MAASAI BRIDES
Few countries are as far from each other in terms of climate, culture and physical distance as Zanzibar and Italy – but that wasn’t enough to keep these two couples apart.
Two Italian women tell us about crossing cultural borders, and the Maasai men they love
Essays have been written about the glamour of cross-cultural attraction, and theses on the potential pitfalls of interaction between tourists and locals where there are differences in culture and economic standing. Most recently, in her article ‘The Interplay Between Imaginations and Interactions in Maasai Cultural Tourism’, Vanessa Wijngaarden, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg, reported how both sides can fear being viewed as naive or ignorant, and fear being exploited.
Yet none of that factored in the romances of Ilaria Beraldi, a hotel school management graduate and chef, and Cristina Pedrinzani, a 34-year-old seamstress with a diploma in linguistics, and the Maasai men, Andrea and Mosses, they each met and fell in love with in Tanzania.
Although both women are from Tuscany, they met each other only after both couples eventually moved to Italy, when they got together on a beach there (of course!) in June 2017. In emails from Italy, they shared their love stories with us, and we thought we’d share them with you, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day.
‘I’D FINISHED MY HOTEL SCHOOL studies and was working around Italy when a tour operator asked me to move to Zanzibar, the spice island off the coast of Tanzania, to be the pastry chef in an Italian resort there for three months.
‘I loved my job from the start. Cooking while looking out over the Indian Ocean and white beach from the kitchen window was a dream. I met many local people, and thanks to them, I had the chance to get to know the real Zanzibar – not the tourist one, but the one made of poverty, barefoot
kids who play in the street and people who live in shacks. I even attended a Swahili wedding, and was fascinated to learn more about the culture.
‘I’d been there for about two months when one night I met the love of my life: Kashuma, or “Andrea”, his Italian nickname. I was immediately attracted by his smile and his charisma. He wasn’t wearing traditional dress, and it was only when we met again on the beach the next day that I saw him in his beautiful Maasai shuka, his “African blanket”. I fell in love with him. He had a small souvenir shop next to the resort, and spoke good Italian [which many locals speak], so it was easy to get to know each other.
‘We got engaged within a couple of months, and I extended my stay. I ended up spending a year-and-a-half on that wonderful, conflicted island. Conflicted, because if you visit as a tourist, everything looks wonderful, but if you live there, you’ll experience the two conflicting worlds: rich and poor. Next to a luxurious resort you can find a fishing village with poor houses and people sleeping on the floor. If you go to Stone Town, the old part of Zanzibar City, you can find nice areas with cute souvenir shops, but when you turn a corner, you can end up in a dirty local market with fish and meat hanging in the open.
‘I worked hard at the resort, and when we had time off, Andrea took me to the mainland, inland, to meet his family. I was blown away by the beauty of the savannah, and by the Maasai’s way of life, their traditions and culture. Men eat separately from women; they brand their faces for decoration; they cure themselves with herbs or by drinking the blood of the cattle or goats they keep.
‘Back in Zanzibar, I enjoyed our simple life, but it wasn’t easy because my salary was low and life is expensive if you want more than the absolute basics; on an island everything must be imported. My work was also limited, so very reluctantly, at the end of 2014 I decided to move to London to follow my career.
‘But I couldn’t forget Andrea, my Maasai love. Within eight months we had decided to marry in Italy, buy a house and have a baby together – and we did just that. Andrea fitted easily into our relaxed Italian culture. In the beginning, my family and friends didn’t believe our relationship would last, but they changed their minds when they saw how hard he worked, and that he really wanted to stay with us. He found Italian friends, too.
‘Our wedding was wonderful, and we went back to Tanzania to celebrate it with a Maasai ceremony as well. We knelt on a cowhide surrounded by elders of the community and witnesses who blessed us by spitting cow’s milk in our faces.
‘Today, Andrea and I live and work together in Italy: he as an assistant cook, me as a chef. We travel between Italy and Tanzania every year for a month or more to visit Andrea’s family, with Mia, our beautiful baby. She is now two years old – a symbol of our love.’
‘I was blown away by the beauty of the savannah, and by the Maasai’s way of life, their traditions and culture.’
‘I participated in a Maasai ceremony with him, and fell in love with their values: respect for the elderly and a strong sense of community.’
CRISTINA WRITES:
‘IRONICALLY, JUST AS ILARIA (whom I’d not yet met) was leaving Zanzibar for London in 2014, I arrived on the island for a holiday. Everything changed after that! I’d always loved living near white, sandy beaches, and on this one I met Mosses, who ran a small shop on the beach. I was immediately drawn to his sweetness and shyness. He was the only Maasai there who didn’t speak Italian, but he had English, and I had a bit too, so we got by fine.
‘It was hard to leave, and for my holiday the following year I travelled again to Zanzibar and visited the mainland with Mosses, living for a week in a mud hut with no electricity, water or toilet. I participated in a Maasai ceremony with him, and fell in love with their values: respect fo the elderly and a strong sense of community.
‘The experience made me decide to change my life. I sold my home and car, left my job and moved to Zanzibar, managing a small resort with two other Italian girls. It was a new kind of job for me after being a seamstress in Italy. I took care of reservations, customer reception and the warehouse, and organised the kitchen, learning a bit of Swahili to communicate with staff who didn’t speak Italian or English.
‘I loved this simple life in flip-flops on the beach. We lived in a basic house with a tin roof, without
TV, a washing machine – and sometimes running water (it was a very small village). The electricity blackouts were numerous. I learned to carry tanks of water and wash clothes by hand. It was a simple life, where days passed between work and enjoying the beach, but I was happy and satisfied. I learnt to live with the slower pace of Africa and embraced the Swahili motto “Hakuna matata” (There’s no problem.) My relationship with Mosses deepened and, to our joy, I got pregnant.
‘I loved spending my pregnancy on the island, but hospital checks were basic and machinery was outdated. So when I was seven months along, we decided to move to Italy to have our daughter. That was in June 2016, and we’ve been in Italy ever since, because to live in Tanzania with a child is less easy – health and education are really expensive if you want good-quality services. Mosses learnt Italian and took a middleschool degree. Now we work and live here – even though we dream of moving back to Zanzibar one day. In the meantime, we travel there whenever we can with our daughter, Raheli.
‘Not long after we’d settled in Italy, I met Ilaria on a beach in Tuscany in a city called Viareggio – thanks to our partners, who were in touch because they had worked on the same beach in Zanzibar. So they organised a beach day in Italy for us to meet up.
‘From that point on, our friendship blossomed. Ilaria and I started the Sotto il Cielo della Tanzania (Under Tanzania’s Sky) project, which is also our name on social media. On Instagram we share our experiences – our stories and trips – and pictures. The project includes a fundraiser to support the construction of a
school for Maasai children in Arusha, Tanzania. We also published a novel in Italian that came out in October last year, Sotto il Cielo di Zanzibar (Under the Zanzibar Sky). It isn’t autobiographical, but our experience gave us a starting point…
‘Our lives are wonderful but not simple, because sometimes we feel the cultural differences. But our love is strong and makes us find compromises to make our relationships work. We are happy that our Maasai men are open to change. We are also happy that our daughters are used to travelling and living in such different cultures. They feel at home in both Italy and Tanzania, and they live in a multicultural, open family. We are so proud of them! We hope they can be the change that the world needs.’