The Maasai age system and the Loonkidongi prophets

ABSTRACT

Spencer wrote this article as a discussion paper to be presented at the African Studies Association conference in San Diego, USA in 2015. The paper is largely based on fieldwork conducted in Kenya in 1976–1977, and critically engages with Spencer’s earlier published work to ask new questions and suggest new perspectives. The article combines a re-consideration of three earlier themes – the role of prophets, the management of age and generational relationships and the differences between Maa-speaking communities along a ‘north–south continuum’ – and examines the wider implications of the relationship between the Loonkidongi Prophets and variations in the age-organisation of different Maasai sections. The article speaks to recent trends in revising the history of Maa-speaking peoples in Kenya and Tanzania. Richard Waller and Tom Spear have edited the paper for publication, and Waller added an introduction.

KEYWORDS:

• Kenya
• Maasai
• identity
• prophets
• history
• age-sets
• environment

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge here the advice and support of Thomas Spear in the preparation of this Introduction and in the editing of the text which follows it. It was his commitment that pushed the project forward, though the editorial responsibility is mine. I would also like to add my own personal tribute to Paul Spencer. For 40 years, from my first steps in Maasailand in the early 1970s, he was a constant presence in my intellectual life, listening, challenging and infinitely patient and generous with questions and ideas. Over the years, his enthusiasm and influence have shaped my own work, as is reflected in the Introduction and editorial notes. -R. Waller

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The original text lacked dating and chronology: these have been added editorially. For an anthropological critique of Spencer's ‘ethnographic present’, see Hodgson, “Review,” 351.

2. See Berntsen, “Pastoralism, Raiding and Prophets”, Waller, “Lords of East Africa” and Sobania, “Historical Tradition”. Earlier work drawn on included Fosbrooke, “Administrative Survey” and Jacobs, “Traditional Political Organisation”, as well as Spencer's own work on Samburu and Maasai. See also the contributions in Spear and Waller, Being Maasai, esp. Introduction by Spear (1–24).

3. For the Maasai/Iloikop controversy, see Berntsen, “Enemy Is Us” and Jennings, “Beyond Eponymy”; for clanship and sectional alliances, see Waller, “Lords of East Africa”; for Loonkidongi, see Berntsen, “Pastoralism, Raiding and Prophets” and Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin”.

4. See, for example, Anderson, “Some Thoughts”; Bollig, “Adaptive Cycles”; Galaty, “Pastoral Orbits”; Jennings, “Scatterlings of East Africa”; Simpson and Waweru, “Becoming Samburu”; Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism”. For Il Chamus, see also Spencer, Pastoral Continuum, 131–49.

5. Waller, “Lords of East Africa,” 398–9. The story has previously been treated as a timeless ‘myth’.

6. A summary and analysis of the evidence can be found in Anderson, “Beginning of Time?”

7. See Waller, “Emutai.”

8. Anderson, “Beginning of Time?,” 58. Additionally, if, as seems possible, the impact of drought was less severe further south, this might help to explain the early expansion of the Kisonko, and even the establishment of the Loonkidongi prophet community in the area.

9. For a summary of the Iloikop Wars, see Waller, “Economic and Social Relations,” 114–20.

10. For example, the re-configuration of Maasai sections along more territorial lines after 1900 was, in part, a response to the land losses of the Maasai Moves of 1904 and 1912 and later to the establishment of section boundaries and the creation of local government structures based on the sections in the mid-1920s. For an important example of how the interplay between internal and external factors change can be more widely contextualised, see Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous.

11. Waller and Spear, Being Maasai, 290–1.

12. So-called because the three allied sections once held joint age ceremonies on the Kinangop.

13. Laikipiak especially seem to have had constituent sub-groups, possibly based on clanship rather than territory – for a detailed discussion, see Waller, “Lords of East Africa,” 124–52.

14. Spencer's seeming lack of attention to gender dynamics and the role of women was one area of criticism, though it is not directly relevant here – see, for example, Hodgson, Rethinking Pastoralism, esp. introduction and ch. 4; and Hodgson, “Review,” 349–51.

15. The present tense in this article refers to 1976–1977, when my fieldwork among the Maasai was conducted, and helps to distinguish the ethnographic present from earlier times.

16. Ed.: The inset map also includes the locations of four Maa-speaking communities – Samburu, Chamus, Arusha and Parakuyu – whom Spencer distinguishes from what he terms the “Maasai proper”. The Uas Nkishu section comprises the remnants of a formerly separate Maa-speaking community in the northwest.

17. Ed.: The Maa word laibon (oloiboni, pl. iloibonok) is frequently translated as either “diviner” or “prophet”. Spencer uses the former, but reserves “Prophet” to refer to the laibon who is acknowledged as the “chief laibon” (oloiboni kitok) for a Maasai section.

