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'Where's Koisa?': The Changing Mukogodo of Kenya
| Article
# : |
10513 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
3,112 Words |
| Author
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Lee Cronk And Beth Leech
Lee Cronk is assistant professor of anthropology at Texas A &
M University. Beth Leech is a free-lance editor at Texas A & M
University. The filed-work for this story was done between
1985 and 1987 in Kenya, with a follow-up visit in 1992. |
Koisa ole Lengei was born sometime in the 1920s in the Mukogodo hills of north-central Kenya. For the first few years of his life, he lived with his parents and sister in a cave, surviving on honey, wild plants, and wild animals as his ancestors had done for centuries.
The Mokogodo of Koisa's generation spoke a disappearing Cushitic language called Yaaku. In 1969, a German linguist, Bernd Heine, persuaded Koisa to accompany him to the University of Nairobi to teach him the old language. Koisa never came home. After a couple of weeks in Nairobi, he disappeared. Police searches turned up nothing, and Heine later hypothesized in a linguistics journal that Koisa had been killed by criminals.
Our interest in the Mukogodo began with Heine's article. We studied their history, customs, and beliefs, living among them from late 1985 to early 1987 and returning for a short stay in 1992. We went expecting to find a people in transition form the hunting and gathering way of life of Koisa's childhood to one based on raising livestock. Instead, we found a society that had completed the transition to pastoral ways and was beginning a new transition to the ways of Western technological society.
The first transformation occurred about fifty to sixty years ago, when in a period of about ten years in the 1920s and '30s, the Mukogodo changed their economy, language, and way of life from those of the cave dwellers to those of the neighboring Masai pastoralists. It is interesting and sometimes telling to compare that transition to the one occurring today as western ideas are brought into Mukogodo by missionaries, the Kenyan government, aid workers, and the Mukogodo themselves.
Bride wealth inflation
Koisa's homeland is a dry forest of cedar and wild olive trees cover-hills. The area's many riverbeds are dry for all but a few days a year, but small permanent springs of clear water are scattered throughout the forest. On the east and north, the Mukogodo hills drop quickly to a flat, dry plain of thorny, flat-topped acacias and bushy succulents; on the west, they taper off slowly into a series of low, rocky ridges covered with short grass and cactus like candelabra trees. On the south side, the forest ends at a wide plain of grass and small thorn trees that eventually leads to the foot of Mount Kenya.
In Koisa's childhood, the Mukogodu men hunters, and apiarists,
...
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