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The Maasai People
The distinctive image of the Maasai people is well known; ochre clothing, strait backs, huge stamina, bush-craft and bravery. But why are the Maasai people better known than other East African tribes?
Today, the 350,000 strong Maasai people span a region that traverses Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania. As pastoralist cattle breeders they demanded and received grazing rights in the national parks of both countries, and have long ignored the international border, moving their cattle across the open savanna with the seasons. It is this resistance to pedestrian modernity and contempt for artificial rules that has led to the western romanticizing of the Maasai way of life.
The Maasai people seem calmly aloof to other ways of life, unbowed by past British colonization and modern African governments alike. The Maasai are the Maasai. It is enough. Western visitors pick up on this sense of self, and the Maasais intimate relationship with their land and the seasons. Over time, the Maasai have become the perfect image for Westerners of the noble savage. Of course, the Maasai, while enjoying any benefits that flow from such alien foreign romanticism can hardly be blamed for it, tending, as a whole, to be modest and not naturally self-promoting. It is comforting to know that the Maasai people themselves couldnt care less for our romanticism.
