People and culture in danger of being eclipsed by a changing world

Every now and then, out of plain nostalgia, Mzee Lobes Lokinyanyi takes a walk deep into Mukogodo Forest, Laikipia District, to visit the Nkapune (caves) where he was born 65 years ago. In those days, the ethnic group from which he comes lived exclusively in caves and hardly ever intermarried with their neighbors, the Maasai and Samburu.

Lobes is the only surviving member from his father’s family. His parents and siblings are all buried in the forest.

At a casual glance, from his attire and language, he would pass for a Samburu. He and his family speak the Maa language most of the time.However, look a little closer and you will see that his complexion is fairer, his hair different in texture, appearing more Cushitic than the Nilotic Maasai and Samburu.

Mzee Lobes Lokinyanyi

Almost extinct dialect

In fact, his mother tongue is not Maa. It is the little known and almost extinct dialect known as Yaaku. He hardly ever speaks the Yaaku because there are few people left who know the dialect.

‘There are only less than 10 other people scattered in and around the Mukogodo Forest,’ says Lobes. About his last visit to the caves of his youth, Lobes says: ‘The ashes in the cooking area and goat droppings are still fresh, as if it were yesterday.

I remember clearly growing up there with my three brothers and sister.’ Giving a hint of efforts to keep the tribe ethnically pure, he says; ‘My mother was the only child of her parents and her father refused to take bride price from anyone, turning down many proposals to have her married.

‘Lobes and his relatives have long since left the caves and he now lives in a mud hut with his wife, Teresia. Their nine children and two grandchildren still live in the Mukogodo forest. He fears that his children and grandchildren may never speak the Yaaku dialect, which was classified as extinct by Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

Lobes is the youngest of nine or so ageing men and women who can still speak it. The Yaaku are also known as the Ilkirimani or Ilmoko’odo, and it was they who gave the Mukogodo

Forest its name. Their Maasai and Samburu neighbours call them the Ontorobo,and they are little known beyond a few academic research works.

Indeed, their existence has never been acknowledged in any official documentation, including the national census, because they are grouped with the more populous Maasai.

‘Only a few’ very old people can speak my language.Many died before their children could learn it. It is really sad,’ Lobes laments . Then he pauses for a moment before snorting a huge pinch of snuff into his nostrils, as if to drown the frustration and the pain of the loss he feels.

His closest Yaaku kinsman, who lives across a valley and a ridge towards the edge of the forest near the Dol Dol Dam, is 78-year-old Lerimani Leleitiko, who laments that many men of his generation died without ever touching a woman alone marrying one.

Coming of white men

‘That is why we are very few. Many men did not marry at all,’ says Leleitiko. A combination of factors seems to have placed the Yaaku and their culture on the road to extinction.

According to Leleitiko, the coming of the white man and the colonial administration marked the beginning of the end for his community. The colonial administration disrupted the Yaaku way of life by banning game hunting by the natives to stem competition with commercial safari hunting.

The hunter-gatherer Yaaku were badly affected. The Yaaku used the hind leg of a giraffe as crucial part of bride price ,’ recalls Leleitiko, ‘and outlawing giraffe hunting meant young men could not marry’.

Yaaku: In the shadow of a dying heritage

Many Maasai families were settled in the Mukogodo Native Reserve (present-day Mukogodo Division) created in 1932 by the colonial authorities. Having Maasai as neighbors only worsened the disruption of the Yaaku way of life.

Leleitiko says: ‘They were rich in livestock and used this to entice the daughters of Yaaku. The Yaaku had no livestock to pay dowry, so the Maasai girls were also out of their reach. Many of our, men died without a family.’

Many of the Yaaku young men ended up as herders for the Maasai. Gradually many of the Yaaku’ people were assimilated into the Maasai culture and abandoned their language. They inter married with the Maasai and started speaking Maa.

Lobes is the youngest known speaker of Yaaku and the others are octogenarians in their sunset years.

Remaining speakers

Lobes and Leleitiko count the remaining speakers of Yaaku as’ themselves and Mrs Narianto Matunge, Ms Lenkileleng’ Saidimu, Ms Nkong’Na’arok Sakuyi, and Lnkoriya Lemoile. Mr Johnson ole Kaunga, a civil society activist from the area, says that ‘their language and culture as a distinct people is destined for extinction unless, of course, some intercession happens urgently. They have become part of the Maasai’.

Scholars who classified the Yaaku as Cushites trace their origin to Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti but no one seems to know when or why they came up the Ewaso Nyiro River and ended in the Mukogodo forest.

‘I heard my parents say that our people came up the Ewaso Nyiro but no one really seems to know when or why. They lived in caves in the forest, in small families, each occupying a hill and adjacent hunting grounds.

Our people never kept livestock until fairly recently.’Our main diet for both adults and children was honey. Children would be fed on bee larvae squeezed from honey combs and mixed with honey. We trapped ta’ara (dikdik) and de’eku (rock hyrax) or used poisoned arrows and spears to hunt bigger animals like buffaloes and giraffes,’ Lobes recalls.

Descendants of the Yaaku, who number about 700 (according to estimates by the local people) and who still live in the forest (although the State has since gazetted it as a protected government forest) are still expert honey-gatherers and beehive makers .

Indeed, although their lives are simple, their attachment to bees and honey is one reason Mukogodo Forest is still intact although there is no forest station or officers stationed there.

‘The Yaaku talk about tree tenure, not land tenure. Indeed, families inherit trees with beehives on them, or batter live trees for’other goods. It is not unusual to find a family battering live trees with beehives on them with goats or cattle,’ says Kaunga.

Before their lives were rudely disrupted, they used to be kings of the forest, occupying it in clearly demarcated territories, each family jealously guarding its turf. Their territory was respected by neighboring communities, the Maasai to the south, the Samburu in the west and Meru in the east.

