The last evening in Merrrueshi, the warriors gathered to dance and sing for us. Maasai traditional singing, like much of traditional African music, has a lead singer who sings out a line and the group responds with a chorus line.
A difference in the Maasai from the Shona or Zulu singing that I am more familiar with is the rhythmic breath and throat singing that becomes part of the response and creates a polyphonic structure under the lead singer's voice.
This breath singing, which sounds most like deep grunts, creates a beat that leads into a jumping dance. Competitive jumping occurs in a circle or line, and each warrior steps forward to jump as high as possible, in time to the beat, keeping a very narrow, upright profile, never letting their heels touch the ground. Their age-mates encourage or mock them depending on the height of the jump, and this competition was full of laughter and encouraging calls from us as the audience. By the end of the dance, the warriors had pulled most of us into the circle, and we tried our best to jump, but none of us could get close to the height that the warriors reached.
The lighting was only firelight and a few headlamps, so the pictures of this ceremony are dark and not too detailed, but I've included two here just to provide a little of the feeling of the evening.
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