God's Country

On the Imponderable in Pastoral Religion

Part I: A Story of Knowledge

1.1: The Cave

The Maasai tell a story [1] about a warrior who walked to God's country. While searching for a hunting party which had left him behind, he came upon the moon grazing her cattle, who gave him a perplexing set of instructions by which to proceed. Trusting the moon's guidance, he successfully passed through a series of trials and temptations. He was rewarded for his humility and wisdom and returned home with a herd of God's own stock. His younger brother, seeing the comely cattle, determined to venture off for himself despite his brother's warnings that he was not prepared. He disregarded the moon's confounding advice and followed his own. He returned home empty-handed.

This tale is about as close as the Maasai come to describing God. Throughout a course on African religions with Dr. Jacob Olupona at Harvard Divinity School, I found myself wondering why the cosmologies of the Maasai and other East African pastoralists appeared so sparingly in the literature. Where they do appear, it is often in discussions of ritual rather than metaphysical vision. The further I looked, the more pointed this absence became. Paul Spencer, in his deep and nuanced study of the Maasai worldview, notes that "generally, the religious beliefs of nomadic pastoralists below the Horn of Africa have aroused little interest among social anthropologists, and the Maasai are no exception." Despite his sympathies, Spencer himself concludes: "The flamboyance of Maasai ceremony and self-regard is offset by a sense of resignation to an unknown and unknowable future. They see themselves rather like Plato's prisoners in a cave, ill-equipped to delve into ultimate truths." [2]

Is this really so? There's a telling tone in Spencer's assessment. To those of us trained to prize intellectual pursuit, a culture that appears to resist explanation—or that shows little interest in pursuing "ultimate truths"—can evoke bemusement or even frustration. Spencer's conclusion was not for lack of trying. He spent many years living with and studying various Maa-speaking communities in Kenya and Tanzania and his work applies numerous analytical tools toward what he calls the "imponderables" of the Maasai culture. His account depicts a culture operating within distinct spatial and temporal boundaries, beyond which they adopt what he renders as an alternatingly fearful and willful ignorance.

But what if the posture Spencer observes is not resignation, but restraint? In this essay, I intend to examine this scholastic attitude and explore what may be its hidden roots. I am prompted to do so in part because of my own experiences living and working with pastoralist communities, and my own fumbling attempts to discern how exactly they perceive the universe and their place in it. I am not a professional scholar, and I don't intend to provide any authoritative account. Rather, in the interest of examining my own relationship to these communities, I want to interrogate why we go searching for knowledge of this kind at all. What is it the Maasai want to tell us? What is that they don't? And what, in the end, might they have to teach us about the pursuit of knowledge to begin with?

As we will see, the story of the warrior who walked to God's country has a great deal to offer us on this journey. What must we do to receive God's gift?

1.2: The Scholarly Gaze

Spencer's account of the Maasai seems to be characteristic of the literature. The very title of his book presents the unknown as a defining quality of the pastoral epistemic posture. There is a storied history of depicting the East African pastoralists as ahistorical communities, living cultural fossils of the Bronze Age—I will address this further below—but let us begin by giving Spencer the benefit of the doubt. His work seems an earnest attempt to theorize the Maasai's ambivalence toward these "ultimate truths."

The "Maasai are confident that their tradition has served them well," he writes, "but this is in the context of an enigmatic order of things that can only be dimly perceived. Even myths of origin may be dismissed as just myths. God is the hidden figure of providence, the guiding hand behind the unfolding of events, and the supreme agent in the operation of mystical forces…There is an unshakable faith in these broad principles, but little consistent elaboration. No one can seriously claim an esoteric knowledge of the unknowable; they insist 'only God knows.'" [3]

It is not unusual for traditional African religions to be popularly described as amorphous, non-systematic, culture- and place-bound, or "mystical." While the tone of academic writing has evolved since the era of overt colonial condescension, contemporary treatments can still subtly reify difference or fetishize indigeneity. The mystical and religious instincts of African communities are often framed—by external observers—as expressions of a magical or opaque episteme, in contrast to Western scientific-rationalist paradigms. Yet such portrayals often obscure the profound depth and internal coherence of these traditions. From the intricate Yoruba cosmology, to the countless creolized expressions of Islam and Christianity, to the layered spiritual worlds of masking and spirit possession across the continent, African religious life resists simplification. Its richness lies not in its exceptionality, but in its equal claim to theological and philosophical sophistication.

In this context, then, Spencer's assessment is all the more striking. Are the Maasai and other East African pastoralists uniquely unsophisticated in this regard? He is not the first to interpret such epistemological boundaries as a vestigial philosophy, echoing a nineteenth century scholar [4] who claimed "that 'ancient religions' were for the most part concerned with institutions and accurate ritual performance, and not with vague meanings or diverse explanations that might attach to them. Maasai elders," Spencer continues, "readily discuss the ritual ramifications of the Maasai way of life, and argue about them at length…[but] would argue that any meaning is only fathomable within an unknowable and unquestionable divine order." [5] This directly implies there is something 'ancient' and ahistorical about their religious life.

Even the great African scholar of religion John Mbiti—himself a Christian theologian—was not immune to the structuring assumptions of a universalizing religious framework. While Mbiti made groundbreaking contributions by articulating African traditional religions as coherent systems worthy of study and respect, he also famously claimed that they "have no histories" and are "not universal." [6] These remarks have sparked extensive debate. In his seminal African Religions and Philosophy, he suggests that the two-dimensional temporality of African cosmologies—rooted in the cyclical memory of ancestors and ritual time—lacks a forward-looking vision of redemption:

"Do religions become universal only when they have been weaned from the cradle of looking towards the Zamani with all its mythological riches, and make a breakthrough towards the future with all the…promises of 'redemption'? Such 'redemption' involves rescue from the monster of death, regaining immortality and attaining the gift of the resurrection. It is in this area that world religions may hope to 'conquer' African traditional religions and philosophy, not so much by coercion as by adding this new element to the two-dimensional life and thinking of African peoples." [7]

This language casts African cosmologies as partial, waiting to be fulfilled by more linear eschatologies—a move which, even if not intended as derogatory, reintroduces a hierarchy of religious sophistication. In the same text, Mbiti also posits that the Maasai word for God, Ngai, could be translated as "the unknown"—an interpretation I've encountered nowhere else. Between Spencer's "cave" and Mbiti's "cradle," a shared suggestion emerges: that African religious life, particularly among pastoralists, may lack the developmental thrust or abstract universality prized by modernity. As we'll see, these impressions—however sympathetically expressed—echo deeper patterns of thought inherited from colonial epistemologies.

As I explored the available literature, both in classic overviews of African religion as well as in a wide array of disciplinary approaches to the East African pastoralists, I continued to encounter variations on this theme. Sometimes the Maasai cosmology was simply overlooked, as in Constance Hilliard's robust Intellectual Traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa, where the Maasai "contribution" of a few proverbs [8] fills two lonely pages. In a sociological study of "Maasai elites," an entire chapter on "religion" referred exclusively to Christianity among the Maasai, never once referencing their traditional worldview. [9]

Samburu morani in northern Kenya, 2025.

On the other hand, this purported intellectual disinterest of the Maasai is also sometimes romanticized. The ethnomusicologist Malcolm Floyd takes one of their more poignant proverbs as the title of his paper "Equal are the Maasai and God," in which he recounts his experiences studying music and ceremony while living with the community. He claims to have "dealt with religion in a mechanistic way" when he first encountered the Maasai worldview, "looking for a set of 'proofs' for the existence of religion," but that this gradually gave way to an appreciation of the timeless character of their ritual.

