NgoroNgoro Crater

Its a collapsed caldera with an area of about 300 sqKm. The crater walls are very steep and the animals inside basically don't bother trying to get out because everything they need is there (food/water etc.)  It effectively makes a very large natural zoo with all the animals "interacting" as they have evolved to :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Massai

The Massai are a prominent “tribe” in the region Im currently visiting here in Africa…

Apparently they were originally from Southern Sudan but they drifted South over the centuries and are now centred around the Serengeti/Mara region of Northern Tanzania /Southern Kenya.

They are nominally a nomadic people who herd cattle and do not grow crops or even hunt wild game. They have a very strong culture and have been the most resistant to changing as a result of  European colonization over the past few centuries… Even today there are many Massai who live largely outside the economic world of Western culture and abide by their own cultural traditions and values… And that’s what makes them so visible… They wear their traditional dress (not our Western clothing) and they are proudly independent. But along with that pride seems to come quite a bit of arrogance too (pretty normal human behavior yes) and no matter how true to their culture they try to be they are still constrained by the world changing around them and that means there are unavoidable compromises to be made, not least as a result of the land they used to roam across being largely divided up and fenced in and owned by others now. So many of the Massai now lead more sedentary rather than nomadic lives and many also do some crop growing in the form of corn and rice. But they still value their cattle most of all and that is their preferred way to accumulate “wealth”.

When I briefly visited this area twenty years ago I also noted the Massai and I think they were much less “modified” then than now… I recall seeing the men almost exclusively wearing red garments (that seems to also be their favorite colour) and only ever traveling on foot (though it was just a brief visit of a few weeks)… This time round I have seen them wearing many coloured garments though always of traditional style (red and blue are the most common colours this time) but I also see them riding bicycles or small motorbikes, and most seem to have cell phones and a few other western adornments (like watches and rings etc).

I also seem to here any number of different stories about their culture and behaviors both from themselves and other Africans… For example, when I went to visit one of their villages as a tourist (I paid a small fee for the privilege) I was told by the Massai “guide” that they used the money from the tourists to buy water for drinking… But the man telling me this had a very nice Gold watch on and a diamond ring to boot!, so Im more inclined to believe my driver who said that this group of Massai was very wealthy due to the tourism and that the got free water delivered to them by the government and that they used the tourist money to buy more cattle… Which I believed as the very large herd of cattle near-by was clearly their property (thousands of head!)… So as I say, the pride and independence definitely comes with its fair share of human frailties.

Some other things that I do believe about them though are…

They are the only people that are allowed to live in the Wildlife reserves which border the national parks… The reason is that they pose no risk to the animals in the park since they simply don’t like to eat anything but their own goats and cattle. They do come into conflict with lions (who would eat their cattle) but the Massai have been living this way for centuries and for the most part the Lions and the Massai avoid each other out of mutual respect/fear… Likewise, their cattle don’t pose any real risk again since they have been living this way for centuries… The only problem I see with this system was that the cattle herds near Serengeti were getting very large and over grazing seemed to be coming a bit of a problem even in these “nomadic” areas… The problem seemed more intense in less remote areas where the grazing land was more restricted by fences and other land use areas.

They have a diet that consists of about 75% meat with the rest made up mostly of blood and milk… They don’t seem to eat cereals or harvest tubers etc (at least not traditionally)… They do seem to use a lot of collected herbs for food and medicine but it’s a minor percentage of diet by weight. Its also worth noting that all their food is “free-range organic” so to speak J  That may seem a rather extreme diet but I tell you that I have NEVER seen a fat Massai. Note also that they seem to get a great deal of constant exercise wandering around on foot tending their cattle. Now that diet obviously works well for them but that doesn’t mean that other people have metabolisms that are equally adapted to it (like I said, they have been living this way for centuries if not millennia and that surely would have “weeded out” the ones who didn’t have suitable metabolisms)… You also NEVER see a short or a “round faced” Massai, so they are I believe a “genetic race” rather than just a “culture”.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures from around the place:

 

 

 

Not a Word of It

Ive given up believing anything I here in Africa. Its not really a negative thing, its just that you cant trust what anyone says to be true in the sense that Im used to…

In the places I was raised, truth has a very specific and quite constrained meaning, and Im of a personality type that strays little from that stringent meaning. There are of course lots of other people with personality types that allow much greater freedom in their version of “telling the truth”.

But it’s a bit different here in Africa it seems. I started out in South Africa where things are not that different to where Im from, but since then Ive moved through quite a few more places and things on the truth front have drifted quite a bit.

The people that I interact with are varied but most of the time when I want some food or drink or directions, my questions are simple and there is not much variation in people’s version of truth… But, when Im asking questions about culture and history and animal behavior and local tradition etc, Im almost always interacting with “tourism specific” people like safari guides or hostel owners and taxi drivers etc… and the “truth” seems to get far more flexible here.

Its not that Im being deliberately deceived but rather that I think these people want to tell an engaging story rather than an absolute factual one… I think its because the information Im asking for is not going to have any direct use that they feel flexibility in answering… Like, who cares if the mating behavior of a particular animal is this way or that way; Its just information and Im not going to “use” it.

And so, over the past few months Ive heard several versions of the same story applied to several different plants, and Ive heard three or four different stories about the same animal etc. When I started to detect the “variability” I responded by inserting a few “test” type questions (that I had an expected or known answer for) into my conversations to see what responses Id get… and that really let me see what was happening J And now Ive reached the point where I don’t believe a word Im being told no matter how sincere the person talking to me seems to be… But Im not stressed by it, I just take the attitude that Im being told an entertaining story which is honestly what the person Im talking to thinks that I need to hear. This new approach also eliminates lots of disagreements I no longer feel the need to assert “the truth” when Im told something that I know just isn’t “true” … I probably should try to retain this attitude when I get back to my own corner of the world as I think it would reduce stresses there too and really there usually is no point in challenging most people over their version of the truth… I rarely manage to change people’s minds and Ive been known to be wrong myself too of course.

But what I have stopped doing is repeating the stories as “fact” to others since Im pretty sure most of it fails my “truth” criteria… In fact I think for the most part Im better off looking it all up on Wiki than believing what Im told J

So I ride on… Listening to all the stories J

Dazzle

The plural for Zebras is a dazzle...