The Maasai "Jeep"

The Maasai Jeep

With tattered ears, scratched-up eyes, a puncture wound on the neck, a growth on the throat, and a heavy pack tightly strapped to his back this purposeful donkey lead his small herd of burdened beasts with seeming serenity through the Maasai village of Longido, Tanzania just south of the Kenyan border.

Want to see Snow on Kilimanjaro? Better Hurry, Just in Case...

I’m back in Texas now, but exactly one full moon ago I stood on top of Africa.  As I continued my slow march to the summit I watched the circular white disk of August 2016’s full moon slip behind the frozen blue-brown crags of a declining, yet still powerfully majestic, glacier near Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru Peak.  That sight, along with the sun bursting above the clouds to the east at the same time, was without compare.

In 1938 when Earnest Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro there was much more snow and a much larger glacier compared to now. But, even in the 1930s the glacier was shrinking and it was due to the natural cycles of climatic change.

“THE SQUARE TOP OF KILIMANJARO”“WIDE AS ALL THE WORLD, GREAT, HIGH, AND UNBELIEVABLY WHITE IN THE SUN…”EARNEST HEMINGWAY, THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARo

AERIAL VIEW OF KILIMANJARO IN 1938

In the late 1880's the entire top of this volcanic mountain was covered by ice–almost eight square miles of it.  By 1912 the overall coverage was down to less than four and a half square miles. Since the first core samples were taken (in October of 1912) it is estimated that 85% of the glacier has disappeared.  Today, only about one-half square mile of Kili’s top is covered by ice.

Some estimates say that soon there will be no glaciers left on Kilimanjaro. “If current climatic conditions persist, the legendary glaciers icing the peaks of Africa’s highest summit for nearly 12,000 years, could be gone entirely by 2020.”1  I was just there; I can’t imagine how it could all be gone in just four years.  I’d perfer to go with other–yet still dire–predictions that say that it will be 2030, 2040, or even not until 2060 before all the white disappears. 

  

This is the hard-to-imagine, but seemingly unstoppable, reality.  It is THE BAD NEWS and some of it CAN be blamed on “global warming.”  After all, Kilimanjaro lies about 220 miles–or three degrees–south of the equator; of course the ice fields in the tropics are susceptible to global warming.  But, for those of us who feel some guilt about what’s happening to our planet, there are other factors at work that, when taken into account, can perhaps lessen our burden a bit.

First of all, the snows of Kilimanjaro have been melting for many, many decades (long before “global warming” became a thing) because the surface temperature of the Indian Ocean and atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns have been “starving the ice” since the late 19th century. [2]

Another major factor is the human-caused “forest reduction” on the lower slopes of the mountain. People need to eat and Tanzanians have been clearing the trees for centuries in order to grow crops on the most futile soil that the country offers.  But, it is this “loss of foliage” that “causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, [and] lead[s] to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation.”[1] 

The glacier has actually been “doomed” for a long time because the “high vertical edges of the remaining ice make a horizontal expansion of the ice cap more difficult.”  (As you can see in the full moon picture above, the glaciers look like cliffs, not the huge, flowing masses of blue ice  like you see in Alaska, for example.) 

One report explained that even though “there is not a highly significant change in air temperatures” on top of this volcanic mountain–it is always below freezing–even in years with significant snowfall, it is the intense solar radiation on all that dark lava rock and dust that causes the melting of the vertical face of the glaciers. These summit-type glaciers have no where to go once their vertical margins are exposed . They shrink, break apart, and shrink even faster as more and more surface area is exposed to the sun’s infrared rays.[3]

Finally, because the ice cliffs can’t catch and retain new snow the surface of the vertical cliffs are brown and dirty because they are made of old (really old!) layers of dirty snow and ice.  “A darker glacial surface absorbs more solar radiation than fresh, white snow.”[1]

BUT HERE IS SOME (potentially) GOOD NEWS?  

A 2007 American Scientist article entitled The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro: Can Global Warming Be Blamed? offers a potentially positive scenario in which Kilimanjaro’s beautiful white top could regrow and reform.  If, due to global warming, the temperatures rise above freezing from time to time the heating of the ice surface would “gradually erode the sharp corners of the ice cap” and create a gentler slope. If “precipitation increased, snow could [then] accumulate on the slopes and permit the ice cap to grow.”  Also, more snowfall “could blanket the dark ash surface so thickly that the snow would not sublimate [or turn into vapor] entirely before the next wet season. Once initiated, such a change could allow the ice sheet to grow.” Glaciologists know that the ice cap may indeed vanish, or it may actually grow again…It is ironic that perhaps, substantial global warming accompanied by an increase in precipitation might be one way to save Kilimanjaro’s ice.” [4]

Meanwhile, take solace.  Why we can’t count on having a white-capped Kilimanjaro in our future it does seem, for now anyway, we are safe in the knowledge that each month the moon will continue to show it’s full face to us again and again. At least we will always have that to marvel upon.  

