Portal to the Past

Fewer than 20 people speak Yakuunte. With the help of her centenarian grandfather, Juliana Lorisho is determined to keep the tribal language and traditions of the Yaaku people alive.

“According to Mzee Leriman Stephen, a Yaaku elder who knows how to speak Yakuunte, ‘Mukogodo Forest is our home. Mukogodo is our life, not simply a source of livelihood.’

“He stares at a crackling fire from wild olive wood, lost in thought and in a trance-like posture. The dark manyatta (a Maasai word meaning settlement) is redolent with a scent like pasture from the wild olive flames, which together with its warmth created a homely ambiance in this humble setting. I sit on an empty water jelly can and I too stare at the fire, trying to conjure up what his aged memory could manage.”

26-year old Juliana Lorisho is transcribing the stories told to her by her grandfather, who claims to be 112 years old. Mzee Leriman Stephen’s memories are a portal into the past - one where the Yaaku, an Indigenous people from central Kenya, lived in caves, hunted for giraffes, and used foraged honey as part of rituals to summon rain. He talks to her in a mixture of Swahili, English, and Yakuunte, the traditional language of their people, which has been classed as extinct by UNESCO and is now understood by only a handful of people.

Juliana is the only individual of her generation fluent in Yakuunte, and she is determined to revive both the language and the traditions of the Yaaku. Part of her plan is the construction of the Yaaku Learning Centre of Hope in Kuri Kuri village, the sole school dedicated to the transmission of Yaaku language and culture. Work has begun on the school, despite a lack of government support. Yet she presses onward, saying: “It’s a must for someone to be dedicated to and sacrificing for preserving the Yaaku language.”

The daughter of a Protestant Reverend of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Barnabas Leriman, Juliana was schooled by nuns, mainly at St Francis Girls Secondary School in Laikipia County. Her father had been indoctrinated as an evangelist through the colonial tradition, but was concurrently an advocate of Yaaku culture and involved in several community projects, helping to establish the Mukogodo Resource Centre. When Juliana was six years old, her father was murdered due to political disputes over forest access. She carries on his legacy as she works tirelessly to advance the voice of her community.

Just this year, Juliana says that she has redirected her energy from Christianity to Yaaku tradition. “It never felt good,” she says. “To me, practising traditional beliefs makes more sense than the church.” When asked why, she says that her prayers are answered immediately at Yaaku shrines and sacred spaces, rather than falling into a void of want. This past January, she and a group of ladies had asked for the rains to come in the middle of a desiccating drought. They sang the traditional Yaaku songs necessary for such rites - one being God of Rain Answer Us (scroll down for lyrics) - and even before they left the shrine, it had started raining.

The Yaaku live in the Mukogodo Forest in central Laikipia County, Kenya’s largest national forest reserve, which covers a landmass of over 30,000 hectares. Out of Kenya’s nearly 400 forests gazetted as protected areas, the Mukogodo is the only one co-managed by the residing Indigenous communities along with the governmental agency Kenya Forest Service. But despite this hopeful and progressive development, the Yaaku still struggle with official recognition from the Kenyan government.

The Yaaku community is estimated to be over 4,000 strong, but fewer than 20 people speak Yakuunte. For centuries, the Mukogodo provided this traditional hunter-gatherer population with buffalo, hyrax, giraffe, and other wild game, along with forest berries, medicinal herbs, and honey. In 1937, the Kenyan government designated the Mukogodo a protected forest and the cave-dwelling Yaaku were forced to relocate. This follows the pattern in which forest-dwellers in Kenya have been repeatedly chased from their ancestral lands in controversial ways.

According to historian Martin Mares, in the following decades, the Yaaku assimilated with the pastoralist Maasai and Samburu people. Then, following Kenya’s independence in 1963, the Yaaku lost their ancestral rights to Mukogodo, and pastoral tribes supplanted the dominant social hierarchy due to the wealth generated by cattle ownership. The Yaaku started keeping livestock and small-scale farming on the outskirts of their forest.

Since assimilating with Maa culture and adopting livestock herding, some of the Yaaku have taken to cattle-rustling. Wrongfully taking property counters Yaaku tradition. Those who have been complicit and want to return to their villages know that they are ungodly, says Juliana. They approach elders to request to be cleansed. The ritual requires a sheep, which is taken to the site of a sacred spring and slaughtered beneath a tree. The culprit is covered with the blood, along with honey; milk is poured over his head. Only then is the individual cleansed and can rightfully return home.

In 1977, the Kenyan government banned all forms of hunting as part of an overarching conservation agenda, eradicating yet another essential component of the Yaaku’s traditional livelihood. But in 2005, The Forest Act granted the local Indigenous communities rights to forest resources in the Mukogodo, and in 2007, the government granted local Indigenous communities a greater role in forest stewardship under the Forest Management and Conservation Act, Kenya’s first participatory forest management effort, in accordance with the country’s constitution, requiring the state to promote programs that ensure minorities and marginalised groups can “develop their cultural values, languages, and practices”.

