A Maasai Ceremony Through the Lens of Milk

15th Novembre 2024

Angela Kronenburg García 

Tanzania is one of the study countries of the Food Communities (FOCE) project with a focus on Maasai pastoralists. However, because the land of the Maasai extends across the border into Kenya, we have decided to look at Maasai food dynamics in Kenya as well.

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending a Maasai ceremony in southern Kenya. The ceremony took place in Loita, an area located in the highlands west of the Great Rift Valley, next to the international boundary with Tanzania. Loita is home to a sub-group of the larger Maasai community called the Loita Maasai. This is a place that I know well, having conducted research there for the past two decades. 

The ceremony marked the inauguration of the new Ilaiser clan chief of the Loita Maasai in Kenya. It was attended by over 3000 people, including local politicians, the media and a delegation of Loita Maasai from Tanzania. Although I was there as a friend, and having recently joined the FOCE team, I couldn’t help looking through the lens of “food” at what was happening around me. Here are some observations and thoughts on Loita Maasai food practices, with a special focus on milk.

First, I tasted that the tea was different. I usually enjoy “Maasai tea”, served in enamel cups, and cooked on firewood with river water, tea leaves, fresh milk (from cow, goat or sheep), and generous amounts of sugar. It keeps you going for hours. But this tea was bland, with no flavour; it was “thin”. The plastic cups in which it was served for sure played a role, but I realized that it was primarily the milk that my taste buds had detected as different.

Large ceremonies like this usually happen in the rainy season when there is plenty of milk to feed everyone. This ceremony, however, was timed to fit the schedule of the governor of Narok County, who was only available on that particular day in October.1 October is also one of the toughest months of the long dry season, when livestock are at their weakest (water and grass are hard to get), and hardly produce any milk. This is the time when you are usually given turungi (tea without milk – a loanword from Swahili) as a visitor. But not during ceremonies; at ceremonies you should drink either fresh milk, kule naaoto (fermented milk) or milky tea – you have to be given something from the cow. It was my first time to attend a Maasai ceremony where the milk used to cook tea was bought at the shops.

Milk was present in the ceremony in another way. I missed it, but I saw it on a video uploaded on the WhatsApp group that had been formed in the run-up to the ceremony. The wife of the new clan chief and the wife of his younger brother blessed the heifer that was given to the clan chief as it entered the cattle enclosure by sprinkling milk from a calabash covered with a bundle of grass. This was fresh milk that had been milked in the early morning by the wife of the clan chief (women are the ones in charge of milking the livestock). I didn’t ask what the significance of milk was in this context, but in an old article about Maasai food symbolism that describes exactly the same blessing, I read that milk symbolizes the relationship between Maasai and cattle (milk is grass transformed by cattle), and hence their identity as pastoralists (Århem 1989). I wonder if the meaning of milk has remained the same given the fact that most Maasai now also practice agriculture, and have effectively become agro-pastoralists. This and other ruminations have inspired my colleagues and me to study milk and change in Maasai society. What are the changes in milk use, milk products, milk symbolism, milk tastes, milk-sharing practices, etc., and what do these milk changes say about broader changes and challenges faced by the Maasai? In short, what can milk tell us about changes and challenges in Maasai society?   

1 What this says about the relationship between the state and the Loita Maasai is a topic beyond the scope of this post, but see Kronenburg García (2015).

References

Århem, K. (1989) Maasai food symbolism: The cultural connotations of milk, meat, and blood in the pastoral Maasai diet. Anthropos 84: 1-23.

Kronenburg García, A. (2015) Contesting Control: Land and Forest in the Struggle for Loita Maasai Self-government in Kenya. African Studies Collection, vol. 58. Leiden: African Studies Centre.