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Archives & Reprint Series (imprint) Humboldt State University Press

Spring 4-30-2016

Maasai Dictionary
Charles Richmond

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/reprint

Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons

Recommended Citation
Richmond, Charles, "Maasai Dictionary" (2016). Archives & Reprint Series (imprint). 2.
http://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/reprint/2

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PRESS

Maasai
Dictionary
by Charles Richmond
MAASAI DICTIONARY
by Charles Richmond, circa 1940

Humboldt State University Press

Arcata, CA
2016
Photo by Charles Richmond

2016 Charles Richmond

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom-

mercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Published by Humboldt State University Press

Arcata, California

Cover image from The Masai by A.C. Hollis 1905 Oxford at the
Clarendon Press

Cover design by Claire Reynolds

Print ISBN: 0996673148
About the Author
This dictionary of English to Maa, the language of
Maasai peoples of Kenya and Tanzania, was written
and compiled by Charles Richmond. It is one of the
earliest Maa language dictionaries.

From 1935 until 1951, Charles lived in the Kenya

colony, East Africa as a subject of the King of
England. At that time, he was a Captain in the
King’s African Rifles and fought alongside tribal
chiefs in northern Kenya and Ethiopia against
the Italian dictator, Mussolini during WWII.
Subsequent to his military service, Charles
traveled briefly to his homeland, England, where he
studied theology and was ordained as a minister
in the Church of England. He then returned to his
beloved Maasai and Samburu tribes of central and
northern Kenya colony near Lake Rudolph, as a
missionary.

Charles Richmond was born April 30, 1911 in Reading, Berkshire County, England,
the son of George and Nellie Deadman Richmond. He was the eldest of five children.
He left home as a teenager and lived with an elderly churchwoman. He gained early
business experience working at a men’s dress shop. His military and spiritual
interest was kindled by his early experience in the British Boys Brigade, in
rugby and boxing contests, and later in the British Christian Missionary Society.

In 1943, while on furlough in the British Army, Charles visited a missionary

outpost in Kijabe near Eldama Ravine, adjacent to the Great Rift Valley, not far
from the fabled Mt. Kenya. There he met Harriet Warner Truesdell, a missionary
from Columbia Bible College in South Carolina who was teaching English and the
Bible to native Kikuyu girls. They corresponded during his service in the war
and were married at Kijabe within the year. The couple moved to Kajiado, a small
community along the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa. There, with the help of the
local people, they built a primitive church and continued their goal of bringing
Christianity to the local people. Kajiado at that time was a very small community
made up of the Richmonds, one other European family, and a scattered collection
of ducas, small shops run by Indian businessmen.

Charles and Harriet Richmond had two sons. Both children were born in a nursing
home in Nairobi, about 100 miles away. The children made friends with locals and
enjoyed the sense of wild isolation. However, within a few years, due to some
disagreements with the British Christian Missionary Society over a desired move
back to the land of the Samburu, and forced by the spreading risk of the Mau Mau
uprising, Charles and Harriet decided to move to Canada. They lived in Ontario
for a few years, and then moved to California where they lived many years.

- Rollin Richmond, Humboldt State University President, 2002 - 2014

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