The Maasai Tribe of East Africa
The roughly 1 million Maasai living near the Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania are probably one of the most iconic tribes of Africa. They are tall and beautiful. Their colourful red or blue togalike garments as well as their spears show the pride they have in their culture.
The Maasai are nearly exclusively pastoralists but nowadays most gave up their nomadic lifestyle and they settle in a homestead which also contains cattle enclosures. Age plays an important role in Maasai culture, and they organise their communities via an age-set kinship system into groups that share the same life events and transition rituals. The ceremony unoto, for example, celebrates the circumcision of the last member of an age set and his transition into adulthood. During this ritual the sons and their mothers accuse each other of incest. However in the end an oxen will be slaughtered and the men will feed the meat to their mothers, showing that they now enter anew stage of responsibility.
