Why young morans are spoiling for war

By ted malanda

Morans-in-training are in trouble. Not too long ago, they ambushed a village trading centre, beat up everyone in sight and stabbed an elder who tried to intervene.

Weeks later, they paid a hormone-induced courtesy call on a girls’ secondary school that sent girls scampering into the bush. They were hunting for wives.

"We shall return," they warned darkly when the principal, with the aid of a few elders, managed to disperse them.

Now everyone is frothing. One newspaper columnist went so far as to refer to them as ‘morons’— not morans. Maasai leaders, all women, now want moranism scrapped because it’s ‘backward’ and affects ‘education standards’.

But we are getting it all wrong. We cannot expect morans to be defenders of the Maasai community and culture.

Morans cannot wake up today and go fighting the Meru or the Kamba for practice. They will be shot dead by GSU personnel. Equally, that old tale of moving from one place to another with livestock is suicidal because when your wives are out grazing the goats on ‘communal land’ in Syokimau, bulldozers come and flatten your manyatta because it’s on the airport flight path.

The reason you are grazing your goats in Nairobi is because the very same Nairobians have taken over your ancient grazing lands and converted them into real estate in Ongata Rongai, flower farms in Naivasha and wheat and barley plantations in Narok.

Spear a lion

Initiation itself is not easy. Ideally, you need to spear a lion or two and kill many birds before senior elders give you the power to read. But any moran who tries spearing a lion will find himself answering tough questions from the Kenya Wildlife Service people.

Not that getting a wife is any easier. With everyone worrying about the girl child, all potential brides have been hustled away from the village to schools — far away from circumcisers — while the morans cool their heels in the bush. Every donor is channeling funds into these ‘special’ schools but nobody is developing special schools to teach morans how to elevate pastoralism to the dot.com age.

No war to fight

It doesn’t help that the Kenya Defence Forces and the police have hijacked the role of defending the community. So we have a situation where highly trained morans, hot blooded men skilled in the art of war, have no war to fight. Is it any surprise that they are inventing war by attacking women and village markets?

But then again, what those young morans are doing is no different from what university students do every now and then when they go on the rampage, looting, beating up people and robbing motorists.

So we all want to ‘save’ young Maasai girls and match with our potbellies to 2030 yet we expect morans to remain as they always have: Lean and handsome, standing arrogantly on picturesque plains with a spear in one hand — the perfect postcard picture for foreign tourists.

Come on!