Everyone knows the Maasai: speakers of Maa, famous for their courage, colourful decorations and love for cattle.
According to Maasai legend, the Maasai stem from a place called Endikir-e-Kerio (the scarp of Kerio).During one dry spell they decided to migrate southwards and so built a bridge to cross the scarp. However, after only half had made the crossing, the bridge collapsed. Those who had already made it to the other side are the original Maasai, those left behind the neighbouring people of the highland region; the Somali, Borana and Rendille.
The more mundane, academic view is that the ancestors of Maa speakers lived in southern Sudan, some time during the first millenium AD. By the seventeenth/ eighteenth century, with the infusion of superior weapons and a new breed of cattle, they started to migrate southwards into the Rift Valley. In the hay days of the Maasai people, during the nineteenth century, the Maasai dominated an enormous area ranging from central Kenya to central Tanzania. Expansion took place at the expense of other, less-specialised pastoralists in the Rift Valley. It did not take place via conflict and conquest only though; a number of neighbouring people simply took over the Maasai way of living and assimilated with Maasai culture over time.
Today, the Maasai inhabit large parts of the rift valley in central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (see map). The Maasai are divided into numerous autonomous political sections, clans and sub-clans, distinct from each other through dialect, geography and historical background. Sometimes sections are clustered in larger alliances, the four main alliances being the Kisongo, Loitai, Kaputiei and Purko (the Ereto Maasai are part of the Kisongo). Within clans and sections, political leadership is in the hands of elders, whose age-set leader, the so-called olaiguenani, has a very influential position. Another individual within Maasai society worth noting here, the divine doctor (olioboni), does not fulfil any political responsibilities, but earns great respect amongst his people.