Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana by Mustafa Mirzeler (review)

Mustafa Mirzeler’s book is an ethnography of an origin myth, the story of Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro which is shared by the Jie and Turkana peoples of East Africa. According to its basic outline, the Gray Bull Engiro was captured along the banks of the Longiro River by Orwakol, the founder of the Jie polity, several hundred years ago. Engiro became the progenitor of all Jie cattle, but during a very hot dry season he went missing. Nayeche, the daughter of Orwakol, followed Engiro’s tracks to the headwaters of the Tarash River. Here she found the water that had attracted Engiro, and also such abundant wild fruit on the nearby hillside that she decided to stay. When Jie men later found her while searching for pasture, they were impressed by the quality of the land and returned to tell the Jie about Nayeche’s discovery. This inspired a number of families to migrate to the area with their families and emaciated cattle. Thanks to Engiro, their cattle prospered, and when Nayeche died, they buried her at the foot of the hill now called Moru a Nayeche and named themselves the Turkana.

Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork and linguistic study between 1996 and 1997 (along with several shorter return journeys), and based partly on the historical knowledge acquired during his period of apprenticeship to Jie storytellers in Karamoja, this monograph represents the culmination of years of research. The book is organized into four parts. The first provides the historical context of the region and described how Jie storytellers refer to historical traditions to navigate contemporary ruptures. The second defines the Jie term for “history” or “historical traditions” (eemut), and explains how performers weave themes of hunger, family conflict, and the dual capacity of all people for good and evil to create narratives that encourage dispute resolution (especially between the Jie and Turkana) and resource sharing. The third looks at how the story of Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro has been reframed by generations of storytellers, and how historical traditions invariably pick up a variety of discursive elements from the present. The fourth contains a conclusion and a rich corpus of translated texts, primarily of Jie and Turkana history and biography.

The book contains numerous valuable tidbits on the history of Karamoja, but to me Mirzeler’s most valuable contribution lies in his definition of eemut. He notes that eemut “abounds in fantasy images” and that a story like that of Nayeche and Engiro references “pressing social and political concerns of the moment of its remembering” (8). This suggests that what Jie storytellers recount to historians today does not fit neatly into Western notions of narrative history, and that the “true” events of the past can never be accurately reconstructed.

On one level, this is intended as a gentle rebuke to scholars like John Lamphear, who in the 1960s and ‘70s dove with great enthusiasm into reconstructing the past of Karamoja. In The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda (Oxford University Press, 1976), Lamphear used age and generation sets to approximate dates for key events (wars, migrations, droughts) only preserved in oral traditions, and created a narrative history of the region that predates the arrival of European, Arab, and Swahili travelers. At the time, the discipline of African history was still fighting for recognition, and one can imagine that Lamphear intended to show the Hugh Trevor-Ropers of the world that even places like Karamoja had a past which, with sufficient patience, could be uncovered.

Mirzeler contends, however, that in this enthusiasm Africanist historians were trying to fit square pegs into round holes. He notes that eemut was never a process of memorization, but rather a constant renegotiation between storytellers and the audience. While these stories...