He seems to have been quite swept away: "This is all part of the Maasai 'being equal with God', as there is nowhere to be above or beyond, nothing to be imagined, all is here and now and Maasai," he writes. "What is known is what is known and there is nothing that we want to know that cannot be known and there is nothing beyond experience." [10]

Whether through scholarly silence, subtle condescension, or even poetic admiration, the effect is the same: the Maasai are cast as inhabiting a timeless realm beyond the arc of intellectual or theological development. Taken together, these portrayals participate in a broader tendency to frame Maasai religious life as static, ahistorical, and epistemically closed—yet in spite of this, scholars from Spencer to Floyd seem to be repeatedly drawn in by a deep cultural gravitas.

1.3: An Amateur Anthropologist

I must admit I sympathize with this attraction to the Maasai way of being. When I have sat under an acacia or cedar or strangling fig with elders, I have felt the way time expands and poignance pervades the shared space. The first day I was sent out alone to meet a group of pastoralist elders in a scrubby boundaryland between Laikipia and Baringo counties in Northern Kenya, I wisely loaded packets of long-life milk, a bag of tea leaves, and a portable propane stove into my Toyota. I boiled over the blended chai, in the manner of the land, and served each of the wazee (elders) in their enamel mugs before even beginning the lengthy pleasantries. I wanted to be sure they saw I was properly raised.

Losho, 1998.

I like to think I came by my affinity for the cattle-keeping cultures honestly—my father was a missionary veterinarian and I spent the first four years of my life in a little house on a hill near the border between Kenya and Tanzania—the heart of modern Maasailand. I say I like to think this because as we drifted back and forth between continents throughout my adolescence, I found that I frequently and enthusiastically inhabited the role of cultural expert.

I was an earnest representative and amateur anthropologist, as have been many foreigners with occasion to flit freely in and out of African spaces. But the nature of my knowledge sat strangely in me. I returned again and again to pastoral communities, began writing and taking photographs and building a budding career around being that tired old archetype of the African-born white man. Yet the seductive "presentness" of those worlds drew me deeper in and by my mid-twenties I found myself a young conservationist on the Laikipia Plateau. This role led to intense encounters and robust relationships with members of several pastoral communities, including the Maa-speaking Samburu and Ilchamus, but also the Turkana, the Endorois, and most of all the Pokot.

Laikipia West, 2021.

The Pokot have an unfortunate reputation in Kenya. They are often caricatured as pugnacious and insular and are frequently in conflict with neighbors on all sides of their territory. The cultural ideal of warriorhood has been both co-opted by organized crime and demonized by the state, so much so that throughout the country the words "Pokot" and "bandit" are nearly interchangeable. I loved spending time with them and even began learning the language—my employer said it was because I must "find them fascinating," and perhaps this was so, but I also found them inscrutable and proud. Ever the theological investigator, I grilled my interlocutors for myths, metaphysics, magic, and found them frustratingly coy. Sometimes they responded to my prodding, as Spencer recounts of the Maasai, with "disgust rather than curiosity." [11]

I didn't wholly sense yet the manner in which I risked becoming part of a problematic lineage of frustrated foreigners myself. Then one day I heard a story as I was hiking with a Pokot friend—we will call him Kiptoo—in the rugged, rambling hill country where the Great Rift Valley rises abruptly to the highlands. Kiptoo was well-acquainted with the occult aspects of Pokot life: his mother was traditional herbalist, his father-in-law a renowned seer. I had been hoping in a heavy-handed way to be invited in, made privy to some secret ritual or knowledge that surely no other white man had ever known. Kiptoo waited a while as we walked and then said in Kiswahili, "Unajua, kuna sebabu Pokot wanakaa hivo." You know, there's a reason the Pokot are this way.

He explained that the Pokot tell a story amongst themselves, inherited from their oldest elders, of an mzungu (white person) who appeared in the early days of ukoloni (the colonial era). He traveled around the landscape with a pad and pencil, sitting with elders and following warriors, observing daily routines and religious rituals, compiling in the end a thick book. The elders say they trusted him, shared their sacred stories and spiritual knowledge, never thinking he could do anything with it. After all, he was not Pokot. But as the colonial project advanced, as the dispossession and marginalization of pastoralist peoples deepened, the elders began to fear they'd made a great mistake. They'd shared their secrets with a foreigner, and it had all gone downhill since. And this was why they are the way they are, or so Kiptoo told me.

1.4: Crooked Genealogies

Kiptoo's story is reminiscent of Maasai accounts of first contact with the Europeans. The Maasai researcher Michael Lolwerikoi reports the following telling of a Laikipia elder in 2009:

"It was during the age set of Lmirisho (initiates of 1910) that the Lmaa started to experience for the first time new white faces walking across the land. They started asking questions about water source areas. The new visitors also inquired about the names of mountains and the lakes along the Great Rift Valley. It was not long that they began asking questions about our land. They came first as friends and we allowed them to settle as Ltungana Le Latia, 'good neighbors'. They [then] appointed rulers, known as local chiefs and headmen, to instruct us what to do in our land. Later we came to discover that the new rulers were acting as…the 'messengers of the white man'. They brought rules and commanding force to our community. They ignored the authority of Lmaa elders. In order to create space for the new foreigners to the land, we were moved by force…to resettle into dry and desert areas (Ipurkeli)...The loss of land is the loss of our social structures, the loss of our local knowledge and the loss of generations." [12]

These stories from the Pokot, the Maasai, and from other communities I have since encountered have rung quietly and insistently in my ears as I left the continent to pursue study of environmental ethics at Harvard. Even sitting in class in Cambridge or while reading magisterial compilations of anthropological accounts, I have wondered about the untold stories of broken trust. Stories of knowledge offered in relationship, of the land, callously collected to "better understand the 'people to be governed.'" [13]

A Pokot family's boma in Tiaty East district in Kenya.

The Dutch scholar Ton Lietz compiled a revealing "meta-study" of the research conducted on the Pokot as a case study, where he explores how "'hegemonic knowledge development' replicates the power dimensions of existing geopolitical relationships." [14] It was in Lietz's study that I recognized the roots of a narrative that have prevailed to this day. He writes, "The first-ever publication mentioning the Pokot (as 'Sukku') was by the German missionary explorer Krapf in the service of the British Anglican Church Missionary Society, who relied on oral sources from Swahili traders on (slave) caravan parties to the west: 'Writing in 1854…Ludwig Krapf described the Suk (Pokot) people living to the north of Lake Baringo, stating them to be well known to the ivory traders from the East coast. Krapf was told that the Suk were hostile and ferocious.'" [15]

Thus do stories begin their long lives. It is a classic example of colonial confusion becoming inscribed in the 'official' history. Lietz notes, "The fact that throughout the colonial era the Pokot have been called 'Suk', a [pejorative] name used by Maasai [16], and through them by the Swahili-speaking slave-raiders from the Indian Ocean Coast, is telling: they always despised that name, but it took ages before 'authorities' decided to use 'their own' name: Pokot." [17]

More chilling still was his reference to a resource that I realized might well be the very "book" Kamama told me about. "The most important text" from the period, writes Lietz, was "M. W. H. Beech's book The Suk, Their Language and Folklore, published in 1911 in Oxford." I found the book in Harvard's Widener Library, replete with century-old photographs of a Rift Valley topography I knew well. Given my own history, I was unsettled to read in Beech's preface an uncomfortably familiar reasoning:

"I can testify from experience in Africa that a knowledge, however rudimentary, of the actual language of a tribe…has a remarkable effect towards removing the suspicions of the natives, and indeed, towards enlisting their sympathies." [18]

A page from M.W.H. Beech's 1911 book.

