African History: Pokot, Turkana and Karamonjong

Sitting in a café in Kitale yesterday I overheard the discussion of some wazungu (white people – Americans). One man was with about 5 college age kids talking with two middle aged single women. While sipping my chai (tea) I surmised that the young people group was part of some university summer team; the two women were missionaries. Both of them talked extensively about Pokot, a semi-nomadic tribe 200 kilometers away. The women talked about the primitive conditions they lived in while the leader of the college group explained that they would be spending the night in a town called Kachelipa and it would be more like camping.

As they talked about the Pokot and their ministries I wondered if any of them had read or heard of “The Social Structure of the Kara Pokot and Its Implications for Church Planting,” written by yours truly, and that much of the research was done when I was living in a mud hut down in Kachelipa.

When I first began working in Pokot, back in 1976, there were very few missionaries of any kind working in those remote areas. I am not suggesting I was the first, as the African Inland Mission and the Roman Catholics arrived in some places before I did. However, in some places where I worked those group were not serving and I was, indeed, the first mzungu to work in certain areas in the bush of Kenya.

I left Kenya as a resident in 1989 and now serve as a non-resident missionary teaching anthropology, cross-cultural communication and church planting in places like Kenya, India and Ukraine. Of the three components of missiology one is history (the other two being theology and anthropology). I challenge my students to know the history of the people they are working with so you will have a better understanding of their present in light of the past. To ignore history, including church/Christian history, among the people we are working with leads to assumptions that are possibly incorrect, i.e. the people have never heard the Gospel. The first documented publication on the Pokot was printed in 1911. To assume, 100 years later, that the Pokot is a new venture is classic example of missing the point due to poor historical study.

Ironically, speaking of history, yesterday I met John Wilson, an 84-year-old man who has lived in Uganda and Kenya most of his life, 16 years living among the Karamonjong people. My time with John was brief but he has a fascinating collection of material culture from the tribes of Turkana, Karamonjong and Pokot. Typing away on a manual typewriter in his dusty Treasures of Africa Museum (reminding me that one person’s junk is another person’s treasure), meeting Jack was like peering back to the days when the semi-nomadic’s of Kenya were untouched by modernism. If one is working with these pastoralists it would seem worthwhile to spend some time with people like John, or Father Anthony, the Catholic priest who has lived in Kacheliba for 40 years.

History is one of those subjects that many in America care little about. However, no matter where you serve in this world, spend some time learning about the past. Find that old man or woman, who may seem eccentric and perhaps senile, and mine for nuggets of days gone by. Who knows, they may be sipping tea in the backside of some café.