1 - Pax Borana

Summary

There is a progression of tales widespread in the lowlands of northern Kenya and the Horn, variously known by its Somali name as kedi guur, the time of migrations or, by the Gabra, gaaf Iris, the time when people went to Iris. These tales describe how, in what must have been the sixteenth century, people fled from the Boran while others remained behind, or how treks of migrating nomads got cut into two by emerging or re-emerging bodies of water (the Moses motif). These stories refer to the ethnogenesis of the modern ethnic groups out of the earlier Proto-Rendille-Somali (PRS) stratum. They describe how the Gabra Miigo were separated from the Garre, the Hawiyya Somali from the ancestors of the Rendille and Sakuye, the Gabra Malbe from the Rendille. Because of their importance for the origin of the interethnic clan relationships these tales have been discussed at some length in Identities on the Move (Schlee 1989a) and are indeed the main theme of that book. With the exception of the Rendille who remained hostile to the Boran for centuries and might have been saved the choice between annihilation and final submission by the arrival of the British in the early twentieth century, all other Cushitic groups who now live in northern Kenya later submitted to the hegemony of the Boran. They include groups like the Garre who have traditions about escaping from the Boran to the east and later coming back.