Lies, damned lies and Africans

The Mng'ati, the Maasai and a missing cow

At first sight, it's hard for an outsider to tell the difference between a Maasai manyatta, or enclosure, and a Mngati one. They're both surrounded by impenetrable fences of wood and thorn (to keep their cattle in and predators out). Their huts are built of the same wood, mud, cow dung and straw, choked with smoke and with windows so small you can barely fit a fist through them. And their occupants pursue similar traditional lifestyles, follow similar traditional customs and dress in similar traditional clothing - predominantly red, or red-checked, wrap-around cotton blankets that serve to protect against sun, wind or rain in equal measure. (In fact, the red blankets date only from the 1960s, before which both tribes used animal skins, but they are now so ubiquitous that it's rare to see anyone without one.)

Both tribes are pastoralists, moving from place from to place according to the seasonal rains and the availability of good grazing. For both of them, their cattle constitute the alpha and omega of their existence, culturally as well as economically.

Cattle provide the milk, blood and meat that remain the staples of their diets, despite every outside effort to persuade them of the benefits of fruit and vegetables. They provide the dowries for marriage in a world in which polygamy is still very much a norm. They are the measure of a man's status in a society that remains stubbornly, proudly, rooted in its traditional past.

'We could never leave our meat,' as one Maasai expressed it in the best English he could muster, when I asked him why, despite earning a good living from the tourist herds that now also populate the big wildlife parks of the Maasai's east African heartland, he still lived in the primitive surroundings of the mud huts where he grew up.

It should come as no surprise, then, even to an outsider, that when a member of one tribe steals a cow from a member of another, all hell can break loose. And it is at times like this that even an outsider can appreciate how little those apparent similarities of customs and lifestyle can mean when it comes to the crunch.

The first hint that I was witnessing something more than the usual daily pageant of life among the pastoralists of northern Tanzania was the sight in the distance of flashes of red moving quickly across the landscape. Here was one red-blanketed figure running quickly through the bush. There were three or four or others striding swiftly through the heat haze. In the far distance, their feet throwing up clouds of dust and startling the zebra as they ran, was yet another group, spears and sticks in hand. All were converging on the same location.

These were Maasai, gathering in a large circle about a kilometre north of the Mngati village where I stood. But also arriving, from nearby settlements in their tribal heartlands to the south and around Lake Manyara to the west, were groups of Mngati men.

Suddenly it became easy to tell the two groups apart. The young Maasai warriors, with their long hennaed hair, their hugely pierced ears and elaborate jewellery; the Mngati, with their bows and arrows, as well as their spears, and their preference for wearing shorts alongside their blankets. Ominously, while the Maasai rarely travel anywhere without the full personal complement of spear, hardwood stick and machete or large knife, the Mngati rarely take their weapons away from their homesteads. Since every Mngati was armed, something serious was going on.

The 'something serious' turned out to be a dispute over the theft of a Mngati cow by a Maasai tribesman. The alleged thief had been caught and tied to a tree, although the cow had not been retrieved. The Tanzanian police had been alerted and two of them had turned up with the unenviable task of trying to intervene in a row that had all the potential to be settled by a tribal war.

Until very recently it almost certainly would have been settled by some level of violence. The Maasai's belief that God gave them the right to all the cattle on the face of the earth doesn't lend itself to mediation or compromise. And their warlike reputation (the words 'Maasai' and 'warrior' are used together so unsparingly that they seem to be etymologically conjoined at the hip) may be much exaggerated today. But it is not based solely on their predilection for carrying their weapons with them wherever they go.

The Maasai tribal heartlands in northern Tanzania and Kenya were largely taken by force when the Maasai first moved into the region from the north two or more centuries ago. The British gave a further stir to this turbulent brew with some land seizures and compulsory population movements of their own. Wherever two tribes have met, and among the different Maasai clans in the absence of an external enemy, cattle raiding and intermittent conflict have been a frequent feature of life. So much so, indeed, that there is barely a traditional settlement among the Chagga people, who were driven by Maasai incursions to seek refuge on the heavily-forested slopes of Kilimanjaro, that does not have a system of protective tunnels and hiding places dug into the volcanic tufa beneath its huts. As for the Mngati people, numbered only in the several thousands compared with the Maasai's several millions, they have managed to cling onto only much-reduced grazing grounds around the Tarangire and Manyara national parks of northern Tanzania.

The Maasai, though, have been victims of this inter-tribal conflict too. A director of one Tanzanian safari company told me how his grandfather had become a rich man in the 1950s as a result of killing a Maasai. A member of the Sukuma tribe, he returned to his village near Lake Victoria with the head and testicles of his victim as proof of his valour. He was welcomed home as a hero; the murder of a Maasai entitled him to claim a gift of his choice - usually a head of cattle - from every family in the village.

Cattle raids and sporadic conflicts continue today. In the week of my visit to the Mngati, an armed gang had killed eight villagers and stolen 250 cattle in a raid across the border in Kenya. There, the proliferation of firearms as a result of civil wars to the north in Somalia and Sudan, and of tribalist Kenyan government policies during the 1990s, has added a new dimension to traditional conflicts.

But in Tanzania, at least, such violence is rare - and almost unheard of in the tourist areas, which the Mngati lands adjoin. In the dispute over the stolen cow, the Mngati - reluctantly, after much persuasion, and with a nervous eye on the sheer number of Maasai warriors gathering on the edge of their territory - were eventually persuaded to hand over their captive to the police. The Maasai - with equal reluctance and after long deliberation, during which older, wiser heads tried to persuade younger ones that one cow and one man might not be worth going to war over - agreed to let the police take him.

The cow had not been retrieved by the time I had to leave, but the warriors who had gathered seemed to be gradually dispersing. 'They knew you were here,' I was told later by one of my Mngati hosts. 'No one wants to fight when there are guests in the village.' Nor when they are so massively outnumbered, I might have remarked, but the young bloods of the Mngati would probably have gone to war just to prove me wrong.