The Breaking Spears: A Culture at Crossroads with Modernity

By Paul Kunoni

The story is about Pauls life in Kenya, and how his tradition and family background shaped his resolve to acquire modern education. He takes the reader through the various stages of formal education in tandem with Maasai rites of passages that he went through. He describes how colonization influenced education in his country and how it continues to influence wealth distribution and politics. The author is from the Maasai, a pastoralist community who have been able to maintain their culture and traditions despite the pressure exerted on their lifestyle by modernization. He gives a detailed account of the struggle experienced by his cultures gradual transformation in order to conform to the new world order. Traditionally, it was considered sunrise was the beginning of a day, yet in this formal world, a day begins at midnight and ends at the same time. The author illustrates how a father saw an eminent change of his peoples culture and what he did to prepare his children for it. As the author was educated, his boundaries expanded and revealed experiences that touched about family, ethnicity, Nationality and to some degree, race.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491783719

Paul Kunoni

His mixed ethnic heritage together with education led him to have a hybrid cultural personality. He had, largely grown up in a village with occasional exposure to urban life. He went to school during the transition period from traditional to modern life when his sectionalism and ethnicity was really challenged. He served at the Ministry of Health and other faculties in his country, Kenya and then crossed borders to the United States of America.

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Copyright © 2015 Paul Kunoni.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8370-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8371-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920289

iUniverse rev. date: 02/09/2016

Contents

Acknowledgements

Dedications

Preface

Prologue

CHAPTER I

Growing up in the village

My first day in the village school

The 1977 drought

Boarding School

CHAPTER II

Initiation into adult hood

Ceremonies in our homestead

Interruptions in the village school

CHAPTER III

High School life

Raising my own school fees

CHAPTER IV

After high school

Medical college

Job appointments

CHAPTER V

My First Trip Overseas

Going back to my country

The loss of my son

CHAPTER VI

The change of events

The long journey back home

CHAPTER VII

Seeking independence from my parents

Author's note

Editors and readers notes

Acknowledgements

Much appreciations and love to Kathleen Ryan, Mary martin, James Mathieu and Raph Valentino for their enormous contribution to the writing of this book.

Dedications

To my parents, Nakuo and Njoki, my entire family, and most of all, my late Son Graham Parpai Kunoni.

Preface

I am a Maasai from Kenya, East Africa. I was born when my people were in their first stages of changing from practicing their traditional ways to embracing education. My age-set was the last one to practice meaningful warriorhood in my section and to be involved in the transition from traditional practices to modernity. The book is therefore about my first hand experience on my tribe's traditional rites of passage in tandem with the introduction of formal education. It is an illustration of the the complexities of growing up in a polygamous, multi-cultural family and in a multi-ethnical changing society. It's also about the influence of colonization, post-colonization, and modernization on the Maasai and in Kenya as a whole. I have demonstrated that by giving an account on my schooling, work experience and life both in Kenya and abroad. Some of the names and places have been deliberately hidden or omitted to protect their privacy.

Regards

P. Kunoni

Prologue

Just as what Mzee Jomo Kenyatta said, The missionaries came with the Bible and found us with the land. They told us to close our eyes in prayers and when we opened them, we found ourselves with the Bible and them with the land. It is best to say that exploration and missionary work in Africa and the world over gave rise to colonization and eventually led to the formation of the various nations, each one of them taking up its colonizer's culture and language. No one knows why that had to happen, but one thing is surely true, it somehow reorganized the world. However, what that statement does not say, is that the missionaries did not just take the land, they also brought in religion and education with them. It was through these two that new ways of governance and modern living got introduced.

