Tanzania preaches that all of these tribes have been united under the common language of Swahili. All tribes in Tanzania still teach their children their tribal language and traditions, but most feel that their traditions are at risk as more of the younger generation want to learn more about the traditions of the many other tribes throughout the country. The Chagga for the most part still live in the territory that they’ve always lived in, the area surrounding Mount Kilimanjaro, while the Maasai’s original territory went across both Tanzania and Kenya. Both tribes have adapted is very different ways to modern society, the Maasai keep themselves as separated from modern society as possible and try to maintain the way of life they have always had, while the Chagga have for the most part accepted modern society.
While I was volunteering I stayed in the town of Moshi, which is the closest metropolitan area to Kilimanjaro. Moshi was almost entirely inhabited by Chagga, there’s no restriction for people of other tribes to live in the area, but most people didn’t move far out of their own tribal area. Whereas the Maasai are usually easy to distinguish by their clothing of red and purple sheets, the Chagga look just like any other average person. Moshi is usually where tourists go when they plan to climb Kilimanjaro and so there are many safari companies within the city. Moshi is Swahili for smoke and it got this name because it used to almost always be cloudy in the city from the clouds that came down from Kilimanjaro, but climate change has caused cloud formations to not go as far out from the mountain and so Moshi has become much more dry. One man told me how he could remember when they didn’t need to worry about mosquitoes in Moshi because it rained so often that there would never be water that sat for long enough for mosquitoes to lay their eggs.
The Maasai territory, known as Maasailand, is between Lake Victoria and Kilimanjaro and going across both Tanzania and Kenya. The formation of the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was done on purpose by the British and German colonizing powers so to divide and weaken the Maasai. The Maasai are traditionally nomadic but due to governmental pressure more have begun to establish more permanent residences. The draw back to this is that it allows the government to encroach on Maasailand territory and develop areas that aren’t claimed by the Maasai. The advantage to permanent homes is that the Maasai have now begun to grow crops, which had led to the average Maasai having a more balanced diet and better nutrition. Traditionally the Maasai diet would be only milk, meat, and blood. Blood was consumed in order to gain strength, either after a day tending to the herds, before battle, or after childbirth. Whatever nutrients they didn’t get from that they would usually have from some kind of medicine made from surrounding fruits and herbs. One tradition of the Maasai is to go into the hills where a certain plant grows and spent a few weeks alone there, feeding off of the plant. This plant is high in vitamin C and the ritual usually takes place before the coldest time of the year, it is meant to give the person the strength to make it through the rain and cold.
The Chagga diet is centered on bananas and maize. The maize is used to make ugali, a type of corn meal paste that is a staple for nearly every meal, and the bananas, in addition to being used in various foods, is used to make a banana beer called mbege. The Chagga territory is well suited for growing bananas and much of their culture is centered on it, many huts have roves made of banana leaves, which are amazing at keeping the rain out. Mbege was traditionally made for the elders and during their meetings they would pass around a large cup filled with the drink that they would all share. The passing around of a large cup of mbege still happens, but now it is no longer reserved for the elders, tourists are welcome to join in the drinking but most are scared away from the yeast still floating on the top of the drink. The Chagga tradition of drinking being a thing of social gathering has contributed to Tanzanian culture as a whole; the bar isn’t seen as a place to get drunk but a place to meet with all of your friends after work. This was interesting in comparison to Maasai culture, where the warriors were not allowed to have any form of alcohol.
