Kalenjin people

The Kalenjin are a group of Southern Nilotic tribes descending from Maliri people (thus related to Daasanach of Ethiopia.) They are indigenous to East Africa, residing mainly in what was formerly the Rift Valley Province in Kenya. The number 6,358,113 individuals as per the Kenyan 2019 census. They have been divided into 11 culturally and linguistically related tribes: Kipsigis, Nandi, Keiyo, Marakwet, Sabaot, Pokots, Tugen, Terik, Sengwer, Lembus, and Ogiek. They speak Kalenjin languages, which belong to the Nilotic language family.

Origins

Linguistic evidence points to the eastern Middle Nile Basin south of the Abbai River, as the nursery of the Nilotic languages. That is to say southeast of present-day Khartoum.

It is thought that beginning in the second millennium B.C., particular Nilotic speaking communities began to move southward into present-day South Sudan where most settled and that the societies today referred to as the Southern Nilotes pushed further on, reaching what is present-day north-eastern Uganda by 1000 B.C.

Linguist Christopher Ehret proposes that between 1000 and 700 BC, the Southern Nilotic speaking communities, who kept domestic stock and possibly cultivated sorghum and finger millet, lived next to an Eastern Cushitic speaking community with whom they had significant cultural interaction. The general location of this point of cultural exchange being somewhere near the common border between Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

He suggests that the cultural exchange perceived in borrowed loan words, adoption of the practice of circumcision and the cyclical system of age-set organisation dates to this period.

Neolithic

The arrival of the Southern Nilotes on the East African archaeological scene is correlated with the appearance of the prehistoric lithic industry and pottery tradition referred to as the Elmenteitan culture. The bearers of the Elmenteitan culture developed a distinct pattern of land use, hunting and pastoralism on the western plains of Kenya during the East African Pastoral Neolithic. Its earliest recorded appearance dates to the ninth century BC.

Certain distinct traits of the Southern Nilotes, notably in pottery styles, lithic industry and burial practices, are evident in the archaeological record.

Linguist Christopher Ehret suggests that around the fifth and sixth centuries BC, the speakers of the Southern Nilotic languages split into two major divisions – the proto-Kalenjin and the proto-Datooga. The former took shape among those residing to the north of the Mau range while the latter took shape among sections that moved into the Mara and Loita plains south of the western highlands.

Pastoral iron age

Early iron-age

The material culture referred to as Sirikwa is seen as a development from the local pastoral neolithic (i.e. Elmenteitan culture), as well as a locally limited transition from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.

Radiocarbon dating of archaeological excavations done in Rongai (Deloraine) have ranged in date from around 985 to 1300 A.D and have been associated with the early development phase of the Sirikwa culture. Lithics from the Deloraine Farm site show that people were abandoning previous technological strategies in favour of more expedient tool production as iron was entering common use. The spread of iron technology led to the abandonment of many aspects of Pastoral Neolithic material culture and practices.

From the Central Rift, the culture radiated outwards toward the western highlands, the Mt. Elgon region and possibly into Uganda.

Late iron-age

The Sirikwa culture was the predominant Kenyan hinterland archaeological culture of the Pastoral Iron Age, c.2000 BP. The name Sirikwa derives from a community that occupied the Uasin Gishu plateau perhaps as late as the 17th or 18th century. Seen to have developed out of the Elmenteitan culture of the East African Pastoral Neolithic c.3300-1200 BP, the Sirikwa culture was followed in much of its area by the Kalenjin, Maa, western and central Kenyan communities of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Archaeological evidence indicates a highly sedentary way of life and a cultural commitment to a closed defensive system for both community and livestock during the Iron Age. Family homesteads featured small individual family stock pens, elaborate gate-works and sentry points and houses facing into the homestead; defensive methods primarily designed to prove against individual thieves or small groups of rustlers hoping to succeed by stealth. Coins of Indian and English origin, some dating to this period have been found at the Hyrax Hill archaeological site and may indicate contacts with international trade networks.

At their greatest extent, their territories covered the highlands from the Chepalungu and Mau forests northwards as far as the Cherangany Hills and Mount Elgon. There was also a south-eastern projection, at least in the early period, into the elevated Rift grasslands of Nakuru which was taken over permanently by the Maasai, probably no later than the seventeenth century.

