Notes

• [1]
  Video NTV Kenya May 42011. “Turkana Killing Fields,” accessed September 6 2011 on YouTube < http/::www.youtube.com:watch%3Fv=-iR33qEhQz8>
• [2]
  Named after the white clay, which only the women from this grade had the right to use, and which is thought mortally dangerous for anyone else.
• [3]
  Although initiations are performed in many different ways, they are often based on this kind of arrangement. Examples of this outside Africa include the Baruya people in New Guinea (Godelier 1996).
• [4]
  Evocative of the Maasai or Samburu moran. However, these adornments have been modified considerably since the advent of colonial power!
• [5]
  This substitution came into force in strictly controlled areas under colonial rule; all the more relevant since an increased number of predators such as lions made certain areas unsafe.
• [6]
  Inya is primarily a term for the energy of the supreme Power; Ngai by extension means any energy, positive and beneficial force.
• [7]
  Unlike the Maasai and Samburu (Fratkin 1977) or the Nandi (Anderson 1995) and Turkana (Lamphear 1992), the Meru diviner-healers were not independent of the authority of the Fathers of the Country.
• [8]
  The memory of these altered states, which are neither trances nor possessions, has been preserved/ maintained because these dance sessions were not banned or controlled until a much later date than the raids, subsequently becoming the subject of folkloric entertainment (Hann 1977). For the Tigania-Igembe, these long evenings of song and dance before the circumcision sessions, organized more or less officially by the neo-lamalle up until the end of the 1980s, were the means by which these traditions were recreated and passed on.
• [9]
  Example: Baibere—“he who has killed an enemy and returned with a spear”; Kaileba—“he who gave great thought to how he would kill the enemy”; Kirimania—“he who has killed many enemies,” etc.
• [10]
  Example: Kîrua—“he who was the first to kill”; Baibuto—“he who killed third”; Munye—“he who killed a rhinoceros,” etc.
• [11]
  This difference in the reproductive capacity of some in relation to others is crucial in that members of generations sets that were active, in terms of fertility, were not allowed to interact with each other on pain of illness or even death.
• [12]
  This reinsertion ritual is quite different from the purification rituals regarding murders committed within the society, where the murderers had to be cleansed of a sort of pollution. The reintegration of warrior/killers is never a small matter. This calls to mind the magnificent work on the fate of murderer by M. Carty and M. Détienne (1996).
• [13]
  There are two mythical/historic accounts of war among the Meru. In the story of Mbugi, Murutu and Mukunga linked to the young men’s preoccupation with finding enemies to fight and young women to marry; the harmful effects of procrastinating over initiation in the myth of Mbwaa (Peatrik 1999, 189–208,381–425).
• [14]
  Ethnographical data is distributed across a considerable number of references (Peatrik 1999, 280–289). Here I have provided the mere outline of a comparison, which would require a whole volume in itself to be fully developed.
• [15]
  The study by U. Almagor (1977) is a fine illustration of this confrontation among the Dassenetch (Marile) people. See also R.Waller (2010) work on the Maasai.
• [16]
  Apart from the fact that it is echoed in Johnson’s (1991) research in South Sudan, to mention but one example, this detour into political ecology is a deliberate move away from the pastoral centrism fashionable at one time, and which was an obstacle to any true understanding of real and existing situations (Spear & Waller 1993).
• [17]
  Age- and generation-graded societies cease to be predominant when other principles come into play, for example, the chiefdoms of Tanzania, the kingdoms of the Great Lakes, South Sudan and of Ethiopia, the Swahili city-states. Intermediary forms exist, for example, among the Chagga of Kilimanjaro (Raum 1996) or the Nuer of South Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1968). Elsewhere, traces of the warrior ethos of age-grade societies, and sometimes more, can be found, as in the Nyakyusa in Tanzania (Wilson 1963), and in the Comoros (Blanchy 2009)—an indication that these forms of political organization used to be far more widespread.
• [18]
  Since the 1970s, AK47s have become the main weapon of preference, but this has not rendered the traditional weapons obsolete.
• [19]
  The calendar age here is just an indication. The old Meru have a different concept of the passage of time (Peatrik 1999, 62–69).
• [20]
  Similar parallel arrangements existed amongst the women, through various forms of adoption.
• [21]
  Wood (1999) studied the connection between androgyny and the exercising of religious functions, in particular the d’abella stage in the Gabbra people.
• [22]
  Although I do not have any specific ethnographical data on this, it is quite acceptable to make a connection between the postmortem erection that often follows a violent death and the conceptions surrounding reproductive energy. In any case, this is certainly the thinking behind the Borana warriors’ practice of bringing the severed male pudenda of the enemy back to their fiancées.
• [23]
  In his work on childbirth mortality in Niger, J-P.Olivier de Sardan (1999) draws attention to this woman’s exclamation: “Giving birth is like a battle, like a war. Any woman, who has been pregnant and given birth and who has not gone down on her knees to thank God, can no longer be a believer.”
• [24]
  In his analysis of the Borana male age grades, comparable to those of the Meru, R. Hazel (1999, 328) offers the following distinctions: “latent virility (dabale stage), pastoral virility (controlling the herds in the bush), warrior virility, procreative virility, and finally sacrosanct virility.”