Dont say I didnt warn you
In the late 19th century, the British colonialists found Nandi raiding parties ranging more than 100 miles from their highlands, striking at night and driving cattle miles toward home before enemy warriors could regroup. Nandi ferocity was such that it took the British five military campaigns over 10 years to subdue the tribe, which they finally did in 1906.
To make men who could run a hundred miles on a handful of millet and a spurt of cow's blood, the Kalenjin tribes employed powerful means. The most potent was ritual circumcision.
To come of age in much of East Africa, a boy between 12 and 20 must command himself to remain stoic while an extremely sensitive part of his body is slowly cut away. Sir A. Claud Hollis, a British diplomat, wrote of Nandi circumcision in 1909: "The boy's face is carefully watched by the surrounding crowd of warriors and old men to see whether he blinks or makes a sign of pain. Should he in any way betray his feelings, he is dubbed a coward and receives the name of kipite. This is considered a great disgrace, and no kipite may ever attend another circumcision festival." Or claim full rights as an adult.
Boys are prepared with months of seclusion and instruction in the ways of the tribe. "Circumcision parallels what the military does to a draftee," Boit has said. "The elders shave his head, give him a new name and subject him to rigorous discipline, all to remove his individuality and replace it with a new identity of toughness and obedience."
Kibor was circumcised at 14. "Some other boys and I. It was important," he says. "But everybody does it." So how could it be extraordinary? Kibor doesn't think it the most difficult thing he's ever done. It was not as hard, he says, as leaving his childhood home to go to a distant school. The discomfort of running he does not see fit to mention.
"Once you feel the sweetness of winning," Ndoo has said, "running is not what you call pain. The pain is losing. Most of them don't even think about what they are feeling...until you ask them."
So widespread is circumcision that Kenyans can seem rather offhand about it. CIRCUMCISION RITUALS IN FULL SWING, reads a headline in the Daily Nation. "December is always a busy month...."
The story, by Waigwa Kiboi, details how the Kuria tribe near the Tanzanian border practices not only male but also female circumcision, or clitoridectomy, which is outlawed by the government. "As you walk along the roads," writes Kiboi, "you will see young men and women dancing wildly as they surround the initiates, who, despite the pain and bleeding, walk home majestically."
"There is no way," says Nelson Monanka, a farmer, "that girls can command respect here if they are not circumcised and ready for marriage."
Marriage means farm labor and childbearing. Circumcision, one is told, allows women not to be distracted by concern for their own pleasure. It lets them be good wives. In this way, and in many others, the plight of Kenyan women is dismal.
"Parents acquire cows as dowry," says Boit, "as the bride price for a daughter. It makes a wife more of an economic object than a partner in a joint venture."
So Kenyan women are seldom encouraged in sport. Time and again wonderfully talented 14-year-olds have gotten pregnant, married, quit school and given up running. There has never been a female Kenyan Olympic medalist.
Down through the generations, as the raiding life killed off slow runners and made fathers of the swift, the tribes must have distilled their talent. The genes that shape football tackles or sumo wrestlers would have been winnowed away. Always the culture exalted endurance. And so the Kalenjin men became not explosively muscular, but lean and tireless.
Then the British came in and couldn't tolerate all the cattle raiding to which this tirelessness was devoted. So they substituted sport. "They jailed the raiders and put them to work leveling and marking out running tracks," says John Manners, a former Peace Corps teacher in Kenya who has made an extensive study of Kalenjin runners and whose help in preparing this article was invaluable. "Because the Kalenjin, and especially the Nandi, were such frequent offenders, they got a disproportionate number of tracks in their districts and the biggest push to participate."
Topic: From frying pan to the fire (Read 2686 times)