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Beyond Eponymy: the Evidence for Loikop as an Ethnonym in Nineteenth-Century East Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Christian Jennings
Christian Jennings*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
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Extract

During the early nineteenth century, European travelers and residents in east Africa wrote of an important pastoralist society, called Loikop, that dominated the plains of the Rift Valley, and whose divisions included, among others, the rapidly expanding Maasai. These pastoralists were described in detail by three missionaries: Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johannes Rebmann, and Jakob Erhardt. Their various journals, letters, and published articles, written during the 1840s and 1850s, are widely recognized as the earliest documentary evidence for Maasai and Parakuyo history. But they have often been neglected, and sometimes deliberately shunned, in favor of later written or oral sources, perhaps because their views of pastoralist history, including the idea of a pastoralist Loikop community, seem rather incongruous when compared to those of more recent vintage.

This skepticism was fueled partly by the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, Maasai expanded dramatically, demolishing and absorbing other Loikop sections; eventually, Maasai pastoralist identity superseded and erased that of Loikop. By the time of European colonial conquest, the term “Loikop” carried negative connotations, and scholars from this point forward had difficulty in seeing any other valid meaning for the term. This essay is devoted to making the case for restoring the idea of Loikop pastoralists in our narratives of east African history. In many ways, it is a response to John Berntsen's “The Enemy Is Us: Eponymy in the Historiography of the Maasai,” published in 1980.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 32 , 2005 , pp. 199 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2005

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References

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2 Johann Ludwig Krapf, journal entry, 4 January 1844, CA5/O16, Church Missionary Society, “Records, 1803-1914,” microfilm copy of the CMS archives courtesy of the Center for Research Libraries. Documents from the Church Missionary Society archives are hereafter cited as CMS.

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6 Although Krapf and the other early missionaries noted that the proper term for these pastoralists was Loikop, they continued to use the term “Wakuafi” in their correspondence and journals, because it was the conventional term used on the coast (“Wakuafi” or Wakwavi is, in fact, simply the Swahili derivation of Loikop).

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