Traditionally, sunrise was always taken to have been the beginning of the day and it's setting the end of it, yet in the modern world, a day begins at midnight and ends at the same time. It is a fact that those people who lived closer to their colonizers were the first to be educated. They were also the most oppressed and were therefore the first to fight for their liberation. They used the same knowledge and tools they acquired from their colonizers to liberate the rest of their population. The fact that they were already educated when the created countries got their independence made them the first to take over the responsibility of leading the rest. They also became mentors to their relations, who also took advantage of already established educational facilities in their areas to embrace education and to benefit from it. There were other people who got educated accidentally, by finding themselves in proximity to their colonizers either through work, jail, or leadership collaboration, but brought up their families within communities that still had their traditions and customs intact. They led two lives, the traditional one, owing to their upbringing, and that of their masters, due to service or confinement. That is the group that the father of this book's author came from, owing to the fact that his wild behavior, when he was a warrior, led him to be recruited to the colonial police force.

The British occupied part of East Africa for close to a century. They put together the many areas that were occupied by the many ethnic groups and formed nations. The author is from the Maasai, a minority ethnic group in East Africa that was perhaps the biggest in name, due to the fact that they occupied more than a third of that country, before the British went in, and also by their persistence in maintaining their culture. They had a complex social organizational structure in the form of moieties (pairs), clans, age groups, and sections. According to myth, its founder, who went by the name Maasinta or Leeyio, got married to two wives. He let his first wife build her hut on the right of the gate to his homestead and gave her red oxen. He also let the second wife build her house on the left of that gate and gave her black oxen. The first wife had three sons, Loiken, Lelian, and Losero, whose descendants were collectively referred to as Odo-mongi (the house of red oxen) moiety. The second wife had two sons. Lukum and Naiser, whose descendants were collectively referred to as Orok-mongi (the house of black oxen) moiety. Their individual genealogical make up gave rise to the five Maasai major clans, in which several sub-clans emerged. It was from Naiser that the ruling sub-clan, the Inkidongi, arose. Two other groups, the Isiria and iIiatayiok, joined them to make a total of seven major clans. They were also organized in the form of sections, whose territorial boundaries defined them and in which the moiety system persisted.

Perhaps the order that was held most highly by them in their organizational structure was the age group system, which was dictated by the formation of a military wing in the form of an organized warrior group. This order was comprised of groups of men of the same generation who had distinct names. Some age groups were created in pairs, the left and right, and at different times, but were later put together in their elderhood and given one common name. Every consecutive age group sponsored and mentored their own age set whose members were mostly their own sons. Marriage formed the basis of maintaining that order, in that, members of an age group formed families after they retired from their warrior activities and gave rise to children who in turn formed successive age groups. Marriage was very selective. Members of the same age group were prohibited from getting married to children born of them because they considered them their own. At the same time marriage within the same clan was highly discouraged. However, inter-moiety marriage was allowed so long as the clan and age group factor was taken into account.

Like every other tribe, those of them who got educated first were the ones who lived closer to where the British had settled and put up their administrative points. Those were also the same places that the British had put up schools and other amenities. To fill up those schools, without unnecessarily disrupting their social lives, they instructed their leaders to force each family to let at least one child attend the schools they had set up. Most parents gave out those children that had disabilities, those they thought were not sired by them and those of their slaves or adopted families. The author was from a village that was in a section that was closest to where the British had put their central administrative station. Its border position and closeness to two other tribes together with a high preference of diseases, mostly East Coat Fever, made it risky and unfavorable for livestock keeping and human habitation. Those factors made it attractive to friendly families from two other tribes, the Kikuyu and Akamba, who went in to settle there and later get assimilated to the rest of the population. That diversity was perhaps the reason why the villages in that area were known to have had the bravest warriors of all times.

Paul grew up within that community and was among the first to take up formal education after the independent government abolished the age set system in his section. He was also forced to abandon his traditional lifestyle when his father refrained from having him become a warrior. He however suffered a small set back, during his adolescence and when he was going through his high school that was brought about by a temporary family separation. But that did not deter him from pursuing his education, to the admiration of his father, who eventually decided to sponsor him through to college. He was employed immediately after his college studies and served in various stations throughout his country. His people's traditions returned to him when he met an archeologist from America, who had worked with him for more than two decades researching and documenting his people's indigenous knowledge and practices. They have co-authored many publications that have been presented at various international forums.

