by Jo Piazza
We headed to the Naurori village by jeep first thing in the morning, fording muddy trenches filled with bored crocodiles. Giraffes peeked their heads over the orange-leafed croton bushes to inspect us. Topi, massive antelope with striking colored coats that make them look like they are wearing blue jeans and yellow socks, trotted along in a line behind us.
As we drove alongside the ridge, our guide Pius, a jolly fellow in a traditional red-checked Maasai wrap and a baseball cap, informed us he had big news. “I have just gotten a second wife,” he announced proudly as he skirted a family of elephants.
“Congratulations!” I said.
Pius, who is a Maasai, was clearly used to American attitudes toward polygamy and began to defend himself. “You know we do not take a second wife only because of the fun.” That’s what many Americans think. “It is based on need. My wife wanted it. She needed it. She is happy now. She told me, ‘Pius, I have too much work to do. Get me a cowife.’ So I did. Two is not very many. My uncle has six wives and forty-five children. We can be like the impala.” Because the Maasai have lived among the wildlife for so long, comparisons between their own lives and those of the animals pepper their speech. In this case Pius was equating himself to a male impala, which has a harem of many mates, sometimes more than twenty. He impregnates them all and guards them from other males. You often see groups of female impalas roaming the plains in a tight-knit troop with a single-horned male nudging them on from behind. That male impala always looks exhausted.
“What makes a good Maasai wife?” I asked Pius as we continued driving toward the village. He scratched his head and considered it for a second.
“Hardworking. Kind. Caring. She must be able to take care of the goats, the sheep, and the cows, find the firewood, cook the meals, build the house. They work hard, Jo. They work very, very hard. Life isn’t always easy.”
The harsh reality of Maasai life for both men and women could fill several books, and I only have one chapter here. The short and simple answer, the answer that isn’t enough, is that it’s complicated. Girls can be married off as young as eleven and circumcised even earlier. There are activists on both sides of the circumcision issue. One side criticizes it as a barbaric, cruel, and archaic practice while the other talks of preserving tribal culture and securing familial bonds. It is often the tribal women who both advocate for and perform female circumcision.
“Who the hell are you to judge these people?” I was asked by one white woman who had lived among the tribes her entire life as a rancher. “Who are you to say what they’re doing is disgusting or wrong?”
We also heard stories of prepubescent girls fleeing their sixty-year-old fiancés to escape arranged marriages. On the other hand, we asked one young Maasai girl if she minded being married to a decrepit old man four times her age, and she told us it was perfectly fine because he was too old to have sex with her. He took good care of her and bought her extra sugar at the market. Many others assured us that when a girl was married off so young, she would be raised by her husband’s mother and other wives until she was an appropriate age for sexual intercourse.
These are serious, complicated topics. Nick and I spent hours talking about the issues within the East African tribal societies, and we don’t know the answers. My heart broke for young women forced to endure pain and trauma. It’s eye-opening to see this wildly different way of life, and part of what makes the Maasai and Samburu so interesting is how they’ve managed to hold strong to their traditional culture in a rapidly changing world.
Most tribal men and women still don’t choose their spouses. Rather, marriage is arranged by the elders of the tribe, who try to maximize the economic value of the marriage and find a happy and healthy fit between the two spouses. The husband’s family pays a dowry to the bride’s family composed mainly of cows, goats, and sheep, and fathers negotiate among their close friends to seek out an advantageous exchange of cattle. The Maasai consider genetics. They want a son-in-law who is healthy and strong to protect the women and children. They make sure he has no close blood ties to their clan. The joining of a bride and groom is also the joining of two families. The fathers of daughters look for a man from a good family with good morals. They care about the morals of the entire family. A boy with a nasty uncle who steals cows will have a more difficult time finding a good wife.
When I later explained the tribal arranged marriages to my mother-in-law, Patsy, back in Milwaukee, she shrugged.
“Oh, please,” she said with a flick of her hand. “How is their arranged marriage that much different from what we do here? We send our kids to the right schools, we live in certain neighborhoods, we plan certain things, all so they’ll meet a certain kind of people. Families behave the same way all over the world.”
A week before a Maasai marriage is supposed to take place, a meeting is held between the fathers and other elders in the tribe called the aadung inkishu, which literally translates to “splitting of the cows.” The number of cows doesn’t depend on how beautiful the bride is; it’s a figure determined by the prominence of the clan and the family that the girl is from. There’s recently been a progressive evolution of the bride price, an increase based on the education of the girl. If the girl is highly educated and can make money for the family, her bride price is now often higher. The upshot of this is that there is more of an incentive to send girl children to school.
There are superstitions involved as well. The bride price is always paid with an even number of cows, because an odd number of cows in the dowry can curse the marriage. Pius paid eight cows for his first wife and ten for the second sixteen years later, due to inflation. Both girls and boys must respect their fathers’ decisions about whom to marry. Very few dare to refuse.
