On his first junket to the United States in 2002, Joseph Ole Koyei, cultural ambassador for the Masai people, raised $7,000, enough to build two classrooms for a village school. So when he left his home in the grassy pastures of the Great Rift Valley again this April, this time to raise money for a new well (the women in his village haul drinking water from several miles away), he was given a hero’s send-off. Two truckloads of well-wishers, some of whom had walked for three hours just to get to the trucks, came to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi to see him off. That might have been on April 27, or maybe 28–where he comes from, they don’t keep close track of things like that.
A small minority of the half-million Masai of Kenya and Tanzania have absorbed the trappings of modernity, including cell phones and the Internet, but most of them live as their ancestors have for thousands of years, as seminomadic pastoralists for whom wealth is measured in cattle, goats, and sheep. They live on the land in tribal units, tending their livestock and defending them against predators. The women still build family huts in the traditional manner, from cow dung, grass, sticks, mud, and urine. “It doesn’t smell in Africa,” Ole Koyei says. “It really doesn’t.”
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Onstage Ole Koyei describes the rites of passage every Masai warrior goes through on the journey from childhood to manhood. He shows the audience two darkened disk-shaped scars that were carved into his upper thighs when he was about ten. Around the age of 12 he had to remove his bottom incisors with a knife, he says, opening his mouth and showing the gaps. The audience gasps. Upon reaching puberty a few years later, he underwent a ritual circumcision–unanesthetized. “While it is happening you cannot blink your eyes, not even move your eyelashes,” he explains. “You sit like you are unconscious. You are not supposed to move any part of your body or they will consider you a coward.” Following his circumcision, Ole Koyei says, he spent eight months in the bush training to be a warrior. He killed his first lion, then survived a lion attack that left claw marks on his left calf, which he shows to the audience.
Ole Koyei has been staying off and on in the home of Marnie Glaser, who volunteered to put him up in her spare bedroom after he spoke to an assembly of 80 fourth graders at Oakton Elementary School, where she works as a psychologist. After Ole Koyei’s presentation Glaser tells me about having a Masai warrior as a houseguest. Dinners, she says, have been easy to plan: “He likes beef. You can win with beef. Vegetables, there ain’t much he really likes. I’d give him a spoonful, he’d make a face.” The Masai diet is heavy on animal protein: milk, meat, and blood. The late Dr. Atkins would have approved.
The suggested donation at the Portage Park event was $3; most of the adults gave a little more on their way past the collection bottle at the front door. Though he’s only raised $2,000 on this trip so far, Ole Koyei is optimistic. He still had several fund-raising events to attend before returning to Kenya early next week. And on a nonfiscal level the voyage has already been a success for him, full of broadening experiences. Before it he’d never seen a vacuum cleaner, and had never used a corkscrew, swum in a pool, ridden on a train, heard jazz, or eaten pizza. “It’s strange to me the way people eat here,” he says. “It’s not that they eat a lot, but they eat quite often.”