The life of a Maasai man is broken up into three phases; the child, the warrior, and the elder. The children have the responsibility of taking the cattle out grazing, the warriors protect the village, and the elders are leaders of the village and lead spiritual rites. The warriors must be able to stay peak physical and mental condition so to be best suited for guarding the village, usually their duties are to stay up all night guarding against lions and hyenas. Because of this they are strictly forbidden to drink alcohol because it will slow their reflexes, impair their judgment, throw off their coordination, and make them prone to falling asleep. But they use the bark and roots of the acacia nilotica, which acts as a stimulant to keep them awake and alert while guarding or before a battle with an enemy tribe. The use of the acacia nilotica has become popular throughout Tanzania, people call them happy sticks, the sticks are very bitter and so when eating happy stick people will usually pair it up with chewing gum. You will regularly see roadside merchants with a large amount of gum for sale; this isn’t so much for the children as it is for those who use happy sticks. As far as I was able to gather, happy sticks are not illegal in Tanzania, this may be because Maasai warriors will sometimes come in to a city and work as a night guard and need to use the happy sticks to stay alert all night.
The Maasai working as night guards is an example of their slow assimilation into Tanzanian society. The Maasai are resistant to assimilating to modern society because they are afraid of loosing their cultural traditions, but slowly and sometimes reluctantly they have been becoming more modern. For a long time most Maasai were resistant of sending any of their children to school, this is understandable since schools can have a huge impression on a child’s development. At this point there are still some tribes who refuse to send any of their children to school, but most villages have begun to feel the importance of a formal education. What I found the most intriguing was how nearly every Maasai warrior I met had a cell phone. Before cell phones, the Maasai would use smoke signals or horns to signal to each other across the bush. But cell phone reception in Tanzania is much better than in America, you can get full reception in the middle of the Serengeti, so it became much easier for Maasai to just text message each other instead. This was one of the immersions into modern society that most Maasai were not as resistant to, though it forced them to find ways to earn actual money to pay for the phones. Traditionally Maasai society had a barter system, but as the modern world encroaches there is increasing pressure to earn money instead of trading goats and cows for what you want. Because of this more children are being sent to school and warriors are traveling to nearby cities to find a job to help support the village. Maasai warriors don’t only work as night guards; they also commonly work as guides for safari companies or taking photographs for various companies like National Geographic.
The Chagga are much more integrated into modern society and so you can’t exactly pin a certain profession to the tribe. But as you ascend Mount Kilimanjaro the surroundings become more rural, village society and you get a better idea of how traditional Chagga society was. The Chagga lifestyle is centered on agriculture, there are ancient canals that are still maintained and used for farming today. When German colonists arrived, the Chagga were able to adapt by changing their main crop from bananas to coffee. The Chagga profited from getting involved in the coffee trade, but when it came to international trade they weren’t able to keep up. Chagga style coffee doesn’t require a filter; you only need to add hot water, yet most locals will drink imported instant coffee, which generally tastes worse than Chagga coffee. Chagga tradition has been closely tied to economy, it’s tradition that the women trade goods at the market, and so it was easier for them to adapt to the use of currency instead of bartering. The Chagga also raised cattle and goats, but instead of taking them out to grazing fields like the Maasai, the Chagga kept their livestock in their hut with them. Most Chagga don’t live in their traditional huts, but a Chagga hut consisted of a bed for the father and a separate bed for the mother and children, on the other end of the hut would be an enclosure big enough for one or two cows and around three goats. In the middle of the hut would be a fire pit and above there would be an area where food would be stored because the smoke from the fire would help cure the food.
The Maasai believed that cattle were a gift from their god and felt all cattle were their property. Because of this, before German colonization, the Maasai were notorious for raiding villages and taking all of their cattle. To combat this the Chagga built cave networks that they would live in and keep their livestock. I visited one of these caves and it was difficult for me to imagine what it would be like living every day like that. The ceilings were low and the whole time you were down there you were between the crouching and sitting position, there wasn’t really anyway to stretch out your back. It was interesting that the Maasai had become such a problem for the Chagga that they would dig out an entire cave system that they would then live in for days at a time.
