Material Culture in Alama’s Walk: The Oracle Speaks

Alama's Walk, The Oracle Speaks

From the early 1970s, I started collecting and documenting the material culture of Kenya across Indigenous communities for the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nairobi, and the National Museums of Kenya. Hundreds of objects passed through my hands. I studied and sketched them in my field books. And I learned what material culture meant to the people. Working closely with the illustrator, Sadiq Somjee, we bring that experience of Indigenous Africa into the story of Alama’s Walk: The Oracle Speaks. This is a book of fiction inspired by the resourcefulness of the Turkana, Pokot and Borana people who draw from their histories, languages, and cultures to create objects of art and function. They also draw from the resourceful nature of the scrubland desert of northern Kenya. 

Their walking sticks, attires, containers and ornaments are artfully designed for use and adornment. These objects also hold cultural aesthetic codes and carry social meanings.

The elders’ walking sticks are often crafted from sacred (or peace) trees. They support the elders while walking and are held between men to stop fights. They are exchanged among peers of the adversary groups during negotiations to close the conflicts. Thus, they are also known as peace staffs and have distinctive shapes and properties of the wood sensed by touch and sight. In the book, they have personalities and I have given them names in Swahili. I have made them peers of the protagonist, Alama, so he may speak with them as an elder to an elder, and to the readers to say who they are.

Alama the Seeker, carries a headrest to lay his head down at night and when tired during the day. He carries the headrest together with the milk gourd, and a snuff container made from cow’s horn. The woman with a shiny belt and the man in white, too, carry water or milk containers with the peace staffs that are characteristic of their cultures.

The skin attires of Ua and the woman with a shiny belt are distinct. In that, they have been fashioned with distinct cultural patterns that are made by shaving and trimming calf and goat hair on the skins. The women of the two neighbouring cultures also have particular styles of wearing their skin apparels that are different from each other. 

Similarly, the sets of ornaments on the two women show the richness of diversity of Indigenous adornment and colours of Africa. Some, like the waist belt leketyo is a highly respected object. It’s revered as sacred for it supports the womb that is life of the unborn. It’s also a powerful as a symbol of motherhood. I have seen the leketyo  dropped between two fighting young men and immediately the blows ceased. In fact, in several of the eight Kalenjin communities, the word for peace is the woman’s waist belt called leketyo.

Sultan Somjee