This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

The Maasai are a semi-nomadic, pastoralist people who make their living hurting cows, sheep, and goats.

They don't eat wild animals.

Their traditional lifestyle revolves around cattle.

They move for the best grazing in harmony with nature and the seasons. Their lands once covered almost all of the Great Rift Valley.

In the early 1900s, shortly after the British colonized East Africa,

the Maasai lost around 60% of their traditional grazing lands in a series of treaties. In the decades after that, they were further displaced, as the governments took land to form wildlife preserves and national parks.

The Messiah have faced pressure from first the British colonial government and now the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments

to give up their traditional

semi-nomadic culture, to send their children to government schools, and to assimilate to a more

sedentary way of life. It's estimated that there are nearly two million Maasai people living

in Kenya and Tanzania today, and their lands are being carved up and sold to developers.

They're increasingly restricted from accessing their traditional pastures and water sources,

and climate change is only adding to the problems faced by the Maasai.

In today's episode, another in our From the Archive series,

Teppalit Oli Saitoti, a Maasai warrior and author,

tells his story and the story of his people.

Teppolet Oli Saitoti was born in Maasiland in Tanzania in 1949.

His father had 36 children, and of those, Teppolet Saitoti, was the one who was chosen to go to school.

He attended a missionary school called the Endelen Native Authority Primary School through fifth grade.

And then he went on to Longuito Upper Primary School, where he discovered a love of writing.

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