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.)
