The Maasai are a Nilotic speaking pastoralist people of the Rift Valley grasslands of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, organized traditionally through an age set system in which boys become morans, warriors, and later elders, in ceremonies that mark each stage of life. Cattle stand at the center of Maasai livelihood and belief: Paul Spencer's ethnography of ritual among the Matapato Maasai records the conviction that Engai gave cattle to the Maasai alone at the beginning of the world, a charter that long justified raids on neighboring herds and still shapes how wealth and marriage payments are reckoned.
British and German colonial administration pushed the Maasai out of much of their best grazing land from the early twentieth century, formalized in the 1904 and 1911 Anglo Maasai agreements that confined communities to reserves, and the same pattern of displacement continued after independence with the creation of the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, both carved from land Maasai herders had used.
Naomi Kipury's collection of Maasai oral literature records the age set songs, praise poetry and prayers through which this history and the Engai charter are still transmitted. Today Maasai communities in Kenya and Tanzania combine cattle herding with wage labor, tourism and, increasingly, permanent settlement, while contesting continued restrictions on grazing inside protected conservation areas.