Full Moon Setting over Texas Hill Country, September 2016

The Maasai Man--Part III--Tembos! (aka Elephants!)

There is a mystery behind that masked gray visage, a life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires and the sea.

Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

All morning we drove along the banks of the mostly dry Grumeti river in Northern Tanzania with our safari driver, Wambura, and our very own Maasai, Twerta.  The abundant wildlife enchanted us; the stories and information our guides told us kept us transfixed.  In those few hours we saw lions, capped buffalo, many types of antelope, zebras, wildebeests, and much more.  But, what we most enjoyed was hanging out with a family of elephants while they munched on the trees, took sand-shower bathes, rested (their oh-so-heavy trunks on rocks), and sipped water from puddles in the riverbed.

Please click on this link to also see my short and peaceful video on the Elephants at the Watering Hole

As we were departing from the area we inadvertently drove too close to a mother elephant and her youngster.  She turned, flapping her ears, hardening her wide-spaced eyes, and raising her truck to trumpet a loud “back-off-buster” warning at us. Our guides respectfully (and perhaps with some trepidation) moved our Land Cruiser slowly, but steadily past her.

Within moments she resumed her loud foraging, breaking off branches, ripping up grasses, and elegantly swinging the foliage into her small hidden mouth under her fat trunk and long tusks.

In the late 1960s, scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton was the first western behaviorist to realize the basic unit of elephant society is led by a matriarch elephant.  In order to determine this he spent years photographing and getting to know the elephants as individuals.  He traipsed through the savanna intentionally annoying the beasts in order to get them to face him and angrily flap their ears.  From this posture he could see notches and cuts in their ears, the size and configuration of their tusks, characteristic scars, and other distinguishing features.  As he got to know the elephants what he learned was that the herd matriarch is usually the oldest, wisest, and best leader, and that she is one of “undaunted female intelligence.”

Peter Matthiessen wrote in his African travel masterpiece The Tree Where Man Was Born, that the matriarch “may be fifty years old and past the breeding age, but her great memory and experience is the herd’s defense against drought and flood and man. She knows not only where good browse may be found in different seasons, but when to charge and when to flee, and it is to her that the herd turns in times of stress.”  (p. 209)   Her herd is comprised of her daughters, other female family-member elephants, their babies, and other youngsters--including young males.  As the boys age they are driven off to go live in small bachelors groups or alone for the rest of their days.  

An elephant can eat as much as six hundred pounds of grass and brush each day. They are destructive feeders, damaging trees and shrubs, and tramping down the grass and underbrush as as they pace off paths through the savannas.

“Elephants, with their path-making and tree-splitting propensities, will alter the character of the densest bush in very short order; probably they rank with man and fire as the greatest force for habitat change in Africa.”  (Matthiessen, p. 203)  After the Serengeti was set aside as a game reserve in 1937 more and more elephants, many from space-challenged agricultural areas of western Kenya, moved into northern Tanzania.

Even 50 years ago--when Matthiessen book was first published (1972)--the problems between elephants, the land and man were notable.  Matthiessen said at the time, “The Serengeti is immense, and can absorb this damage, but one sees quickly how an elephant invasion might affect more vulnerable areas.  Ordinarily the elephant herds are scattered and nomadic, but pressure from settlements, game control, and poachers sometimes confines huge herds to restricted habitats which they may destroy. Already three of Tanzania’s new national parks--Serengeti, Manyara, and Ruaha--have more elephants than is good for them.  The elephant problem, where and when and how to manage them, is a great controversy in East Africa, and its solution must affect the balance of animals and man throughout the continent.”  (p. 204-205.)

It was a problem back then; its an even bigger problem now especially with global warming escalating the situation.

After we were safely past the disturbed mama elephant, Twerta told us that among the “Big Five”--the most dangerous of the African animals--he fears the elephant above all others.  “Because,” he said, “if an elephant has ever been hunted it knows that man is his enemy.  And it never forgets.”

...to be continued.

The Maasai Man--Part 2

“I’ve never seen anything as strong as a lion.”  

