the middle of its back. One horn is normal; the other is crooked. But it’s special.

Twice it happened that when my brother took his cows out in the morning that bull got in front of the rest of the cows and refused to move. He refused to move until my brother took his cows in a different direction from the rest of the village herd. The first time it happened, my brother didn’t understand what the cow was up to, but he is smart, he knows that sometimes cows can have a sense of danger, an instinct. So he went the direction the bull wanted to go. And both of those days raiders—men with guns—attacked the rest of the village herd. But my brother’s cows were spared.

That kind of bull is a great blessing. You never can sell one like that. When it gets too old, perhaps 20 or so years old, you can slaughter it in a special ritual in your boma, the corral that surrounds the cows at night. Only your family is allowed to eat the meat from that blessed cow. No one else. No one else but a member of your family is allowed to sleep on its hide either.

IT’S CUSTOMARY for the men to take care of the cattle and the women to take care of the village. If you came to the village during the day, you’d find only women and young children. The men and older boys would be out grazing cattle. But when they are very young, boys and girls work and play together.

From about age five to about age seven, I went every day with a group of about a dozen boys and girls to take the young cows to get grass nearby, maybe a mile or so from the village.

Even as little kids, we were smart. We’d drive the young cows to a place where we knew there was a lot of grass. We knew where the wild animals were, so we tried to avoid them. We let the calves graze, fill their bellies. While they ate, we played. But all the time we were watching. Our ears were always open for any danger.

We were proud to be doing our job, but we were little kids. What we really liked to do was play. We boys practiced throwing our little stick spears. We pretended to be warriors. We wrestled in the dust. With the girls we played house. We would arrange rocks in a circle to make a hut. Then we’d pretend we were the parents. The boys would ask the typical questions an elder would ask his wife when he comes home.

“Mama, how’s the evening? Did all the cows come home safely?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Are all the kids healthy?”

“Yes.”

“How about such-and-such cow, the one that is sick? How is he doing?”

“He’s doing great. We treated him today, and it looks like he is going to get well.”

“Uh-huh. Did you get any visitors today?”

“Yes, your friend came to see you. He was in the neighborhood, only 20 or 30 miles away, so he walked over looking for you. I told him you weren’t here, but he said that’s fine, he will come back tomorrow. It’s only 20 miles. He needs to talk to you about something. Now sit down and have some tea.”

Then we would sit in front of a stone and pretend we were eating our supper. The girl would bring me a little stick and we’d pretend it was a cup and go slurp, slurp, slurp.

“Okay, I’m going now,” I’d say, “I have to attend an elders’ meeting. I’ll see you later.”

Then the boys would sit together and pretend they were elders. We knew what to say because whenever the elders met, we were hiding in the bushes listening.

“We have to move because this location is not good for our cows anymore,” one elder would say. “We have to move because three cows have died here.”

Then the elders would discuss where to move. One elder would say, “Oh, I want to move to that big rock in the distance. That’s where my grandfather is buried. It is a very good area for cows.”

Another would say, “No, that area is not very good because of this and this and this.” So they’d argue and argue until they reached agreement or disagreement. If the discussion ended in agreement, fine, everyone would move together. If it ended in disagreement, one group would move one place and another would move to another place. The elders always tried hard to reach an agreement, but if they couldn’t, they would go in different ways, but they would reunite at a later time. They would always stay friends.

When we played, we were always checking on the little cows to make sure that none of them had wandered off. We all knew we’d be in big trouble if we lost one. Then around noon we brought them into the shade so they could sleep. Calves need to nap, just like people do. Once the cows were asleep, we knew they were safe, so we went back to our play.

THE AFTERNOON always went so fast. Soon someone would say, “Where’s the sun? It’s getting late. Let’s take the cows home.” We were still imitating what the elders do. Women in this situation have no say. They just listen. The little girls did the same. They just followed the boys. So we drove our little cows home.

Now we were really dirty, just covered in dust because of all the running around and wrestling we had done. But my parents didn’t mind. When I got home, they would say, “Son, congratulations. You brought all your little cows home. Drink some tea and eat something.”

Then at about seven o’clock, as the sun was going down, my family put all the calves into the family enclosure, and my job was to stand at the gate to keep them separate from their mothers.

Then my mom would say, “Mongo. Let Mongo get out.” I would open the gate, and Mongo, who had heard his name, would come running out to his mother.

The mother cows have four teats. When the little cow ran to its mother to drink milk, my mom would let it suck from two teats, and she would milk the other two teats. In other words, the calf got half, and we got half.

When my mother finished milking that one, she would call, “Ntei Mongo!” I’d bring the first calf back to the pen, open the gate, and let the next one out. Letting the little cows get their milk takes about an hour.

My mom used to let me drink my milk right there. I would sit by the cow and drink my milk out of the teat. The milk is warm and very sweet, much sweeter than milk in America. The sweetness comes from the leaves the cows eat. If we want sweeter milk, we take our cows to special places where they can eat leaves from a certain tree and a certain grass. Then the milk is especially delicious. It carries the scent of the tree.

We also mix cow blood with the milk. This is especially tasty and good for you. Usually it takes three people to get the blood from a cow. Two people tie a rope around the cow’s neck and hold it so that the jugular vein pops up. The third person chooses a spot on the vein and hits it with a small, blunt arrow, making a little hole, a horizontal slit in the jugular vein. The blood comes out of that hole. You hold a gourd next to the cow’s neck, and the blood pours into the gourd. When you get enough, you loosen the rope and the blood stops flowing. You then put a little medicine on the wound to speed the healing. Having blood taken out isn’t bad for the cow. We don’t take any more blood than it can spare.

When you have a bowl full of blood, you take a stick and swirl it around in the blood for five to ten minutes to remove all of the clots. Then you mix the blood with milk, more milk than blood. It’s delicious, simply delicious. If somebody’s sick and needs more blood in his body, we give him more blood than milk in the mixture. We believe that blood goes to blood in the body.