If his motives were in any way unclear, he more than compensates with his tone. Besides calling their traditional folklore "not very good" and postulating that they might be more forthcoming if they were inebriated [19], he writes with a jocular paternalism that "nothing could be more delightfully vague than the religious ideas of the Suk: indeed it is difficult to find two men having ideas on this subject exactly coincident…The Suk, indeed, are somewhat like the Athenians of the Bible and worship an 'Unknown God', and, possibly, it remains for some intelligent and broad-minded missionary to 'declare Him unto' them." [20]

The Pokot vision of God was not wholly unknown, though. Beech notes the name still used today: "Torōrut is the Supreme God. He made the earth and causes the birth of mankind and animals. No man living has seen him, though old men, long since dead, have. They say he is like a man in form, but has wings—huge wings—the flash of which causes the lightning, and the whirring thereof is the thunder…He knows all secrets; he is the universal father." In that vast abyss between mankind and God one of Beech's sources, an elder known as Tiamolok, purportedly told him that "there are…such things as spirits, but we don't understand much about them. All we know is that death is the end."

The genesis of a genealogy of "hegemonic knowledge development" can thus be traced from Krapf's first hearsay to Beech's condescension. Beech was later criticized for being insufficiently specific by another researcher named G. W. B. Huntingford, who "himself would later be heavily criticized for being 'colonial and stereotypical.'" [21] Huntingford was part of an early cohort of colonial archaeologists who "became authorities on the 'peoples' and 'native affairs'...precociously and without serious challenges to their methods or conclusions." [22] He and his peers like the later-famous Louis Leakey considered the investigation of recent pastoralist history uninteresting or, when faced with clear civilizational evidence, hypothesized entire "non-negroid races," such as the "Hamites" or the "Azanians," to preserve their racial bias.

"To explain the maintenance of…irrigation works among sections of the northern Kalenjin inhabiting the Rift escarpment, [Huntingford] fell back on a circular argument echoing the crudest of colonial prejudice: 'Irrigation by means of such canals . . . is still practised by the Suk [Pokot] and Marakwet, backward tribes of the Nandi group. They are too barbarous to have learned it themselves, and it is probably an Azanian legacy.'" [23]

Similarly, Leakey's "research endeavor was virtually oblivious to the question of the past of the Kikuyu, Maasai, or any other people of the Kenya highlands, or to the viability of locating and investigating their former homesteads or cattle-camps of, say, one, two, or more centuries ago. His archeological outlook was, rather, a decidedly prehistoric one, with no real thought on where his findings might, at the recent end, connect with the existing 'races'" writes the scholar J.E.G. Sutton. [24] It is as though the possibility of the pastoralists having a history of any kind, and by extension an intellectual or religious tradition, needed to be suppressed in both the present and the past.

Standing downstream of history.

When I worked in Laikipia, there is no doubt I was useful to my employers for my capacity to build rapport with—and to "remove the suspicions" of—the pastoralists. To this day, a foreigner with decent language skills and an affable affect is a major asset to international actors of many kinds.

The scholar James Scott, who we will turn to shortly, remarks that "while the rhetoric of high imperialism could speak un-self-consciously of 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' the nomadic heathen, such terms strike the modern ear as outdated and provincial, or as euphemisms for all manner of brutalities. And yet if one substitutes the nouns development, progress, and modernization, it is apparent that the project, under a new flag, is very much alive and well." [25]

Paul Spencer includes in his book a chapter about the German anthropologist Meinhard Merker who wrote the first "authoritative" monograph on the Maasai. Merker pontificated on his thoroughly scientific method in 1904, "Only this approach can produce results that are in no way influenced by the thoughts of the European enquirer, and which therefore reflect closely the ideas of the people themselves." [26] Yet Spencer astutely observes that "as a guiding principle for Maasai life, Merker repeatedly invoked the axiom that 'Might goes before Right'...[which] implicitly in his conclusion…provided a legitimate argument for Europeans to take over the positions of power." [27] By that same logic, I wonder what Spencer might have been projecting through his conclusions about Maasai knowledge, or by that matter, what I am.

This much is clear: while we may believe we have changed our position in this power dynamic, we all stand downstream of history. As I peered into the history of foreigners trying to pry open the worlds of the pastoralist communities, it became clear that motives were compromised from the beginning of our interactions. What sort of knowledge can be found atop this teetering pile of assumptions? I wonder if, in grasping at the knowledge of other peoples' gods, the mzungu did not in some sense want to become Torōrut himself, to "know all secrets."

Part II: God's Country

And so finally we return to the story. [28] Let me tell it once again, in greater detail.

A Maasai warrior is on a hunting sortie with his age-mates. As they move swiftly through the bush, his sandal is damaged and he asks the party to wait for him as he repairs it. Over-eager for their adventure, they tell him they'll leave a branch where they turn off the trail for him to follow. The branch, of course, is blown away by the wind and the warrior finds himself wandering into a strange land. There he meets the moon, grazing her cattle on a verdant plain. She informs him that he is on his way to God's own country, and that he might venture on and find a blessing if only he follows a few simple, if paradoxical, rules:

"When you come across anybody, do not tell them what they look like, just tell them they look fine, and do not take anything along the way, and when you are given a choice between a good and bad thing choose the bad thing."

So the warrior is given his quest and proceeds. He encounters rivers of water, then milk, then blood, each of which beg him to drink from them. He declines, and continues through the bush, surprised by all manner of inexplicable things—swords sharpening themselves, meat frying itself, axes in masterless combat. Each time he moves on without interfering.

When God's village comes into sight, the horizon extends mysteriously time and again, but he walks patiently on. Finally, a "lady of God" invites him into her house and offers a series of tempting options. Each time he chooses the lesser: the stale milk, the dusty bed. He is given the best instead. Even when a storm of terrific proportions thunders during the night, he remains inside, unperturbed.

For his forbearance he is given a herd of magnificent animals. "The lady said to him: 'All this is your property, drive it and go in peace.' The warrior took the cattle through a different route from the one he had followed before, and returned to his country…When asked how he had obtained the cattle, he related his whole experience in God's country."

His brother, intrigued and envious, demanded the directions to this abundant land. The warrior warned him that although he could tell him, the brother was not prepared for the quest. Nevertheless the young man set off and soon enough encountered the moon, who gave him the same instructions. But the brother drank from the rivers, ate the meat, and took the sword and axe, which he finally threw at the receding horizon in order to catch it. He asked for the fresh milk and the clean bed and was given neither. In the night he rushed outside to brazenly face the thunder.

"He did this over and over again, and eventually the lady said to him: 'You go, you do not want property.' He returned to his country empty-handed…The end."

Part III: A Knowledge of Story

3.1: Ways of Knowing

What I want to propose is that there are multiple epistemologies present in this story, which represents a conscious complexity within the Maasai worldview. Though I have taken certain interpretive liberties in my retelling, the original is short on commentary and rich in suggestion. It sits comfortably in its magical realism, a blended world of the mythic and mundane. It makes clear that to venture to God's country at all is best done in response to life's fateful randomness rather than of our own vainglorious accord. The warrior ended up there by accident, yet he crossed the threshold without complaint. He put his faith in a perplexing paradox, while his brother decried the strangeness of it all. The warrior's reward, ultimately, is a result of his essential and committed restraint. His brother's failure is the fruit of his desire. Is this, perhaps, the more 'ancient' wisdom?

