I Share My Husband with 2 Other Wives (Maasai Marriage Story)

technically a maasai man can have as many wives as he wants to now the concept of polygamy has always intrigued me because it is so foreign and so different from what i was taught about love and marriage in the western culture you know that notion where two individuals come together as two pieces of a whole to complete each other in perfect romance and harmony that is just so different from what happens here so i've come out here all the way to this tanzanian village a maasai village to learn a little bit more about what it's like to have co-wives so this is yay and i met yaya through stephanie her daughter-in-law and yayai has agreed to explain to me maths about maasai marriage how it works and what it's like to have a husband who has other wives step in tanzania far from the country's popular tourist attractions like kilimanjaro or zanzibar they all live together in a bulma in maasai culture that's an extended household or a family unit with several houses built around a central cattle pen this is their home [Music] [Music] is not like a traditional part of the maasai diet is it it didn't used to be but it is now so now it has become their staple but in the past and you hear that also in the books when they explain to you about masakacha and i think many people think that that's still true they tell you they just eat milk and blood and maybe meat sometimes but they don't do that anymore [Music] foreign [Music] hey [Music] oh [Music] they don't count the kettles because it's considered bad like to count how many cuddles you have so they don't do it [Music] whatever what about that one what's her name this one's called pemba like pemba island like pemba island i gave her the name what about this one this one yes [Music] [Music] stephanie how many people live in this bomber i never counted but i think it's about 40 maybe oh wow yes he is a big family you're never alone this is why yaya likes this way of life because there's always people to talk with nobody this is the master way of sharing or the way of showing respect to elder masai nyana engaged [Music] [Laughter] i am foreign [Laughter] foreign [Music] stephanie tell us a little bit about your story how did you get here um i got here i got here the first time i came here was in 2011 because i had met sequoia on mafia island where i was working as a research volunteer and he was working there also as security guard for dive center and i already spoke swahili at that point and i was trying to speak swahili to him a little bit but he didn't seem so interested he was like quite shy but then someone after maybe three weeks on the island told me that he likes me and i was like what crazy because i didn't think that he would like me at all um but so we got talking and then we ended up being together and then my contract had ended and i wanted to stay in tanzania and i wanted to stay with him so i said hey let's go to your traditional maasai home because for me i thought this was the only way for me to keep hold of him i knew if i left him we wouldn't be together anymore and so you've been living here for how long nine years now nine years in this massey village yeah and is my side stephanie recently went viral on youtube when she appeared in a video telling the story of her marriage to sequoia her maasai husband the video got over 10 million views to date [Music] on november [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music] why do you think it's so difficult for us raised in the so-called west to understand the maasai way of love and marriage i think because i had to question myself that same thing because it takes a lot of time for us and a lot of effort to get out of the ways or the system or the way of thinking that we have been raised to think to believe like our thoughts our western thoughts on love and marriage and even what is right what is wrong um we have been raised with these thoughts from when we were little of course that we think when we grow up that these are this is the only way to live but then actually when you travel and you meet other people and you talk to them especially when you talk to them in their own language when you really get to understand how they think then you realize that actually my way of thinking is not the only way of thinking and right and left and good and bad these are like very they can be defined in many different ways so it's difficult because we have to let go of everything that we have ever been taught is right so you have to let go of that and that's very difficult yeah i think uh um and it's not just the marriage customs that are changing around here the maasai who still live a traditional pastoral lifestyle have been witnessing huge shifts in how they raised their cattle unexpected droughts as a result of the changing climate or new and expanding farmlands encroaching upon traditional maasai pastures these are just some of the factors changing this traditional way of life as we speak [Music] that was yayai and her perspective on marriage now look i know it's not all rainbows and butterflies and i know that i as a zungu an outsider a wife foreigner will never hear about even half of the problems that people in maasai marriages face but i hope that what this video gave you is a slightly different perspective on how family structures can work and that there is no single answer to what a good marriage should be every culture has its own version and it's all about how we were raised and the ideas of romance and love and marriage that we've internalized along the way well i hope you enjoyed this vlog and that you got a slightly different new perspective out of it that's all i can ask i want to give a big big big shout out to stephanie who invited me to her village and who enabled this conversation who actually made it happen and massive thank you to yai for sharing her story and to you for coming here with an open mind all right i guess i'll see you in the next week cause we go together

Channel: Eva zu Beck

Views: 3,979,455

Rating: 4.8210621 out of 5

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Id: 78n8IZ2nI2A

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Imjustsmallboned]

At face value the problem here seems to be a lot of males lose out. When there's excess unpaired males- that's when the fighting starts.