GREETINGS, FEEL FREE 

TO

"SHOP NAKED."©

We deal in items we believe others will enjoy and want to purchase.

 We are not experts.

We welcome any comments, questions, or concerns.

WE ARE TARGETING A GLOBAL MARKET PLACE.

Thanks in advance for your 5 STAR patronage.

Please Be sure to add WDG to your favorites list!

NOW FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE…

Maasai Beaded Necklaces
Simanjiro Village, Tanzania
GORGET STYLE NECKLACE

LEATHER BACKING

FOLK ART JEWELRY MEASURES ABOUT

2" ACROSS STRAP

ABOUT 10" IN DIAMETER / NECK LENGTH

FROM THE BACK OF THE NECK TO

THE CHEST PIECE IS ABOUT 13"

17x STRANDS DANGLE 19" DOWN THE FRONT.

 BLUE

RED

WHITE

GREEN

ORANGE

CEREMONIAL / RITUAL TRIBAL GARB.

WAS TOLD THIS WAS USED IN WEDDINGS (?)

MAYBE ABOUT 45 - 50 YEARS OLD.

PURCHASED AS A SOUVENIR WHILE ON VACATION IN AFRICA.

----------------------------------------------

FYI

The Maasai (also Masai) are a Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. Due to their distinctive customs and dress and residence near the many game parks of East Africa, they are among the most well known of African ethnic groups. They speak Maa, a member of the Nilo-Saharan language family that is related to Dinka and Nuer, and are also educated in the official languages of Kenya and Tanzania: Swahili and English. The Maasai population has been variously estimated as 377,089 from the 1989 Census or as 453,000 language speakers in Kenya in 1994 and 430,000 in Tanzania in 1993 with a total estimated as "approaching 900,000" Estimates of the respective Maasai populations in both countries are complicated by the remote locations of many villages, and their semi-nomadic nature.

Although the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments have instituted programs to encourage the Maasai to abandon their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle, the people have continued their age-old customs. Recently, Oxfam has claimed that the lifestyle of the Maasai should be embraced as a response to climate change because of their ability to farm in deserts and scrublands. But while the Maasai run cattle farms, they invade the habitats of the endangered lions in Kenya. As of 2010, there are only about 2000 lions left in Kenya and at the rate the Maasai warriors kill them, the lions in Kenya will be gone within two years.

According to their own oral history, the Maasai originated from the lower Nile valley north of Lake Turkana (Northwest Kenya) and began migrating south around the 15th century, arriving in a long trunk of land stretching from northern Kenya to central Tanzania between the 17th and late 18th century. Other ethnic groups were forcibly displaced as they settled there. The Maasai territory reached its largest size in the mid-19th century, and covered almost all of the Great Rift Valley and adjacent lands from Mount Marsabit in the north to Dodoma in the south. At this time the Maasai, as well as the larger group they were part of, raided cattle as far east as the Tanga coast in Tanzania. Raiders used spears and shields, but were most feared for throwing clubs (orinka) which could be accurately thrown from up to 70 paces (appx. 100 metres). In 1852 there was a report of a concentration of 800 Maasai warriors on the move in Kenya. In 1857, after having depopulated the “Wakuafi wilderness” in southeastern Kenya, Maasai warriors threatened Mombasa on the Kenyan coast.
 
Because of this migration, the Maasai are the southernmost Nilotic speakers. The period of expansion was followed by the Maasai "Emutai" of 1883-1902. This period was marked by epidemics of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, rinderpest and smallpox. The estimate first put forward by a German lieutenant in what was then northwest Tanganyika, was that 90 percent of cattle and half of wild animals perished from rinderpest. German doctors in the same area claimed that “every second” African had a pock-marked face as the result of smallpox. This period coincided with drought. Rains failed completely in 1897 and 1898.

The Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann travelled in Maasai lands in 1891-1893, and described the old Maasai settlement in the Ngorongoro Crater in the 1894 book Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle ("Through the lands of the Maasai to the source of the Nile"): "There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of starvation glared ... warriors scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders. Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims." By one estimate two-thirds of the Maasai died during this period.

Starting with a 1904 treaty, and followed by another in 1911, Maasai lands in Kenya were reduced by 60 percent when the British evicted them to make room for settler ranches, subsequently confining them to present-day Kajiado and Narok districts. Maasai in Tanzania were displaced from the fertile lands between Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro, and most of the fertile highlands near Ngorongoro in the 1940s. More land was taken to create wildlife reserves and national parks: Amboseli, Nairobi National Park, Masai Mara, Samburu, Lake Nakuru and Tsavo in Kenya; Manyara, Ngorongoro, Tarangire and Serengeti in Tanzania.

Maasai are pastoralist and have resisted the urging of the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. They have demanded grazing rights to many of the national parks in both countries.

The Maasai stood against slavery and lived alongside most wild animals with an aversion to eating game and birds. Maasai land now has East Africa's finest game areas. Maasai society never condoned traffic of human beings, and outsiders looking for people to enslave avoided the Maasai.

Essentially there are twelve geographic sectors of the tribe, each one having its own customs, appearance, leadership and dialects. These subdivisions are known as the Keekonyokie, Damat, Purko, Wuasinkishu, Siria, Laitayiok, Loitai, Kisonko, Matapato, Dalalekutuk, Loodokolani and Kaputiei.

(PICTURE FOR DISPLAY ONLY)

BUY, BYE!!

i