For no one could deny the colonialists their desires. I mean this in two senses: any account of European imperialism that does not center the groping, grasping, avaricious quality of their "exploration" is missing the point. Any intellectual endeavour built atop these iron railroad tracks shared in its penetrating, linear quality. The second sense is that the colonial narrative of rightful ownership bridled at any refusal. No one could deny them—their lands, their knowledge, their very spirits—without risking violent intrusion. Did it ever occur to Krapf, for example, that the slave-traders thought the Pokot "hostile" because they resisted the enslavement of their people?

The contemporary scholar Willie James Jennings, in his magisterial account of the theological origins of race, The Christian Imagination, explains that material and intellectual conquest were co-constituted in the rising imperial paradigm. He writes, "Their intellectual posture created through the cultivated capacities to clarify, categorize, define, explain, interpret, and so forth eclipses [knowledge's] fluid, adaptable, even morphable character. This…points to a history in which the Christian theological imagination was woven into processes of colonial dominance." He elaborates that this epistemic frame "not only display[s] the continuing encasement in racial logics and agency, but also reflect[s] the deep pedagogical sensory deprivation of this horrific imbalance. Western Christian intellectuals still imagine the world from the commanding heights." [29]

By "sensory deprivation," Jennings is speaking of the ways in which a colonial and Christian worldview (howsoever this has since been transposed into the 'secular' scientific-rationalist paradigm today) embarked on a project of categorizing peoples, places, animals, plants, and indeed every sort of "thing" into discrete typologies, hierarchies, and chronologies—ostensibly for the production of knowledge, but equally, and explicitly, to better control its newly imagined subjects. This hyper-conceptualization of the world derogated and gradually atrophied other essential ways of sensing and knowing. "The significance of this transformation cannot be overstated," writes Jennings. "The Earth itself was barred from being a constant signifier of identity. Europeans defined Africans and all others apart from the earth even as they separated them from their lands." [30]

In his dissertation on orality, land, and identity within pastoralist culture, Michael Lolwerikoi succinctly explains the collision of these two epistemologies, writing, "A tension exists between the integrated worldview of Indigenous people who are embedded in the stories of the land and the categorized concepts of modern people who tend to treat the land and its people as separable commodities." [31]

For the pastoralists, the land is the "womb" of all things, and, as illustrated by the warrior's tale, is separated from the sacred by degree more than by kind. Lolwerikoi beautifully describes this sense of an embodied continuum, writing, "The soil is like a soul that gives life to all other souls. The land is…the only unique being that has the capacity to hold the story of the past, the present, and the future generation. A Lmaa proverb describes this as Keichu enkop ana Enkongu' Enkai nemeduai, 'the Land is the ever present and invisible eye of the Creator.' This concept taught us that the earth is a vast immeasurable space with an infinite horizon." [32] This is a sort of knowledge beyond the reach of most ethnographies, as the scholar John Galaty writes, because it is the knowledge "of those for whom culture is a horizon of perception and experience rather than an object of study and reflection." [33]

The warrior in the story journeys faithfully along that horizon, ritually passing the veil of sacrality with his epistemic humility. It recalls as well the Pokot who claimed that though no living human had seen God, elders of the past once had. Both the spatial and temporal boundaries with the divine are permeable, and held with reverence in living memory and performance. The warrior's brother, of course, goes "exploring" to a place already fixed in his imagination, with a particular bounty in mind. He has instrumentalized his knowledge. His compulsive desire to describe things definitively, his impulsive interference in the mysteries of the sacred—these immaturities preclude his participation in divine abundance. That which he desperately wants eludes him.

Of course, one of the wonderful things this story does is remind us that there exist within every culture the wise and the foolish, the humble and the proud. For the purposes of this essay, I am suggesting that the Western colonial worldview may be something like that of the younger brother, but the story itself undermines any binary. Cultures and individuals contain multitudes. There is no universal posture toward knowledge—this could only be thought by a universalizing ideology caught up in its own game. The Maasai, once the so-called "Lords of East Africa," are a marvelous example of this.

Tepilit Ole Saitoti writes in his autobiography The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior, that "This, God's country, is my home. My old ancestors won it from the ferocious Iltatua, a people now pushed to the shore of Lake Eyasi. Wells dug by them are reminders of their past history. This country...is so lovely that I do not regret the banishment of the Iltatua." [34] Clearly, Indigenous identity with the land doesn't preclude a tacit endorsement of violence.

Indeed, the Maasai waged war on many of their neighbors to establish their undulating dominance across the Great Rift Valley, and victory over the Maasai became a benchmark of pastoral success in the landscape. The Pokot are thought to have been agro-pastoralists from the hill country who fled west under duress from Maa-speaking groups, towards the Karamojong tribes of modern-day Uganda, where they gradually embraced plains-based livelihoods and military tactics. Their triumphant return to the Rift Valley meant that, "beyond all the dreams of their former ages," writes Kenyan scholar Karani Shiyuka, "they came to occupy an expansive stretch of land [from] Uganda to…as far as Laikipia," [35] just where I met them those many years later.

By all accounts, there were battles over territorial supremacy and above all a greediness for livestock (the Maasai are famous for their convenient origin myth in which God delivered unto them all the cattle on the earth). But seemingly distinct from European imperialism, there is little evidence to suggest that the East African pastoralists ever conquered and committed epistemicide against weaker communities. Political and cultural boundaries, like spiritual ones, were porous and dynamic. If the story of the warrior and his brother represents the deep wisdom of restraint, such wisdom is usually hard-won. Whatever the messy particulars of history may be, it is clear that the Maasai recognized the danger of getting everything you want. Perhaps the brothers held each other in check—and perhaps this is the closest a culture can come to stability.

3.2: Nomadism as Refusal

The possibilities of this dynamic tension are what interest me. I have long wondered why there is little evidence—bearing in mind the ideological blinders of past archaeologists—of large-scale, centralized civilization within the Great Rift Valley and its overflowing highlands. This absence is especially striking given the presence of established kingdoms and dynasties elsewhere in the interior, such as Buganda, Kongo, or Great Zimbabwe, and the proximity of these highland pastoralist communities to the vibrant trading societies of the Swahili coast. Could it really be, once again, that the Maasai were peculiarly unsophisticated in this regard? Or might it be that the cultural, political, and religious structures they developed were intentionally non-linear and decentralized—built not around permanence, but around movement, oral authority, and flexible kinship?

As we've noted, the pastoralists were not saints. But although the Maasai "did serve as middlemen in the ivory trade with Arab Caravans," writes Galaty, some historians believe that their presence along nearly seven hundred kilometers of the Rift Valley may have inhibited the spread of the Arab slave trade in the region, as well as delayed early European exploration and colonization. [36] Whether or not this interpretation holds in all cases, it suggests that the Maasai exercised a form of spatial and cultural autonomy that resisted easy incorporation into imperial trade networks. Paul Spencer suggests that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the Maasai were on the verge of a "proto-state" on established territory, with increasing cultural centralization around a lineage of prophet-leaders known as the Loonkidongi. Yet these prophets "stood outside the conventions of their society in a perpetual liminality," their marginality marked by traditions that held they originated from outside Maasailand. [37] One wonders whether Spencer—despite his attention to the Maasai's cyclical temporality—still imposed a linear teleology upon them. Perhaps there is nothing so inevitable about "progress."