18. See Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin,” 47–50.

19. Ed.: As Spencer notes, the imposition of colonial rule outlawed large-scale raiding, and, from the 1940s onwards, the “military” aspect of murranhood became increasingly outdated. However, the “warrior” ethos remained a central part of murran self-perception. See Waller, “Bad Boys in the Bush.”

20. Ed.: For a full description of the ceremonial stages of murranhood, see Spencer, Maasai of Matapato.

21. Waller, “Bad Boys in the Bush.”

22. Jacobs, “Traditional Political Organization,” 87; Berntsen, “Maasai Age-sets,” 137–8. Richard Waller has questioned this, however, pointing to various exceptions. Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin,” 41–2.

23. Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown, 107, 194–5.

24. For fuller details of this Kisonko/Purko contrast see Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown, 147–204. For a general survey of variation between Maasai tribal sections, see Spencer, “Survey of Variation.”

25. Ed.: The process of Maasai expansion in the nineteenth century is now being re-considered. Spencer's insight here is likely to be of significance.

26. Ed.: From the 1920s, the Kenya administration attempted, with mixed success, to control and curtail murranhood, especially in Purko where there were serious disturbances in 1918, 1922 and 1935; district officials in Tanganyika adopted a more laissez faire approach – Waller, “Bad Boys in the Bush”; Hodgson, Intrepid Warriors, 59–67.

27. Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin,” 35; Berntsen, “Maasai Age-sets,” 138.

28. Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown, 160, 194–7, 221–3.

29. Ed.: This observation requires expansion since the Trans-Mara example seems to support Spencer's larger point. Two of the three sections, Uas Nkishu and Moitanik, were re-settled in Trans Mara in the 1930s; the third, Siria, has a much longer and distinctive history of occupancy in the area. Siria, in fact, have more than one local diviner family and there is rivalry between them, handled by the elders in a way reminiscent of Kisonko. For a short while, Siria came temporarily under the aegis of the Loita Prophet. The Uas Nkishu family of diviners may derive from prophets who were displaced by Maasai expansion in the nineteenth century. Since settling in Trans-Mara, Uas Nkishu have been influenced by their stronger neighbours, the Purko, and relations between diviners, murran and elders in the section seem to follow the “Purko model”. For details, see Waller, “Interaction and Identity”.

30. Fosbrooke, “Administrative Survey,” 10; Jacobs, “Traditional Political Organization,” 75; Berntsen, “Maasai Age-sets,” 134; Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin,” 44.

31. Ed.: Merker was a German official stationed in Arusha from 1895 to 1902. He almost certainly dealt with and probably visited Senteu.

32. Merker, Die Masai, 18–22.

33. Ed.: After the mid-1880s, Maasai came under increasing pressure. Bovine Pleuropneumonia first made inroads into the herds c.1883, but disaster came with the rinderpest pandemic in 1891, followed by epidemic smallpox a year later. The struggle for survival led to inter- and even intra-sectional raiding, thus “breaking the peace” between allied sections and leaving deep scars. Families dispersed to find refuge with neighbouring communities, wherever they could. This is remembered as a time of fragmentation and “civil war”, emutai in Maa, exacerbated by a struggle for dominance between Senteu and Olonana, the sons of Mbatiany. The reality is more complex at several levels, however. Those on the move included Loonkidongi migrating from their home area in Kisonko and looking for clients. Before this, it is not clear that northern sections, like Purko, actually had Prophets, in Spencer's sense; nor is it clear whether rivalry between prophets (the ostensible “cause” of civil war) provoked conflict between their followings or the other way around. By 1900, violence subsided, the herds regenerated and refugees began to return. The Maasai community began to rebuild itself in the form that we now think of as “traditional” and which was still the dominant “model” in the 1970s, based on defined and bounded territorial sections and incorporating the familiar structure of Loonkidongi Prophets, now established in most sections and seeking some accommodation over their respective domains. It is possible, therefore, that the kind of adaptive change discussed in Spencer's paper had in fact happened on a massive scale in response to the challenge of rebuilding after disaster and the opportunities offered for prophetic entrepreneurship. Retrospectively this became “tradition”. Further, as the Introduction suggests, it now seems likely that even greater upheavals had occurred a century earlier. See Waller, “Emutai”; Berntsen, “Pastoralism, Raiding and Prophets”; Waller, “Lords of East Africa,” 194–267; Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin”.

34. Fosbrooke, “Administrative Survey,” 21.

35. Spencer, “Opposing Streams”; Gulliver, Arusha. I first understood the distinction between the northern and southern age systems when I compared the Samburu with Gulliver's analysis of the Arusha age system before undertaking research among the Maasai. The subsequent discovery of a more general north–south trend between these models among the Maasai proper was quite unexpected.

36. Hurskainen, “Cattle and Culture,” 137–142.

37. Merker, Die Masai; Storrs-Fox, “Further Notes,” 448, 450–1.

38. Spencer, Samburu, 149–53, Hurskainen, “Cattle and Culture,” 136.

39. Merker, Die Masai, 75.

40. Ed.: Spencer, “Loonkidongi Prophets,” 336. It is worth noting that, while Spencer found little concern over sorcery in Samburu in the late 1950s, the situation had apparently changed by the time that Fratkin did his fieldwork nearly twenty years later – Spencer, “Loonkidongi Prophets,” 334–42; Fratkin, “Loibon as Sorcerer,” 318–33.

41. Spencer, “Samburu Clan Census,” 2.

42. Significantly, the shadowy figure overhanging a Samburu family is held to be the ‘mother's brother’, who belongs to another clan and is feared for his endless requests for gifts, underpinned by his power to curse his ‘sister's-sons’. The corresponding shadowy figure in Maasai family legend is the grasping ‘father's-brother’, who is popularly portrayed as a sorcerer, unrestrained by his clansmen – Spencer, Samburu, 29–42, 111–17; Spencer, Maasai of Matapato, 2, 36, 54–5, 249–50; Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown, 82; Spencer, Youth and Experiences, 34–5, 112.

43. Ed.: The apparent decline in the significance of clanship and possible reasons for this have been suggested before, but it may also be that its continued importance has previously been underestimated or, possibly, that clan identity has now re-emerged as a politically significant category, as some recent work indicates. See Waller, “Lords of East Africa,” 156–64; Mara Goldman, pers. comm.

44. Merker, Die Masai, 32, 47, 86-7, 97, 204–9, 211–12, 219, 231 n15; Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown, 219. Cf. Lechieni, World of Masiani, 11. There remain traces of clanship in Loitokitok and Kaputiei tribal sections where their manyat have been organised by clan up to a point, but it was also suggested to me that the existence of cross-cutting clan bonds diminishes the rivalry between manyat.

45. Ed.: Maasai have almost no traditions of migration before the early nineteenth century. Linguistic evidence suggests that people who spoke some version of Maa have been in the Rift Valley for perhaps five hundred years, and it is possible that they were part of a larger movement of peoples from the northwest, though it is not certain that they once occupied what is now Turkana as Spencer suggests. What the linguistic evidence cannot reveal is the relationship between earlier Maa-speakers, not all of whom may have been specialised subsistence pastoralists, and the present Maasai (and Samburu). The issue has become more complex with the discovery of a catastrophic drought at the turn of the nineteenth century (discussed in the Editor's Introduction). It is probably helpful to think of successive layers of Maa-speakers, deposited by generally north to south migration over a long period and influenced in various ways by other communities whom they encountered. This provides a deeper context for the shifts and variations that Spencer considers, including the possibility that Samburu are a “historical remnant” or, perhaps, “ur-Maasai”. For a summary of the linguistic evidence, see Vossen, Eastern Nilotes, 69–84; Sommer and Vossen, “Maa Language.”

46. The sheer spread of Kisonko as a section is a clear exception, drawing attention to its federal structure in performing major age-set ceremonies, which only involve delegations from the various parts. Ironically, the term Section, used by the British administration for the Maasai territorial sections, was also adopted for the Samburu, but referring to their dispersed clans. In effect, the whole of the Samburu area broadly corresponded to a multi-clan Maasai ‘Section’.

47. Merker, Die Masai, 90–7; Lamphear, Scattering Time.

48. Ed.: The importance of the environmental factor in Loonkidongi success was first pointed out by Fratkin in a comparison between prophets in Samburu and Maasai, and was further developed in Berntsen – Fratkin, “The Role of Prophets,” 54–65; Berntsen, “Pastoralism, Raiding and Prophets,” ch.4.

49. Waller, “Kidongoi's Kin,” 44.

50. Ed.: Spencer's comments on both the conflict between “peaceful” and “predatory” modes and the crucial importance of environmental advantage are supported by an examination of inter-ethnic relations. Elders had an interest in maintaining good trading relations with neighbouring cultivators, who were anxious to acquire pastoral products and on whom Maasai families might have to depend for food and refuge in times of severe drought. In contrast with pastoralists in the more arid north, Maasai could develop reliable relations with “cultivating partners”, and this increased the likelihood that, in favoured areas, settlement would become semi-permanent and quite dense rather than nomadic and sparse. See Waller, “Economic and Social Relations,” 84–94.

51. Spencer, Pastoral Continuum, 34–5, 45.

52. Ed.: In 1902, Senteu had crossed into British territory, partly to make his peace with his brother, Olonana, and partly to escape from German control. He remained in Kenya, as Prophet of Loita, until his death twenty-five years later. With the departure of Senteu, there may have been an “interregnum” in Kisongo until the end of German administration in 1916. The in-coming British administration later decided to recognize and install a new Prophet, to whom Spencer refers, Parrit, the younger brother of Senteu and Olonana.