Perceived as an insult

Various hills in the Mukogodo Forest are still named after Yaaku clans or families that used to occupy them. They include Terdo Hills (Supuko clan), Losos (Nkinyanyi clan), Kiapei (Letiko clan), Parsenek (Sialo clan) and Lekurrki (Ntula clans).

‘Many of our children do not want to be referred to as Ontorobo or Yaaku, perceived as an insult by the Maasai and Samburu,’ Lebos recalls.

To the Maa speakers, whose wealth and status is measured by the number of livestock one owns, an Ontorobo or Dorobo is a poor person.

It is an insult to call a true Maasai a Dorobo. ‘Each family kept to its hills and hunting grounds. Custom dictated that if a hunter’s animal ran or stumbled into another family’s territory,that. would mark the end of the chase. It could ignite a serious fight if anyone broke the rules.

‘The Yaaku brought up their children under strict discipline to respect the community’s and family’s ways of life, defined by secrecy and keeping as little outside contact as possible.

Only the most disciplined and discerning son was allowed to know where the family beehives were kept. Girls mostly remained with their mothers until they were married.

Women, on the other hand, knew their place. If a woman had to go out herself for firewood or water, she would first check husband’s footsteps and take the opposite direction. Apart from circumcision and marriage, the Yaaku had few social ceremonies ‘ perhaps due to scarcity of food or hostility from their neighbours .

Lebos relates his experiences: ‘If a son was ripe for marriage, the father would approach another family to ask for the the’ daughter.

The dowry amounted to the hind leg of a giraffe and five or six beehives, at least one of which must have bees and honey for the girl’s mother. Most of the time, the groom’s father would simply point at the hives he had ear-marked for dowry to the girl’s father.

The girl’s father could wait for the hives to have bees and honey then pick them up or harvest the honey or take away the hives if they already had bee colonies in them.’ After the girl’s father took the hives, the girl was given away, no elaborate courtships or wedding ceremonies common with many communities.

During circumcision, the boy’s father would invite five or six men to witness his son’s foreskin being cut by an expert. A feast of meat and alcoholic brews would follow and the gathering would then disperse.

‘There were no communal or mass circumcision ceremonies. Each family held their own ceremony for their son,’ he recalls. Today, although the Yaaku still live in the forest, where some two primary schools have been built, they are concerned that there is no security of tenure, the government having gazetted it as public property.

‘Government officials, especially game rangers, stop us from cutting trees to build our homes because it is government property, but we have nowhere else to go. We were born here and our parents are buried here,’ Lobes says.

Social prejudices

The community has few members who have been to school, and most of them don’t like being referred to as Yaaku or Ontorobo, preferring to be identified as Maasai ‘ due the negative connotations and social prejudices ascribed to their identity.

Although the government is currently working on a national land policy ‘ the first since Kenya became an entity ‘ the Yaaku did not seem be aware of it. It will be difficult to decide whether it is they who have intruded upon a government forest or it is the government that intruded upon the ancestral home of the Yaaku.

What can be done to save this language and culture

The Kenya Government, if ever it looks at the plight facing the few surviving Yaaku speakers in Mukogodo Forest of Laikipia, can borrow a leaf from what South Africa did with the death of apart heid and emergence of black majority rule.

Khomani speakers are part of the San ethnic . group, who are indigenous to South Africa. At one time spread over almost the whole, of South Africa, in 1930 the Khomani moved to the Central and Northern Kalahari Desert and adjacent districts.

However, in 1973, the last San communities were evicted from the Kalahari Gemsbok Park, with their native tongue, Khomani, being declared officially extinct. In 1994, with the end of apartheid, and the installation of nationalist Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected President of what came to be known as the Rainbow Nation, a new law was enacted in South Africa to allow people to reclaim land they had lost on the basis of race since 1913.

With the help of the South African San Institute the Khomani community put in a claim against the National Park. In 1999, the government awarded them 40,000 hectares of land outside the park and another 25,000 hectares inside the park.

At the end of the 1990’s, the first known surviving Khomani speaker was identified. Since then research has found around 20 additional speakers. Approximately 1,500 adults are spread over an area of more than 1,000 square kilometres in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.

Most Khomani nowadays speak fluently Khoekhoegowap (Nama) and or Afrikaans as their primary language. The use of the languages differs according to the context: Khomani is used with other Khomani speakers, Nama with friends and children, Afrikaans with adults and outsiders, sometimes with children, and for church. Literacy is in Afrikaans. The San also live in Botswana and Namibia.

UNESCO’s Red Book on Extinct and Endagered Languages defines dead languages as follows;

If there are only a few speakers but practically no children among them. If it is possibly extinct but there is no reliable information of remaining speakers. Nearly extinct, with some children speakers at least in some parts of their range but decreasingly so. Potentially endangered languages, with a large number of children speakers but has no official or prestigious status.

With Less than a dozen known speakers, all them aged. Yaaku is more than endangered.

Languages become extinct when native speakers, usually minority groups,adopt languages spoken by the majority either for survival or other reasons. in 1983, researchers put the number of Yaaku at 50, in a population of about 250.

A recently formed self-help group, the Yaaku Group, with offices in Dol Dol township, helps the forest dwellers refine and market their honey on a commercial basis. It estimates their number at 700 although there has been no official census.

Another endangered group is the Baka (pygmies)in Gabon, who live in the forest in the area bordering Cameroun to the north. They are part of the large group of Baka found in Southwest Cameroun and Northeast of Congo Brazzaville. They migrated to Gabon in recent history. The language of the Baka is Ubangian-based in contrast to other forest people groups in Gabon the languages of which are Bantu based.

Article was first published in the Sunday Nation of October 17 2004