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Beyond what tourists see, a rich Maasai culture with many challenges

Guardians of the greater Serengeti’s landscape embrace traditions, but also have modern concerns such as poaching, education, and clean water.

As a teen, Jeremiah Cheruiyot Maritim killed animals to eat and to sell as bushmeat. Now a park ranger, he patrols the Serengeti along the Kenya-Tanzania border to catch poachers who target wildebeests and other animals migrating through the area. Poachers set traps or sometimes drive animals into gullies and kill them with spears.
Photographs byCharlie Hamilton James
November 30, 2021
10 min read

This is one of five stories that explore the greater Serengeti region and its ecosystem. Read the rest of those stories here.

Several ethnic groups inhabit the Serengeti ecosystem, but none is more associated with this landscape than the Maasai, the fierce, cattle-herding people who’ve lived in parts of Kenya and Tanzania since migrating from the lower Nile Valley during the 16th and 17th centuries. Over the years, safari operators have brought foreign tourists to showcase Maasai villages, where the people turn out in their colorful cloaks, the olkarasha, and pose for pictures holding traditional spears and performing the adumu, their famous jumping dance.

The Maasai are proud of these traditions and have shrewdly capitalized on the interest in them, but they also point out that what the tourists see represents a narrow aspect of their culture, one that bears little resemblance to their everyday concerns—schooling for their children, clean water for their communities and animals, political issues affecting their use of the land, among others.

The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Through the Wyss Campaign for Nature, we funded the fieldwork of Explorer Charlie Hamilton James, who spent more than two years photographing the people and animals in the greater Serengeti ecosystem.
Illustration by Joe McKendry

As part of his coverage of the Serengeti ecosystem, photographer Charlie Hamilton James traveled throughout the region seeking to understand different facets of Maasai life, and portray the mix of traditional and modern that represents their day-to-day experiences. 

Along the way he encountered Maasai serving in a wide range of roles—wildlife rangers patrolling for poachers, teachers training new safari guides, community leaders managing health-care issues, and herders continuing the age-old practice of protecting their cattle and moving them to fresh pasture.

“To be Maasai is to live in this land,” said Aloyce Mollel, a senior member of Irkeepusi, a Maasai community situated near the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. “The people, the animals, and the land are together. We will always be here.”

In Kenya, the Mara River weaves between small ilchampai—farms where crops are interspersed with trees—and industrial-scale operations that use center-pivot irrigation. Together these forms of agriculture consume so much water that the river has run extremely low in recent years.
Maasai villagers tend their animals in traditional bomas (this one in Tanzania): homesteads of dwellings and corrals enclosed with fencing made from tangled, thorny acacia branches to keep livestock in and predators out.

Boys learn early to protect the herd and live in harmony with the land.

Melubo Olenauni (at right) and his sons return to their home in Tanzania after bringing in the cows. Young boys begin to learn shepherding with sheep and goats, and then later with cows. When they become ilmurran, or warriors, they’re ready to be responsible for the whole herd.
The pool table is a social hub in Irkeepusi, Tanzania, where men who aren’t tending the herd play for money throughout the day. Women work at home. They milk cows, chop and carry wood, and haul water for cooking and washing.
Naserian Dennis Lukumai bathes three-month-old Meng’oriki, the youngest of her four children, at home in Tanzania. A fire burns around the clock in the communal area; two other rooms shelter young calves and sheep that need special attention. While the 29-year-old takes care of the household, her husband, Dennis, works as assistant manager at the Lemala Ngorongoro tented safari camp.
Ol Doinyo Lengai, Mountain of God in the language of the Maasai, is an active volcano in Tanzania. Considered the home of Enkai, who signals her wrath with eruptions and drought, it’s a place of pilgrimage for pastoralists, who go to pray for rain, cattle, and healthy children.
Yohana Medukenya works at a hair salon in Irkeepusi, taking inspiration from a wall of celebrity photographs. The 22-year-old prefers styling hair for men and women at MGZ Quality Hair Cuts to tending his five cows. His family helps out with the animals.

Making a leap from village life to careers in tourism, young Maasai train for the future while keeping traditional ways.

The Maasai in Orboma, Kenya, welcome tourists who pay to visit the village and learn about traditions such as the adumu, or jumping dance, a rite of passage for young men. They compete to see who can jump the highest straight into the air—and to win the admiration of potential brides. “It’s easy to be cynical about tourism,” photographer Charlie Hamilton James says, but he sees perfor...
At the Koiyaki Guiding School west of Nairobi, students prepare for a driving test. Several dozen aspiring guides, about half of them on scholarships, take a one-year course to learn every aspect of guiding a safari, from driving to camp management to first aid.
A wildlife team in Kenya’s Ol Kinyei Conservancy tends to critically endangered Rüppell’s and white-backed vultures that may have fed on a poisoned hyena. Two were saved. It’s illegal, but some herders use pesticides to kill animals that prey on livestock. Other animals that eat poisoned vultures, such as jackals, also may die in a toxic chain reaction.

What happens when people need more land, fuel, and food? Forests get turned into charcoal, and animals get snared by poachers.

Kenya’s Nyakweri Forest, at one time an important birthing area for elephants, was formerly communal land: 800 square miles of indigenous woodland. But the forest has been subdivided, and Maasai have made it their home—no longer moving with their livestock as they once did, but rather settling down and sending their children to school. Forested land is of little use to cattle herders...
Francis Peenko (pointing at screen) and other Mara Conservancy rangers work with Kenyan-born Marc Goss from the Mara Elephant Project to steer a drone carrying a thermal camera to hunt for poachers. Brian Heath (at far right) is CEO of the conservancy.
On his phone much of every day, Leriro Tung’ung’wa, chairman of the Irkeepusi community, manages issues such as education, health care, grazing rights, and water supply for more than 7,000 people on the eastern edge of the Ngorongoro Crater.

This story appears in the December 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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