Twerta, The Maasai Man

“Have you ever killed a lion, Twerta?” I asked.  “Ndio,” he said, “simba mbili.” Yes, two lions. The first, he killed as a young morani warrior, and the other, when a lion broke through the protective nettle fence that surrounded his home and attacked one of his cows.   

Traditionally, as part of the initiation of the newly circumcised morani warrior, their boys-to-man ritual included a group lion kill.  The boys, in their black robes and painted faces, would surround a male lion and rush in with their spears trying to wound it.  Once injured, the lion would invariably try to break out of the circle by charging one of the boys.  The threatened boy had a large cape buffalo skin shield to hide under while the other boys pummeled and stabbed the lion until he died.

Twerta’s description of his first lion kill was comparable to this generalized description of the practice.  But Twerta’s experience was made more profound by the fact that one of the morani boys in his group was badly hurt by the threatened beast.   “The lion almost killed him,” Twerta said, “his face, his scalp, his skin--all just ripped off.”

Years later, Twerta was awakened one night by his distressed cattle.  A female lion (the ones that do most of the hunting) had penetrated the fence that surrounded his home and the corral meant to keep the predators out.  “The lion just grabbed my cow and threw it over the fence,” he said.  “I’ve never seen anything as strong as a lion.” But, like most Maasai men, Twerta had been trained to kill the predators that threatened his herds.  Twerta didn’t go into as much detail about this incident and I noted some reluctance (or guilt?) in his voice about having killed this lion.

A Maasai encampment.  You can see the arrangement of thatched topped circular homes

and the encircled enclosures made a of sticks and bushes for their cows and goats from this aerial view stock photo.

Maybe Twerta didn’t want to admit to having killed this second lion because nowadays the Maasai are forbidden to kill lions and the practice has been discouraged for decades.  The lion population in Africa is facing extinction (by 2050 by some estimates) and in Western Africa they are all but wiped out.  In the past three decades the lion population has been reduced by 50% to a total world estimate of 34,000. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown

Still, there are thousands of lions that roam the savannahs of eastern Africa and continue to threaten the livelihoods of the Maasai.

There are several programs in place to provide economic incentives, education, and alternatives to the herders.  The Predator Compensation Fund active in Kenya, for example, reimburses the herders for cattle lost in lion attacks.  (See this excellent video, https://www.bing.com/videos/search=maasai+reimbursement

In other areas, there are programs like the Ruaha Carnivore Project, funded by the African Wildlife Foundation, where tribal communities are learning to build better livestock enclosures to protect their herds and are offered other economic benefits for demonstrating success in living peacefully with carnivores.http://www.awf.org/wildlife-conservation/lion

Still, as reported in a National Geographic story entitled, Can Good Come From Maasai Lion Killings in the Serengeti?, dated April 2014,  lions (and sometimes the moranis who hunt them) continue to be killed.  They report on a new incentive that involves government payments as a “reward for conservation” rather than paying them for lost livestock. The idea is pay the “hot-blooded young” moranis to be lion-tracking scouts that protect other herders against certain cats, and thereby, “defusing lion conflicts before they happen...then [the] living lions could serve as an even better voucher of courage and competence than dead ones." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140428

And I have another possible solution. Just get the lions, like these, that we saw feasting on a wildebeest in Ngorongoro Crater, to teach their friends that there is other meat to eat beside the Maasai cows.

UP NEXT: THE MAASAI MAN--Part 3 (Focus: Elephants!)

The Maasai Man--Part 1

Men dressed in green, night-watchman’s uniforms carry rifles at the Grumeti Lodge in northern Tanzania on the edge of the Serengeti.  Their purpose--to protect the guests from the wild animals that roam around this remote encampment at night.  And they are there, right outside the canvas walls of our luxury tent!  “Is that a lion?” I asked loudly in the middle-of-the-night darkness. “Yep,” my husband said in his half-asleep voice.  “Is that a zebra?” I asked when I heard a strange braying cry. “Yep.  That, or a wildebeest,” he said.  I didn’t need to ask--I recognized the barking of hyenas.  Security guard or not, I didn’t sleep very well.

The next morning Wambura, our safari driver, introduced us to Twerta, one of the guards, and a Maasai from the area who would be our scout for the day.  I think Wambura just wanted him along so we wouldn’t get lost again on the barely-more-than-a-path of a road that had,  eventually, lead us to this wilderness hotel the evening before.

Sitting directly behind Twerta, in our Tanzania Journeys safari vehicle, I was immediately intrigued; I could see that his ear lobes were tucked up over the tops of his ears.  A “real” Maasai, I thought, so I launched right into asking him a thousand questions (as I often do--to the chagrin of my family). Wambura translated.   