“Why would I refuse?” one new Maasai bride told me, horrified at my question. “My father wants what is best for me. I respect my father. I love my father. Refusing to marry the man he chose for me would be disrespectful.”
The thing that seems crazy to modern Americans is that the couple might never even meet in advance of the wedding celebration, when the groom travels to the bride’s home with the required number of animals. He picks her up, gives her father the cows, and takes her back to his village. There’s a huge wedding ceremony when the girl is brought to her new home. The women of her new village welcome her with singing, dancing, hugs, and kisses on the top of her head.
“It is a very, very special welcome that is given,” Pius explained to us. “Such a warm welcome. Everyone gives them presents—bowls, utensils, goats. The woman is given advice for how to live in her new community. You are celebrating a very new and very special love. Love gets real after marriage.”
“The more I know you, the more I love you, baby,” Nick whispered.
“See?” Pius eavesdropped. “It is true.”
The village then divides into smaller groups based on age and gender. Old men go with the old men and old women with the old women. A large bull and a large sheep will be slaughtered and roasted over a traditional fire made of cedar, olive wood, and elephant grass. The two types of wood symbolize the coming together of the two families. The bride and groom are decorated in traditional beads and covered in cowskins. The bride spends the next two nights with the women of the village, who help ease her into her new family and her new community. This whole ceremony is a process meant to marry the bride not just to her husband but to the entire community. I thought about that. In theory that was what most Western weddings are supposed to be about too. You invite your special people from different parts of your life to welcome your new spouse, to incorporate them even further into your world, bringing together your past, present, and future.
But community is one thing urban-dwelling couples from my generation have abandoned in too many ways. We isolate ourselves into smaller and smaller family units. We get married and move at the whims of our careers, often far from our own families and longtime friends. It’s rare for extended families to live in the same place. Somet
imes we forge friendships that are like family, but in our increasingly transient world they don’t always last. Nick and I hardly even know our neighbors in our building in San Francisco even though we all live under the same roof.
After our long and bumpy journey, Pius finally delivered us to the village of Naurori and into a boma, a compound of sunbaked mud huts, home to one man, Dickson Naurori, and his many wives. Using only their bare hands, the women had built those huts and the foreboding wooden fence of sharpened spikes all around them that protected the family and their cattle from roaming lions.
“Supa,” I said to the group, which Pius had taught me means “hello” in Maasai.
“Ippa,” they called back, which means “Hello back to you.”
The women introduced themselves to me, shyly at first. Long days spent toiling in the harsh African sun had carved premature lines on all of their faces. When I began asking them about love and marriage, they looked down at their hands, busy with sewing and making intricate beaded jewelry. I stood there stupidly. This was a bad idea, I thought. Who was I? A privileged white girl who had come here to ask these women personal questions about their family and their marriages. I felt like an intrusive alien standing there in my moisture-wicking safari pants from REI and my fake Fendi sunglasses.
“I just got married,” I blurted out. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to know how to be a wife.” I paused and then added: “I need help.” I glanced feebly at Pius.
He murmured a line of the Maasai tongue to them and received no response.
“No, I don’t think you said it right. Please tell them exactly what I said,” I urged him. “Use my words. Tell them I really want their help.”
He began again.
Explaining to them the reason I was here, relating to them as a woman and a new bride instead of a nosy foreigner, shifted something in the atmosphere of the boma. They looked from Pius to me and back to Pius and then began answering my questions all at once, demanding Pius keep up with what they were telling me. One of the women pulled me down to the ground. If I wanted their advice, it was clear we should be on a level playing field. I relaxed into the soft earth, narrowly dodged a bit of goat dung, and stretched my legs in front of me. I looked at the Maasai women’s smooth and hairless legs. My own had gone scraggly since I dropped my razor down a toilet that was more of a hole in the ground, and I hadn’t been able to acquire a new one in the bush. For a moment I wondered what they used to shave but decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask.
Another woman spread her blanket over my lap and poured a cup of brightly colored beads into its center. She handed me a piece of wire and encouraged me to work on making a bracelet as we talked. No moment for Maasai women is ever wasted.
Naropil was clearly the leader of this group. She was tall and slender and immaculately dressed in a yellow shuka. Her long black braids were pulled back from her face and a few lighter, caramel braids framed her exquisite cheekbones. Dozens of strings of beads hung from her neck and her waist. I asked her how long she had been married.
“I am the third wife,” she responded.
Maasai women measure a marriage not in years but in the total number of wives their husband has married and where they fit into that hierarchy. It makes sense in a culture that doesn’t keep track of time the way we do. Maasai live very much in the present, worrying little about what will happen following the day’s sundown. They don’t keep track of birthdays and many of them can’t tell you how old they are. A new wife lives with one of the older wives in the same house until she builds her own house within the compound. Naropil pointed across the circle of women at a much older woman whose face was shriveled like a raisin left too long to dry, her mouth bare of teeth. “That’s my first wife. I love her so much. I love all my cowives so much. We need each other. We are a team. We do the work together.”
