At the beginning of this century, S.L.Hinde, one of the first administrative officers among the Kenya Maasai, published a book entitled The Last of the Masai (Hinde and Hinde, 1901). His counterpart in Tanganyika, Moritz Merker, concluded the first serious ethnography of the Maasai with similarly gloomy views (Merker, 1910: 351):

Hinde's and Merker's dismal prophecies have been echoed in many subsequent accounts, and now, almost a century later, Hinde's title itself has been revived on the cover of yet another glossy book for tourists (Amin and Willetts, 1990). While Hinde and Merker believed that the Maasai would be swallowed up by agriculture and inter-breeding, later writers have blamed sedentarization, education and the encroachment of capitalism for their impending, but regrettable, demise.

Why this predisposition always to see the Maasai — and, indeed, ‘real pastoralists’ generally — as a dying breed? Partly, no doubt, it stems from a mixture of romantic nostalgia and fashionable guilt, but it also suggests that western observers have always had a far more rigid attachment to the outward trappings of ‘tribe’ than the ‘tribesmen’ themselves. Few have questioned whether the Maasai, whose passing they deplore, are not simply one particular manifestation of a general, enduring but highly mutable and varied identity which they happen to observe on the point of its apparently becoming something else. Maasai themselves were clearly more optimistic about their future, as Merker himself continued (Merker, 1910: 351):