by Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna
“This time of day?”
I said, “Oh, yes, yes, she wants the sugar right away, and she told me to run.”
He looked at me and said, “Well, I was just going to your house, so I will ask her.”
“Fine,” I said, and I walked past him, but as soon as he couldn’t see me anymore, I left the path and cut through the woods as fast as I could to get to my mother’s hut before he did. I didn’t care if elephants or rhinos killed me. I was more scared of him than of any wild animal.
When I got home, I told my mother the truth, the whole story—“Mom, I made a mistake today. I left my cows with the other kids, and the pinching man caught me. Mom, I wanted to play with my friend so much. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. I really had to do something with him. Nothing bad was going to happen.”
My mom was shocked. “You left our cows with someone else? What kind of a son are you?”
“Please, Mom. Only protect me today. I will never do it again. This is the only time I’ll ask you to protect me from the pinching man. Please, Mom. When he comes, just tell him you sent me to get sugar.”
“Go!” she said, and I took off to look after my cows.
Sure enough, a little while later, the pinching man showed up at our hut. “Hey, Nkaririe Lekuton, are you home?” he called.
“Yes.”
“Can I have some tea?”
“Yes, I am just cooking some. Come in and rest.”
While sipping his tea, he said, “Oh, by the way, I just saw your son on the path leaving the village.”
“Oh, yes, I sent him to the next village for sugar.”
My mom loves me so much. She supported me. That was it, but if I hadn’t told my mom, I would have been in trouble twice—with the pinching man and with her.
But I was an active boy, and my mom didn’t always protect me. One time I got a whipping from a warrior right outside our hut, and my mom did nothing to interfere. That day, when my friends and I were watching our little cows, I pretended to be one of the village warriors. A little boy would often pretend to be a warrior, someone he admired and wanted to be like, but this was different. I was imitating this particular warrior to make fun of him. I was saying, “Who’s this? Who’s the ugly warrior? See how he struts?” The kids loved it. They were laughing and laughing, so I did it the whole day. But that night one of the kids told the warrior what I had done. I had been disrespectful of an elder, and that is very bad in our society.
At that time I loved doing things for older people. I liked running to do someone a favor, to get some sugar or tea, or to carry a message. Run, run, I loved to run. When that warrior came to our hut that night and asked for me, that’s what I thought he wanted.
“Ngoto Lemasolai, Lemasolai’s mother,” he called.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“Where is Lemasolai today?”
“I’m here,” I yelled. I knew his voice and figured he wanted me to go to the next village or hut to get some tobacco for him or something like that.
“Come,” he said, “I need to send you.” So I came out of the hut quickly, and just as I did, he grabbed me. Before coming to our hut he had gone into the forest and cut a long, thin branch. It was like a whip. As soon as he grabbed me, he took the stick and cut the air with it just like a sword. Swoosh.
When I heard that sound, I thought, “Oh my!” I did not know if I was going to die or what.
“So, you have been making fun of me all day?”
“No, no, not me,” I said.
“Tell me! What did you say! Tell me everything!”
Then he took that stick and, Phoom! Phoom! Phoom! He whacked me on my knees, my thighs, my calves, where it would leave no marks. Then he said, “Go.” I took off running, and I went to look for my friends. Who could possibly have told on me? We suspected one of the girls we had played with that day. We decided that if she didn’t come back the next day with her little cows, she was the one who had told on me. She did not come back for a week.
My mom heard that warrior whip me, but she never said a thing about it. That is part of the discipline, part of the culture. We don’t have many disrespectful kids in our villages. I can vouch for that.
Chapter 5
School
I love my age-mates,
Our warriorhood and brotherhood.
We are to be feared
By men and animals.
THE GOVERNMENT OF KENYA had issued a law that every nomadic family must send one child to school, whether they liked it or not. My father did not like it. He didn’t have any use for school—he wanted us home, helping to raise the cattle. A child at school was one fewer child to work. My father was also very traditional. He wanted us to grow up in our own culture, among our own people. But this was a law. The authorities came and said, “You must send a boy to school. Choose.” No one sent their girls to school, only boys. My father didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to give Ngoliong away. A mother’s oldest child always stays at home; he is an important member of the family. And my father could not send me; I was too young. So he was left with no choice but to send my second brother, Lmatarion.
Because the village moved around, sometimes it was close to the school and sometimes it was far away. At that time, it was close—I’d say about a mile away. The school was run by American missionaries. They taught reading and writing and arithmetic; they also taught Christianity and other Western ways of thinking. Lmatarion, who was about 11 years old, was placed in the first grade.
Right from the beginning, he couldn’t stand it. He went to school for one day, and on the second day he ran away with a group of other boys. They all went in different directions. Lmatarion hid in a hyena’s hole. He later said, “I’d rather be eaten by hyenas than go to school,” but fortunately the hyenas had moved out. He stayed in the hole for three days. Finally, the villagers and police found him and brought him home. The police said to my father, “Well, you’re not off the hook, you still have to send one.”
