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Article Excerpt
Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitic-speaking foragers to Maa-speaking pastoralists. This rapid transition took place in the midst of competing views of Mukogodo ethnic identity. To Maa-speakers, Mukogodo were low-status il-torrobo. To British colonialists, Mukogodo were true Dorobo, victims of more powerful agricultural and pastoralist groups. Although British administrators fashioned a set of policies designed to protect Mukogodo from such groups, other British policies inadvertently contributed to the Mukogodo acquisition of Maasai subsistence patterns, language, and culture. Mukogodo themselves strategically used a Dorobo identity to manipulate the British while striving to lose the stigma of the il-torrobo label and achieve acceptance among Maa-speakers as true Maasai. (Mukogodo, Dorobo, Torrobo, Maasai, Samburu, ethnicity, Kenya)
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Between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, Mukogodo of Kenya underwent a rapid transition from being Cushitic-speaking hunters, gatherers, and beekeepers to being Maa-speaking pastoralists. (2) This transition is problematic in a number of ways. First, thanks to data on time allocation collected since the 1960s, it can no longer be assumed that a change from foraging to food production will improve a group's standard of living or reduce the workloads of its members (see Hames 1992 for a review). In the Mukogodo case specifically, there is no convincing evidence of an increase in standard of living since their acquisition of livestock (Cronk 1989b). Second, other hunter-gatherers in East Africa in superficially similar situations have remained hunter-gatherers despite contact with pastoralists (e.g., Hadza; see Kaare and Woodburn 1999), and Mukogodo themselves had had contact with pastoralists for centuries before the transition without themselves becoming pastoralists. Third, it cannot be taken for granted that even if a group does change its subsistence strategy it will also necessarily undergo the sort of wholesale cultural shift experienced by Mukogodo. Other groups in East Africa have made similar changes in subsistence while still keeping their own languages and other aspects of their own cultures (e.g., Okiek; Huntingford 1928, 1929, 1931, 1942, 1951, 1954, 1955; Blackburn 1976, 1982; Kratz 1981, 1994, 1999).
Elsewhere (Cronk 1989a, 1989b) I have analyzed the Mukogodo transition in behavioral ecological terms, suggesting that for individual Mukogodo men the adoption of pastoralism represented a response to a rapidly changing social environment in which they either obtained livestock or failed to marry. I have also examined some of the consequences of the Mukogodo transition to pastoralism, including their low position in a regional hierarchy of wealth and ethnic status (Cronk 1989c, 1990, 1991c). This article explores the change from a different but complementary angle, focusing more on the external factors that changed their social environment. An examination of the broader historical and political context reveals that the Mukogodo transition occurred as Mukogodo attempted to manipulate the attitudes and behaviors of both British colonialists and Maasai pastoralists, two groups with competing and strikingly different views of Mukogodo ethnicity.
THE EMERGENCE OF A MUKOGODO ETHNICITY
Mukogodo live on the northeastern edge of the Laikipia Plateau in and around the Mukogodo Hills, which are covered with a dry forest dominated by cedar and wild olive trees (Mukogodo Division, Laikipia District, Rift Valley Province, Kenya). The origins of the Mukogodo people are obscure, but linguistic evidence suggests that they may have roots among the original Khoisan-speaking hunters and gatherers of East Africa (Ehret 1974:88). Until recent decades, however, they spoke not a Khoisan language, but rather an Eastern Cushitic one called Yaaku (Heine 1974-75; see also Brenzinger 1992 and Brenzinger, Heine, and Heine 1994). Words like "Yaaku" and "Mukogodo" may have been used for many centuries as labels for hunter-gatherers in north-central Kenya. The term "Yaaku" appears to have originally meant hunters and was borrowed from a Southern Nilotic language around the end of the first millennium A.D. (Ehret 1971:51-52). The origins of the word "Mukogodo" are not so clear. Most likely the word originated among Bantu-speaking Meru, southeast of the Mukogodo area, where oral traditions dating from the early 1700s mention hunters, identified by Meru informants as ancestors of Mukogodo, referred to by such names as Mokuru, Mukoko, Mugukuru, Mu-uthiu, Mukuru, and Aruguru (Fadiman 1976:155). As suggested by a colonial official (Fannin 1936), the name may originally have meant people who live in rocks. Supporting this idea is the striking resemblance between the word "Mukogodo" and the word in Kikuyu, a language closely related to Meru, for stone used in concrete (ngogoto; Barlow and Benson 1975:277).
By the time they became pastoralists in the early twentieth century, Mukogodo society was organized into four clans and thirteen patrilineages (see Table), but this particular configuration had probably emerged fairly recently. Mukogodo informants agree that the Ol Doinyo Lossos clan, which is coterminous with the Lentolla lineage, represents the original Mukogodo. This idea is supported by the fact that this clan controlled the largest territory, one that included one of the group's holiest sites, the peak of the mountain Ol Doinyo Lossos. Informants generally agree that the Luno clan, coterminous with the Liba lineage, and the Biyoti and Suaanga lineages, which were not part of any clan, also had ancient roots in the Mukogodo area. The two other clans, Orondi and Sialo, probably represent more recent additions. The Orondi clan, for example, includes two lineages, Matunge and Leitiko, that are known to have been founded by impoverished Maasai in the nineteenth century.