History

Pre-19th century

A body of oral traditions from various East African communities points to the presence of at least four significant Kalenjin-speaking population groups present before the 19th century. The earliest mention appears to be of the Lumbwa. Meru oral history describes the arrival of their ancestors at Mount Kenya where they interacted with this community. The Lumbwa occupied the lower reaches of Mount Kenya though the extent of their territory is presently unclear.

North-east of this community, across the Rift Valley, a community known as the Chok (later Suk) occupied the Elgeyo escarpment. Pokot oral history describes their way of life, as that of the Chemwal whose country may have been known as Chemngal, a community that appears to have lived in association with the Chok. The Chemwal appear to have been referred to as Siger by the Karamojong on account of a distinctive cowrie shell adornment favoured by the women of this community. The area occupied by the Chemwal stretched between Mount Elgon and present-day Uasin Gishu as well as into several surrounding counties.

Far west, a community known as the Maliri occupied present-day Jie and Dodoth country in Uganda. The Karamojong would eject them from this region over the centuries and their traditions describe these encounters with the Maliri. The arrival in the district of the latter community is thought by some to be in the region of six to eight centuries ago.

To the north of Chemngal were the Oropom (Orupoi), a late neolithic society whose expansive territory is said to have stretched across Turkana and the surrounding region as well as into Uganda and Sudan. Wilson (1970) who collected traditions relating to the Oropom observed that the corpus of oral literature suggested that, at its tail end, the society “had become effete, after enjoying for a long period the fruits of a highly developed culture”. Bordering the Maliri in Uganda were the Karamojong, an iron age community that practised a pastoral way of life.

Towards the end of the 18th century and through the 19th century, a series of droughts, plagues of locusts, epidemics, and in the final decades of the 19th century, a rapid succession of sub-continental epizootics affected these communities. There is an early record of the great Laparanat drought c.1785 that affected the Karamajong. However, for communities then resident in what is present-day Kenya many disaster narratives relate the start with the Aoyate, an acute meteorological drought that affected much of East and Southern Africa. Nile records distinctly indicate a start about 1800 while oral narratives and the few written records indicate peak aridity during the 1830s resulting in a notable famine in 1836. This arid period, and the consequent series of events, have been referred to as Mutai.

A feature of the Mutai was increased conflict between neighbouring communities, most noted of these has been the Iloikop wars.

19th century

Cultural changes, particularly the innovation of heavier and deadlier spears amongst the Loikop are seen to have led to significant changes in methods and scale of raiding during the 19th century. The change in methods introduced by the Loikop also consisted of fundamental differences of strategy, infighting and defence, and also in the organization of settlements and of political life.

The cultural changes played a part in the significant southward expansion of Loikop territory from a base east of Lake Turkana. This expansion led to the development of three groupings within Loikop society. The Sambur occupied the ‘original’ country east of Lake Turkana as well as the Laikipia plateau. The Uasin Gishu occupied the grass plateaus now known as the Uasin Gishu and Mau while the Maasai territory extended from Naivasha to Kilimanjaro. This expansion was subsequently followed by the Iloikop wars.

The expansion of Turkana and Loikop societies led to significant change within the Kalenjin-speaking society. Some communities were annihilated by the combined effects of the Mutai of the 19th century while others adapted to the new era.

Members of collapsing communities were usually assimilated into ascending identities.

Significant cultural change also occurred. Guarding cattle on the plateaus depended less on elaborate defences and more on mobility and cooperation. Both of these require new grazing and herd management strategies. The practice of the later Kalenjin – that is, after they had abandoned the Sirikwa pattern and had ceased in effect to be Sirikwa – illustrates this change vividly. On their reduced pastures, notably on the borders of the Uasin Gishu plateau, when bodies of raiders approached they would relay the alarm from ridge to ridge so that the herds could be combined and rushed to the cover of the forests. There, the approaches to the glades would be defended by concealed archers, and the advantage would be turned against the spears of the plains warriors.

More than any of the other sections, the Nandi and Kipsigis, in response to Maasai expansion, borrowed from the Maasai some of the traits that would distinguish them from other Kalenjin: large-scale economic dependence on herding, military organization and aggressive cattle raiding, as well as centralized religious-political leadership. By the mid-nineteenth century, both these communities were expanding at the expense of the Maasai.

The Iloikop wars ended in the 1870s with the defeat and dispersal of the Laikipiak. However, the new territory acquired by the Maasai was vast and left them overextended thus unable to occupy it effectively. This left them open to encroachment by other communities. By the early 1880s, Kamba, Kikuyu and Kalenjin raiders were making inroads into the Maasai territory, and the Maasai were struggling to control their resources of cattle and grazing land.