Much like the earlier discussion of pastoralist religion, this invites us to reconsider whether nomadism is best understood as a political absence or as a deliberately alternative formation. Lolwerikoi opens the question by highlighting the continuity of antipathy toward pastoralists across Kenyan regimes: "The colonial British mistrusted the nomads but attributed romantic qualities to them… African governments, on the other hand, believed nomads had no valuable contributions to the nation-building as long as they adhered to their traditional ways. They regarded nomads as much as the Romans must have viewed the Saxons when they first settled Britain: an armed horde of unruly, uncontrolled and untaxed subjects." [38]

The political scientist James C. Scott would draw just such an analogy, and his scholarship on the hill tribes of Southeast Asia led him to a novel framing of this dynamic. The civilizational "schema" of inevitability, he writes, "assumes movement in a single direction toward concentrated populations and intensive grain production; no backsliding is envisioned; each step is irreversible progress." [39] If communities chose instead "deliberately to place themselves at a physical and cultural distance from that civilization, then we need a way to describe this process that treats it as more than a loss or a fall from grace." [40] Scott proposes the term dissimilation. [41]

A Turkana village in the northernmost part of Kenya.

This dissimilation means that nomadic communities' "subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that state-like concentrations of power will arise among them." Scott suggests with tongue-in-cheek that they are "barbarians by design." [42]

By its very nature, for example, orality is bound by temporal horizons, much as nomadism is bound by spatial ones. Scott suggests that although indeed oral culture has "an inalterable presentness" — the affective quality Malcolm Floyd and I were drawn to — "there cannot be a single authoritative genealogy or history that can serve as the gold standard of orthodoxy," meaning it is also, "in most respects, inherently more democratic than a written tradition." [43]

"Such disaggregation leaves a potential ruler facing an amorphous, unstructured population with no point of entry or leverage," he explains, and then helpfully points to religious approaches to illegibility using the example of Sufis in the Ottoman empire. "Most feared were such forms of autonomy and descent as for example, the mystical Dervish orders, which deliberately, it seems, avoided any collective settlement or identifiable leadership precisely to fly, as it were, beneath the [state] radar."

There are of course limitations to this approach. To whatever degree such communities define themselves in opposition to settled civilization, there is a risk of internalizing that antipathy. Scott notes that, "constantly aware of the contempt in which they were held, many of the tribal peoples in their oral histories explain their current location and status by some combination of victimization, treachery, and negligence," an account that is deeply consonant with my experience of pastoralists, in particular the Pokot. The Maasai, as we have seen, tended more so to sneer at settlement. In either case, there is an implicit refusal in their cultural practices and beliefs, "as if they were intended to be a state-maker's or colonial official's worst nightmare. And indeed, they are largely so…faced with situations of this kind, a state often tries to find a collaborator and create a chiefdom." [44]

Scott is obviously writing about a different geopolitical context, so what I'm trying to apply here is a more philosophical principle: what if we assumed one another's agency and autonomy as the starting point for our interaction? What if pastoralist social, political, and most especially spiritual structures are legitimate choices rooted in a skepticism towards power, permanence, and certainty?

My contention is that this "refusal" extends to the religious realm. Deliberately choosing to not know, to not plumb the cosmological depths, and to not valorize or proselytize esoteric knowledge, is as much an act of agency as choosing to do so. It is an act of intellectual autonomy, uninterested in playing by our rules. That it seems benighted to our episteme is besides the point. The limitations, on the other hand, are the point.

3.3: Wisdom is Good Company

It would be hazardous in this era to suggest there is any inherent nobility or moral superiority in these choices, and I have done my best to sufficiently muddy the waters. But I do believe that in our age of civilizational overreach, when the prevailing ideology is one of linear growth-at-all-costs is bewilderingly divorced from natural law, it might be time to turn to an unconventional wisdom. "Wisdom," says the Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolofe, "is that which disturbs the continuity of our knowledge-making rituals. Wisdom steps in the way. Wisdom is an impediment." [45]

Indeed, the story of the warrior first struck me because of its similarity to the apophatic traditions. Buried in the deep core of any religious tradition is a quiet lineage of mystics who insist that to name God, to try and know God through the mind, is a self-defeating project. The unsaid, unseen, and unknown serve an elemental role in the universe as the ineffable "other side" to our reality which animates life. To attempt to grasp, measure, own, or even conceptualize it risks desecrating the source of all abundance and disconnecting us from our deepest, truest nature. Wisdom is knowing when to stop.

This manner of thinking (for lack of a better word) is anathema to the modern paradigm and has been frequently suppressed both in its heretical manifestations in the dominant culture and in Indigenous cultures (such as across Africa during the colonial missionary project). It is not only incomprehensible but threatening to the fundamental structures of power and knowledge, for it undermines the ideas of ownership, commodification, permanence and certainty. It is not an epistemology essentialized to a particular culture, but rather a deep wisdom available and patiently present in all. Hence coloniality prefers to isolate the more compatible attitudes within the cultures it conquered—promoting, as it were, the younger brother to the "chiefdom" and thereby compounding the most possessive instincts of humanity.

However, as it always has, the perennial wisdom of the warrior—who knows what he shouldn't ask—keeps emerging spontaneously at the margins of the hegemonic system. I think of postcolonial theorists like Édouard Glissant, whose concept of "the right to opacity" resonates with mystical traditions. Glissant describes the essence of the dominant episteme as a kind of reductive violence: "If we examine the process of 'understanding' people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you…I have to reduce." [46]

This demand for legibility, for exposure, becomes a form of conquest. "The thought of opacity," Glissant writes in The Poetics of Relation, "distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be." How many such "guardians" has the modern metropole sent forth—myself among them—on idealistic quests of "discovery"? The project is shot through with a restless hunger for certainty, always reaching and never satisfied. That is why Glissant urges us to "give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures." [47]

If Glissant defends opacity as a right, Tyson Yunkaporta offers a practical glimpse of how such unknowability is lived. The Australian Aboriginal scholar point out the long-avoided obvious that "making yourself an expert in another culture is not always appreciated by the members of that culture," [48] and that the key to Aboriginal knowledge "lies in the processes rather than just the content." [49] In a colonial epistemology severed from land and driven to instrumentalize, "any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity." [50]

While Yunkaporta adopts an explicit, if sardonic, anti-civilizational posture, his argument is clear: instability, non-linearity, and embodied relation to land are not signs of deficiency but deliberate strategies. "From settlement onward," he writes, "locals in each era believed the system to be stable and planned their future around it"—but this is an "illusion of safety…provided by an invisible hierarchy [that] is completely anathema to our way of being." There is no agency in safety, he warns, only passive dependence on authorities who may or may not come through. [51]

Taken together, these theorists offer a full-throated defense of the pastoralists' apparent ambivalence toward conceptual mastery and permanent settlement. "Move with the land," Yunkaporta advises. "Maintain diverse languages, cultures, and systems that reflect the ecosystems of the shifting landscapes you inhabit over time. That is the blueprint." [52] If nomadism is the social blueprint for survival in an unstable world, opacity is its epistemic counterpart. "Far from cornering me within futility or inactivity," Glissant writes, "it relativizes every possibility of every action within me"—facilitating "the escape far from any legitimacy anchored silently or resolutely in possession and conquest." [53]

Like the warrior who stumbles into wisdom, Yunkaporta suggests that there is freedom in this kind of errantry: "We don't have a word for non-linear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name." [54]

Orality, nomadism, a deliberate deference to the "imponderable"—all of these forms confound and complicate linear, systematic, and acquisitive modes of being and knowing, or in other words, a colonial epistemology. If there was a kind of truth to the ahistoricity Mbiti and others observed, then, it was not a deficiency to be overcome but a different ordering of time and meaning, one that cannot be conquered because it does not compete. Instead, as the frenetic chase exhausts itself, it waits. It fixes the sandal. And sometimes, it tells a story.

