Marakwet Erotic

The Marakwet are the people of the furrows. Along the western wall of Kenya's Kerio Valley, where the Cherangany Hills drop from above 3,000 meters to a hot, dry floor near 1,000, they built and still run a network of gravity-fed irrigation channels that predates colonial rule by centuries. The furrows tap rivers coming off the hills, cross gullies on hollowed logs and stone embankments, and water millet, sorghum, maize and, these days, mango orchards below. Each furrow belongs to the clans that dug it. Men of those clans repair it, ration the flow and settle disputes over it, and that shared labor defines who belongs where as firmly as any genealogy. They are one of the Kalenjin peoples, Southern Nilotic speakers whose common label was coined only in the mid twentieth century. Marakwet itself is a colonial rendering of Markweta, one of several territorial sections alongside the Almoo, Endoow, Sombirir and Kiptaani. The Cherangany, or Sengwer, forest people of the high country, are usually counted in as well, though many of them insist they are a separate nation and have fought repeated evictions from Embobut forest. Marakwet speech sits close to Keiyo and Tugen, while Pokot, to the north, is a more distant cousin.

Kinship has not kept the peace with the Pokot: cattle raiding between the two has a long history. The 2001 attack on Murkutwo, where Pokot raiders killed dozens of villagers, is still a reference point, and many families keep their homes up on the escarpment ledges, above the valley floor, as their grandparents did. Most Marakwet are Christian now, Catholic or Africa Inland Church for the most part, and the mission hospital at Kapsowar has been a local fixture since the colonial era. Older ideas persist underneath: Asis, the sun, as the distant supreme power, and Ilat, the spirit of thunder and rain, who matters a great deal to people whose harvest depends on water arriving on schedule. Cyclical age-sets still rank men by generation, and boys enter them through circumcision and seclusion. The cutting of girls, once the parallel rite, has been illegal in Kenya since 2011 and is contested within the community, with churches and local groups promoting alternative ceremonies. The anthropologist Henrietta Moore made Endo Marakwet households the subject of a well known study of gender and space, down to the rules about where ash, chaff and goat dung may be thrown. The wider world mostly meets the Marakwet without knowing it, on the track: steeplechase champions Moses Kiptanui and Ezekiel Kemboi both come from these hills.