A warrior named Mchangi

Samburu women with their beaded necklaces. Photo by David Lansing.

If you really take a good look at the Samburu, both men and women, what you notice are three things: They are handsome people; they are flashy dressers; and they love beads. I mean, take a good look at these two women we photographed the other day and just pay attention to the thousands and thousands of beads they’re wearing (and realize that they didn’t go down to the local Samburu jewelry store and buy them; they spent hundreds of hours designing and stringing them together themselves).

A Samburu warrior named Mchangi showing me his mchangi. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

When we were at the singing wells, I asked the one warrior who spoke a bit of broken English what his name was and he said it was Mchangi. I asked him what that meant and he pointed at the bracelets on his wrist.

“Mchangi are the beads,” he said.

And then he told me a story. He didn’t tell it to me exactly this way but I’d need a tape recorder to get his Swahili-English piggin perfect. He said that when the women drop a bowl of mchangi on the ground, they make the totos—the children—pick them up. The children think they get them all but mama will continue to step on one here or there for days, maybe weeks. When this Samburu warrior was a toto, his mama told him he was just like the mchangi—always under her feet! So that’s what she named him.

I asked him if he liked the name and he gave me a big smile and said it was good for him—“Mzuri.”

I rather like the name myself. And for some reason, it made me think about the orphanage Pete and I visited in Nairobi at the beginning of this trip. Those children, whose parents have died of HIV/AIDS, are a bit like these mchangi—if you leave them on the streets they’re going to get underfoot and cause problems for everyone. But if you collect them up and handle them with care, you just might end up with something quite beautiful. Like the bracelets this Samburu warrior was wearing.