Over the last decades, the description of African languages has made enormous progress, resulting in a wide range of new grammars. Description has focused on sentence grammar, grammatical and lexical categories, and the phonological, semantic and information strucure of African languages. In some recent studies, attention is also drawn to the role played by discourse - organizing and other formulaic material in structuring texts beyond the sentence. Following this line of research, the present paper looks at the structure of Akie, a moribund Nilotic language spoken by traditional hunter - gatherers in the Maasai Steppe of Tanzania (König et al. 2015).