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Dr. Ludwig Krapf And Reverend John Rebman

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In the late seventeenth century, more specifically 1840, Europeans first experienced the Maasai. Dr. Ludwig Krapf and Reverend John Rebman, both were missionaries from Germany. In 1861, Krapf published a book that is most likely the first written history and description of the Maasai people and their lifestyle. In the book, Krapf states “the Maasai ‘live entirely on milk, butter, honey, and meat of black cattle, goats and sheep…. Having a great distaste for agriculture, believing that the nourishment afforded by cereals enfeebles and is only suitable to the despised tribes of the mountains…… They are dreaded as warriors, laying all waste with fire and sword, so that the weaker tribes do not venture to resist them in open fields, leave them possessions of their herds and seek only to save themselves by the quickest possible flight.”

Sir Charles Eliot At the time of the British arrival, in the early twentieth century, Maasai territory stretched 700 miles north and south from northern Kenya to central Tanzania, and 400 miles east and west. The entire area measured some 200,000 square miles of territory. Until the early 1880s, the Maasai were a formidable nation in eastern Africa. Sir Charles Elliot, Britain 's first governor in Kenya, wrote of the Maasai: "They asserted themselves against slave traders, took tribute from those who passed through their country, and treated other races, whether African or not, with great arrogance." Sir Charles Eliot recognized the

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