The Loikop people, also known as Wakuafi, Kor, Mu-Oko, Muoko/Ma-Uoko and Mwoko, were a tribal confederacy who inhabited present-day Kenya in the regions north and west of Mount Kenya and east and south of Lake Turkana. The area is roughly conterminous with Samburu and Laikipia Counties and portions of Baringo, Turkana and (possibly) Meru Counties. The group spoke a common tongue related to the Maasai language, and typically herded cattle. The Loikop occasionally interacted with the Cushitic, Bantu, and Chok peoples. The confederacy had dispersed by the 21st century. Etymology Johann Ludwig Krapf of the Church Missionary Society in East Africa arrived on the East African coast in December 1843. Krapf made his first trip into the interior the following month and encountered reports of the nearby Okooafee and their southern neighbors, the Quapee. He deduced that the two groups were the same people within a year, and began referring to them as Wakuafi in his writings. In 1852, Krapf learned that the Wakuafi called themselves the Iloikop. He published a vocabulary of the Engutuk Eloikob in 1854, speculating that Iloikop was an abbreviation of the word engob (land or country) combined with the article loi and defining Iloikop as "those who are of/in the country, to whom it belongs") Stigand (1913) noted that the term "Loikop" referred to "the people of the country of Laikipia" and that at the time it survived in the Rendille word "Lokkob". In Rendille the word Lokkob was used to "denote any cattle-breeding tribe, such as the Samburr or Masai, in distinction to a camel breeder". In another account, he notes; Associated terms It has been suggested that the term Wakuafi was a Swahili term first used to represent all Iloikop peoples, and later narrowed to represent only the non-Maasai Iloikop. It is believed that the word Humba (or Lumbwa) was, likewise, a Bantu word used by the Bantu peoples of the interior to refer to Iloikop pastoralists. Later writers noted other names used to refer to the same group of people. The Turkana, with whom the northern regions had significant interaction, referred to them as Kor. The present-day Samburu refer to themselves as Lokop (or Loikop), and the Turkana call the present-day Samburu Kor. Meru tradition notes a people known as the Mu-Oko, Mwoko and Muoko/Ma-Uoko (paired variants found in one section). According to Imenti tradition, the Mwoko of that region were also