The tale of a lion and a strong, fierce woman
Mara Naibosho Conservancy, Lorna, the guide
My feet on the floor of a jeep
’What would you like as a sundowner?’ were the first words that Lorna asked us having collected us at the Conservancy gate.
A desperate state
It was nearing dusk and she had heard that the lions were out and so in our open jeep we slithered and skidded on lands drenched by the late rains towards them along the red-soiled track. There, staring at a young male lion looking as bored as a lion can look, we drank warm whisky as the light turned blue, then dimmed to the shade of a Whistler nocturne. Drinking whisky in the back of a jeep whilst staring at a lion somewhere deep in Kenya was about as bizarre an experience as I have ever had. Everything about this seemed wrong. Seeing an animal from a jeep. Drinking in its presence, so cheapening its majesty. It being so habituated to vehicles that it would not be possible to call it truly wild. And so it seemed to be an amusement for the white man to toy with. What a desperate and distasteful state for both of us to be in.
Seeing through a Nikon lens
The next morning bright and and clear, we journeyed on well worn-tracks in the ‘land that goes on forever’. In various apertures and focal lengths, I shuttered the elephant, the buffalo, the zebra and gazelle along with other beasts of the plains. And it was very fine, as Hemingway would say.
‘A strong and fierce woman’
It was not yet time to return to camp, so I asked Lorna, our brilliant and talented guide, to stop the car. We sat in an immense stillness with animals grazing all around us. The sky was huge, the green grass sea as beautiful in itself as anything can be. Lorna sat behind her wheel sweeping her binoculars across the huge expanse. She was referred to in almost reverential terms in the camp as the ‘strong and fierce woman’ and one who was one of the best guides in the Mara. I suspected that her story was going to be more interesting than seeing another giraffe lumbering through the bush.
My life was changed
‘I graduated from the Koiyaki Guiding School which was established in 2005’, she explained, ‘to encourage us women to be guides. I have been a guide for two years. Sometimes clients change your life and one man, Robert Smith, said, ’I want to sponsor three women to be guides’. He paid the $2300 for me to do the course. I could never afford to do it myself. I’ve never met him. He changed my life. I want to meet him one day to say thank you. Men think we cannot do things, but we prove them wrong everyday. Everyday I come here and I think I am so lucky. My fiancee is an accountant and he does not stop me from continuing even if I have children. He knows I like it so much’. I ask if she will be his only wife and she giggles and says ‘Yes, I hope so’, and yes, she would mind if he took another - ‘but that is how men are’.
No hands below the hips
I knew from my reading that being a woman in Maasailand is no easy thing. They cook all meals and feed their husbands first, giving them the best cuts of meat, then the children are fed. What is left, is eaten by the women. A man may have many wives providing he treats them all equally, but a woman only her husband. Divorce is harder for a woman than for a man. Both men and women are circumcised on reaching adulthood, but it is the women who suffer most through the procedure. Sexual satisfaction for women is rarely gained, as men are forbidden by cultural law to touch a woman with their hands below the hips, even if that woman is the man’s wife. We did not discuss these things the middle of the ‘siringet’ - the land that goes on for ever, but I knew.
A brilliant approach to wildlife management
Lorna seems keen to drive on and reaches for the ignition key. Guests suffer from visual gluttony, rather than savouring slowly the light, the air, and the smells of Africa. We listen to the swishing of tails and the masticating of grass, we smell the sweet cattle dung that wafts in the eddies. We talk about the Naibosho Conservancy which incorporates 600 or more individual plots leased from Maasai families. It is, she explains, a private wildlife conservancy established in 2010 and one of 9 such conservancies in the the Mara. Each camp has no more than 12 tents. The cattle and fences have been removed and the income from tourism is divided between all the families. This is how they survive. The number of cars within the conservancy is strictly limited and only a maximum of four jeeps can be at the same location at any one time. ‘Tourism is everything for us. Without it, it is difficult to see how we can protect this area’, Lorna explains. It is a win-win. The animals live in protected areas and the numbers are rising for all species. The local people benefit too from the income. The conservancies are the only places in the Mara where guests can do a walking safari. Maybe we can do one tomorrow’.
She asked whether tonight I’d like the same sundowner as I had had the night before. I said that I’d rather walk with ‘the carriers of spears’ (which is the meaning of the name ‘Maasai’). And so we did.
Mara Naibosho Conservancy, Guide