Episode list

Adventurer Bruce spends a month with the Hamar, a sorghum-growing and cattle-herding tribal people in the fertile part of the southern Etiopian Omo valley. After witnessing women willingly being flogged bloody with whippy branches for half an hour by the Maza, recently initiated unwed men, as prelude for a stark-naked youngster's initiation by jumping on and walking over the cattle they line up and hold, Bruce gets permission from the chief of Argude village to stay with elder Jammu and follow his adolescent cousin Suri, who prepares for weeks his coming-of-age initiation by the tribe's distinctive cattle-jumping, a requirement to become eligible for marriage and cattle-ownership. Bruce is even allowed to train in near-permanent seclusion with the Maza and jump himself. Hamar youth schooled in town starts questioning or even rejects the tribal traditions, increasing tourism and Ethiopian government objections affect their way of life. Besides sorghum beer, the ceremony also requires a lumpy version mixed with cattle blood.

Bruce's journey trough the Southern Ethiopian Omo valley ends in the river's delta at Lake Turkana (mainly in Kenia), the home of the Dassanech tribe, which absorbed various immigrant elements since its arrival circa 1800. The nomadic pastoral people defines wealth as cattle and goat herds, but the pastures are arid and bad weather can wipe out whole herds. Those without herds are called the Dies (poor), and live on the mosquito-infested marshy shores of the lake, where their main source of income is hunting and fishing in the shallow lake. Bruce experiences life in a typically destitute village, which barely offers any shade, and joins men on a nightly canoe hunt for the dangerous main prey, crocodiles, and their preparation. His female host, the stand-in for the absent village chief, also explains the system of totemic 'clans' which rather constitute hereditary professional casts.