One evening at Wild-Eye’s riverside Enkishui Camp, the local Maasai staff put on a cultural entertainment for us, with storytelling and traditional adumu dancing led by the charismatic Dickson Sakaya, local chief and Wild-Eye director.
This is no pastiche sham laid on for tourists.
The Maasai guides, drivers and camp staff live and work in fantastically photogenic traditional clothing, and the senior members of staff when younger had led the semi-nomadic life of their ancient forebears. This included ritual circumcision, and proof of male adulthood by killing a lion, alone and armed only with a spear and a sharpened stick*.
Hearing their histories of bravery, plainly told, observing the natural respect given to Dickson, and watching the obvious joy they all took in performing together was frankly humbling for all us guests.
The adumu is familiar to many Kenyan travellers, but I imagine few have had the chance to experience one performed at night, five yards from the Mara River, accompanied by booming hippos and lit only by a blazing firepit.
It’s the famous dance where men show their athletic prowess by leaping in to the air in turns while the others look on. Although I’m pleased with the general atmosphere I captured in my image of Dickson above and the ones that follow, the technique I used to illustrate the jumping Maasai didn’t give me the effect I was after (now I have seen the images on the computer I know what would be a much more successful technique, so I’m just going to have to go back!).
*In case you ever find yourself facing a lion when armed in the Maasai tradition, this is the method:
First, stand your ground, and don’t whatever you do run away. Simple, eh.
As long as you’re standing up to them, lions usually strike first with their teeth, so you hold the stick by the middle, vertically out in front of you (it needs to be a bit under a foot long, sharpened on both ends, and hardened in the fire). Then, when the lion comes at you, jam the stick in its open jaws, and you can then simply finish it off with your spear while it struggles to remove the stick.
We were told that the only animal the Maasai fear is the buffalo.