CHAPTER I

Meeta enkerai olopeny (a child has no owner)

Growing up in the village

I was born the ninth in a family of eleven, six girls and five boys, and of a Maasai father and a Kikuyu mother. My father met my mother when he was working as a police officer in her region. The inter-tribal intermarriage between them brought about a sort of hybrid system in our upbringing, the most notable one having been in our naming. According to Maasai traditions, a child was named in a special ceremony that took place two or three months after birth. That duration was prolonged during times of adversity like drought and war. But before that, midwives gave it a fictitious name that was immediately dropped after a real name was confirmed. The reason for the lapse of time was to ascertain its chances of survival. The child was considered a fetus during that duration and its death before it was named was considered to have been a miscarriage. The mother and her child were put in seclusion during that period to protect them from people with bad intentions or what they referred to as people with bad eyes.

The women alerted the father to prepare for the naming ceremony and he in turn brewed honey wine in a large round flat-bottomed gourd, in which dried pieces of seedpods from the osukuroi (sausage tree) were added to accelerate the fermentation process. The mixture was then placed next to a fireplace and was regularly checked for any spillage. The father invited a few of his age mates to help him in ascertaining the wine's readiness and to set up a date for the naming ceremony.

On the evening of the naming day, the mother and her child were for the first time taken out of the house to be shaved, when the cows were getting back home from the grazing fields. It marked the end of their seclusion and the beginning of the child's childhood. A ram was then slaughtered and the meat roasted and shared according to traditions. The father and some of his age mates were for the first time allowed into the mother's house that evening to participate in a ritual that paved way for the naming ceremony. He allocated the gourd of wine to one of the elders, who had to be of reputable character, and that elder in turn assigned the duty of serving it to one of his peers, who was referred to as Opiku (the server). The gourd's owner gave the Opiku permission to fill up the elder's cups or horns with the wine, which they in turn poured some of it on the ground to appease their ancestors, and also to cleanse the Opiku's hands.

They went on to drink the wine until they felt happy enough to start the ceremony. The mother was asked to hold her child in her lap as the elders went on to suggest possible names. The name that was suggested first was said to have been a mocking one and the child was considered to have accepted a name when it cried or made some noise after hearing it. The elders then offered their blessings to the mother and child and put a black or dark blue beaded necklace that was wrapped up with a charm on the child, before it was made available to all. Children were named after prominent people, irrespective of their family or tribal affiliation, which was the reason why all kinds of names and from any part of the world could be found among the Maasai. There were instances where children were named after great missionaries, expatriates, business people, politicians and other leaders.

On the other hand, among the Kikuyu, children were named after their immediate relations; the first and second after their father's parents and the third and fourth after the mother's parents, that is, if it was a boy and girl situation. The rest were named after their uncles and aunties from both sides. Having been from the Kikuyu community, both my mother and my father's second wife, to whom I will refer to as Yeyio Kiti, took advantage of my father's refusal to take us through his tribe's traditions, to name us according to their traditions. They gave unofficial Kikuyu names to those of us who fell into the category of their relations, which were only used by our maternal relations when they addressed them, when they paid us visits or when we went to visit them. They also named those of us who fell in my father's category his relation's names and those they gave kikuyu unofficial names, they gave Maasai names too.