I’d been paying attention to what was going on, and I said, “I’m here!”
“How old are you?” they asked.
“Eight.” Actually, I was only about six. You had to be eight to go to school, but I was very quick talking, and there was no way for the police to know how old I was because we didn’t have birth certificates or any other document that recorded when I was born.
The way the government people reckoned a child’s age was to ask him to lift his arm, reach over the top of his head, and touch his opposite ear. A small child can’t do that: His arms are too short. So they asked me, “Touch!” and I stretched, put everything into it, and just about reached—or at least got close enough to satisfy the police. It solved a problem for them and for my father and my brothers.
I wanted to go to school. At that time, I was very heavy and the kids picked on me. I was tired of it and eager for any change. So the next day, off I went. When I got there, the American woman who ran the school looked at me and asked, “How old are you?”
I said, “Eight.”
She said, “Touch!” and again I reached, really put everything into it. I convinced her, too. Then she gave me a piece of candy. I’d never had candy before. It was so sweet, so good. From then on, she gave me a candy every day. Sometimes I went to her door very early in the morning and waited for the candy. It was like magic. I stayed and never left.
I WAS PUT right into first grade. The school was very simple. There were no chairs, no desks. The teacher had a blackboard, and we sat on the ground. The school day was long, starting at seven in the morning and running until four or five in the afternoon.
We learned the same things in school that children learn all over the world—reading, writing, arithmetic. At first we didn’t have paper and pencil, so we learned to write with a stick in the dirt floor of the school.
Another thing we learned was the Bible. I got to know the Old and New Testaments very well, and I learned a lot of Christian values from the miss
ionaries at that school. I still follow those values.
School was so different from life in the village and the cattle camp. The first thing we were told when we arrived was to take off our traditional clothes—our nanga and beads. The missionaries supplied us with uniforms instead: shorts, a shirt, shoes, sometimes a jacket. And I was baptized at the school, which is how I got the name Joseph. But when I went home during the holidays, I changed back into my traditional dress, put on my beads, painted my body. For one thing, the other kids would have teased me if I hadn’t. But even at that age, I didn’t want to be set too far apart from my culture. I wanted to learn, but I wanted to remain part of the tradition I’d grown up in.
School was tough. The teachers expected a lot from you. They expected you to pay attention and work hard, and to sit still and not cause trouble. It didn’t help that I was overweight. The kids at school were just as bad as the village kids. They called me “Kimbo,” which is the name of a brand of cooking oil sold in East Africa. It was like being called “Crisco” in the United States. When kids picked on me, I fought back, so I was always in trouble.
A part of every school day was set aside for punishing troublemakers, and I was often one of them. The teacher would call us up in front of the whole school: “Noisemakers, here! Now!” They used corporal punishment—they beat us on the behind with a stick. It was painful, but it didn’t stop me. Instead, I found an old pair of shorts and started wearing two pairs, one inside the other. Eventually, I was called up in front of the school again over something I’d done, but this time when the stick came down, I didn’t yell, I didn’t make a sound. One, two—nothing. I was being brave, showing off in front of the other kids. Three, four—not a sound! But the spare shorts I was wearing were old and dirty, and by this time dust was flying everywhere.
“How many shorts do you have on?” the teacher asked.
“One.”
Five, six—the stick came down again.
“How many shorts?”
“Two, sir!”
“Go and take one off!”
So I went to the bathroom and took one pair off, and I was punished pretty severely afterward. But I didn’t give up. The next time, I wore two pairs of shorts, and I put a piece of cardboard in between them. But when you hit a piece of cardboard with a stick it makes a loud noise, and sure enough when I was called up to be punished—Smack! You could have heard the sound a half mile away! Of course the teacher knew right away what I had done. But instead of being angry, he laughed.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “This is your lucky day. Go and remove the cardboard, but be good in the future.” So that time I got off without a beating.
EVENTUALLY I LEARNED how to deal with the bullies who were always getting me in trouble. There was one in particular: Addison. He was my height, but very strong. He used to bully everybody, even kids who were older and bigger. Because of my weight and my big mass of curly hair that the kids made fun of, and because I was younger than the others, I was an easy target for Addison. He made me carry his bags for him. He took my food at mealtimes. But the last straw for me came at the end of the year. During the last week of school, prizes were given to the top students. Even though I was often in trouble, I liked the schoolwork and was good at it, so at the end-of-year assembly there I was: Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, receiving a prize for being one of the best in the class. The prize was a pair of good tennis shoes from America.
Addison was waiting for me. On the way out of the assembly, he took the shoes.
“Fine,” I said. “Take the prize. Just take it.” I was furious. “But leave me alone.”
“Don’t you tell anyone,” said Addison. “If you tell Mama”—Mama was the American headmistress—“if you tell Mama, you’ll pay the price. We’re going home in a few days. I’ll make you carry my bags, and I’ll make it harder for you by making you carry a log, too.”
I hadn’t complained to a teacher about Addison all year, but this time was different. I went to Mama, and she must have believed me, because Addison got punished, and I got the shoes back.