Around this time, two instances of epizootics broke out in the Rift Valley region. In 1883, bovine Pleuro-Pneumonia spread from the north and lingered for several years. The effect of this was to cause the Loikop to regroup and to go out raiding more aggressively to replenish their herds. This was followed by a far more serious outbreak of Rinderpest which occurred in 1891.

This period – characterized by disasters, including a rinderpest epidemic, other stock diseases, drought, mass starvation, and smallpox was referred to as a Mutai.

Traditional way of life

The nineteenth-century saw massive upheaval among the Sirikwa societies, old identities such as the Maliri and the Chok were annihilated or assimilated giving way to new identities such as the Pokot. Others like the Sengwer and Lumbwa acculturated to the new reality, merging and dropping their old identities to become Nandi and Kipsigis. These new societies retained many elements of their old way of life – like the iron-age Sirikwa societies they were primarily semi-nomadic pastoralists. Their economy revolved around raising livestock and cultivating sorghum and pearl millet on the western highlands of Kenya as it had since at least the last millennium B.C.

There appear to have been areas of specialization across different regions, communities living on the Elgeyo escarpment for instance traditionally focused on irrigated cultivation. A variety of crops had been borrowed from the neighbouring Bantu communities and New World foods were introduced following the arrival of the Portuguese on the Swahili coast during the fifteenth century. Of these, indigenous vegetables and herbs, beans, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and tobacco were grown widely while maize and bananas were also cultivated though in small quantities.

They traded locally for goods such as honey, pottery, tobacco pipes and weaponry as well as medical and magical services while connections to international markets supplied foreign goods such as iron wire and cloth in exchange for ivory. The long tradition of beadwork benefited from the introduction of a variety of beads from European markets.

Their territory was not as a whole recognized as a geographic locality. However, there was a standardized set of classifications for geographic localities across the respective territories. Of these geographic classifications, the Kokwet was the most significant political and judicial unit among the Kalenjin. The governing body of each kokwet was its kokwet council; the word kokwet was variously used to mean the whole neighbourhood, its council and the place where the council met.

Social order was regulated by Kamuratanet and cultural life largely revolved around its teaching through folklore and observation of the various tumwek (rituals/customs), the important one’s being Tumdo (Initiation) and the tumwek of marriage such as Koito. The Saget’ab eito ceremony was held every number of years to mark the change of ‘ages’ and the Kipsundet festivals celebrated every September (Kipsunde) and October (Kipsunde oeng) to mark the change in seasons.

To a significant extent however, the Maasai era fundamentally changed the character of the Sirikwa/Kalenjin-speaking communities, the magnitude of which remains unclear.

20th century

The latter decades of the nineteenth century saw the early European explorers start advancing into the interior of Kenya. By this time, the Kalenjin – more so the Nandi, had acquired a fearsome reputation. Thompson was warned in 1883 to avoid the country of the Nandi, which was known for attacks on strangers and caravans that would attempt to scale the great massif of the Mau.

Nonetheless, trade relations were established between the Kalenjin and the incoming British. This was tempered on the Kalenjin side by the prophecies of various seers. Among the Nandi, Kimnyole had warned that contact with the Europeans would have a significant impact on the Nandi while Mongo was said to have warned against fighting the Europeans.

Matson, in his account of the resistance, shows ‘how the irresponsible actions of two British traders, Dick and West, quickly upset the precarious modus vivendi between the Nandi and incoming British’. Conflict, led on the Nandi side by Koitalel Arap Samoei – Nandi Orkoiyot at the time, was triggered by West’s killing in 1895.

The East Africa Protectorate, Foreign Office, and missionary societies administrations reacted to West’s death by organizing invasions of Nandi in 1895 and 1897. Invading forces were able to inflict sporadic losses upon Nandi warriors, steal hundreds of livestock, and burn villages, but were not able to end Nandi resistance.

1897 also saw the colonial government set up a base in Eldama Ravine under the leadership of certain Messrs. Ternan and Grant, an intrusion that was not taken too kindly by the Lembus community. This triggered conflict between the Lembus and British forces which included Maasai and Nubian soldiers and porters.