I spent part of my childhood with my father in his business premises in a nearby township where one of my half brothers occasionally joined us. We were provided with a room and a housekeeper to take care of us. While we were still living with him, there was an outbreak of a skin disease that was characterized by itching that developed into rashes and ulceration. The disease mostly started in between the fingers and spread to softer parts of the body, especially the stomach, the thighs and the buttocks. Infected persons sensationally and endlessly scratched themselves up at first and later on developed rashes that eventually bust and then got exposd to secondary infections. The disease caused painful discomfort to the victims and at times immobilized them. It was worse when it affected the anal area, because the fluid from the lesions made their buttocks stick together and was very painful when they wanted to defecate. My father ensured that we lived in a clean environment and were given regular prophylactic treatment in order to prevent us from being infected. I can still remember the excitement we used to have when we were being taken to a nearby dispensary in his vehicle and the agony it turned out to be when it was time to be injected.

My father was so busy running his businesses that it was almost impossible for him to have had time with us. If he was not away outsourcing supplies for his business, he was repairing or extending his premises or supervising those activities. We therefore often found ourselves changing rooms, as the work progressed. He also loved loading and offloading goods to and from his truck by placing two used car tires at the rear of his track and on top of each other and slowly pushed the heavy drums full of contents out of the vehicle onto them. He would then move them to the ground and progressively rolled them to where he needed them to be. We thought he was the strongest man at the time, a perspective that he affirmed by showing us his biceps while saying to us, muona? nguvu (do you see? strength!). Our imitative response was always met with a corresponding smile that was coupled with a lovingly light touch on our heads. He however never forgot to ask us to ensure that we ate all our food in order for us to be as strong as he was.

We never had much time with him, mainly due to his busy schedule and also due to a cultural norm that prohibited parents from having strong bonds with their children. The high child mortality rate that was present at that time, necessitated that parents refrained themselves in bonding with their children in order to avoid going through a lot of trauma in case they lost them early. It was also the same reason why a mother was always instructed to say to her newly born baby, "Imbunga oltau lino maibunga olalali" (hold onto your life as I do the same on mine), immediately the umbilical cord was cut. My father was among the first people to establish a business in that township, the earliest one having been a white man who had a tannery that used to supply leather to a nearby prison.

Just like many other families in our village at that time, my family lived next to a permanent river, whose springs sprung up from a swamp that was at the end of our village. The swamp was surrounded by a salt lick that used to act as a livestock and wildlife convergence zone. One needed not to worry if one or two of his livestock were missing, because all one needed to do was to look for them at the salt lick the next day. One knew straight away that the animals had strayed into the bush if they were not at the salt lick with the other animals, and that they had probably been killed by wild animals during the night. The owners then searched for their lost animals in the bushes and the fields, all the while looking out for vultures in the sky that often led them to their dead carcasses.

I went back to the village after the skin disease described above was eradicated. The uncle whom I was named after and my father had some differences over an inheritance issue, but they agreed not to involve their children in it by allowing us to freely visit each other during the school holidays. It was during such visits that his wife took me with her to her homestead when she brought her children to ours. But their last-born was not happy with the attention I was being given by his parents. He thought his parents had decided to take me up when I was not taken back to our home with the rest of my siblings after schools were reopened. He used to come back from school in the afternoon and the two of us played together in the house thereafter. He would make me play the part of a male calf and ask me to remove my pants so that he could pretend to be castrating a male calf with a gadget that was used to castrate them. I thought it was the normal child plaything, only to realize that he was serious when he got infuriated when I refused to let him place my testicles on that gadget. One day, he attempted to do it by force and I defended myself by hitting him on the head with a stick. He dropped the gadget and ran out of the house crying. I got so scared and at the same time relieved that I was able to rescue myself and also ran out of the house and hid in my aunt's house in the same homestead.

The servants came in running from the garden, when they heard the boy crying and began to search for me when they found out that it was I who did that to their boss's son, but my aunt protected me from them. I waited until milking time was over and asked her to let me go back. I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody was sent to get me. She asked me if I wanted one of her children to escort me back, but I assured her that I was capable of doing it on my own. But I did not go back to that house; I instead opted to hide in a cow's enclosure for being fearful of being punished for what I did.

The enclosure wasn't good for me either,