MAASAI Market ! More than Meat Eating Festival !

CULTURE:

Maasai a famed for many things. They are the best and, fearless warrior. As they migrate to town they have become security guards of choice. Their clothing style-red and blue and the shiny metal and beaded accessories foe women and men make them a unique spectacle.

The Maasai make Arusha an important tourist destination. Tourists, nationals and foreigners, come to places where the Maasai live to see and learn what make them, as one of the largest tribal groups in Kenya and Tanzania, keep their cultures and traditions.

Maasai have known from time immemorial of the importance of having a get together where some festivity and better trade is conducted. The market occurs once a week and this is the place where relations from various locations, come to meet, discuss issues relating to family, animals and community and to drink.

When you visit the Maasai community on market days, you will enjoy seeking them very busy not only selling and buying, but also slaughtering and roasting goat meat. For in most cases men use part of their financial proceeds on booze. And the meat roasting add to their being unique and famous. Their favorite for this style of preparing meat is the goat meat.

Big chunks of meat are hooked on sharpened bamboo sticks and stuck on sand or soil besides a bon-fine. Usually, the meat is fresh as blood of the newly slaughtered animals is still fresh and dripping. And it is the eating part of it which draws much interests

If they are roasting the meat for themselves, they do not wait for it to cook perfectly, they keep cutting pieces as eat as the meat is becoming brown, they won’t wait for the blood to completely dry. If they are roasting it for a lien customer, not a Maasai, they will make sure that it does perfectly cook.

You will hardly see men on these days selling beans or grains. This is an exclusively women’s province, and the money is women’s. Women appear in the best of themselves. Men are divided into age groups, as told by how they dress and the wearing of their hair, and by how they greet each other. Old men are greeted by touching their fore heads.

What have I learned! When you see young Maasai men with their red-hair plaited, they are the Moranis, a stage which lasts for about eight to ten years. It is must stage for all Maasai. Men you have not yet attained this stage, or have passed it already have their heads clean shaven. You are a Laiyoni if you are of the age between toddlers and those about to be circumcised.

Nyagulo is circumcised boy,but her cannot be a Morani unless he is about 20 or more.After you graduate from Moran, and are between 35 an d 40, you are a Korianga, and a Landisy when you reached 50.Makaa are old men starting 65 and you approach being a Seury when you are 75 and you a Mmeshuki when you reach 90.

A very old man indeed. Women’s age groups are not as rigid. They ndiko, when toddlers or a bit older, Sangiky when they reach adolescence. They are given the ordinary appellation of Mama before they become Kokoo, a name applying to older people among Maasai.