Despite these advances, assimilation with other ethnic tribes has inevitably diluted certain facets of Yaaku identity. At present, they are not nationally recognised as a distinct ethnic group. But there have been hopeful steps toward recognition, driven mainly by grassroots organisations and individuals like Juliana. She believes that preserving the language is key to this. “Yaakunte will also help the government recognise and give us our own identity,” she says.

In November 2021, the Kenyan parliament proposed a bill that would weaken the role of the Kenya Forest Service as an intermediary between petitioners and parliament as part of the process to alter forest boundaries. Although this change could make it easier for Indigenous people to contact lawmakers about forest land rights, environmentalists and community groups are concerned that it could also remove existing safeguards against outside interests, opening ancestral territories to land grabs.

Throughout these social and political challenges, some Yaaku have maintained generational connections to the land. A key is their tie to traditional foods. For instance, honey is not only a vital part of the Yaaku diet and cherished for its different medicinal properties - specific honeys are harvested from different blossoming trees to treat various illnesses - but also offered as dowry and used in certain sacrificial rites. Older generations follow the sounds of different birds like cuckoos and honeyguides in their search for wild honey hidden away deep in the forest. And today, each household maintains its own beehives. “Yaaku without honey is like Maasai without cattle,” says Juliana.

The disappearance of indigenous flora and their obsolescence in Yaaku traditional life has prompted her to explore the realm of agroecology by studying and charting certain plants. Amongst her favourites are the manuka tea plant, white flower croton, and lavender fever berry - all important flowering plants for bees.

She is ardent about preserving the culture and lifestyle that Yaakunte sustains. Just as it was internationally recognised as extinct, Juliana started a WhatsApp group named “Revival of Yaaku Language.” Hovering around 33 participants, she and her students utilise both text and voice notes to learn new words and pronunciation.

Through messaging, she encourages lessons in a region where roads are nearly non-existent and children commonly walk upwards of 17 kilometres each way to school. Until there are enough funds to complete the Learning Centre building - the brick and mortar component of Juliana’s dream - WhatsApp will have to do. “We’re very under-resourced here,” she says. “But we press on.”

“Our language makes us as Yaaku unique and different from our neighbouring communities,” Juliana says. “I have a great mission towards reviving Yaakunte because many Yaaku are interested in speaking the language. It is a way for us to practice our culture and be differentiated from other communities we assimilated to.” She has also been working on a Yaaku dictionary, and coaching other teachers in transmitting their unique language and culture.

And she continues to record the stories that her grandfather tells her, to bring the past into the present. An early entry in her journal reads: “I had been warned that he might not be as coherent due to advancing years and this worried me since my mission was to have a firsthand encounter with this beacon of hope for the Yaaku of my community; the last from his generation (my deep loving grandfather) and be able to share the experience with a large audience. Bracing for disappointment, I shift my stare into his experienced eyes and waited. And then the man spoke: ‘Musacha mila ni mtumusa’ (culture abandonment is akin to slavery).

“I almost jump from my seat. Not only is the old man alert and coherent, he could communicate in Swahili and English (Niko sawa, I am fine) when I started greeting him. What a relief. He went on in the Maa language, ‘We integrated with the Laikipia Maasai to our demise.’ I asked him why they integrated and he said it was simply to survive as a community. He explained that the intruding Laikipia Maasai were more numerous and they were also very fierce fighters. But with a chuckle, he added, ‘We cheated a physical annihilation but we are staring at a cultural death.’ He still remembers the days of living in the caves. ‘The forest is our home,’ he insists. ‘We don’t want to live anywhere else.’”

Yiie Cheere okochu cheleeli
In Yaaku as transcribed phonetically by Juliana Lorisho:

Chorus:
Yiie chere okochu choleef
Dekaya abarya kaalye oona
Birya maaleli oyaa otaa
Maaye

Stanza 1:
Laayna liiyema oogoye
Uemasi gagayi meenayee
Kaare matiya siyaa lyn
Gaasyi meeyiih gabaari
Paaaye ooi ooi gabaah
Kiseeyi yii chere kayab
Liiyameg taakah

Stanza 2:
Maaya kalewah iitih iitih
Kawayha masherkah yooh
Yooh kaahwaley maaseyah
Tiiisakya wariih maatya leyoh
Kirisbagah ofishalah matya kalya
Lyaaa dakylayi
Yi chore maati gasykei

Stanza 3:
Aay yiie chere ‘wandiki’ yiichoere
Ka “losos” haaway qee gabasiiya
Haleg goreg haloowaa kabayaa
Naga loona waah yenega
Neeyhey orididiih maleey ikeyha


God of Rain Answer Us
Translation by Juliana Lorisho

Chorus:
Oh God, listen to us
And answer our prayers
As we ask for rain
And answer our prayers
As we ask for rain

Stanza 1:
We are sinners for we have broken
All your rules that we are not supposed to break
By destroying the beautiful environment
You blessed us with

Stanza 2:
Our sons have broken the traditional taboo
By coming to our homes with their hands full of blood
With blood flowing as they kill people
And in Yaaku we didn’t have God
Don’t refuse giving us rains

Stanza 3
Oh God, don’t leave us
God of Wandiki, God of Losos
Honoured mountain to perform sacrifice
We bow and ask you to please answer us
We cannot get out of here
Without you giving us rain