PHD-Department of History, Archaeology and Political Studies

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Browsing PHD-Department of History, Archaeology and Political Studies by Subject "1800-1965"

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    Religious Experience of the Kalenjin of Kerio-Valley Cultural Complex, Kenya, 1800-1965
    (Kenyatta University, 2023-09) Shiyuka, Elvis Karani; Gimode Edwin; Biegon Eliud
    This study explores the religious history of the Kalenjin people living in the Kerio- Valley Cultural Complex of Kenya. It overturns the conventional understanding, in religious studies, which portrays African religions as static and ahistorical entities, by introducing the theoretical dimension of agency. This revisionist interpretation presents the ancestors of the Kalenjin as creative agents who transformed their religion by absorbing ideas from other ethnic groups, in the Kerio-Valley, during interactions and infusing them into their culture. When confronted with new religious ideas, during cultural interactions, the ancestors of the Kalenjin engaged the repertoires of their past, projected hypothetical pathways in time, and adjusted their actions to meet the problems of emerging historical moments. This agentic intervention inevitably led to the fusion of ideas from various temporalities, the past and their present, to formulate syncretism. This study thus speaks to Africa‟s wider struggle for self-invention and self-definition that is at the center of the decoloniality movement. It is an attempt to demonstrate the African agency in religious change by examining how the Kalenjin navigated through the different religious universes presented to them, during interactions with their neighbours including the autochthonous groups, Ateker, Masaian groups, and later with western Christianity. This study used primary sources of data, especially oral traditions and archival materials, and secondary sources to examine how the Kalenjin used their agentic power to negotiate through the different ways of explaining cosmological meaning in their history.