Аннотация

After the triumph of Maasai, the lavishly produced and highly praised book that records in pictures and words the vanishing culture of his people, Ole Saitoti now gives us, with precision, sensitivity and humor, an enchanting memoir of his own traditional childhood, adolescence and coming into manhood in Maasailand, and of his education in Europe and America.

On the plains of the Serengeti—lush green during the rainy season, harsh and arid during the dry, but in either case teeming with dangerous wild animals—a child grows up tending cattle, sheep and goats for his strict, traditionbound father. Here is Ole coming to terms with the vagaries and hardships of the nomadic life of the Maasai, while behaving as any child would—though when his mother dies, he lives under the domination of his father’s various wives. He ventures grudgingly into the unknown as he is chosen to leave home for a government school, where we see him, child of an oral culture, enraptured by the magic of the written word. He switches to a missionary school where he is encouraged to eschew the traditional ways of his people and to adopt those of “civilized” missionaries—he is baptized. Fired by a desire for education to better himself, he nonetheless fails a crucial exam, ruining any chance he may have had to enter secondary school. The young man now returns to the bosom of his family but changed in ways he could never have imagined. And he is circumcised, initiated into manhood; he achieves what it takes to be a warrior. Yet he runs away to become a park ranger chasing poachers; later his world expands as he meets visitors from other countries. He is chosen to represent his people in a National Geographic Society film; finds himself in Munich studying German, but is sidetracked by circumstances to America, where through special dispensation he acquires a college education that enables him to record the culture of his people in a book and to go back to Maasailand to help them to survive.

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior is at once a magical evocation of a life both exotic and familiar and a portrait of the frightening tensions and ambiguities that characterize relations between the so-called Third World and the West.