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Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna (National Geographic)

Price: $6.95 USD

Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton gives American kids a firsthand look at growing up in Kenya as a member of a tribe of nomads whose livelihood centers on the raising and grazing of cattle. Readers share Lekuton's first encounter with a lion, the epitome of bravery in the warrior tradition. They follow his mischievous antics as a young Maasai cattle herder, coming-of-age initiation, boarding school escapades, soccer success, and journey to America for college. Lekuton's riveting text combines exotic details of nomadic life with the universal experience and emotions of a growing boy.

Author: Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton

Author: Herman Viola

Publisher: National Geographic Children's Books

Masai: The Rain Warriors

Price: $24.95 USD

This arrestingly beautiful adventure shot on the savannahs of Kenya depicts a community's quest to bring rain to their land and ensure their survival. A band of very young Masai warriors sets out to kill a mystical lion to end a drought that is plaguing their village. Barely teenagers, the warriors are untested and unskilled, and they are unsure whether the lion actually exists. And, if it does exist, will bringing back its mane cure the drought.
MASAI: THE RAIN WARRIORS is the debut fictional film of Pascal Plisson, a devoted nature documentarian. It is the first film to be solely populated by real-life Masai and spoken entirely in their native tongue.

Publisher: Art Mattan

From Mukogodo To Maasai: Ethnicity And Cultural Change In Kenya

Price: $25.00 USD

Can one change one's ethnicity? Can an entire ethnic group change its ethnicity? This book focuses on the strategic manipulation of ethnic identity by the Mukogodo of Kenya. Until the 1920s and 1930s, the Mukogodo were Cushitic-speaking foragers (hunters, gatherers, and beekeepers). However, changes brought on by British colonial policies led them to move away from life as independent foragers and into the orbit of the high-status Maasai, whom they began to emulate. Today, the Mukogodo form the bottom rung of a regional socioeconomic ladder of Maa-speaking pastoralists. An interesting by-product of this sudden ethnic change has been to give Mukogodo women, who tend to marry up the ladder, better marital and reproductive prospects than Mukogodo men. Mukogodo parents have responded with an unusual pattern of favoring daughters over sons, though they emulate the Maasai by verbally expressing a preference for sons.

Author: Lee Cronk

Publisher: Westview Press

The Last Of The Maasai

Price: $50.00 USD

To nineteenth-century Europeans, they were the "noblest savages," an elite corps of painted and feathered warriors, strangely aristocratic in their disdain of other people's civilization.

For the Maasai, nothing has proved an inducement to change during the last 100 years: not peace for war; money for cattle; nor cities and settlement for the plains and open boundaries of their land covering much of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. This isolation, their land, their traditions, codes and values have all been defended in a long, mostly passive war of resistance carried out by a society structured as a standing army.

Now the old tribal conflicts are no longer acceptable in the new nation states. No land can be left fallow and unproductive and the Maasai cattle are counted in the national herds. Change has not been forced on the Maasai. But they are on the final retreat to the point of individual choice: either across the line of time and cultural advance or all the way back to the reservations - to whatever land is left to them.

In this superb, full-color portrait, photographers Mohamed Amin and Duncan Willetts have produced a comprehensive pictorial record, and John Eames the narrative background, to these remarkable people.

Author: John Earnes

Publisher: Camerapix

Mikela: Memoirs of a Maasai Woman

Price: $16.95 USD

"...the tumultuous life and struggles for freedom and survival of Mikela, a young Tanzanian woman of the Maasai tribe... Untangling the chains of her violation and bad memories... Mikela is an epitome of a victim of sexual abuse...her experience speaks for millions of women still treated as objects..."

Barry Chukwugekwu Eneh
Lecturer, Ohio Dominican University Mikela is a young and vivacious beauty with a unique artistic talent. Her nightmare starts in the open plains of the Tanzanian Maasailand where she experiences female circumcision. The saga of tradition and ensuing events force Mikela to embark on a blinded journey, one that would eventually take her across two continents.

As she journeys through life, the emotional scar of female circumcision and later rape, continue to haunt Mikela. Scared by her violation and bad memories, Mikela is unsure about her own emotions as her world seems to be spiraling down an endless dark tunnel.

Can Mikela survive the streams of tragedies? Can she overcome the challenges and daily torment by her own life's experiences? Can pure and undefiled love fuel her enough to survive? Is her love for Maasai and Parisian art sufficient to cleanse her mind of the emotional scare of female circumcision and rape?

Author: Jacyee Aniagolu-Johnson

Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.

The Maasai of Matapato

Price: $44.95 USD

This study is the first to relate the dynamics of the Maasai age organization to tensions within the family. The analysis is illustrated with extensive case material from the Matapato, selected for this study as a typical Maasai group.

Author: Paul Spencer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis