This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello, this is the Investigations team at Morales.

Please leave your statistical query after the tone and we'll investigate.

Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander.

This week we thought we'd dedicate the programme to answering as many listener queries as we can.

And I've got two of our top salutes in the studio to help answer your questions, Charlotte and Ian.

Hi, Ruth. Hello.

Let's get to our first query, then, which came to us through Twitter using hashtag BBC Morales.

It's from an American anthropologist who's been to record the music of the Masai tribe in Kenya.

Dear Morales, my name is Hans Johnson and I'm from Boston, Massachusetts.

Throughout my studies, I've come across a figure of 1 million being the estimated population of the Masai.

And I'm just wondering how accurate that figure is and if it's even current.

Well, the Masai are a traditionally nomadic group who live in the south of Kenya and the north of Tanzania.

Charlotte, you've been looking into Hans' question.

Yeah, the figure of 1 million Masai is reported all over the place.

I spoke to Ernestina Coast and Associate Professor of Population Studies at the London School of Economics.

And she traced the number back to a report from 1998, but it didn't give any evidence where that number comes from.

Okay, so the figures at about 15 years old then, do we have any official figures we can look at?

Yes, there were around 840,000 people who identified themselves as Masai in Kenya's census of 2009.

Unfortunately, in Tanzania, the census doesn't ask for ethnic group or tribe, so we don't have a figure for them.

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