The Maasai have led semi-nomadic pastoral lives for generations, but now some are settling down - and all thanks to a type of grass.
Nairobi, Kenya:
In Kenya, tales and sayings about the close attachment between the Maasai people and their cattle abound. Should you accidentally hit a Maasai's cow with your car, goes a familiar warning, keep driving as fast as you can. You may want to stop and reach a settlement with the cattle owner, but if you do so you risk sharing the same fate as the cow.
According to Maasai legend, God gave all the cows in the world to their people and some believe that every bit of cattle is worth fighting for to the last drop of blood. In Maasai culture, the cow holds enormous significance and the group traditionally led a semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle, dictated by the needs of their cattle.
Peter Ole Nembo, a 46-year-old father-of-six nostalgically recalls his boyhood days when he says his family used to traverse vast expanses of grassland, trudging tens of kilometres looking for water and pasture. As a moran (Maasai warrior), Nembo and his peers would brave wild animals, hostile tribes, tortuous terrains and the vagaries of weather to get to the lush, nutritious grass for their cattle. They would not return to their manyattas (traditional Maasai homes) for weeks or months at a stretch, he explains.
But those days, when life seems to have been simpler, have not lasted. The fabled days of plenty, when one's land stretched as far as the eye could see, rain fell with regularity and predictability, and the population was sparse, are over. Population explosion, the need to expand agricultural land, and climate change has set a new scene. Though there has always been competition for resources, it has grown dramatically. While weather patterns always threw up surprises, they have become more erratic. And while clashes over scarce resources between farming communities and pastoralists have a long history, they have increased in both frequency and intensity.
In fact, some Maasai believe that their nomadic lifestyles have now become unviable and are instead trying to adapt to more settled lives, lives that might have been unthinkable only a decade ago and that would have been alien to their ancestors.
"Moving about looking for pasture for our cattle is not possible anymore so we are trying a different kind of lifestyle," says Nembo.
A grass that's always greener
Nembo has been living an agrarian existence for three years and was originally helped to make the transition by an initiative led by the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in collaboration with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and the Biosciences eastern and central Africa-International Livestock Research Institute (BecA-ILRI).
There have been many attempts by the Kenyan government and NGOs to encourage nomadic people to settle down before, but many of these have fallen flat. A project which involved NGOs digging 60 water troughs for Maasai herdsmen in Kajiado County, for example, failed after the Maasai refused to use them. "If cattle from different villages shared water resources, the likelihood of them transmitting diseases is very high, something which was never taken into consideration," explains Richard Lesiyampe, Kenya's Principal Secretary for the Environment and Natural Resources.
The difference with the initiative that managed to encourage Nembo to settle down is perhaps the power it puts in people's own hands as well as its relative simplicity. Unlike a programme aimed at changing the landscape, this initiative relies on a humble bit of grass.
Brachiaria - otherwise commonly referred to as Maasai, Tanzania or Mombasa grass - is a particularly sturdy species which also has properties that enables it to reduce greenhouse gases and nutrient loss from soil.
The grass is native to East Africa, but under colonialism it was taken to the likes of Australia and Brazil where it become hugely popular. It was primarily used to feed cattle and helped both those countries become leading exporters of beef. Brazil, where Brachiaria now covers an estimated 40 million hectares, has also become a leading exporter of the seeds from the grass.
Over the decades, Brachiaria has really flourished in its adopted homelands, but now, says Onesmo Ole Moiyoi, a senior scientist at the ICIPE, "the grass is being taken back to Africa - something which is going to change the lives of many small-scale farmers."
Moiyoi and his colleagues are trying to promote the climate-friendly grass species in Kenya, partly by encouraging and training the Maasai to settle down and grow it as fodder for their cattle. The hope is that the Maasai will find that agrarian existences can be as viable as their semi-nomadic ones while the spread of the grass will benefit Kenya's environment as a whole. So far, the programme has enjoyed some small successes. Approximately 300 farmers have adopted the grass variety and the numbers are steadily growing.
Flying high
Nembo, who has 65 cows, is one of those in the programme. He is now in his third year living a sedentary lifestyle, which he says he could not have done without the grass species.
"The advantage of growing Brachiaria is the fact that it grows very fast in clumps, each of which can weigh between 10-20 kg," he explains, adding that it can be harvested in under a month of the first harvest. "My milk production has since increased from between 2-3 litres per cow to between 7-8 litres as a result of feeding the grass to the cows," he adds.
Nembo is now dedicating three-and-a-half acres of his land specifically for growing this grass, which is enough to feed all his cows. He warns, however, that water availability is a major problem, a challenge he hopes to solve by building a dam.
Leonard Laina, 25, is another Maasai who has abandoned a pastoral life and embraced farming. He comes from Ntulele village and owns two cows along with 12 acres of land.
"We used to herd our cattle all the way to Kilgoris, some 80 km away where rainfall is good, but it is no longer possible these days because people have planted sugarcane," he says.
He started planting Brachiaria recently and soon saw an opportunity to make profit too after he sold a clump of the grass for Ksh 2,000 ($23) to another farmer. "I am now planning to acquire a grass cutter and put up a store for the grass, which I will sell to other villagers during the dry spell," he says.
Watching the grass grow
Brachiaria has thus helped changed some Maasai's lives and helped them settle into an agrarian existence, but there are still many challenges.
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One major technical drawback is that it is difficult to get seeds from the grass. "We have planted a lot of the grass in our Kiboko Research Centre in Eastern Kenya, but it is not producing seeds, though we have had a bit of success in the Trans Mara area," observes Oscar Magenya of KARI.
However, perhaps a more difficult challenge going forwards will simply be to convince larger numbers of Maasai to follow in Nembo and Laina's footsteps and take up the scheme. Although a few hundred have welcomed the opportunity to grow the grass and have reoriented their lives around it, many others remain cautious. Indeed, despite the challenges of leading a pastoral life, switching to a settled agrarian existence would be a radical change, and it will take some convincing to encourage larger numbers of Maasai to make this choice.
Those involved in the scheme, however, are holding out hope that the successes of settled Maasai will eventually show more and more of their counterparts that there is a real alternative to their increasingly difficult lifestyles.
Samuel Ole Seme, a 45-year-old father-of-11, perhaps sums up the thoughts of many as he says: "I will do it when I see a lot of people in this area doing it."
For further reading around the subject see:
Kenya: Cattle in the Capital - Urban Agriculture Comes to Town Going With the Grain: New Breed of Rice Raises Hopes for Kenya's Domestic Rice Production Predicting Africa's Next Oil Insurgency: The Precarious Case of Kenya's Turkana County
