The boma

Jonathan and his mother at the family boma.

MESERANI, Tanzania – There was no jumping ceremony when we arrived at Jonathan’s village. That’s reserved for weddings and, nowadays, tourists.

His brother greeted us wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt. The family boma, or compound, is still made up of mud and dung-walled houses, but drought and overgrazing means thatch is hard to come by, so a new house for Jonathan’s mother has a tin roof. It radiates heat in the afternoon swelter.

Jonathan, carries a traditional dagger on one hip and an oft-used cell phone on the other, both of which lie beneath the flowing red robes that are the mark of a Maasai warrior. Fluent in English and Swahili, as well as the Maasai language, he works a 9 to 5 job as a museum guide but goes home to a village with no running water or electricity (he’s thinking of getting some solar panels). He must spear the occasional hyena to protect his livestock. Jonathan’s father had three wives, but Jonathan, a born-again Christian, says his current wife will be his one and only.

He is a Maasai warrior with one tire-tread sandal in tradition and another in the modern world.

Just 25, he remembers when lions used to roam the land around his village, about 25 km from the city of Arusha, basecamp for safaris into the Serengetti. Now most of the wild animals have been moved into the National Parks. When he was a child the land used to be mainly Maasai territory and they had ample land to graze their livestock and material to build their homes. They also had little access to education and practiced female circumcision, a ritual Jonathan says has largely died out (it’s outlawed in Tanzania).

Despite his modern beliefs and gadgets, his education and desire to continue his education to lead safaris and tours, he pines for the old days.

“Some people think it’s good (now) because there’s more education. But the people now don’t have a lot of cows because there’s no place to feed them.”

I met Jonathan in the village of Meserani, where he took Connie and I on a tour of a small Maasai museum. We chatted afterwards and I asked him if I could come with him to visit his boma – not as a tour, just to meet his family.

We walked an uneven dirt track in the midst of the Rift Valley surrounded by sweeping scrub-land and the freestanding, rolling eruptions of earth that speak to the area’s volcanic history, all in the shadow of 15,000-foot Mt. Meru.

A circular fence of cactus-like plants surrounds Jonathan’s boma, a series of round huts and small corrals of thorny plants. Cattle have traditionally been the lifeblood, quite literally of the Maasai, who drink cow’s blood as a staple of their diet (Jonathan says his religious beliefs now prevent him from the practice). But the days of free roaming herds are coming to an end, with non-Maasai moving in over the past twenty years and crowding out the pastureland, dwindling the herds.

“The Swahili people don’t have cattle and get mad when Maasai cows eat their trees.”

The outside world has crept into the boma, too. Pages from old Cosmopolitans and Vogues adorn the walls of Jonathan’s brother’s hut.

Over the course of several days, we got to know Jonathan well. He’s quick-witted, generous, and resourceful (saved my ass when I got pickpocketed, but that’s another post). On the day we left he said goodbye and told us that next time we come to Tanzania, we should set up our tent in his boma. By the  time we return, I hope someday soon, he will be a father – his wife is due to give birth to their first child in August. He hopes his child treads the same tricky path he is taking: one of education and worldliness, but contained in the colorful robes and traditions that remind him where he comes from.