3.4: Coming Home

Michael Lolwerikoi recounts a myth the Maasai tell about two wise old elders who decide they have finally seen all there is to see—that it is time to die. They sit down under a tree together, and instruct their families not to interfere with their plan. As they sit and wait, a ruckus ensues in the nearby bush, and they are told that a ram has attacked and broken the leg of a camel. "This strange news was unheard of in the ancestral oral accounts," Lolwerikoi records of the narrative. "After the two elders consulted with one another, they summoned an assembly of elders to interpret the symbolic meaning of [the event]. They communicated to one another that there are still unrevealed mysteries in life for awe and wonder."

According to Lolwerikoi, this story was told as the prelude to a meeting in which oral tradition as such was to be discussed. It struck me that the very opening of this Maasai discourse was an apophatic acknowledgement of non-knowledge. This is the elemental epistemic humility that permeates the pastoralist worldview. Whether it is a kind of spiritual "dissimilation" is harder to prove, because the nature of opacity itself refuses to give a straight answer. But there are experiential answers. Lolwerikoi records one of these:

"I tried to use the voice recorder in several places, but I realized that, although they gave permission, the recorder tended to dampen discussion. One of the informants wisely took me aside and he whispered to me that if I wanted to obtain concrete and firsthand information from the pastoral nomadic community, I should instead put the voice recorder aside and interact with them as much as I could…The elders advised each meeting that we gather under sacred trees which provide enough shade, and are always the place where important orality occurs in the community." [55]

It is important to remember that Lolwerikoi himself is Maasai. Once again we see that this posture is not intrinsic to a particular culture or faith but rather a dynamic reality—animated by active and accountable relationship to the land and to one another, and upheld through the quiet insistence of its elders. It is not tradition for tradition's sake, but a living ethic of reverence—sustained in the spaces where presence matters more than proof.

Tepilit Ole Saitoti offers another window into this same posture, refracted through the experience of return. After leaving Kenya to study and live in the United States for many years, he reflects in his autobiography that his connection to the land and the Maasai worldview had become strained. "I do not know whether I believe in the Maasai laibon (seer) as I used to. My life abroad has clouded all those beliefs," he recalls telling his brother. "I was skeptical…the more [Western] education I had, the less religious I became."

Saitoiti reflects that through his education in the Western paradigm, he "had come face to face with the painful realities of knowledge. One who understands is freer in the head but sadder in the heart…My brothers live according to seasons and accept death and rebirth as normal. They are spared the anguish and the failures I sometimes experience." He finally asks a poignant and crucial question to our discussion, "I wondered: who is luckier—my brothers who had never gone to school, or me?"

Yet his brother exhorted him to make a pilgrimage to the laibon—likely one of the Loonkidongi seers who lived in the Loita hills, although he does not specify—and after a journey of several days through the ancestral landscape, Saitoti is left alone with the religious leader. He writes,

"After my brother departed, the laibon and another elder of my father's age led me under an acacia tree. They peeled off a piece of tree bark and tied its two ends to sticks in the ground, leaving a small space through which I had to crawl. I was told to drag myself through the space. It was a hard and difficult squeeze. I was told to do this four times; the laibon and the elder blessed me each time. The laibon said 'be free of evil ways and be a healthy man'...Many other symbolic acts were performed as well…I believed in every symbolic act and my skepticism disappeared. I left the village happier and lighter in spirit, enjoying a sense of accomplishment…From that day on he was my laibon, my spiritual leader." [56]

What caused Saitoti to reconnect with his sense of Maasai spirituality? If it was the symbolism, it was of a paradoxical nature. A similar ceremony is recorded by Zahan in his account of African mysticism, where he suggests that "the passage under the arch which the initiates can only execute while crawling on all fours recalls their obligation to seek the knowledge of God by experiencing their own weakness." [57] But beyond this representation of humility, was it not the embodied act itself, the relational context, the pilgrimage to and from a sacred site that transcended the pure rationality Saitoti had inculturated in his travels?

Thus Saitoti represents an important character in our exploration of knowledge: one who can live in both worlds, who can journey back and forth between the categorical and the diffuse, the rational and the paradoxical without seeing them in conflict. Our grand scientific and philosophical endeavours might be leavened by a healthy sense of limits; an enterprising curiosity might keep awe and reverence from sliding into superstition and apathy. Once again, it seems that apparently opposing ways of knowing are actually best as collaborators.

I wonder if this is what is meant by the proverb "Equal are the Maasai and God." Perhaps a totalizing and universalizing epistemology is the deeper form of ignorance, because it guarantees a perpetual hunger, a dangerous sense of lack. An epistemology that assumes and practices the "imponderables," on the other hand, inculcates a deeper sense of presence and belonging to one's reality. The bounded-yet-boundless horizons of time, space, and knowledge push us up against the mystery of being—where we might recognize that in this divine continuum, like the land, we too are "the ever present and invisible eye of the Creator?"

An olipironi tree in Maasailand, northern Tanzania.

The Maasai are in good company on the continent. Dominique Zahan writes that the African mystic "feel[s] himself to be of the same nature as his creator." He continues, "Man and God are in the position of partners tied together by the most subtle and noble relationship…the meeting between man and the Invisible turns into a sort of 'game' in which sanction and fear do not have a place, where death itself loses its disturbing character in order to be no more than the reverse of the lost opportunity which is Immortality." [58] That is an entirely different sort of salvation than the one Mbiti demanded. It is the salvation of the sacred moment.

It also transforms the idea of the "imponderable" from one of benighted ignorance, like Spencer's cave, to one of liberatory limitation. Certainly the Maasai, like all other Indigenous communities today, will need to learn how to navigate the world built by Western epistemologies. Many will find its analytic and productive powers both useful and seductive—but if Lolwerikoi's or Saitoti's stories are any guide, it is equally essential that the life-giving qualities of epistemic humility are rediscovered and cultivated. Indeed, it is strangely urgent that our sense of urgency be disrupted.

I myself am one final example—for as my relationship with Kiptoo and other pastoralists deepened over the years, I was slowly invited into some of the circles and ceremonies that had captured my curiosity. I met his father-in-law, the seer, and ultimately spent many days with him. But once there, the mysterious things I saw and heard were so synonymous with the space, with the moment itself, that I realized to my surprise they didn't bear repeating. Like Saitoti, I saw there was no rational explanation and yet felt no dissonance. I realized—I should say, perhaps, remembered—that what is sacred demands opacity.

Part IV: The Gift

Bayo Akomolafe speaks of "three apocryphal curses" that have haunted humanity: "May you live in interesting times. May you be seen and recognized by the emperor. And the last curse is: May you get what you want." [59] Certainly we in modern industrial society live in their shadow. Yet it seems to me that these curses are disarmed—if not altogether escaped—by the practice of the imponderable. The wisdom of the warrior was to put his faith in a paradox: that God's abundance lies on the other side of restraint. To chase after knowledge, control, or satisfaction without end is to spiral further into anxiety and estrangement.

