News Article Release
Visiting Africa: One Midshipman’s Perspective
July 3, 2012
By Midshipman 1st Class Kyle Hatcher
If you’re visiting Africa and hear someone say “Mambo,” respond with “Poa kama ndizi.” That means “cool like a banana” and is one of the more colorful responses to the Kiswahili greeting “mambo” which means “how you are doing?”
This is just one of the many cultural facets picked up by a group of Naval Academy midshipman on a recent Language, Regional Expertise, and Culture trip which provided a treasure trove of experiences unavailable outside Tanzania. Our experiences included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, two encounters with two separate chapters of the Maasai tribe, and a visit with the famous but reclusive African Bushmen.
It’s difficult to spend time in Tanzania without seeing a Maasai warrior. A Maasai warrior is distinguishable in a crowd by his walking stick and striking red robe. The warriors carry a traditional armament consisting of a ceremonial ebony club and a series of blades which, in the modern era, are more a matter of tradition than practicality.
Despite the high visibility of the Maasai warriors, there are those tribes that are so remote, it requires a combination of driving and hiking to reach them. Departing from Arusha in a bus, our group drove for several hours on roads, dirt paths and uneven terrain before disembarking and hiking over broken ground. We took this much trouble to witness a very important coming-of-age ritual one of the tribes invited us to.
When we got there, the tribe's reaction was immediate. Children who had been watching a group of their elders dancing around the soon-to-be Maasai warriors - known as Loyoke until their trials are completed - turned and stared. Many of the tribe had never seen a Caucasian before, and a few of them touched our skin to see if we had tinted it in some way. One member of our group had brought a translucent water bottle with him, and some of the younger members of that particular Maasai tribe had never seen such a thing before.
Like many other members of Tanzania who live outside the city, they had also never tried American candy. Our group made it a point to keep a small amount of sweets on hand to hand out to curious children circling our trucks.
The ceremony was a Maasai rite of passage for all young men in the tribe: a ritual circumcision. Every seven years, the young Maasai of a village ages 18-25 must undergo a ritual in which they are deprived of sleep, food, and water for 24 hours leading up to the actual circumcision itself. After the rite is completed, the young Maasai, no longer a loyoke, are allowed to clothe themselves in black robes and apply striking skull-white face paint in order to signify that they are in recovery, and have completed the first phase of their transformation from boys to warriors. During this recovery phase, which lasts several months, the young Maasai are known as moran, and are allowed to rest and recover before they are considered sufficiently healed and able to undertake the next phase in their rite of passage, which will allow them to wear the famous red robes and earn the title of warrior.
The Maasai warrior plays an important role in his community, not the least of which is the duty to take up arms and protect his village and cattle whenever either is threatened. This is no petty task, as the Maasai do not farm in any great capacity, and they cannot hunt since their cultural guidelines stipulate that no Maasai may eat the meat of a wild animal. They are essentially a culture of ranchers and warriors following a rigid code, not terribly unlike the traditional image of cowboys in the Old West. Their primary source of income and food derives from the raising of cows, sheep, and goats, with the most plentiful and important of the three being the cows themselves.
The Maasai are a flourishing people, and can be found all across Tanzania, including some areas which are legally exclusively their own. Because the Maasai are not allowed to eat the meat of a wild animal, they can be counted on to leave those wild animals alone - except in the defense of their cattle - and can also be relied upon to not greatly alter the landscape of a given region since they have little need to farm. Because of this particular arrangement, the Maasai are the only group that have been given the right to raise cattle and live in the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area.
Another interesting fact which derives from the Maasai’s strict adherence to their culture is the fact they retain their own language which is entirely different from Kiswahili. This complicated matters slightly when trying to communicate, since this particular Maasai tribe had relatively few English interpreters. Despite this, it remained relatively easy to communicate with some of the very simple Kiswahili we picked up prior to the visit, since many Maasai speak at least a little of Tanzania’s national language.
Although this branch of the Maasai tribe was secluded from the rest of Tanzania, there are those which live just outside the borders of Arusha and have much higher visibility and experience with tourists like ourselves. On a visit to one of these tribes, we were given a traditional greeting with dancing and singing and were shown around their village. We saw their living quarters, a small market place, and a rather minimal structure which served as a primary school for the children of the village. While touring this school, our group leader noticed a pair of rectangular constructions which looked almost like soccer goals. An impromptu soccer match was organized (which the home team won.)
After the Maasai, the midshipman group visited the African Bushmen, specifically the Hisabi tribe. The Hisabi people live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years. Their cultural history consists entirely of an oral tradition, and each Hisabi has an arsenal of highly lethal hunting skills passed down from prehistory. Because each tribe of Bushmen speaks their own language, a highly specialized interpreter who was able to speak both English and Hisabi was brought along to aid communication.
Hisabi is what is known as a click language, and many of the simpler words exclude the vocal chords entirely. Instead clicks, whistles and sibilant hisses comprise many of the syllables. When our group was invited to go hunting with the Hisabi, we were given a true test of communication since neither group could understand one another verbally. Since our interpreter couldn’t possibly be on all edges of the hunting formation at all times, much of our communication was simple pointing or gestures. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this is the fact that our inability to communicate verbally didn’t seem to inhibit the hunting group at all. Within minutes, the combined group had managed to work out a system of gestures and could communicate with little trouble.
All in all, the trip to Tanzania met and exceeded all of its objectives. Within a period of 18 days, a group of 12 Americans were exposed to a more varied palette of cultures than most people will experience in a lifetime. Our trip, which began with the ascent to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, included game drives through Africa and perhaps most importantly provided a chance for interaction between cultures that might otherwise never meet.