But that wasn’t the end of it. He didn’t do anything for a couple of days. Then on the last day, when everybody was leaving, Addison took the shoes again. “You know what, Joseph? I’m ready for a fight. One o’clock, down by the river.” And he announced it to the whole school, so there was really no way out for me.
When I got there, kids were gathered in a circle: big kids—Addison’s friends—on one side, and little kids—the kids Addison bullied—on the other. Addison was sure he was going to beat me up.
“Look at this stupid boy,” he was saying. “Look how fat he is. Look at that big Afro. You think he can fight me?”
I was so mad, I didn’t wait. I just dove at his legs. He wasn’t ready. He was standing off guard, bragging, daring me to come toward him, and—bang! He hit the ground, headfirst. As soon as he landed, I jumped on top of him and started pounding him. I guess my weight helped. And that was it: fight over. As soon as I let him go, Addison took off. He had learned to swallow some of his own medicine, and I was working toward being a warrior.
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS the nomads have with school is that we move our villages and the cattle, but the school stays in one place. That means leaving the children behind. The first year, my village was near the school, and I was able to go home easily. In my second year, the missionaries built a dormitory and started a boarding school. My family could move wherever they wanted to, and I could stay in school.
My mom used to visit sometimes. She’d bring me milk. The food at school wasn’t what I was used to, and there wasn’t much of it. We ate mostly corn and beans—yellow corn, from America. Once I counted mine: There were 75 pieces of corn and 15 beans—so little it barely covered the plate. I didn’t complain—I was grateful for the school and the missionaries—but I was a nomadic kid, raised on milk. So whenever my family was nearby, my mother would bring me some milk. Sometimes she’d walk 10 or 20 miles with it.
I went to that school through the seventh grade. Every time school closed for the vacation, I had to find my way home. That was one of the hardest things: The village might be 5 miles away, or it might be 50. Sometimes I wouldn’t know exactly where my family was. I had to search for them. So I’d set out with some other boys from my area. Sometimes the school car would take us to a point on the road as close as it could to where we were going. Then we’d walk. Usually, there would be plenty of people along the way, in villages and cattle camps. We could spend the night with any family. If we didn’t encounter any people, we’d find a cave or sleep in a tree. The longest it took me to find my own family was about two weeks.
I’ll tell you a story about a journey home when I was about ten. At that time, our village was really far away from the school, near the northern border of Kenya. About 80 of us boarded a truck. Most of the students were from other clans, very few from my village. The truck took us to a place called Nolongoi. It’s not even a place, really. It’s just a big acacia tree by the road. The truck stopped, and we all got out. And home was still 40 miles ahead.
With us were some older boys. They were almost in their 20s but were going to school late because their fathers were forced to send someone. Those boys were our leaders. And their families were even farther away than mine. First we would walk to my village, and then they would continue on to theirs—another 25 miles or so. And it was raining, so we were all pretty miserable.
My suitcase was a plastic garbage bag. I had been given a real suitcase by the missionary women in school, but it had broken apart in the rain one day. So now I carried a plastic bag with the few clothes I had in it.
So we started walking. The terrain was flat with acacia trees, small bushes, and a few rocks that increased as we went farther into the lowlands. The ground was muddy from all the rain, and the mist made it hard to see where we were going. We were hungry—so hungry. And then I was afraid, because all around us as we walked along were fresh elephant and buffalo tracks.<
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All of a sudden, the older boys who were leading called, “Shh! Stop! Everybody, get down!” So we all crouched down. There in front of us was a large herd of elephants—dozens. Something had alarmed them. They were scared and running in our direction. One of the older guys, Mogole, picked me up and put me on his back. He was two classes ahead of me, and big—probably six feet tall. When my mom brought milk to the school for me, she always brought some for him as well. He had become a good friend of mine. Someone in our group whistled. Elephants hate a whistle, and they shifted direction when they heard it. Then we got out of there.
We all ran and hid in a cave because there was more to worry about than the elephants. From the cave we could see back the way we’d come—could watch to see what had startled those elephants. Sure enough, we soon spotted two men with guns and tattered clothes. Shiftas. They were coming in our direction.
There are a lot of shiftas in Kenya—poachers who kill wild animals for money. As soon as we saw them, we knew we had to get away. Poaching is a serious crime, and shiftas are dangerous if they think someone has seen them at work. Luckily, the older guys figured out a way to go around the hill. It was probably five miles out of our way, but we managed to escape. Even then everyone was uneasy. Some boys kept insisting they could see people ahead of us, but it always turned out to be tree stumps they were seeing.
We finally reached home at six or seven in the evening. It was about 40 miles, but we had covered it in about 12 hours because we were running most of the time. I took the older boys to my mother’s hut, because we have a lot of cattle and a lot of milk. They drank and rested, and the next morning they left for their own village.
The next day we heard that the shiftas had found our tracks and followed us right to the edge of the village. That’s just one of the many dangers I encountered when I went to school.
