History of Maasai Beadwork

Glass beads has in big quantities come to Africa from Europe and India as trading goods. Beads were traded as a currency for tea, coffee and sugar etc, and also as a popular payment for slaves during that long dark period of Africa's history. Although, old traces of ancient glass beads has been found and shows that small amounts of Egyptian and Roman beads came south over the Sahara to Kenya already B.C.

The beads soon became very popular all over and for some tribes they have become a symbol of their traditions, although the small colorful beads themselves are a rather late invention. Before the glass beads spread to east Africa the Maasai and other tribes used seeds, shells, wood, bone and other natural materials for their ornaments. Nowadays the Maasai use the small colourful glass beads for their jewelery. 

The Maasai beadwork carries messages, from where you are and to which age group you belong. The patterns and colors in a bracelet are for instance made uniquely for each age group and its the women sitting down together beading that decides the style of the new jewellery they are making for their sons, husbands and boyfriends.

The colour fields in the Maasai jewellery are rarely large and divided by contrast colours The Maasai hardly ever puts similar colours next to each other. The fields of colour "must" always be divided by a darker or brighter field. Contrasts are seen as beautiful and as a natural state. There must be night if there is day, peace if war, sun if rain, there’s always a opposite and when those two opposites stands next to each other then it’s in their eyes beautiful.