Of Kuria clans, Abairege live the farthest away from the tarmac road. They call themselves abatuuri ba isaahi, meaning “settlers of the bush.” In their northward quest for pastures and land for cultivation at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had penetrated deep into Maasai country to their north and east. The leopard is their totem, and Abairege fancy themselves brave, fierce, and staunch supporters of tradition. As the dusty red murram road approached the boundary between the administrative locations of Nyabasi and Bwirege, I noticed evenly spaced utility poles alongside the road, signifying a new kind of development. I was stunned that no one had thought to inform me about this, and contemplated the enormous change in living and working conditions it signaled.5 Distracted by changes to the otherwise extremely familiar countryside, I felt the remaining stretch of the trip pass very quickly. In no time, we were disembarking from the matatu at Nyankare market. I heaved my tightly packed carry-on, containing all my necessities for the next two months, including a camera, tape recorders, gifts for friends, clothing, and bedding, onto my shoulder and crossed the market to the house of a good friend.
“She doesn’t live here anymore,” I was told. “They built a new home near the police post.” So short a time had elapsed since I confirmed my travel plans that I had notified few people of my return. Only my former assistant knew, but his home was four miles from the market—too far to walk in my fatigued state. I shuffled back into the market square and was approached by a young man who greeted me respectfully and kindly. Samwel Ragita, the son of another good friend, and the spitting image of his late father, told me his mother was home. He invited me to go there with him. Gladly I acquiesced, and during our short walk, I thought about how odd it was to see him grown up, and how happy I was to see him lift my bag without even asking and carry it for me. The four years since I had last been in Nyankare had brought many changes to my life, no doubt etched in my face, but Samwel, at thirteen, was physically transformed. I was glad he was so much his father’s son in appearance, or I would not have recognized him. As we left the hubbub of the market behind, I told him briefly about the processions we had encountered along the way. “So how are the circumcisions going over here?” I asked eagerly. He looked at me, seeming puzzled, and responded, “They have been canceled.”
“How can that be?” The shock of his statement sent ripples of disbelief into me.
“There is too much witchcraft,” Samwel replied matter-of-factly.
“Settlers of the Bush”
From the earliest colonial records, it is evident that migrations of Kuria people were ongoing at the time of the establishment of colonial rule. Writing about 1907 and 1908, the District Commissioner for South Nyanza District notes that “there is a marked increase of huts all along the German border from Mohuru on the Lake [Victoria] to Uregi [Bwirege]. This is most noticeable in Uregi where in March there were only six huts. In August I found 25 and on my safari last month [March 1908] when I collected hut tax there the number had risen to 94” (Kenya National Archives, DC/KSI/1).6 By 1911, the settlement at Bwirege had increased to nearly 200 huts (Kenya National Archives, DC/KSI/3/3). The people’s primary identification, then as now, was with the clan (ikiaro). The designation of Abairege as the settlers of the bush (abatuuri ba isaahi) by other Kuria is meant as a pejorative, but Abairege take pride in the designation, stressing those elements they perceive as prideworthy—independence, ruggedness, and a pioneering spirit, as well as their status as the ones who challenge the boundaries of Maasai.7 Because their area has, in the past century, been seen as remote, it has been the last affected by contact with outsiders and external institutions, including organized religion, formal education, and the market economy. Whereas other Kuria see Abairege as backward, other Kenyans level that same charge against Kuria in general. Despite the epithets, Abairege and Kuria of other ibiaro are well aware of changes in their lives on many fronts—economic, political, and social, as well as cultural. Though Kuria people were not recognized as a unitary ethnic group, or “tribe” in the colonial parlance, until the late 1950s, a shared history is referred to and cherished by many residents in the area. The importance of the overarching Kuria identity is growing, as is a sense of national identity, of being Kenyan. But since more than half of Kuria live in Tanzania, national identity has been slow to take full hold. Instead, underlying these emerging identities is an important, localized designation reflecting clan and lineage membership—that of the ikiaro, recognized as the maximal unit of affiliation prior to the late colonial era. Its enduring importance warrants examination and delineation.
Major demographic, social, economic, and political transformations on the national level in the past thirty years have not bypassed Kuria District.8 Many people living in this rural area aspire to be progressive and rue what they see as backwardness (Prazak 1999). Electricity in the district was limited to sporadic service in the capital until 2012, when even Bwirege became linked to the power grid. A growing number of people have solar panels at their homes, used in the past decade to recharge batteries for mobile phones and, in a few cases, to power television sets. Since 2005, the isolation of the area has been broken by mobile phone technology, and Nyankare market now hosts a phone booster tower, connecting the area with the rest of the globe. Another, just on the other side of the international border, allows people to communicate easily with kin south of the border in Tanzania.
The only paved road in Bukuria, a mere 20 kilometers, runs south of Migori to the Tanzanian border. The murram roads, on which the bulk of humans and cargo are transported, are pitted, potholed, poorly maintained, eroded, and overused. During the rainy seasons, their clay base makes them dangerous or impassable. Large lorries come into the district to remove maize surpluses accumulated and stored in the capacious warehouses of the Cereals Board, which buys up the harvests of Kuria and the adjacent Transmara districts. Lorries also export the tobacco harvest of smallholder farmers supplying British American Tobacco, Mastermind, Stancom, and Alliance companies, which compete for the best leaf to sell on the international and national markets for cigarette making. The only running water is in rivers and streams, and these have become increasingly polluted by runoff from tobacco nurseries, in which seeds are germinated and nurtured prior to transplanting. Girls and women fetch water from these sources, sometimes multiple times a day, to meet the needs of their homesteads.
Kuria widely regard educational attainment as the principal way to get ahead economically, as well as to gain access to horizons broader than the rural countryside. Nonetheless, educational attainment for Kuria men and women is lower than the national average and, perhaps consequently, employment levels are lower as well. Since very few people are able to survive by subsistence farming alone, most resort to multiple strategies to make a living (Bryceson 2002). Though employment options have been more accessible to men than to women, women are also intricately tied into the global economic system through cash-crop production (coffee, tobacco, maize), agricultural labor offered for sale, and petty trade.
In the last few decades, a number of important changes occurred in Bukuria. In the late 1980s, a large-scale in-migration of families placed a new burden on the resource base of these rural communities. The families had been squatting for the previous fifty years in the adjoining Rift Valley areas and were dislocated in the name of majimboism (Klopp 2001).9 This influx of peoples, whose livelihood was based on large herds of cattle, reinforced the most conservative elements within Bwirege society (Prazak 2000, 25). This is true, too, of neighboring Abanyabasi, who also squatted in adjoining Maasai areas.
That the initiation season was canceled because of witchcraft seemed impossible. It did not square with the image Abairege and Kuria generally have of themselves as the intrepid challengers of obstacles that stand in their way, an image reinforced nationally by the significant role they took historically and play currently in the police, army, and security industry, including private forces.
But that was the state of affairs when I arrived in the community on December 2. I had received my invitation back in October, and excitedly stayed up nights, preparing for the opportunity to fill this hole in my experience and knowledge. There and then, in the dusty marketplace,