The <i>Irua</i> Ceremony Among the Kikuyu of Kiambu District, Kenya

Bunche, Ralph J.

doi:10.2307/2715049

Cited by 25 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…This implied that the role of environmental conservation when it comes to land was individual, a view which is maintained until today. The traditional land of the Kikuyu community is not supposed to be sold (Bunche, 1941) and, therefore it is preserved according to their rights and rituals. Leakey (1981) explained that the Kikuyu's traditional law provided for the formation of what would now be called forest reserves.…”

Section: The Concept Of Environmental Sustainability Amongst the Kikuyu Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother Earth, Mother Africa & African Indigenous Religions

Matholeni¹,

Boateng²,

Manyonganise³

2020

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Africans embrace all of life, the humanity of each person, the world, and the creation of God. Consequently, the plenitude of African indigenous education reflects the completeness of life itself (Goduka 1999). This volume brings together voices from leading proponents of ATRs and African religious heritage, bonding us all together, to help us appreciate how values are richly entrenched in African religious life. This volume demonstrates the detailed richness of ATRs and culture and showcases how far the academic study of ATRs in Africa has come.

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Section: The Concept Of Environmental Sustainability Amongst the Kikuyu Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother Earth, Mother Africa & African Indigenous Religions

Matholeni¹,

Boateng²,

Manyonganise³

2020

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Section: The Concept Of Environmental Sustainability Amongst the Kikuyu Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

African Imagination of Technology: Examples of Kikuyu and Luhya communities in Kenya

Nyaga¹

2020

Mother Earth, Mother Africa &Amp; African Indigenous Religions

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Community and environmental sustainability are a global concern that calls for the civilised, the professional practitioners, the creative thinkers, and the future world to participate in providing, creating and establishing a sustainable environment. This study aims at stimulating and informing the discussion on the concept of community and environmental sustainability, as well as on how technology has influenced it. It explores African concepts of environmental sustainability with relevant examples from the Kikuyu and the Luhya communities in Kenya. The chapter highlights an African imagination of community and its role in the conservation of natural resources, and the creation of sustainable economic conditions for African communities. A survey was conducted in Roysambu, a small village in Nairobi, Kenya. The study picked a sample of 150 respondents in the area, who were selected using random sampling. One stipulation in this selection was that each of the members of the study sample was either from the Kikuyu or Luhya communities. The study also adopted the diffusion of innovation theory, which explains that over a duration of time, an innovation or idea is adopted by users and spreads in a given social system or population (Rogers, 1983). The study established that it is important for communities to live according to their traditions and values despite the intense technological wave, with the support from the government, in order to create a balance between traditional ways and the technological ways of establishing a sustainable environment.

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“…The customs official required that she register the film camera and then &dquo;he clamped a seal on the camera&dquo; (pp. [116][117] (Bunche, 1941). The intertitles used in the film-&dquo;The candidates are fed Muhia (medicine food) and they dance&dquo;; &dquo;They seek leaves from the sacred Mugumo tree&dquo;; &dquo;Johi-sugar cane liquor-is made (and later drunk)&dquo;; &dquo;The candidates are immersed in the cold mountain stream-the only anaesthetic&dquo;; &dquo;The Muruithiawa-ihii cuts the boy, the Muruithia-wa-irigu the girl&dquo;; &dquo;The victims dash about wildly, blood streaming down&dquo;; and &dquo;The 'surgeons' pose with their instruments&dquo;-only superficially explained the filmed sequences that followed them.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In his field notes, Bunche wrote that the &dquo;Kikuyu think that if circumcision is abolished, their own customs, established by their forefathers-will be destroyed,&dquo; a point mentioned frequently in his 1941 article (RJB Papers, Box 63, February 13,1937). In the article, Bunche (1941) explained that &dquo;by 1903-4 ... serious encroachments on native land [by White settlers] began,&dquo; which destroyed their system of land tenure, &dquo;the most important single factor in the social, political, religious, and economic life of the tribe&dquo; (pp. 47-48).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The ceremony, according to Bunche, represented the efforts of a desperate people to cling to a part of their cultural heritage threatened by destruction. In the 1941 article, Bunche (1941) described attempts by both missionaries and the colonial governments to abolish the circumcision ceremony until &dquo;the rite itself ha[d] become the central symbol of tribal chauvinism and the rallying cry of their cultural loyalty,&dquo; an &dquo;emblem of their national self-assertion and a recompense for lost power&dquo; (p. 52). The film alone neither suggested the importance of the ceremony to the Kikuyus nor conveyed the significance of the ritual as a final assertion of their traditional identity in the face of European pressure to change-themes that, as described earlier, became an integral part of Bunche's investigation during his second visit to Africa.…”

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confidence: 99%

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