The Maasai posture toward "ultimate truths," then, may be less a sign of childish ignorance than of an elder's faith. In this light, epistemic humility is not a limitation but a source of strength—a means of resisting domination, deferring possession, and sustaining a more integrated relationship with the land, the self, and the divine. Orality, too, protects this posture: its pliability allows stories to emerge, evolve, and elaborate according to need. All stories are prisms—we hear what we are ready to hear, and what we most need to remember.

And so let me tell the story one last time:

A warrior was out in the bush on an everyday sort of mission. His hunting band left him alone to repair a broken sandal, promising to mark the path so he could follow. But life's unpredictability intervened, and the warrior found himself lost in a land of impossibilities. He met the moon, who sent him on a quest to God's country with a set of unintuitive directions: withhold judgement, restrain desire, and do not interfere. He followed her instructions faithfully even as the world before him became surreal. Upon reaching God's country, he was given as a gift a herd of magnificent animals, like the mythic Maasai ancestor. He returned home and told his tale.

His brother demanded to know the way, and set forth himself, full of desire. But at each encounter as the world grew stranger, he was drawn in. He obsessed over difference. He took what he wanted. He used violence to achieve his ends. There was no reward for him. The gift is given to those who would give it up.

References

[1] Naomi Kipury, Oral Literature of the Maasai (Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), 101-105. See Appendix.

[2] Paul Spencer, Time, Space, and the Unknown: Maasai Configurations of Power and Providence (London: Routledge, 2003), 1-6.

[3] Spencer, Time, Space and the Unknown, 72.

[4] Smith, W. Robertson. The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions. New edition. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1894).

[5] Spencer, Time, Space and the Unknown, 91.

[6] John S. Mbiti, African Religions & Philosophy, 2nd rev. and enl. ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990), 1.

[7] Ibid., 99.

[8] Constance B. Hilliard, Intellectual Traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

[9] Serah Shani, Indigenous Elites in Africa: The Case of Kenya's Maasai (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

[10] Malcolm Floyd, "Equal Are the Maasai and God," Performance Research 13, no. 3 (2008), 78-86.

[11] Spencer, Time, Space and the Unknown, 71.

[12] Michael Lmatila Lolwerikoi, "Orality and the Land: The Impact of Colonialism on Lmaa Narratives in Kenya" (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2010), 117-118.

[13] Dietz, Ton. 2020. "Meta Knowledge About Areas: The Example of Pokot." Paper presented at the Africa Knows! Conference, Panel 16: "Country/Region-Specific Knowledge Development Histories in Africa," African Studies Centre Leiden, University of Leiden, December 2–4, 2020, 17.

[14] Ibid., 6.

[15] Ibid., 16.

[16] "The eponym 'Suk' is said to be a miswritten Maasai pejorative that denigrated their non-pastoral lifestyle, derived from the word chok. Chok is a bill-hook that Pokot women used for tilling soil," according to Kenyan scholar Karani Shiyuka (478).

[17] Dietz, "Meta Knowledge About Areas," 7.

[18] Mervyn W. H. Beech, The Suk: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), iv.

[19] A Kenyan civil administrator once suggested something similar to me, offering to provide an unspecified substance to spike the elders' chai in pursuit of their secrets.

[20] Beech, The Suk, 22.

[21] Dietz, "Meta Knowledge About Areas," 19.

[22] J.E.G. Sutton, "Denying History in Colonial Kenya: The Anthropology and Archeology of G.W.B. Huntingford and L.S.B. Leakey," History in Africa 33 (2006): 287–320.

[23] Sutton, "Denying History in Colonial Kenya," 305.

[24] Ibid., 291.

[25] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 1st ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 98.

[26] Spencer, Time, Space and the Unknown, 224.

[27] Ibid., 218-219.

[28] Kipury, Oral Literature of the Maasai, 101-105.

[29] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 8.

[30] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 43.

[31] Lolwerikoi, Orality and the Land, 4.

[32] Ibid., 2.

[33] Tepilit Ole Saitoti, The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), xiv. Foreword by John Galaty.

[34] Saitoti, Worlds of a Maasai Warrior, 6.

[35] Karani Shiyuka, "The Transformation of the Religious Thought of the Pokot of Northwestern Kenya, c.1800–1900," Journal of Religion in Africa 52, no. 3–4 (2022): 482.

[36] Saitoti, Worlds of a Maasai Warrior, xv. Foreword by John Galaty.

[37] Elizabeth Allo Isichei, The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 287.

[38] Lolwerikoi, Orality and the Land, 38.

[39] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 187.

[40] Ibid., 173

[41] He credits this term to the scholar Geoffrey Benjamin.

[42] Ibid., 8.

[43] Ibid., 230.

[44] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 327.

[45] Bayo Akomolafe, Why We Need Postactivism Today, YouTube video, posted by Schumacher Center for a New Economics, May 9, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjzuxr3kEdU.

[46] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.

[47] Ibid., 190-192.

[48] Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (New York: HarperOne, 2020), 85.

[49] Ibid., 101.

[50] Ibid., 104.

[51] Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 59.

[52] Ibid., 69.

[53] Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 192.

[54] Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 18.

[55] Lolwerikoi, Orality and the Land, 74.

[56] Saitoti, Worlds of a Maasai Warrior, 136-140.

[57] Dominique Zahan, "Mysticism and Spirituality," in African Traditional Religions: A Symposium, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991), 138.

[58] Zahan, "Mysticism and Spirituality," 154.

[59] Bayo Akomolafe, Why We Need Postactivism Today

Bibliography

Beech, Mervyn W. H. The Suk: Their Language and Folklore. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911.

Dietz, Ton. "Meta Knowledge About Areas: The Example of Pokot." Paper presented at the Africa Knows! Conference, Panel 16: "Country/Region-Specific Knowledge Development Histories in Africa." African Studies Centre Leiden, University of Leiden, December 2–4, 2020.

Floyd, Malcolm. "Equal Are the Maasai and God." Performance Research 13, no. 3 (2008): 77–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528160902819356.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Hilliard, Constance B. Intellectual Traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Isichei, Elizabeth Allo. The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kipury, Naomi. Oral Literature of the Maasai. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983.

Lolwerikoi, Michael Lmatila. "Orality and the Land: The Impact of Colonialism on Lmaa Narratives in Kenya." PhD diss., ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2010.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions & Philosophy. 2nd rev. and enl. ed. Oxford; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990.

Saitoti, Tepilit Ole. The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1986.

Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. 1st ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Shani, Serah. "Indigenous Elites in Africa: The Case of Kenya's Maasai." In Indigenous Elites in Africa, 1st ed., vol. 1, xi–xxx. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003183990-1.

Shiyuka, Karani. "The Transformation of the Religious Thought of the Pokot of Northwestern Kenya, c.1800–1900." Journal of Religion in Africa 52, no. 3–4 (2022): 475–500. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700666-12340239.

Spencer, Paul. Time, Space, and the Unknown: Maasai Configurations of Power and Providence. London; New York: Routledge, 2003.

Sutton, J.E.G. "Denying History in Colonial Kenya: The Anthropology and Archeology of G.W.B. Huntingford and L.S.B. Leakey." History in Africa 33 (2006): 287–320.

Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. 1st ed. New York: HarperOne, 2020.

Zahan, Dominique. "Mysticism and Spirituality." In African Traditional Religions: A Symposium, edited by Jacob K. Olupona, 89–105. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991.

