Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/282/en

These two streams did not flow into general cultural life until post-Christian times. Yet here and there they long maintained themselves in time-displaced cultures with the purest contrariety. A personal experience can illuminate this: in the Africa of the 1930s, in what is today Tanzania in the Kilimanjaro region, the tribal peoples of the Bantu and the Maasai lived in close spatial proximity to one another, each preserving their tribal customs. The latter, a Hamitic people, lived nomadically with their Zebu herds amid the wilderness, neighbours to lion, elephant, buffalo and the rest. Protection for man and herd was provided at night by encampments surrounded with thorn-brush — so-called *kraals*; their nourishment consisted of the milk and blood of Zebu cattle, along with the roots of certain wild-growing plants as dietetics. There he stood, the shepherd — a cloth thrown over the shoulder, lightly resting on the spear, the buffalo-hide shield leaned against him, tall, with noble features, resting like a column in the full blaze of the sun, his grave and dreaming gaze directed toward the distance, the herd gathered around him — turning toward the stranger, a fleeting greeting, otherwise no question, no word. The Maasai of that time rejected every form of civilisation, every schooling. They lived interwoven into nature, with a consciousness reaching back into the chain of ancestors.