Adult Masai (Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting northern, central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania) living in traditional style, both warriors and women, are decked with massive earrings, colourful bead necklaces and bracelets of wrought-copper, and women also wear anklets. Warriors wear orange-red cloaks knotted at the shoulder and dye their tall, slim bodies with ochre clay and fat. Men and unmarried women wear their hair ochred and braided right up to the skull, but married women have their heads shaved and polished with red clay.
Every stage of life is marked by ritual. Naming ceremonies for infants, for example, and circumcision rites for older girls and boys. And once every 15 years at a full moon, the E unoto graduation ceremony for warriors takes place - the main one is at Mukulat in Tanzania.
Warriors, some wearing lion's mane, ostrich-feather and leopard skin headdresses, gather for the four-day event, which includes traditional dancing and sacrificing bullocks, as well as ritual shaving of the head. The young men cannot marry until they become senior warriors.
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