The British eventually overcame the Lembus following which Grant and Lembus elder’s negotiated a peace agreement. During the negotiations, the Lembus were prevailed upon by Grant to state that they would not harm nor kill, to which the response was women. As such, they exchanged a girl from the Kimeito clan while Grant offered a white bull as a gesture of peace and friendship. This agreement was known as the Kerkwony Agreement. The negotiations were held where Kerkwony Stadium stands today.

On 19 October 1905, on the grounds of what is now Nandi Bears Club, Arap Samoei was asked to meet Col Richard Meinertzhagen for a truce. A grand-nephew of one of Arap Samoei’s bodyguards later noted that “There were about 22 of them who went for a meeting with the (European) that day. Koitalel Arap Samoei had been advised not to shake hands because if he did, that would give him away as the leader. But he extended his hand and was shot immediately”. Koitalel’s death led to the end of the Nandi resistance.

Colonial period

Politics and identity

Until the mid-20th century, the Kalenjin did not have a common name and were usually referred to as the ‘Nandi-speaking tribes’ by scholars and colonial administration officials.

Kenya African Democratic Union Eldoret Branch

Starting in the 1940s, individuals from the various ‘Nandi-speaking tribes’ who had been drafted to fight in World War II (1939–1945) began using the term Kale or Kore (a term that denoted scarification of a warrior who had killed an enemy in battle) to refer to themselves. At about the same time, a popular local radio broadcaster by the name of John Chemallan would introduce his wartime broadcasts with the phrase Kalenjok meaning “I tell You” (when said to many people). This would influence a group of fourteen young ‘Nandi-speaking’ men attending Alliance School and who were trying to find a name for their peer group. They would call it Kalenjin meaning “I tell you” (when said to one person). The word Kalenjin was gaining currency as a term to denote all the ‘Nandi-speaking’ tribes. This identity would be consolidated with the founding of the Kalenjin Union in Eldoret in 1948 and the publication of a monthly magazine called Kalenjin in the 1950s.

In 1955 when Mzee Tameno, a Maasai and member of the Legislative Assembly (LEGCO) for Rift Valley, tendered his resignation, the Kalenjin presented one candidate to replace him; Daniel Toroitich arap Moi.

By 1960, concerned with the dominance of the Luo and Kikuyu, Arap Moi and Ronald Ngala formed KADU to defend the interests of the country’s smaller ethnicities. They campaigned on a platform of majimboism (devolution) during the 1963 elections but lost to KANU. Shortly after independence in December 1963, Kenyatta convinced Moi to dissolve KADU. This was done in 1964 when KADU dissolved and joined KANU.

Religion

Traditional Kalenjin religion was based upon the belief in a supreme god, Asis or Cheptalel, represented in the form of the sun (asista), although the sun itself was not considered to be God. Beneath Asis is Elat, who controls thunder and lightning. Spirits of the dead, oyik, were believed to intervene in the affairs of humans and were placated with sacrifices of meat and/or beer, called koros . Diviners, called orkoik , were considered to have magical powers and assisted in appeals for rain or to end floods.

Christianity was introduced and rapidly spread through Kalenjin speaking areas during the colonial period. Traditional Kalenjin religion which was undergoing separate change saw a corresponding decline in this time.

Today, nearly everyone claims membership in organized religion—either Christianity or Islam. Major Christian sects include the Africa Inland Church (AIC), the Church of the Province of Kenya (CPK), and the Roman Catholic Church. Muslims are relatively few among the Kalenjin. For the most part, only older people can recall details of traditional religious beliefs.

Food

The colonial period saw the introduction of tea cultivation on a large scale in the Kericho and Nandi highlands. These regions have since played a significant role in establishing Kenya as the world’s leading exporter of tea and also in establishing a tea-drinking culture among the Kalenjin. This period also saw the introduction of the mid-day meal as well as the addition of wheat-based foods such as bread and less often pancakes and maandazi to the morning meal.

Literacy

A significant cultural change of the colonial period was the introduction and adoption of the Latin script for transcribing first the Bible, and later Kalenjin lore and history.

Also, See other Indigenous people.

African Great Lakes

Hadza people, Sandawe people, Twa people, Bangweulu Batwa, Great Lakes Twa, Kafwe Twa, Lukanga Twa, Nilo-Saharan, Kalenjin people, Maasai people, Samburu people, Bantu languages, Abagusii People, Kikuyu people, Luhya people, Bukusu, Afroasiatic, Iraqw people, Rendille people.

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