The Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa Book

Chapter Four : Female and Male in Maasai Life:

Aging and Fertility

Any visitor to a Maasai homestead cannot fail to notice the conspicuous presence of women within the thorn bush fence enclosing the homestead (enkang). Most likely the visitor will be welcomed inside by a woman, guided by her footsteps through the narrow entrance into her house (enkaji), treated to milk or tea upon entering and, if staying over night, offered a place in the house to sleep. Thus, a decade ago I wrote:

... by socialising children and domesticating animals, by transforming animal products by means of the hearth and calabash into food (endaa) or by resocialising the ilmurran (i.e. the young, unmarried men, "warriors," anglicised moran) after their life in the bush, the house and its occupants are in many ways mediators between "nature" and "culture." The enkaji is the most important unit of social reproduction and as such is actually the embodiment of culture (Talle 1988:196-7).

I also claimed that, in their capacity as managers and owners of houses, milkers of cows, domesticators of people and livestock, Maasai women were major upholders of a cultured and moral world. The reproduction of the social order was as much a female as a male concern.

The same year, in his ethnographically rich and highly readable monograph The Maasai of Matapato: A Study of Rituals of Rebellion (1988), Paul Spencer writes in a section on organizational aspects of pastoralism that the fact that women are "tied down to the domestic sphere" (my emphasis) gives them a "subordinate role within the husbandry sector of the economy" (1988:21). This remark, as I see it, presupposes a hierarchically ranked dichotomy between the domestic sphere and the rest, giving cultural precedence to that which is beyond the province of the house. On the same page Spencer continues, saying that "the women's sphere has a certain autonomy, and forms a separate economic sector in its own right, subordinate and yet not wholly subdued" (my emphasis).

The last part of that sentence as well as a number of other passages throughout the book reveal that Spencer and I, in fact, have made similar observations of Maasai pastoral life. We have both suggested that women, although ideologically and jurally subordinated to men (through normative premises to which I return below), are socially and culturally important. In particular, individual women frequently stand forth as remarkably powerful persons (cf. Chieni & Spencer 1993; Hodgson 1994). However, we also differ in perspective. Instead of reducing the "domestic" to a subordinate position within the Maasai social order, as Spencer seems to do, I prefer to see it as a core site for the regeneration of life, and for the continuity of the cultural order.

The relationship between the house and the "outside" (the cattle corral or the "bush"), representing a prevalent, recurrent duality in the Maasai social universe (cf. Århem 1991), is marked as much by complementarity as by hierarchy. Women and men, juniors and seniors, left and right, the house and the 'outside' are undoubtedly separate and different, but nevertheless mutually dependent and equal (arisio) parts which together form a whole, a meaningful unity or "balance." The one cannot act without the other. Nor can any of them grow or prosper in its own right.

Thus, complementarity and interdependence are the points of departure for this chapter which concerns itself with aging and fertility. Therefore, the growing of men into social maturity cannot be accomplished without a feminine mediator; conversely, girls cannot develop into adults without the vitality of young men and the acquisition of male virtues.

To come of age (botor, large, senior, old) among the Maasai is to become "fertile," ready to procreate and reproduce life, i.e., to beget children and to increase the number of animals. The Maasai elder with numerous children and a large herd (olkarsis, wealthy) is the incarnation of a life fulfilled. Equally, women who have given birth to and raised many children are "wealthy" (enkitok narikisho). Men, in contrast to women, continue to increase and "prosper" (abulu) even in old age and in that sense they never cease growing (cf. Saitoti 1980).

Among the Maasai aging and fertility, culturally paired, are gendered concepts. The cultural process of maturity, which is notably shorter and less symbolically elaborated for women than for men, may bear witness of an innate "transformative capacity" in women (Arens & Karp 1989, Beidelman 1987). Ageing (olaji) as a social and cultural process, and basically concerned with the gaining of fertility, is culturally enacted around the advancement of men through ranked age-grades.

During field research among the pastoral Maasai, both in Kenya and in Tanzania, I frequently experienced male informants stressing the importance of female agency in symbolic contexts, as well as in practical life. Typically, after having elaborated on the prerogatives of men in Maasai politics at all levels of decision-making, and on male cultural excellence and moral sophistication, informants would volunteer addenda which unraveled female will, choice, negotiating power, or ritual efficacy, into their accounts. Those added remarks were somehow made to complete the story, I thought. Typically, after often long renditions of age-set values permitting age-mates to have sex with each others' wives, a concluding remark emphasizing the compliance of the woman in question would notoriously follow. Furthermore, the practice of bonding between "warriors" by mixing their semen in the same woman was represented as a privilege not only of the men, but also of the woman. "She likes it" was the comment. The fact that her lover wants to share her with his best friend, and thus seal their friendship through her body, was taken as a sign of his sincere affection.

Finally, female fertility delegations (olamal looinkituak), by which women in great numbers tour the country, accumulating livestock gifts as they proceed from homestead to homestead, seeking sex from men across age-set preferences, and thus violating moral norms, are much more than "rituals of rebellion" (Spencer 1988). They are also a demonstration of female power.