Twerta explained that he is 35 years old and has “one, lovely wife.” (Maasai culture is polygamist, so I guess that is why he was so specific.)  Twerta continued, “besides my four children, I have 37 cows and 60 goats.”  While he is at work at the lodge during the week his boys take care of his herd.  He has this extra job because, “I just want to see my cows grow higher and higher.”  Meaning, I guess, that increasing the size of his herd is his primary goal in life.  I asked him why he needed so many cows. ”To sell,” he said, “If I need money for the kids’ school uniforms, I sell a cow. If I need to build a house, I sell a cow.” Trice, my very fiscally-aware husband, asked, “How much do you get for a cow?” “Depends,” he said, then in Shilingi, told us the equivalent of about $300, indicating that the cattle do hold great value and are a clear measure of a Maasai man’s wealth.

“Don’t you also eat them?” I asked.

“Not too often,” he said, “we do drink their milk.  I drink more milk than water.”  Then, he added, “we also drink their blood.”

Blood?!  That halted my interview abruptly. I had to ponder this foreign concept.

“The Maasai believe that all cattle on earth belong to them, and that taking cattle from others is their right.”  

Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man was Born

Several hundred years ago the Maasai people and their cattle migrated south of the Nile to a place they called the “seringet,” (which means vast, open space in the Maa language).  They remained in this area that is now north central Tanzania and southern Kenya.  Maasai chiefdoms grew in number and these “semi-nomadic pastoralists”  became renown for their fierceness and for their propensity to rob other tribes of their cows.  To the Maasai however, it wasn’t stealing, they were just taking what was rightfully theirs, as their deity, Engai, had bequeathed all the cattle in the world to them.  

The Maasai only slaughter their cows for meat for special occasions.  They prefer to keep them alive and to periodically bleed them by puncturing an artery in the neck.  They capture the blood in a gourd container and mix it with milk.  This “delicious and nutritious” beverage is a significant component of the Maasai diet. If you aren’t squeamish, there are several YouTube videos (not my own) about the procedure:  Just type in: Maasai Blood Drinking Ritual.  

Indeed, the whole Maasai culture revolves around cattle.  Even young boys are expected help shepherd the beasts, using long acacia sticks as cattle prods.. See my YouTube video: Maasai Boys Herding Cattle in Tanzania.

Once the boys reach puberty (between the ages of 14 to 17) they are set to become “moranis”--warriors that  protect their herds and their homes, known as “bomas.”  This begins with a circumcision ceremony.  

Twerta told us about his own experience. First, he and his friends were dipped in cold water.  It was about 4 in the morning.  Then, were then made to stand up straight while an elder took the scalpel to them.  “If you shook you were told you were a coward and warned that no woman would ever want you. You had to just bear the pain.”  

For the next couple of months, instead of wearing the typical red or blue toga-like cloth, called a “shuka,” the new moranis dress in black and paint their faces like white skeletons.  Their heads are shaved and are sometimes adorned with huge ostrich plumes.  During this period the boys/men live out in the bush, they eat only meat, and they are trained to use traditional weapons, spears and long double-edged knives.  Traditionally, they must test their courage by stealing cattle and, as part of the initiation ceremony, to kill a lion using a poisoned spear.

Photo from National Geographic

“We aren’t allowed to kill the lions anymore,” Twerta said, then interrupted himself to exclaim, “There’s one now!”  

Twerta pointed at a sand-colored female lion basking below us in a dry riverbed.  Up the embankment from her was a  young male companion.  After a couple of minutes, she got up and trotted off.  He immediately followed.  They moved even closer to us and settled down to watch some nearby bushbucks.  We were in silent awe as these shared moments passed--man/machine (Toyota Land Cruiser), the beasts, and the breeze.

See my YouTube video: A Young Lion Pair, Grumeti River, Tanzania

We had many more animals sightings and conversations with Twerta.  By the end of the morning, I felt comfortable enough to ask if he would let down his ears. He kindly obliged by unfolding his lobes, something, I can safely say,  no one has ever done for me before.

Jambo Y'all!

I'm working on some write-ups about our recent trip to Tanzania and I'll be posting them soon! We did a week-long safari, two-weeks of volunteer work, and then climbed to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro!
In the mean time, please check out my YouTube videos of funny elephants, baboon babies, a matchless Maasai fire, etc.  See: Baby Elephant Dog Pile, Serengeti Baby Baboons, Maasai Herding Cattle in Tanzania, Matchless Maasai Fire, and Rough Road Thru the Serengeti.

Success!  7:15 a.m. August 19, 2016