also participating at a workshop on African issues on nearby Whidbey Island the following weekend. He was on the board of the organization hosting the event, he said, and he would be happy to inquire whether I could attend as well. I’d be delighted, I told him. It would be lovely to be in the presence of such interesting people—and to connect to Africa again as the long and rainy Northwest winter commenced.
I hadn’t truly had a role model since I was twelve and Nadia Comaneci, the young Romanian, had been the first gymnast ever to receive a perfect score of ten in the Olympics—something an aspiring gymnast like me believed was a super-human achievement.
When Wangari Maathai walked into the room at the university that evening, it was as if Mother Earth herself entered. Her face glowed and her eyes had the intensity and sparkle I remembered seeing in many of the people I recently had met in Tanzania. Wangari had been the first East African woman to receive a Ph.D. Her own bloodline was Kikuyu-Maasai, and she spoke phrases similar to those I had been using in my Environmental Studies and Social Change courses: “We don’t need any more research. We know what is wrong. We need to act.” That evening, Wangari seemed to cut down all the ongoing debates on development aid, foreign policy in the Third World, and ways to heal from colonialism with a scythe and got right to the point. We simply needed to plant more trees. It had been a very long time since I had been so inspired.
I walked up to Wangari after her talk and began a conversation. We connected immediately. I was very weary of writing an endless string of papers suggesting better local and global policies for environmental conservation practices. My pilot light, my Russian-Italian passion flame, by now flickered very low as a result of over-thinking any number of problems. Yet this African earth mother gave me new clues on how to re-ignite it. She invited me to return to East Africa, to see how things really were on the ground, to put theory into practice—and to learn from her people.
And I couldn’t help but answer her call.
MY GUIDE
Following the end of my first wildlife safari in Africa, I found myself at Gibb’s Farm in Karatu, Tanzania, where I met with Ole Sululu, a Maasai born just a few kilometers away on the rim of Embakaai Crater in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
Sululu estimated that he was born in 1956, one of eleven children of the first wife of his father. Most of his full brothers and sisters—his father had seven wives—had chosen to leave their traditional Maasai village and pursue modern livelihoods as doctors, nurses, miners, and in positions in tourism and development. Many of his half-brothers and sisters, however, remained in the rural village. I wondered if his mother had encouraged her children to take up lives in the outside world, and it seemed that the entire extended family would certainly be an interesting study in the “nature versus nurture” debate. I asked Sululu about his journey from herding cattle as a boy to leading expensive, high-quality safaris up Mt. Kilimanjaro and into the Serengeti.
In almost perfect English he explained, “As a child, I stayed with a missionary from Europe in Ngorongoro who taught me the Western things—how to speak English, how to drive and cook. The missionary helped sponsor most of my brothers to go to school and sponsored me for tour guiding school, where I received a certificate that gave me the ticket to a job in the growing tourism industry in Arusha. Since 1980 I worked as a safari guide in Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zaire, meeting people and seeing the land. It was a very challenging time because our culture was being disturbed. In the 1970s, there was a drought in my home area that led to a lot of cattle dying and people starving. So I was happy to get the opportunity to spend time with the missionary. It seemed better to start to think about getting out of the area at the time because there were no rains, no water, no food. There was no school there. The missionary gave me food and taught me a lot, a lot, a lot.”
One day, when Sululu was grazing his father’s cows, a vehicle drove by that seemed lost. It was a tourist group looking for Oldonyo Lengai—the Mountain of God, in the Maa language—and had taken a wrong turn. Sululu pointed out on the map where they were and in which direction they needed to go to reach their destination. The tour guide was very impressed with Sululu’s map and English skills and asked him to come to town to interview for a job with their company. A month later, Sululu made the three-day walk to Arusha. He passed an exam with flying colors—knowing all the birds and wildlife species on the test, and his driving skills were excellent. “So, the company gave me a car to drive for groups, and that is how I started to work in tourism.”
Sululu’s full name is Lekoko Ole Sululu. Sululu is his surname and Ole means “son of” in Maa. The word “Sululu” literally translates as “swamp,” and Sululu explained that it also means “hope,” because a swamp “is a place that never comes dry,” something vitally important in an arid land where people’s wealth depends on the survival of their cattle. “Lekoko” means “son of grandmother”—a name he was given because children are often named after ancestors.
As we spoke, Sululu remembered how the missionary tried to teach Sululu and his people about Christianity. “That is what all the missionaries tried to do. They have this very strong religion. We just let them talk. And when they finished talking, we thought, okay, that is good. Many people in my village listened but never followed much of anything the missionaries said about religion.”
Sululu remained drawn to the traditional way of the Maasai, moving in search of green pastures to graze their cattle. The traditional rhythm of life—grazing cattle, becoming a man through initiation, protecting the community—was wonderful, he said, a precious way of living. But as time marched on, it had become difficult to find good land on which to freely graze cattle. He knew that with climate change, more droughts could very possibly devastate the Maasai communities. And it was important for people to gain skills other than livestock raising.
I knew I was asking Sululu too many questions, but I was fascinated. He seemed to be a wonderful combination of bushman and modern Maasai. How was it possible for him to be both, I asked. “I see many people who left our Maasai community to study in other parts of the world. And they have come back. They have kept their culture,” he said.
From that first meeting, Sululu and I became great friends, and he ultimately became my guide on a decade-long psychological-spiritual journey. Over the years, our conversations about bridging indigenous and modern wisdom have never stopped. Together, we established a visionary organization that put into practice the concept of honoring traditional knowledge, while assisting communities to develop people’s lives for the better—leading people-to-people safaris designed to share all we have discovered with travelers from the West.
Sululu is, in a very real sense, the co-author of this book. Many of its parables are results of experiences we shared together, inside Maasai villages and while traveling in the United States as well. He has listened to me for hours as I tried to make sense of the events I was experiencing, feeling many times as if my brain was unraveling, or as if I was looking up at my own culture from below and seeing its underbelly. Sululu has been as patient as a hartebeest as he has listened to thoughts coming from my often over-analytic mind. He has shared his insights with me, told me when he suspected I might be wrong about something, and has cheered me when I’ve made a breakthrough in understanding.
I know I have been blessed many times in my life, but it was a special blessing to meet Sululu and be invited by him to travel deep inside an indigenous culture, to have been accepted by his fellow tribespeople, the Maasai of East Africa, and to have learned some of their amazing ancient gems of wisdom. In return, I have made a promise to them to translate this rapidly disappearing knowledge into a form understandable to modern peoples; and to share this with my “tribe,” whom the Maasai call “the paper people.”
The Maasai don’t do monologues. Ideas and plans emerge from inside of rich conversations. In fact, when you listen to a group of Maasai
