My mom and I have translated one of the oldest published accounts of the Maasai. It is the article “A short description of the Masai and Wakwafi tribes in southeast Africa” which appeared in the journal Das Ausland (Abroad) in 1857. The author was Johann Krapf, a missionary who lived in a village inland from Mombasa from 1846 to 1853. From there, he made a number of travels deep into the East African interior in what is now Kenya and Tanzania. He was the first such traveler, native or foreign, to write a detailed and lengthy first-hand account of the East African interior, which was published in 1858 in the two-volume set Reisen in Ost-Afrika (Travels in East Africa). (Krapf also holds the distinction of being the first person to ever mention the Maasai in writing at all, in a letter from 1846.)
The article from Das Ausland contains descriptions of coastal and inland geography, and the Maasai, Wakwafi, Wanika, and other tribes of the interior, as primarily related to him by an enslaved young man from the Wakwafi tribe. There are descriptions of the Maasai and Wakwafi pastoral lifestyle; age sets and political arrangement; the culture of warriorhood and practices in war; rites of passage like circumcision, marriage, and inhumation; their settlements, huts, jewelry, and household wares; and their theology, particularly their belief in a Neiterkob, an intermediary between them and the god Engai. Krapf also describes negotiations for the passage of caravans, and mineral deposits and tree types to be found in the interior.
