The only memory I have of my grandmother Kimoi is that of an old woman in a leso and plimsolls. She is holding a packet of Digestive biscuits which she eventually gives to me for I keep looking at them. She must have said something but I can’t recall her voice.
She passed on when I was three-years-old and I know this about her:
Her porridge name (which she would give up when she became a woman) was Chebelio. Named so because her father hunted an elephant the day she was born in order to feed her mother with the meat.
She spoke Maa and Kimukony (Pokot) fluently because she grew up in Laikipia and West Pokot. But she refused to speak Kiswahili for people laughed at her accent when she tried to. She never ate chicken or eggs for that was akin to eating a lizard and lizard eggs.
Just after initiation, and a few years after the Great War, she married a man named Chesire who minded horses for a Scottish colonial farmer. The marriage was an agreement between her father and Chesire’s father, and was sealed without their consent by an exchange of tobacco.
And she despaired in the first few years of her marriage for she kept miscarrying. Her parents asked her to walk out but she consulted an Orkoiyot who told her that she had to cross three rivers in order to make her home. That way her children would survive.
This she did, and when her first child was born she placed her inside a hyena’s den so that death would mistake the child for a hyena cub and leave it alone. Chesiny, her first-born, is still alive at 95.
(To be continued)
tirobon 