The Ngorongoro Crater is a great extinct volcano that contains the highest density of super mammals in Africa. It is a wonder of the world and an alpha tourist attraction popular with honeymooning couples and Japanese tours, who drive slowly round its tracks hoping to come across gory death.

The only mammalian bipeds allowed to walk through the vigorously wardened spot are the Masai, who follow their bony cattle to waterholes and salt licks, lean ruminatively on their lion-killing lotus-bladed spears, and generally pretty up the place in their red togas, muddy punk hairdos and elaborate jewellery.

To tourists they look as if they belong, timelessly in character. The implication is that they are exempt from human laws of progress because they are somehow more part of nature than the rest of us.

When Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, decreed there would be an end to tribalism and a single language for the sake of national unity, he specifically excluded the Masai. Some say this was because they were too proud to conform; others that he realised they’d be jolly useful for the tourist industry.

The Masai traditionally straddle the Kenya-Tanzania border wandering over the Serengeti and Masai Mara game reserve. They are Africa’s Beefeaters, its morris dancers. They have also wandered through the English imagination. The English have always had a patronising, sentimental and colonially romantic fondness for these tall, bouncy cattlemen.

And now we have a Masai chief of our own in the West Country, 57-year-old Graham Pendrill, an antiques dealer. He is wandering around in traditional robes carrying a knop kierie and wishes to be known as Siparo (“Brave One”), particularly serendipitous for a middle-aged white bloke who fancies walking into a Bristol pub dressed in beads and a knee-length tartan frock.

Pendrill’s anthropological epiphany came on a sightseeing holiday in Kenya when he gave a gaggle of hardy warriors a lift because it was raining. Back at the village they got talking about cows, he swigged a little bull’s urine, they made him an honorary chief and one thing led to another and now his 12-bedroom house is on the market and he is off to live in Cow Pat Castle. Yes, he’s going to build these nomadic herdsmen a 20-room pumice castle. I bet they’re thrilled. Apparently when he went back the first time they were already expecting him: “It’s a bit like dogs who can tell when their own is coming back before they see him.” Nicely put, Siparo. And good luck to him. People should get out more.

He is just another in a line of westerners who decided to go native with the Masai. True, most have been women of a certain age and weight who take the romance of the native literally for at least a couple of weeks, occasionally a bit longer. One Swiss Masai missus, Corinne Hofmann, has got four books and a feature film out of her stint. There was famously, possibly apocryphally, a public school classics master who took early retirement to go and become a Masai wife.

What is it about the Masai that is so alluring for the English in particular? You get the feeling that if Pendrill had given a lift to a hitchhiker in Switzerland, he would have been less likely to have donned leather shorts and taken up yodelling. There is apparently a timid noble savage lurking in every English provincial shopkeeper and, more rampantly, in his wife.

I first came across the Masai while writing a travel story. I asked my guide if I could dine with them. He ummed and ahhed and said they didn’t encourage tourists to interfere with the immemorial ways of the men in skirts, except through the special shops, performing villagers and laid on hotel ceremonies and dancing, but he would see what he could do. So at dusk I was led to a kraal where an extended Masai family greeted me with great hospitality and a selection of decorative beaded goods.

We had a few moments of “nice weather we’re having” chat before my hosts said: “Shall we go through?” and we filed into the dining room — or cattle byre — where, ankle deep in slurry, a bony cow not much bigger than a labrador had a tourniquet round its neck and a young man fired a blunt arrow into a bulging vein. Blood spurted; half a pint was collected in a gourd, which was vigorously stirred to prevent lumpiness and the sticky stick passed to an ecstatic child like mummy’s cake spoon.

The pot smelt as rank as a prep school laundry bag. It was passed to me. “I thought you mixed this with milk,” I said weakly. “Sometimes we do,” said mine host, “but as you are a special guest we thought you’d like it neat.” Gingerly I tipped the gourd and got a mouthful of warm, thick blood. It was, of course, delicious, like a steak smoothie and the first time I’ve been able to thank a cow for the meat. Later I asked my guide if he’d ever drunk cow’s blood. He pulled a face: “No, my tribe would never do that. Do you know what they rinse their gourds with? Bull’s piss.”

The Masai will be familiar even if you’ve never set foot in east Africa. They appear in adverts for four-wheel-drive cars, airlines and banks, and feature in fashion shoots and in celebrity holidays in Hello! magazine. The English have always loved them. A couple of warriors in the back of the Land Rover were essential Happy Valley accessories, like a pair of gundogs in Gloucestershire.