In our marriage, Nick and I were the team. Here, it was the women who worked together to accomplish their goals—to keep their lives sane.
The sun was going down and the boma, which had no electricity, was getting dark. Cows wandered in, single file, from their day out to pasture.
A woman named Nekiswa noticed me staring at her earlobe. It had a hole in it the size of a water chestnut, and rings of beads encircled the sagging flesh. She grabbed my hand and pulled it to her ear to let me know I could look at it and touch it. Then she pushed my own hair behind my ear and looked sad to discover only one empty hole. I wanted to make her smile again, so I raised my shirt up a little to show the women that I had my belly button pierced. All of the women gasped in unison and shook their heads. It was clear they thought my belly button ring was gross.
Nekiswa was the youngest of five wives, and she couldn’t stop telling me how much she loved her cowives and how much she owes each of them for her livelihood. “I owe them my life. My life!” she insisted. “They taught me what makes my husband happy, what annoys him, what he needs, what food to make, how to make him proud, how to take care of the property. Everything I know about being a good wife I know from our first cowife. I respect her. I love her. I am like her daughter.”
I’d long wished that Nick came with an instruction manual penned by all of his ex-girlfriends. Wouldn’t it be nice to receive all the gifts on your wedding registry along with a finely annotated guide to your husband? He’ll eat garbanzo beans, but not pinto. He prefers the missionary position and hates it when you say the word “fuck.” Sometimes he drinks directly out of the faucet and needs to be reminded not to do this in front of guests. He gives good shoulder rubs but snores if you let him sleep on his back.
“The older women act like guides. Like helpers? I don’t know how to say it in English,” Pius said.
“Mentors?” I asked.
“Yes! Mentals!” Pius went on to explain that all of the older women and men in the tribe acted as relationship mentors for the younger ones.
The Western transition away from tribal culture has caused us a few great losses—one of them is the concept of true community. Without community we turn to the economy to replace what we’ve lost by hiring therapists, nannies, doulas, reiki healers, and housekeepers. But it’s hard to hire a mentor, to find women and men who’ve been there before us and are willing to honestly counsel us about what marriage really has in store.
Naropil beckoned me inside one of the houses. We took a seat on the bed, the only place to sit, just a raised platform covered in a thin layer of cowhide. The children’s bed was similar and about an arm’s length away, separated only by the cooking fire. The small details inside the house struck me: how the pots were arranged by size, how the sheets were folded into fours.
“How often does your husband sleep here?” I asked her, hoping that it wasn’t too personal a question.
“It depends. He splits his time between the different wives and houses,” she said with a simple shrug of her shoulders, as if this were an issue of little consequence. The division of labor isn’t just physical. They divide the emotional labor of a marriage too. More wives means more than one person to listen to the husband complain, brag, or repeat the same story over and over. “It’s nice to have a break,” Naropil said. Maybe that was how I should think about Nick’s exes, as taking on some of my emotional labor.
But in the morning, Naropil told me, when everyone wakes up, it doesn’t matter who slept in what house. All of a sudden, the chores are divided evenly among the women. One will start the fire while the other prepares breakfast and another watches the children. There’s always someone to talk to, to bitch to, to help you braid your hair.
Pius motioned to me that it was time to go, and I waved my hand to put him off. I was finally being accepted into this complicated community of women, and it felt nice.
“Do you want to stay?” Naropil asked me. “You can be one of our cowives.”
I thought about it.
Despite their many hardships, I began to envy what these women did have—their strong kinship with the other w
omen.
Research shows that having strong friendships and strong community ties keeps a marriage together. A 1999 study by Chalandra M. Bryant and Rand D. Conger of Iowa State University found that having a strong social support network outside of the marriage predicted marital success.
Having strong friendships can also make you healthier. An Australian study conducted over ten years among an elderly population found that those with a large group of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study’s duration. And a 2006 study of three thousand nurses with breast cancer found that women without a strong group of close friends were four times as likely to succumb to the disease than those with a formidable network of confidantes. In those cases having a strong community was literally the difference between life and death.
Nick has an incredible group of friends in San Francisco that he’s been close with for twenty years. It’s one of the things I love about him, the fact that he’s managed to stay so connected to so many people for so long. We’re similar in that way. I’ve also had a lot of the same friends for almost twenty years. But the truth was I felt like I’d left my own village behind when I left the East Coast. When you first leave a place, moving to a new city as I had, you kid yourself that you’ll be back all the time. It had been almost nine months since I’d spent a night in New York City.
Once I settled into everyday life in my adopted city, I began to feel something I’d never felt before. I was lonely. When I left my mom and dad at eighteen to go to college, I was thrust into the robust community that freshman year instantly affords you via orientation, midnight breakfasts, communal coed bathrooms, and keg parties. It’s easy to make friends when you all live on the same floor, drink too much cheap vodka, and have no responsibilities.
Postcollege all my friends migrated, lemminglike, to New York, and my circle, my community, the people cheering for my well-being, continued unbroken for the next twelve years. I left all of that behind when I moved to San Francisco.
