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

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Maasai expanded dramatically, demolishing and absorbing other Loikop sections; eventually, Maasai pastoralist identity superseded and erased that of Loikop.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.