The Maasai also believe their god, Enkai, resides in the active volcano, Mount Kenya. Maasai will occasionally pray to Enkai and give it an offering of a goat or cow that is thrown into the volcano. When the German colonists of Tanzania decided on the border with the British colonists of Kenya, they purposely made Mount Kenya be in Kenyan territory so to make it difficult for Tanzanian Maasai to perform their religious rites and hopefully break their spirit. The Chagga and Maasai both had religions that consisted of a single god, but the Maasai are still resistant to Christianity while the Chagga are dominantly Christian. Both tribes still maintain some traditional rituals, but the Chagga generally will integrate it to Christian beliefs.
The spread of HIV can be attributed to some of these rituals, the Maasai stick practice female circumcision. Both males and females are circumcised when they are initiated as elders and usually the tool that is used is not cleaned between uses on different people and so if one of those people has HIV then it can be transmitted to everyone participating in the ritual. The Maasai have many rituals based around blood and warriors regularly test their physical endurance through trials of pain and a handful of these practices can put its participants at risk of transmission of HIV. Chagga tradition doesn’t have anything that can be directly linked to the transmission of HIV, but majorities of Chagga are Christian, primarily Catholic. The Catholic Church forbidding condoms leaves fewer options for protection against HIV transmission.
The Chagga and Maasai both have a folklore passed down through oral tradition. Both tribes use song and dance to tell their folk tales and both are patriarchic. There are only two matriarchic tribes in Tanzania and if people were to marry from different tribes, one patriarchic and the other matriarchic, the father would likely run the family. In both of the tribes the women play an important role, Chagga women have the responsibility of gathering the banana harvest and bringing it to market and Maasai women gather water and firewood. This being said, women’s rights are still not very progressive in either tribe or Tanzania as a whole. The Maasai conduct most of their rituals separate from each other, they believe that if women were to see them taking part in the ritual then it would loose its power, but the same goes vice versa. The Maasai believe that their men and women originally came from two separate tribes, each one dominated by only one gender. According to the story the all female tribe raised gazelle and antelope with the help of zebra and elephants, but the women bickered amongst each other so much that all the animals escaped. The tribe of men raised cattle and goats and so the women came to them when they lost their own livestock and asked to live with them, but because of this women are supposed to always serve the men and are no longer seen as equals.
A Maasai man is not allowed to marry until he has become an elder, but when he does become an elder he is allowed to have multiple wives. When a Maasai man becomes an elder he usually moves away from his father’s village to make his own and brings what wives he has with him. This means that each village is one family unit under one father and neighboring villages usually consist of relatives. The family is also very important to Chagga tradition; the Chagga belief system is focused around ancestry. Chagga stories trace a long chain of ancestry that is still recorded today, children and the elderly are considered important because of their closeness to the spirit realm; children have just come from the spirit realm while the elderly are about to return. There is a Chagga proverb of, “He who leaves a child lives eternally,” which illustrates the Chagga belief that ancestors will be reborn through their descendants. This is related to the Tanzanian culture of how you show respect; you always show respect to your elders and a respectful title like “sir” or “miss” are the Swahili words for grandfather and grandmother, babu and babi.
While I was in Tanzania I became friends with a Maasai warrior named Zac. After talking about our differences in culture Zac offered to take me to his tribe for a weekend. Zac was in Moshi because he was going to the university to study tourism; he wanted to make a cultural safari company that would allow tourists to experience an authentic Maasai lifestyle. His village was quite a distance away from Moshi, it was close to the Serengeti, and so we took the mode of transport popular to most traveling warriors, bus and dallah dallah. A dallah dallah is a large van that is used as the main public transport for most Tanzanians and the drivers will pack the van to absolute maximum capacity, so it wasn’t the most comfortable trip. We got off at a small roadside village and started to walk out towards the bush. Zac told me about how there used to be no village there and it had been built up without the permission of the Maasai, a result of more Maasai settling for more permanent housing because the Tanzanian government will move in and develop in areas not claimed by the Maasai. We walked for hours, when we finally got to the village there was no sign of modern life in sight. It was proper for when I was welcomed into the tribe to give some form of gift as a sign of gratitude. Back in Moshi I had bought pens and notebooks for the children that they could use in school, candy for the whole village, and rice for Zac’s mother. Zac’s mother was very happy to receive the rice and it was mainly what we ate for the entire time I was there. When we ate none of the children were allowed in the hut, it was only the other warriors, Zac’s mom, and me. This kind of exclusion of people from meals was a way that the Maasai ensured everyone respected their position within the village. I was given one of the largest servings that was very difficult to finish, the warriors had no problem finishing their serving and going for seconds, this is because the Maasai generally only eat breakfast and dinner and breakfast is always very large so to last through most of the day. Zac had to explain it as wazungu, white people, have smaller stomachs and so they can’t eat as much, it was the only way his mother would let me give my food to the other warriors and have her give me smaller servings.
