FAMILIES : Kenya : Villagers Cling to Values at Odds With Those of West : For the Samburu, family is rooted in clearly defined roles and interdependence.

From the broken rocks in the distance a lion roars. A dry breeze stirs across bush land and through flat-topped thorn trees. It is early, before the sun rises and the heat comes to this spectacular, forbidding African landscape.

Tall figures move in the dawn light. They are men, mythical figures in the 20th Century: Samburu warriors, their braided hair caked in ocher and mud, their bare-chested bodies lean and sleek, their waists wrapped in a yard of bright red cloth, their faces painted with grease and coiled with beads.

They plant their limber 8-foot iron spears in the dirt with leaf-shaped blades pointing skyward. The men push open a pathway in the ring of dried thorn bush that surrounds and secures their small village like razor wire.

If they are nervous about the lion, they do not show it.

Another day has begun for the Samburu.

Ethnic cousins of the storied Masai people to the south, the Samburu are pastoralists, semi-nomads, and among East Africa’s few remaining traditional and ordered cultures.

Here, in cow-dung huts, experts with spears and adornment, a few thousand African families live ritualized and vulnerable lives.

“Welcome,” says the old man whose name is Lelepoko, and who limps on a foot discolored as a consequence of being bitten three days before by a puff adder the size of an inner tube.

His greeting is a good sign. The Samburu are uncommonly shy. Outsiders represent progress. And progress is tugging at the moorings of these remote people. Progress is regarded with suspicion. Outsiders are rude. They behave as if Samburu were animals in the bush. They make photographs and give nothing except the dust of their four-wheel machines.

The family is the essence of Samburu life, at least as they define family. It interests them that others would come to learn. Because the Samburu believe they have things to teach.

“Sit,” says the old man.

It is a polite standoff over who will sit on the only stool in this manyatta , or village, of 12 huts, 48 people and nine amalgamated families, a herd of cows and several herds of goats. The outsider prevails. Lelepoko assumes the stool under a thicket of thorn bush just as the flames of equatorial sun leap over the horizon.

Lelepoko’s voice is of a senior elder. That requires a speech, not a conversation. His speech tells this:

The Samburu may be curiosities, at the back of the line in the race to meet the future. But understand this, the Samburu people do not know loneliness. Samburu children have essential responsibilities in daily life. The elderly are venerated, not warehoused. Frolic coexists with discipline. Possessions mean everything, possessions mean nothing.

And, at least for the moment, the Samburu illuminate their nights with campfires and sing in harmony with their harsh environment.

Yes, the Samburu are different, as measured by Western values. Men, according to their holdings of livestock, take more than one wife. The sexual organs of women are ritually despoiled with a blade with the same professed nonchalance as ears are pierced and the lobes stretched hugely. The entire family lives in fear of evil spells--the controlling power of the elders. The Samburu diet is based on the blood of the cow, extracted by lancing its neck. It is drunk straight or mixed with milk.

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Modernized Africans tend to regard the Samburu with unease. People like these perpetuate Africa’s backward stereotype in colorful coffee-table books.

But most Africans also recognize in the Samburu the attachments that remain imperatives across the continent: to family, to clan, to tribe, to region--all of these ahead of nation and government.

Speaking through an interpreter in the Maa language, using suggestive sentences, Lelepoko reaches for the essence of Samburu family life: “Everyone,” he says, “has a place.”

He could also say, everyone accepts the rules. Time passes slowly enough for the old to accumulate useful information, which in turn earns respect. Music and dance evolve over generations, not with each billboard listing, so all can share together. The young are dependent on the old, and the old on the young.

These deceptively simple ideas rest on an unusual foundation. The Samburu are joined not just by family and clan, but even more strongly by “age sets.” To those not familiar with this social organization, groupings by age assume a powerful logic the longer the concept is pondered.

Males go through three: They are children. Then, as a group, they become moran , or warriors. Finally, together and according to the needs of the community, the warriors lay down their spears and become elders. Every male will pass his life with the same age set. Each group has its responsibilities and its own high standing in the community.

The children learn to herd, the warriors learn to protect the herds against lions and poachers, the elders learn to teach. That, as it happens, amounts to a lifetime of learning for the Samburu.

“We respect the old among us. Old men have to sit and tell the warriors their responsibilities, how to behave, how to be good warriors. We respect the warriors. They must safeguard us. We respect the children. They are our future,” says Lelepoko.

The old man’s high rank can be told by the drab cloth, a faded floral curtain. He wears it as a toga, an intentional contrast to the proud red wraps of the warriors.

The Samburu elders also wear wristwatches, although they do not count the time. Lelepoko can only guess his age--maybe the mid-50s.

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Females live through two age sets: They are children, during which time they are permitted an openly promiscuous adolescence. Then they are married off, and they have no say in the selection of a husband. Their role remains servile. Or so say the men.

The senior of Lelepoko’s two wives, Nolomisi, assumes a position at his side for the day’s conversations. She wears a cape of goat hide and her head is shaved. She speaks carefully, but with the hint of authority suggesting that anthropologists have not fully deciphered the position of women in this culture.

One is tempted to blurt out the question: To what extent do women yearn for more freedom, something closer to equality? Wouldn’t they like to choose their own husbands? Escape the knife of circumcision?

But this is a constrained culture, and a visitor knows that such blasphemy, if felt, is held close and certainly not expressed to strangers in the presence of elder men.

The woman smiles with teeth unmarred by sugar and talks of caring for the children. Of the nights during the rainy season when the warriors and girls gather around the fire and dance and sing. Those are the joyous times.

Now, though, the rains are finished for many months. Maybe the Ewaso Ng’iro River will go dry and the Samburu will dig wells in the riverbed and the men will form bucket brigades to draw water for their cattle.

During the dry season, the woman says, there is no singing.

And beyond the dry season, there are other worries for the Samburu.

For one thing, they and their herds are growing beyond the capacity of the land to nourish them. Lelepoko and his two wives have 12 children and a whole platoon of hungry grandchildren.

Some will be selected to be sent to school. “The only way for us to survive in the future is for some to go away and work and help the community,” says Lelepoko.

But this also awakens strange hungers. Normally, the only money that comes to the village is from the sale of beadwork--and it is spent for maize, more beads, water jugs and sandals, the only consumer items found in this manyatta .

Today a young warrior can dance at a tourist lodge and earn more in a week than the whole village does in a year. With this, he can buy forbidden alcohol or cigarettes or strange gifts for the girls.

And how long will it be, the Samburu wonder, before one comes home in a Toyota pickup with a generator and a TV? And then who in the village will be able to hear if the lion roars tonight?

PROFILE

* Husband: Lelepoko

* Senior Wife: Nolomisi

* Home: Cow-dung hut in unnamed village, northern Kenya

* Occupation: Subsistence livestock

* Annual inclome: Estimated $150