4 minute read
A Ramble around the Rift
There’s an area between the valleys in the great rift, just about an hour’s drive from Nairobi that’s well known in Maasai land. They call it Karatatu Nyoi. A red road cuts through it, a track really, now popular with hikers and charcoal burners. This wild, winding path that hugs the sides of the escarpment as it twists and winds around the hills is the remnants of an old colonial highway connecting Kajiado to Narok. Caves pit the sides now and again and there are sites on small plateaus, where inter-tribal conflicts and battles with the Mungiki occurred during British reign and later.
I am at Oldonyo Olmaroroi - with my companion and guide, Daniel Ole Musei who is a most theatrical story teller. Oldonyo is a mountain in Maa, the language of the Maasai and Samburu peoples. Olmaroroi is a plant, abundant here, with roots whose powers include controlling blood pressure.
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He points out Olkilenyei – its roots are boiled with bones, to aid digestion of the vast amounts of
meat that are eaten during the Ol pul - meat camps, that men indulge in. Like during Eunoto ceremony, when warriors graduate to junior elders. At the end of the age of moran, their locks are shaved and their heads covered with red ochre.
As we stroll he stops before a Mugumo – strangler fig tree, that has its tentacles around a massive boulder. The Kikuyu say if you walk around it the wrong way, you can change your sex, he tells me. The Maasai will put milk on it’s wound, if he accidently wounds it. Returning it’s milky sap is a show of respect. Our culture demands retribution that way. In ancient times, if you knocked someone’s tooth out you’d have to give them one of your own. Balance and equanimity was thus achieved.
But people have lost their honour these days, he tells me. Three young Kikuyus came here to cut and burn wood for charcoal. They didn’t know that the Mugumo’s sap is not good for charcoal making. And ignorant of old myths, they chopped down an old tree. It wailed as it fell. As if a curse was upon them, two of them, then raped a Maasai maiden herding her goats.
The girl ran home to her manyatta and reported the matter. In the honest tradition of the Maasai, she said one of them was innocent and
CLOCKWISE: Rift valley views; Cave interior; Mungiki Cave
had tried to stop his mates from committing the crime. The Maasai elders listened and then dispatched their warriors. Now Daniel Ole Musei, has stopped and is waving his arms across the breadth of the horizon, where blue sky meets purple mountainsides. The Maasai hunted them down in the bush where they were hiding. He enacts the moran, so silent, as he stalks them. Just a swish in the air and in the time it takes for the warrior to shake one sandal off his foot, the targeted man, falls. Esayet is poison in Maa. A deadly one for arrows is made from orpopogi, ormerepari and olmorijoi plants boiled with blood of snake. It can also be used on the edges of daggers and spears.
Why did the innocent man die? He asks the world. Was it because he was unable to stop his friends from committing the crime or was it because he did not protect the sacred Mugumo tree?
My curiosity piqued, I ask; “what’s the effect on the human body of such a poison?”
And I am treated to another gory tale.
In 2003, the Soncho tribe from Tanzania, came to these parts and killed many people. The local tribesmen here, used their poisoned weapons in retaliation. In the aftermath of the battle, the bodies of the Soncho were observed as having no hair nor skin and the bones could be pulled apart easily.
Now we’ve walked a full circle and have got back to the house where I’m staying with my friends for a long weekend. As we enter the gated compound, the water bottle gurgle of the Coucal rises above the warm air. That’s a sign that rain is on its way. I look at the endless blue haze above me. “Not till the night”, he says.
Olmaroroi house’s Swahili architecture sits on the edge of a cliff overlooking an infinity pool, a deck with a fire bowl around which we’ll be having our sundowners. Then I’ll be looking up at the sky and remembering Ole Musei’s entertaining words. “When the stars are not bright, a little rain; when they are dull, then there is rain and when the stars are very bright, rain is coming”.
DAY TRIP FROM NAIROBI AEROLINK UGANDA
From the tracking of Gorillas to the footprints of the Big Five
