Making Ethnic Ways by Bill Bravman

Making Ethnic Ways by Bill Bravman is a book that primarily discusses communities and their transformations in Taita, Kenya. The book covers the settlements and societies, missionaries’ influences, colonialism, and changes in education and politics in the twentieth century. Clearly, these topics investigated all deal directly with identity. Identity can be defined as “a set of characteristic by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known.” There are numerous versions of identity. There is the individual’s identity and a cultural identity within a group. The people of the Taita Hills formed their own identity through numerous ways, overcoming and accepting changes in religion, geography, and most importantly traditions.

The first example of identity in the book dealt with an initiation the females of the Taita community undertook. Adult teachers, who were mostly women, would take the adolescent girls for approximately two to eight days into the forest and reveal to them the “secrets” of life. These secrets were topics dealing with sexuality, contraception, and the dangers of men’s seductions, maturity, and marriage. After the initiation, the “newly” defined women would go into seclusion from anywhere between a few weeks to a year. At the turn of the twentieth century, some of these girls began to decline to undergo the initiation. Later in the 1930s, an expanding group of Taita Anglicans developed a new method for initiation. The Christian initiations were literally tea parties, with the participants discussing issues such as respecting parents and the church, and less talk of sex. The Church Mission Society missionaries (CMS) first entered Taita circa 1840. The CMS first attempted to promote Christianity and replace the local religions, and then later aimed at forcing profound changes. The residents of Sagalla viewed missionaries as interferes with their traditional religion. In response to the Christian invasion, Sagalla broke into separate neighborhoods for and against support of missionaries. By 1910, missionaries did not pose a political threat, but the Anglican converts became a social one. This is just one instance in which the identity of the Taitans was challenged.

Religion is one of the key elements that contribute to identity. Wutasi, a word that originates from the verb kutasa, which means to pray or offer liberation, was the traditional lineage-based religion in the Hills. Each lineage had their own shrines, rather than share with other families. Although Wutasi and the Gusii religion share similar views in a universal creator (Mlungu and Engoro respectively, although the Gusii religion believed Engoro did not directly intervene with men), explaining why certain events occurred, and the relationship between people and the creator, Wutasi focused relationships with their deceased ancestors, or βaramu, as well. The Taitan religion also was used as a method for the elders to retain control over the younger family members through diagnosing and solving problems. If a family member’s action displeased βaramu and misfortunes occurred, the culprit must then appease the ancestors to restore order. Overcoming and accepting Christianity, as well as the distinct differences in religions between tribes, the societies in the Taita Hills were able to mold and define their identities.

Another illustration of identity is how a community struggles and overcomes the norms and terms of their communities, which Bravman defines as cultural politics. In this sense, the Christian version of the female initiation challenged the original method of initiation. With the introduction of Christianity to Taita, Kenya, the tribes as a group had to either accept or fight the “new” religion. Even if the tribe accepts the religion as it eventually did, this cannot be viewed as defeat. To be able to come together and accept a new view or belief with unity is an accomplishment in itself. Traditionally the seniors of the tribes would set the terms, but later the subordinates would try to alter the terms and attempt to promote change by using new resources or opportunities. Kidaßida, “proper Taita ways,” began to be challenged in the twentieth century by younger men, women, and both young and old Christians. The idea of Kidaßida basically was defined by what the elders of the tribe thought were proper and correct. The proper ways would later be changed as time progressed; the elder men’s version of Kidaβida gradually changed due to young men, women, and Christians. The events of the Christian initiations taking over and the younger men and women along with the Christians taking more control of the tribes are good examples of overcoming norms and terms of the community. Ethnicity is another factor that helps define identity. Barth, author of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, defines ethnicity as relational, in other words what sets one group apart from another? Bravman argues that this definition overlooks a group’s internal dynamics of differentiation, struggle, and negotiation.

Geography can also play a role in how a group identifies itself. The surroundings, such as plant and animal life, along with climate and elevation, can define a group of people. The Taita hills of Dabida, Sagalla, and Kasigau provided many ecological zones, complex topography, and abundant but unreliable rainfall. This encouraged localism rather than the Taitans being nomadic. The first known inhabitants of Taita were non-Bantu speaking, hunter gatherers known as Dorobo by the WaTaita in the first millennium A.D. The second group migrated from the Ethiopian Highlands by the ninth century A.D. These people built the first permanent dwellings, and perhaps were agro-pastoralist. This group was also non-Bantu speaking, and they purposefully displaced the hunter-gatherer ancestors by killing them, driving them out, or absorbing them into their community. This shows how identities can be erased or changed, as the hunter-gatherers losing their own identity and became agro-pastoralist.

Bantu speaking ancestors later came to the Taita Hills in the middle sixteenth century in many waves and directions, over a long period of time. The first group of the sixteenth-century migrants is believed to have occupied in southeast Somalia or northeast Kenya, in an area known by its legendary name, Shungwaya. Over the next several generations, immigrants would make their way to the coast until a man named Mwanda decided to move his family and his sons’ families from the hills near Mombassa to the mountains in the west. They eventually settled in an area now known as Mwanda, in the Dabida section of the Taita Hills. Shortly after, another group arrived to Dabida led by Munya. Differences clashed, and Munya’s son Walo moved the “Wanya” to another part of Dabida known as Mgange. It is interesting to note how two cultures, speaking the same language, can still quarrel over land and space. During this time in other parts of the world, countries sharing a common language would usually unite or have alliances with each other. In the late seventeenth century, a fourth group of Bantu-speaking people came to the hills led by Ngasu, who are said to have brought skills of iron smelting with them. By the nineteenth century, a lineage-based settlement of the hills led to establishing patrilineage as the foundation of the societies’ organization. With the influx of various foreigners into the Taita Hills, identity became increasingly important to separate one tribe from each other.

The most important aspect of defining identity between cultures is traditions. The tribes in the Hills practiced several traditions, including the idea of blood brotherhoods and various rituals. These practices appear to have similarities among the different tribes, but minor differences existed to set the groups as unique and diverse. Blood brotherhood, called mtero, allowed the tribes to “make connections across neighborhood boundaries of suspicion.” This practice was primarily used for men to travel safely through unknown and possibly hostile territories. Permitting the movement through foreign lands, blood brotherhoods could spread ideas, practices, and goods with neighbors. Most people across Taita honored the oaths made between the two men. This is an example of a shared ritual within the different societies of the Hills.

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[1] http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/03/i0020300.html

[2] Bravman, Bill. Making Ethnic Ways, 1-33

All other citations after 2 is from Bill Bravman's Making Ethnic Ways, which this paper was based off of.