Maasai

The Maasai are an Eastern Nilotic, Maa-speaking people of the Great Rift Valley, and the southernmost of the Nilotic speakers, whose ancestors drifted south from the region of South Sudan.

Semi-nomadic cattle pastoralists organised in some twenty local sections, or iloshon, they built a warrior society armed with spear, shield and throwing club, and took from neighbouring Cushitic peoples the age-set system, circumcision and much vocabulary. As they spread through the Rift Valley they absorbed Southern Cushitic hunter-gatherer groups and displaced older settled communities.

From the late eighteenth century they competed for pasture with the related Kwavi, or Loikop; the long drought that began about 1800 peaked in the 1830s, bringing the Kenyan famine of 1836 and opening the Mutai, and around 1830 the long Iloikop wars between Maasai and Kwavi began.