KALENJINS. EVIDENCES SHOWING THAT KALENJINS ARE ANOTHER LOST TRIBE OF ISRAEL If, in Kalenjin cosmology, the expanse of land that centres on the Mau forest was the “Promised Land,” then the Ogiek were their Canaanites.As we read in Wanguhu Ng’ang’a’s newly published book Communities of Kenya, theOgiek were the natives of that land.The Kalenjin were later conquerors. Like the Israelites, who travelled northwards, the Kalenjin came southwards from Egypt.No wonder the Ogiek remnants of the Ndorobo-Sirikwa cluster are beginning to pose what looks like a “Palestinian problem”.The Kalenjin story is nearly identical in many other ways to that of ancient Israel. Why is it that certain central details of Kalenjin settlement in Kenya’s Rift Valley have mythical counterparts in Israel’s reported colonisation of Canaan at the endof the 13th century BC?Why does the Kalenjin epic claim a suddenexodus from Egypt, a wandering for long decades in the wilderness, the crossing of a river called “Jordan,” a mass circumcisionat Pisgah, capped with the conquest of Jericho, Bethel, Ai, Hazor and other cities of the Levantine natives?Even more astonishing, how is it that, for these events, Kalenjin tradition uses terminology almost identical to that of Judah’s King Josiah, his chief priest Hilkiah, their redactor Ezra and other mastermindsof what Bible students call the Deuteronomistic History?Today’s Kalenjin equivalents of the Soferim— those who wrote and edited the Jewish Bible in the seventh and sixth centuries BC(just before, during and just after the Babylonian exile) — assert that the Kalenjin arrived in abrupt escape from Egypt.They began to settle only after some 40 years of wandering in the “wildernesses” of Southern Sudan and northwestern Kenya and “the Mountain God” (Elgon). Divested of the Bible’s thick ethnic self-aggrandising gloss, it is true that a certain Semitic tribe left Egypt abruptly after a period of imperialistic rule.Known to historians as Hyksos and including the immediate family of a certainY-aa-gub (“Jacob”) — known in Kalenjin mythology as Yak-hober — this Semitic tribe renamed itself Ysro-el (“Israel”) after their leader had dreamed of an encounter with the god El at a place thereafter called Beth-el or Bethel (“House of El”).In Out of Egypt, Ahmed Osman explains that the term Israel was derived from the Coptic god Asar-el, (a name that means “Osiris is God” or simply “El empowers”) the chief god of the Nilo-Hamitic Copts, Edomites and Canaanites.Known in the Pentateuch as “Moses,” Amenhotep IV was the pharaoh who triggered so much religious unrest by revolutionarily imposing a monotheon called Aten — for which reason he changed his named to Akhenaten — and banned all other gods and goddesses.Egypt was electrified. But what archaeo-history now knows is in conflict with what we read in the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History.Moses abdicated and fled not because he had killed an Egyptian and hidden him in the sand but only because the priests conspired to kill him on account of the Aten.First, he went south to Nubia — his motherTiye’s maiden country. There, he married Tharbis, the black beauty whom Exodus calls Zipporah.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 15:48:16 +0000
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