34 
A COLONY IN THE MAKING 
CHAP. 
Whether under some single despotic ruler they sprung 
into notice is uncertain. The probability is that, 
like the Zulus, their supremacy was sudden and 
temporary. Certain is the fact that, in the first half 
of the nineteenth century, and indeed for the next 
forty years, theirs was a name to conjure with. North, 
south, east and west, they raided ; to the coast on the 
east, Lake Victoria on the west, far into German East 
Africa on the south, and beyond Mt. Kenia on the 
north. The object of their raids was a lust for fight¬ 
ing and a desire for cattle. Women they never took ; 
neither male nor female might marry outside the tribe. 
They attacked Mombasa, they sacked Vanga. Early 
travellers, European or Arab, were confronted and 
forced to pay tribute (hongo). To what extent they 
were feared, a perusal of almost any of the works of 
early shooters or explorers will show. At the mere 
mention of the word Masai rifles were loaded, laager 
was formed, and tribute was to hand ! Possibly to a 
certain extent this universal respect was founded on 
“omne ignotum pro magnifico ” ; at all events Mr. F. 
J. Jackson, formerly an ardent shooter and naturalist, 
now Governor of Uganda, once stood up to them with 
no ill effects. Again, as far as we know, they were 
none the better for their periodical encounters with the 
Nandi. Still, of their prestige there can be no two 
questions. Their decline began through natural 
causes and came so quickly that it is a fair presumption 
that their rise was equally rapid. Somewhere about 
1890, the Masai were themselves visited by famine and 
smallpox and their cattle by rinderpest. They suffered 
enormously, and in the dissensions that inevitably 
ensued split into two fractions. Their great chief, 
Mbatian, died, and one portion, remaining in British 
