What is the Yaaku?

The Yaaku (often Mukogodo-Maasai) are a people living in the Mukogodo forest west of Mount Kenya, a division of the Laikipia District of Rift Valley Province, Kenya. Former hunter-gatherers and bee-keepers, the Yaaku have assimilated to the pastoralist culture of the Maasai in the first half of the twentieth century, although there is still some occasional bee-keeping going on. The reason for this transition is mostly one of social prestige. The Maasai look down upon hunter-gatherer peoples, calling them Dorobo ('the ones without cattle'), and many Yaaku consider the Maasai culture to be superior. As a result of the assimilation the Yaaku almost completely gave up their Cushitic language Yaaku for the Eastern Nilotic Maasai language between 1925 and 1936. The Maasai variant they speak nowadays is called Mukogodo-Maasai. Old Yaaku words are still found in some parts of the bee-keeping vocabulary, for example:

• sɪka — 'honey' (cf. Maasai en-aisho)
• íno — 'Greater Honeyguide (Indicator indicator)' (compare Maasai n-cɛshɔrɔ-î)
• kantála — 'wooden honey container (about 60 cm)'

A revivalist movement has been rising among the Yaaku in recent years, aiming to strengthen the Yaaku identity. In early 2005, Maarten Mous, Hans Stoks and Matthijs Blonk visited Doldol on the invitation of a special Yaaku committee, to determine whether there is enough knowledge of Yaaku left among the people to revive the language. This visit has shown there are few truly fluent Yaaku speakers left, all very old: two women called Roteti and Yaponay, respectively, and a man called Legunai. The latter two are both of the Terito age set, which means that they must be around a hundred years old. Knowledge of vocabulary is much wider spread in the community. Full language revival is improbable because of the scarcity of fluent speakers, but one of the possibilities for a partial revival is to use Yaaku vocabulary in the framework of Maasai grammar, a strategy that is analoguous to the making of Mbugu, a mixed language of the Usambara mountains in Tanzania.