Maasai bomas (houses), kraals (fences) and manyattas (villages) are built of materials found in the local area. The Maasai collect mud, cow manure, sticks, thorns and dried grass to make them.
Bomas - sticks are used to form the 'walls' of the house. A mixture of mud, straw and cow manure is used overtop to 'plaster' the sticks which when it is dried turns hard. More sticks are then placed ontop of the walls making a pointed cone, which is then covered in dried grass to form the roof.
Kraals - Sticks and thorns are put at different angles in the ground forming a large circle around the Manyatta to stop wild animals entering the village. A small gap is left in the fence to allow people to come and go and is patrolled by Maasai warriors. Smaller circles are built inside the Manyatta as 'pens' for the cattle and goats.
Activity
Make your own modal Maasai boma or manyatta. You can either do this:
The Traditional way: collect twigs and dried grass/straw from your local area and use clay or mud to form the walls of the house.
Use Paper and Cardboard: cut a toliet roll in half to use for the base of the house and make a paper cone to go ontop for the roof. Use strips of cardboard or felt tip pens/paint to draw on the straw/mud. Make a fence out of cardboard or paper to go round the edge of the village.
Challenge
Take a photo of your modal Boma or Manyatta and turn it into an annotated drawing with arrows and labels explaining the different parts of the design.
Unfortunately not the ones with chocolate chips.
Our cookies ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Please make your choice!
Some cookies are necessary in order to make this website function correctly. These are set by default and whilst you can block or delete them by changing your browser settings, some functionality such as being able to log in to the website will not work if you do this. The necessary cookies set on this website are as follows:
A 'sessionid' token is required for logging in to the website and a 'crfstoken' token is used to prevent cross site request forgery. An 'alertDismissed' token is used to prevent certain alerts from re-appearing if they have been dismissed.
We use Matomo cookies to improve the website performance by capturing information such as browser and device types. The data from this cookie is anonymised.
Cookies are used to help distinguish between humans and bots on contact forms on this website.
A cookie is used to store your cookie preferences for this website.
Cookies that are not necessary to make the website work, but which enable additional functionality, can also be set. By default these cookies are disabled, but you can choose to enable them below: