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Abstract
This article examines the origins of the Samburu people of northern Kenya. It puts the relatively recent development of the Samburu, assuming a common identity, into historical context and argues that one can best understand the pastoralists’ ethnogenesis by examining a host of complex and dynamic variables. The authors emphasize the significance of environmental factors, as well as the Samburu's interactions with neighboring ethnic groups, for their coming into being as a distinct community and argue that only by critically analyzing a variety of sources can one gain a clear understanding of events for which there is a paucity of reliable written documentation. Thus, this work traces the history of human habitation in the East Lake Turkana Basin from its beginnings through the nineteenth century. This study compares the oral histories of the inhabitants of the region and includes information derived from sources drawn from comparative linguistics, comparative material culture, and the early written accounts of outsiders to reconstruct the past and explore how proto-Samburu groups adopted a common identity. The authors also address how major developments among neighboring ethnic groups (namely, the collapse of Oromo and Maasai hegemony and the arrival of large numbers of Turkana and Somalis) influenced the Samburu. Finally, the article addresses the nature of the Samburu institutions and how pastoralists exploited the environment for their sustenance in the early years of their existence.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a paper which was recognized as the “Best Paper-Africa” at the 2011 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).
Notes
1I. M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 241; Günther Schlee, Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990).
2Howard R. Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 7–8. For an examination of human adaptation to environmental changes, see S. H. Ominde, “Ecology and Man in East Africa,” in Ecology and History in East Africa: Proceedings of the 1975 Conference of the Historical Association of Kenya, ed. Bethwell A. Ogot (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1979, 9–23).
3J. E. G. Sutton, “The Prehistory of East Africa,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 1, Methodology and African Prehistory (London: Heinemann, 1980), 452–86; J. C. Onyango-Abuje and S. Wandibba, “The Palaeoenvironment and Its Influence on Man's Activities in East Africa during the Latter Part of Upper Peistocene and Holocene,” in Ecology and History (see note 2), 24–44; P. A. Jewel, “Ecology and Management of Game Animals and Domestic Livestock in African Savannas,” in Human Ecology in Savanna Environments, ed. David R. Harris (London: Academic Press, 1980, 353–81).
4C. Ehret, “The East African Interior,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 3, Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, ed. M. El Fasi (London: Heinemann, 1988), 616–17; Sutton, “Prehistory of East Africa”; J. E. G. Sutton, A Thousand Years of East Africa (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1990); Onyango-Abuje and Wandibba, “Palaeoenvironment and Its Influence”; Thomas Spear, “Introduction,” in Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa, ed. Thomas Spear and Richard Waller (London: James Currey, 1993), 9.
5Sutton, “East Africa before the Seventh Century”; Spear, “Introduction,” 575. See also David M. Anderson, “Cultivating Pastoralists: Ecology and Economy among the Il Chamus of Baringo, 1840–1980,” in The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History, ed. Douglas H. Johnson and David M. Anderson (London: Lester Crook Academic Publishing, 1988), 259–60.
6N. W. Sobania, “The Problem of Origins: Linguistics Hypotheses and Oral Tradition, or Are We the Language We Speak?” Documents pour servir à l'Histoire des Civilisations Ethiopiennes [Documents for Use for the History of Ethiopian Civilizations] 9 (1978): 87–88; Lee Cronk, “From True Dorobo to Mukogodo Maasai: Contested Ethnicity in Kenya,” Ethnology 41 (2002): 27–49.
7Sobania, “Problem of Origins,” 89; Ehret, “The East African Interior,” 625.
8Sutton, “East Africa before the Seventh Century,” 586–88.
9Ehret, “The East African Interior,” 630–31; Spear, “Introduction,” 1; Gabriele Sommer and Rainer Vossen, “Dialects, Sectiolects, or Simply Lects? The Maa Language in Time Perspective,” in Being Maasai (see note 4), 25–9.
10Sutton, Thousand Years of East Africa; Peter Robertshaw, Early Pastoralists of South-Western Kenya (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1990); Sommer and Vossen, “Dialects,” 32–33. Jacobs places the separation of the Maa much earlier, while Fratkin places it later, around 1500 to 1700 CE; see Alan H. Jacobs, “Maasai Pastoralism in Historical Perspective,” in Pastoralism in Tropical Africa, ed. Théodore Monod (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 411; and Elliot R. Fratkin, “The Organization of Labour and Production among the Ariaal Rendille,” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1987), 44.
11Schlee, Identities on the Move, 30–35.
12Ibid., 40; Günther Schlee, “Rendille Ornaments as Identity Markers,” Kenya Past and Present 20 (1987): 32; Günther Schlee, “Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille as a Mirror of Past Interethnic Relations” (University of Bielefeld Working Paper No. 159, 1991), 14–17. See also Martin Falkenstein, “Long Ways: Ethnicity, Market Integration and Urbanization among the Ariaal and Rendille of Northern Kenya” (Ph.D. diss., Bielefeld University, 1997), 13–18.
13Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 36.
14Paul Spencer, Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and Growth among the Rendille and Samburu of Kenya (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 148–49.
15The Tana Orma people are the descendants of the Warra Daaya invaders today. Schlee, Identities on the Move, 35–42; Günther Schlee, “Who Are the Tana Orma? The Problem of Their Identification in a Wider Oromo Framework” (working paper, University of Bielefeld, 1992); Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 9–12.
16Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 36.
17Neal W. Sobania, “The Historical Tradition of the Peoples of the Eastern Lake Turkana Basin c. 1840–1925” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1980), 83. See also Lamphear's comments concerning the “Sirikwa” culture in John Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana': Interactions and Assimilation between Maa- and Ateker-Speakers,” in Being Maasai (see note 4), 91.
18Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 9.
19Ibid., 35; and Paul Spencer, The Samburu: A Study of Gerontocracy in a Nomadic Tribe (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 50, 76–77.
20Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 78.
21Samayo Lekairab and Mugogodoi Lemoshogoti, oral interview, March 1991.
22Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 78.
23Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 149.
24Alan H. Jacobs, “The Traditional Political Organisation of the Pastoral Maasai” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1965); Sommer and Vossen, “Dialects,” 34; Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 81.
25See also Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 13.
26Mugogodoi Lemoshogoti, oral interview, March 1991.
27Jacobs, “Traditional Political Organization,” 16, 23; also cited in Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 81.
28Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 150. A colonial rendering of Samburu age sets recorded twenty-five years before Spencer lists the “Il Michobo” [Meishopo] as the earliest laji. Samburu Age-Grades, April 7, 1935, Kenya National Archives (KNA): SAM/9.
29For the source of the discussion that follows, see Peter Waweru, “Ecology Control and the Development of Pastoralism among the Samburu of North-Central Kenya: 1750–1909,” (M.A. thesis, Kenyatta University, 1992), 81–82.
30Lemeyon Lenareyo, oral interview, March 1991.
31See Ludwig von Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., 1968), 2:74; Arthur Donaldson Smith, Through Unknown African Countries (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1897), 349; Elspeth Huxley, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1967), 1:46; Alfred Arkell-Hardwick, An Ivory Trader in North Kenia: The Record of an Expedition through Kikuyu to Galla-Land in East Equatorial Africa (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 210.
32Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 150.
33Richard Lamprey and Richard Waller, “The Loita-Mara Region in Historical Times: Patterns of Subsistence, Settlement, and Ecological Change,” in Early Pastoralists (see note 10), 19.
34William R. Ochieng’, An Outline History of the Rift Valley up to A.D. 1900 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975); John Lamphear, The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 143n.
35Lamphear, Traditional History of the Jie, 52; Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,’” 90–91.
36For a more extended discussion of this issue, see Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 86–91.
37This is the same designation that the Turkana use today for the Samburu.
38Lamphear, Traditional History of the Jie, 194–96; Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,’” 93–96.
39Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 77.
40Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 150–52. Lamphear also observes that Samburu traditions trace their initial contact with the Turkana to the Kipayang laji; see Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,’” 96.
41Lebaa Lebarsoloi, oral interview, April 1991. See also Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 93, 98.
42Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 152; John Lamphear, The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 27–29.
43von Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes, 2:236.
44Caspar Odegi-Awuondo, Life in the Balance: Ecological Sociology of Turkana Nomads (Nairobi: ACTS Press, 1990), 270.
45Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 94–95, 78.
46Paul Spencer, The Pastoral Continuum: The Marginalization of Tradition in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 145–46, 150.
47Ibid., 151.
48K. R. Dundas, “Notes on the Tribes Inhabiting the Baringo District, East Africa Protectorate,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 40 (1910): 50–52.
49David M. Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890–1963 (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 30.
50This study dates the split of the Chamus and the Samburu into two distinct peoples to sometime around 1800; see Sommer and Vossen, “Dialects,” 33.
51Charles W. Hobley, “Notes on the Geography and People of the Baringo District of the East Africa Protectorate,” Geographical Journal 28 (1906): 475.
52Mervyn W.H. Beech, The Suk: Their Language and Folklore (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 3–4. See also Harold Kenneth Schneider, “The Pokot (Suk) of Kenya with Special Reference to the Role of Livestock in Their Subsistence Economy” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1953), 30–33.
53Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 83.
54Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 152; Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 80. Note that a colonial chronology places the “Il Kipoko” laji as having been initiated around 1862. Samburu Age-Grades, April 7, 1935, Kenya National Archives (KNA): SAM/9.
55Falkenstein, “Long Ways,” 11–13. It is worth noting also that Turton traces the Samburu-Rendille alliance to around 1840; see Edmond Romilly Turton, “The Pastoral Tribes of Northern Kenya 1800–1916” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970), 96–97. See also Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,’” 96–97, on the subject of the ethnogenesis of the Turkana.
56Ochieng’, Outline History, 37. See also Elliott R. Fratkin, “Herbal Medicine and Concept of Disease in Samburu” (Paper No. 63, Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, 1975), 47.
57Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 82–83.
58Charles W. Hobley, “Notes on the Geography,” 475.
59Dundas, “Notes on the Tribes,” 50–52.
60Ibid.
61J. R. L. Macdonald, “Journeys to the North of Uganda,” Geographical Journal 14 (1899): 146–47.
62Paul Wesley Robinson, “Gabbra Nomadic Pastoralism in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Northern Kenya: Strategies for Survival in a Marginal Environment” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1985), 282–83. See also John M. Weatherby, “Nineteenth Century Wars in Western Kenya,” Azania 2 (1967): 137.
63Robinson, “Gabbra Nomadic Pastoralism,” 283, 286; Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 80.
64Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,’” 96–97; Lamphear, Scattering Time, 17–33.
65Johann Lewis Krapf, Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labours during an Eighteen Years’ Residence in Eastern Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 142; Turton, “Pastoral Tribes,” 96–97; Isariah N. Kimambo, “The East African Coast and Hinterland,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 6, Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s, ed. Jacob F. Ade Ajayi (London: Heinemann, 1987), 261.
66Jacobs, “Traditional Political Organization,” 62.
67Joseph Thomson, Through Masai Land: A Journey of Exploration among the Snowclad Volcanic Mountains and Strange Tribes of Eastern Equatorial Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1962), 128.
68Lebaa Lebarsoloi, oral interview, April 1991; Spencer, Nomads in Alliance, 152; Turton, “Pastoral Tribes,” 97–98; Lamphear, “Aspects of ‘Becoming Turkana,” 98; Robinson, “Gabbra Nomadic Pastoralism,” 290.
69Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes, 2:76.
70Lebaa Lebarsoloi, oral interview, April 1991; Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 98–102; Uri Almagor, Pastoral Partners (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1978).
71Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 89, 98.
72Ibid. Sobania further insightfully points out the fact that the Masula, with their close links to the Boorana, are part of the Ngishu Narok, or Black Cattle, moiety.
73D. J. Pratt and M. D. Gwynn, eds., Rangeland Management and Ecology in East Africa (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 139.
74Samayo Lekairab, oral interview, March 1991.
75The authors provide a more in-depth treatment of the Samburu economic system in their manuscript “Samburu Transhumance and British Colonial Rule,” which they hope to publish in a planned anthology devoted to pastoral movements and empire, edited by Günther Schlee and Anatoly Khazanov.
76Isaac Sindiga, “European Perceptions as a Factor in Degrading Maasai Ecology” (M.A. thesis, Ohio University, 1981), 80l; Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 106–14, 123–24.
77Parnate Lebiite, oral interview, March 1991.
78Lepari Lesakwel, oral interview, April 1991. See also Chauncy H. Stigand, To Abyssinia through Unknown Land (London: Seeley and Company Limited, 1910), 72l; Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 117–23.
79James Leletia, oral interview, February 1991; Lepain Leleina, oral interview, April 1991.
80Nongiso Lekume, oral interview, March 1991; Peter Lemoosa, oral interview, February 1991. See also Richard Waller, “‘Clean’ and ‘Dirty,’ Cattle Disease and Control Policy in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1940,” Journal of African History 45 (2004): 49.
81Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 114–17, 129–33. See also Harris, “Human Occupation and Exploitation of Savanna Environments,” Human Ecology, 32; Stein R. Moe, et al., “The Influence of Man-Made Fires on Land Wild Herbivores in Lake Burungi Area in Northern Tanzania,” African Journal of Ecology 28 (1990): 35–43; Eric L. Edroma, “Effects of Burning and Grazing on the Productivity and Number of Plants in Queen Elizabeth National Park,” African Journal of Ecology 22 (1984): 165–74.
82Charles Lesing'ude, oral interview, March 1991. A colonial survey conducted at the time of the Kenya Land Commission in the early 1930s corroborates this claim; see Samburu Boundaries: Carter Commission 1931–1947, Kenya National Archives: PC/NFD4/2/3.
83Leparikir Leshoranai, oral interviews, March 1991.
84Thomas Spear discusses these issues and what he terms the “pastoral ideology” in the introductory chapter of Being Maasai (see note 4), 1–18.
85Letende Lekaso, oral interview, April 1991.
86Side Leleina, oral interview, April 1991.
87Siamanda Leshoranai, oral interview, 1991.
88Waweru, “Ecology Control,” 136–42.
89Ian Hodder, Symbols in Action: Ethno-archaeological Studies of Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 101.
90Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 112.
91Ibid., 113–16; Turton, “Pastoral Tribes, 104–115; John L. Berntsen, “The Maasai and Their Neighbors: Variables of Interaction,” African Economic History 1 (1976): 7; James Christie, Cholera Epidemics in East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1876), 196, 224, 238; Charles New, Wanderings in Eastern Africa (London, 1873), 460, quoted in Christie, Cholera Epidemics, 198.
92Thomas Wakefield, “Notes on the Geography of Eastern Africa,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1870, quoted in Cholera Epidemics (see note 91), 198–99. See also E. G. Ravenstein, “Somal and Galla Land; Embodying Information Collected by the Rev. Thomas Wakefield,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 6 (1884): 267; E. S. Wakefield, Thomas Wakefield: Missionary and Geographical Pioneer in East Equatorial Africa (London: Religious Tract Society, 1904).
93New, Wanderings, 460, quoted in Cholera Epidemics (see note 91), 198. Neal Sobania draws a similar conclusion; see Sobania, “Historical Tradition,” 113–16.