Regions with significant populations: the Republic of Kenya, Samburu County, Isiolo County, Laikipia County, Marsabit County
The Samburu are a Maa-speaking Nilotic people of north-central and northern Kenya, closely related to the Maasai; linguists place Samburu within the North Maa cluster, and broader reference works describe them as part of the pastoral peoples of the Great Rift Valley rather than as an isolated community. Their homeland is a dry, semi-arid rangeland across Samburu, Isiolo, and Laikipia counties, where rainfall is highly erratic and people and herds move strategically between highlands, lowlands, wells, seasonal streams, and negotiated grazing areas in order to survive. Livelihoods have long centered on livestock—especially cattle, but also sheep, goats, and camels—and while pastoral mobility remains foundational, many households now supplement herding with maize cultivation, petty trade, livestock marketing, tourism, and remittances as drought, land pressure, and market integration reshape everyday life. Samburu social organization is strongly age-graded: boys pass through circumcision into the warrior stage (lmurran or morans), elders retain substantial authority in settlement and herding decisions, and the whole system is built around seniority, duty, and intergenerational responsibility, even though education and conservancy politics have altered how power is exercised in practice. Traditional Samburu religion centers on Nkai, a distant creator deity, and on ritual specialists known as laibons or loibonok; healing and protection may involve divination, herbal remedies, purgatives, and ritual medicines, so religion, medicine, and morality are closely intertwined rather than neatly separated. Samburu public culture is also visually distinctive: dress, hairstyle, and ornamentation communicate identity, and beadwork is especially important for older girls and young married women, while mporo marriage beads have had long-standing value within Samburu social relations and have also entered transnational markets. Cultural expression extends into rock art as well; Samburu rock paintings are made in camp settings, often depict domestic animals and human figures, and function as an intergenerational medium through which each new age-set preserves the tradition while subtly changing it. Taken together, the Samburu are best understood not as a fixed “tribe” in a simplistic sense, but as a dynamic pastoral society whose language, mobility, age-set politics, ritual authority, and adornment practices have continually adapted to ecology, history, and modern change.