After the meal we had chai, which turned out to be the best chai I had during the whole time I was in Tanzania; the only problem was that they served it in a metal cup and extremely hot. It seemed that any time we were idle we would be served chai, which was the main source of hydration in a place with so little water. When we went to sleep I shared a bed with Zac and to other warriors while the wife of one of the warriors and their children slept in a separate bed next to us, a hut design very similar to a Chagga hut. The next day I was given Maasai blankets to wear, a spear, and a piece of jewelry. Beaded jewelry is very popular with the Maasai, it is a sign of high status and the design of the beads can indicate from which generation of Maasai it was made, but unlike Western society men wear more jewelry than women. The spear is a trademark of the Maasai; they have a specific design of a long point on one end and a blade like a small sword on the other. The spear can be used for slashing, jabbing, and throwing; while it can and has been used against people the spears main purpose is to defend against lions. Lions are basically the sworn enemy of the Maasai, attacking not only their herds but people as well. In an effort to protect the species, the Tanzanian government promises to reimburse Maasai with any livestock lost to lions as long as the Maasai do not kill the lion, but if a lion kills one of their villagers the Maasai will still go out and get revenge by killing a lion. The Maasai have become expert trackers of lions and are common guides for nature photographers, but lions have begun to associate the bright red and purple blankets of the Maasai with danger. This generally means lions will take extra measures to avoid the Maasai, but there have also been known cases of lions targeting Maasai because of the colored blankets. The purpose of the brightly colored blankets is so that the Maasai can easily be seen among the brown surroundings of the African bush, if they need to signal someone in the distance or need help the blankets can be spotted from miles away.
When we returned from watching after the herds we had a goat sacrifice ritual. A strong goat was selected; it took a long time for the men to even decide which goat was good enough. This meticulousness was because the men were supposed to gain the strength from the goat to make up for what was lost that day. Nothing was wasted, the goat was suffocated so not to waste any blood, it was skinned so to be made into leather later, we drank the blood, cooked and ate the meat, and all of the remaining scraps, including the had and hooves, were put into a big pot of water and boiled into a stew. The blood was believed to hold the strength, in addition to this ritual there was another where they would cut the neck of a cow and drink straight from the neck, afterwards they would bandage the cut and the cow would walk away just fine.
Tanzanian culture is a quilt work of the numerous tribes that live within the country and can differ based off of the area you are in, in addition to being influenced by foreign cultures, primarily the English, German, Portuguese, and American. There are times where separate tribes have cultural similarities, even with the Chagga and Maasai which almost polar opposites, so it can sometimes be difficult to find the direct effect a single tribe has had on Tanzania. Both tribes have contributed to the tourist industry in Tanzania, as well as environmental conservation. Both have traditions that have been affected or altered by the Tanzanian government, lion hunting for the Maasai and coffee growing for the Chagga. The Chagga have become part of the traders of Tanzania, while the Maasai have become nature guides and guards. It seems that at this point the tribes are having less influence on Tanzanian culture as Tanzanian culture has been affecting tribal culture and with the addition of the influence of global culture things become convoluted. Many Tanzanians claimed that making Swahili the national language was something that united all of the tribes, could it be said that the melding of tribal traditions with modern society will further unite the people or will it cause people to loose their tribal identity?
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