Appendix: The Warrior Who Went to God's Country (full text)

From Naomi Kipury's Oral Literature of the Maasai.

Once upon a time, a group of warriors set off on a cattle raid, and on the way, one of the warrior's sandals broke and he had to sit down to repair it. As he did so, he said to the others: "Comrades, please wait for me." The others said: "Let the last one wait for you." He said the same to another group of warriors, who also told him the same thing: "Let the last one wait for you." This went on until the last warrior came by. "Please wait for me, comrade," said the warrior with the broken sandal. "I will place a branch on the path that we will take. When I get to the fork on the path, then you can follow that path and catch up with us," said the last warrior, as he hurried to catch up with the others. The other warrior agreed with him and continued mending his sandal.

The last warrior went on, and when he got to the fork he cut a branch and placed it on the path that the warriors had followed. As the warriors went on, a strong wind came and blew off the branch to the other path. When the warrior with the broken sandal got to the spot after repairing his sandal, he found the branch and he followed the path on which it lay hurriedly, in a bid to catch up with his friends.

As he went along, he came upon the moon grazing. He stopped to stare at him. The moon asked him: "Hey you warrior, where do you come from and where are you going in these parts?" The warrior answered: "I am from home and we are off on a cattle raid but the other warriors left me as I was repairing a broken sandal." The moon further questioned him: "When you look at me, what do you think I look like?" "Oh, you look very fine to me," answered the warrior.

The moon further said to the warrior: "You may proceed and when you come across anybody, do not tell them what they look like, just tell them they look fine, and do not take anything along the way, and when you are given a choice between a good and bad thing choose the bad thing." With these instructions accepted, the warrior continued with his journey.

Soon he came upon a river with flowing water. As he was about to cross it, the river said to him: "Hey you warrior, have a drink before you cross me." The warrior answered: "Let me first cross you, then I will drink you from the other bank." He crossed the river and went on without drinking the water. He next came upon a river of milk, and as he was about to step into it, the river requested him to drink from it before he crossed over to the other side. The warrior spoke to the second river in the same way as he had spoken to the first, whereby he crossed and continued on his way. When he next came upon a river of blood, the same thing happened. He crossed all the three rivers without drinking from any of them.

As the warrior continued on his journey, he came upon two swords that were sharpening themselves. They said to the warrior: "Hey warrior, sharpen us then you can take the sharpest of the two." The warrior said to them: "Let me walk a little, then I will come and sharpen you." He went past them and continued with his journey. He next came upon delicious-looking pieces of meat that were frying on their own. The meat said to him: "Hey warrior, stir us, then you can eat the cooked one." The warrior again managed to trick the meat as he had done with the other things, and left it.

As he went along, the warrior found two axes that were fighting each other. They said to him: "Hey warrior, please separate us, then you can take one of us to your mother to hew wood with." The warrior said: "Hold on a little while, I'll be right back." He went on with his journey. The warrior continued with his journey, and whenever he came upon something he played tricks with it, and left without doing anything with it. He left everything behind.

Eventually, he came upon a man who was herding God's cattle. This man had two heads, and all the cattle had two tails. After exchanging greetings, the older man asked the warrior: "Hey, how do you find me?" "Oh, you look just like everybody else," answered the warrior. "And how do you find these cows?" the old man further asked the warrior. The warrior answered: "They are like all other cattle." The old man then gave the younger man directions, and they parted.

The warrior went on. When he was about to reach God's homestead, the homestead moved further away. He walked on with patience until he reached it. When he was about to enter the house, it also moved away. He went on until he got near it and entered inside it. As he tried to sit down, the stool also moved away from under him but he followed it and managed to sit on it. And it so happened that there was a lady of God in this house. After greetings and exchange of milk, the old lady asked the warrior: "Would you like fresh or stale milk?" The warrior answered: "What use do I have for fresh milk when stale milk is in plenty!" He was given fresh milk. Later on, just before bedtime, the old lady again asked the warrior: "Would you want curdled or fresh milk?" The warrior said he wanted fresh milk. He was given curdled.

When the time for people to retire for the night came, the old lady asked the warrior whether to retire for the night in a bed that had been cleared of dust or one that was not. The warrior chose the latter, and was offered the former, whereupon he retired and was soon sound asleep.

At the earliest flickers of dawn, the lady went to wake the warrior up and said to him: "I want you to stay inside and when you hear the sound of thunder you should not utter a sound or come outside." The warrior did as he was instructed. In a few minutes he heard the sound of thunder and the house vibrated. The warrior remained still until the old lady invited him outside whereupon he found a large herd of cattle together with sheep, goats and donkeys. The lady said to him: "All this is your property, drive it and go in peace." The warrior took the cattle through a different route from the one he had followed before, and returned to his country.

As he was nearing his village some clouds of dust were seen a distance away. After waiting for a long time the other warriors had given up their companion with the broken sandal. They assumed he had been eaten by wild beasts. His family had mourned until they had become sober. Then the warrior arrived with an enormous herd. When asked how he had obtained the cattle, he related his whole experience in God's country. His companions had returned empty-handed.

Meanwhile, when the brother of the fortunate warrior heard his story, he made up his mind to go to God's country, so that he may be granted cattle. His brother forbade him to go, saying: "Please do not go, for you are not able to do the things I did." But he insisted. He said: "I must go."

The warrior's brother went on and on until he came upon the moon as he was grazing. The moon talked to him in the same way he had talked to his brother, and asked him: "What do you think of me?" "I have never ever seen anything like you!" answered the warrior in astonishment. The moon gave him directions, and he proceeded on the same path as his brother.

On coming upon the river of water, the river requested him to have a drink before crossing. He knelt down and drank to his fill before crossing. He also drank from the river of milk and that of blood, crossing them all after doing so. He next came upon swords that were sharpening themselves. When the swords asked him to sharpen them and take the sharpest, he did so, leaving with the sharpest. He found meat that was frying itself. He sat down, cooked it and ate the cooked bits. When he found the fighting axes, he separated them, and took one along as they had asked him to. He did everything that his brother had not done.

He next came upon the two-headed man as he was grazing two-tailed cattle. They talked together for a little while, and the old man posed the same question he had put to his brother: "How do you find me?" The warrior boldly answered: "You have two heads." "And how do you find these cattle?" continued the old man. "They each have two tails," added the warrior. The old man, nonetheless, directed the warrior to God's village and returned to tend his cattle.

He walked on. When he was about to go through the gate, the village moved further away. He swung his club and threw it at the village, which then stopped. When the house moved as he was about to enter it, he hit it with his club and it stopped. When he tried to sit on the stool as it moved off, he took his club and hit it, splitting it in two, then he sat on the floor. When the old lady asked him to choose between fresh and stale milk he said: "Why should I choose stale milk when there is fresh milk!" He was given stale milk. At bedtime, he said he did not want fresh milk; he wanted curdled milk. He was given fresh milk. He chose a fine clean bed and he was given one with ashes. He was given all the bad things when he expressed preference for good ones.

Very early the next morning, the old lady went and gave him instructions to remain still and not to utter a sound or leave the house when he heard the sound of thunder. But no sooner had he heard the sound of thunder than he shot up and went outside to check on what was making the sound. The lady once more asked him to go back to the house. But once again, as soon as he heard the sound of thunder, he rushed outside. He did this over and over again, and eventually the lady said to him: "You go, you do not want property." He returned to his country empty-handed, but for the axe, the sword, and the other weapons. The end.