The idea that the Sialo clan may also be a relative newcomer is partly supported by geography. At the time of the transition, the Sialo lineages controlled some relatively small territories clustered in the southeastern corner of the Mukogodo range. Sialo informants also had oral traditions of involvement in the nineteenth century with Kirrimani, a Rendille-speaking pastoralist group, in the lowlands east of the Mukogodo forest that are not shared by informants from other clans. Finally, a separate and relatively recent origin for the Sialo is suggested by their lack of certain food taboos followed by the other Mukogodo clans. While the other clans refused to eat elephant meat, considering it to be the equivalent of cannibalism due to the similarity of the arrangement of mammary glands in elephants and humans, Sialo had no such prohibition. Also unlike other clans, Sialo would eat wild fowl, East Africa's various species of wild hog, and possibly zebras, though informants differ on this point. Judging from a peculiarity in the Mukogodo territorial system, these various groups appear to have coalesced into a linguistically distinct group with peaceful internal relations and a common social system in about the middle of the nineteenth century. Each of the thirteen lineages had its own territory for hunting, gathering, and beehive placement. The Leitiko lineage, whose founder was adopted by the Orondi clan in about 1840, had a territory of about average size. In contrast, the Matunge lineage, whose founder was adopted by the Orondi clan in about 1880, had only a small wedge carved out of other territories as a gift. Thus it seems that the territorial system, and so quite possibly many other aspects of the Mukogodo society that subsequently underwent the transition to pastoralism, took shape after the founding of the Leitiko lineage but before the founding of the Matunge lineage, or in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The basic subsistence pattern included residence primarily in the area's many rockshelters and a diet based on honey from both man-made and natural hives, a few plant foods, and wild animals, chiefly small ones such as rock hyrax. This pattern, first reported in Mukogodo oral histories (Cronk 1989a), has been confirmed by recent excavations of two Mukogodo rockshelters (Gang 1997; Kuehn and Dickson 1999; Mutundu 1999). The lineages were exogamous, and Mukogodo men paid bridewealth in the form of beehives. Before the turn of the twentieth century, the Mukogodo had contact with a variety of Cushitic-, Nilotic-, and Bantu-speaking peoples (Heine 1974-75; Fadiman 1976). Although it stands to reason that there were some marriages between Mukogodo and non-Mukogodo before 1900, my Mukogodo informants have no memories of any. As of the late 1980s, there were about a thousand Mukogodo.
Today, Mukogodo are Maa-speaking pastoralists, and they share Mukogodo Division with several other such groups. Although some people refer to everyone living in Mukogodo Division as Mukogodo, Mukogodo families descended patrilineally from Yaaku-speaking hunter-gatherers are concentrated in Mukogodo and Sieku Locations, located in the northeastern corner of the Division. The other groups include Ilng'wesi, Digirri, Mumonyot, and LeUaso. Ilng'wesi, who live in the southeastern portion of the Division, have historical and cultural ties to the Meru, a large Bantu-speaking agricultural group northeast of Mount Kenya. Digirri, who live in a central portion of the Division, have some connections to the Kalenjin-speaking Okiek hunter-gatherers of the Mau Escarpment area (Blackburn 1982). Mumonyot, who live between Mukogodo and Digirri, trace themselves back to Laikipiak, a Maa-speaking pastoralist group that was defeated and dispersed by other Maa-speakers in the late nineteenth century (see Sobania 1993 for more on Laikipiak). LeUaso, who live in the far western portion of Mukogodo Division along the Uaso Ng'iro River, were once a group of hunter-gatherers and beekeepers associated with Laikipiak (see Herren 1991 for more on the non-Mukogodo peoples of Mukogodo Division). A considerable number of families of Samburu origin also live in Mukogodo Division as well as in the portion of Isiolo District immediately north of Mukogodo Division. The Division headquarters is in the town of Don Dol (also spelled Dondol, Dol Dol, and Doldol).
MAASAI AND IL-TORROBO
Maa-speaking peoples were once distributed in a more or less continuous swath across East Africa from Kenya's Ndoto Mountains and Lake Turkana in the north, where they are represented by such groups as Ariaal (Fratkin 1998) and Samburu (Spencer 1965, 1973), down through the Great Rift Valley and into eastern Tanzania, where they are represented by Parakuyo (Rigby 1992). In the center of this distribution are pastoral Maasai. This continuous distribution of Maa-speakers was split as a result of British colonial policies in the early twentieth century. This bifurcation occurred in two stages. The first Maasai Treaty of 1904 created two reserves, one on the Laikipia Plateau north of the new railway and another south of the railway. The subsequent Maasai Treaty of 1911 eliminated the northern reserve and obligated the Maasai to move to an expanded southern reserve (today's Kajiado and Narok Districts). Among the Maa-speakers remaining in northern Kenya were the Mukogodo, who were still Yaaku-speaking hunter-gatherers at the time, and their Samburu neighbors to the north.
"Maasai" is an ethnic label but, to Maa-speakers especially, it is much more than that. The label carries not only a suggestion of what language a person speaks and other aspects of his or her culture, but also information about subsistence and, most importantly, status. Pastoral Maasai see themselves as being at the peak...
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