Yatani Rassa

Gabra Historical Texts (1978-1982) Number: GHT031

 

Rageh

November 13, 1981

INTERVIEWED BY: Paul W. Robinson TRANSLATION BY: Mamo Barako & Sora Budha Godana

 ““Ahad. Ahad ka adun dote—the Sunday year in which the sun died. It died in the morning. Most of the people were at Gorai. It became dark to the people at Boqe. When the people said, ‘Where are the animals?’ it became morning again. It became morning just like as we are talking now.” 

(Yatani Rassa) 

Biography

I interviewed Yatani Rassa at Rageh, the broad, sandy, and largely waterless plain between Kalacha and North Horr, in November 1981, just after completing the series of conversations I have come to think of as “The Balessa Interviews.” Dabasso Idho (GHT002, GHT003, GHT025, and GHT026) had advised me to seek him out. Almost by accident we found his encampment shortly before I was due to leave the region. Although I met Yatani only once, our conversation became one of the most memorable in this collection.  

Like Yatani Sorale, Yatani Rassa possessed an impressive command of the Gabra calendar and the sequence of named years through which historical events were remembered. He could not extend the chronology as far into the past as Sorale, but within the years he did know, his memory was exceptionally detailed. More importantly, he contributed something distinctive. Where other elders helped establish the framework of chronology, Yatani Rassa filled that framework with lived experience. His recollections gave movement, sound, people, and place to the succession of named years. 

Throughout our conversation, events such as droughts and abundant rains, epidemics and livestock diseases, migrations and warfare appear alongside births, deaths, marriages, particular individuals, remembered sayings, and incidents of everyday pastoral life. A year was seldom on its own a mere mere chronological marker. A named year might call forth the place where people were living, the condition of their animals, an encounter with enemies, the building of a house, the death of a particular person, or an event that had become memorable enough to give the year its name.  

By the time I met Yatani, I had spent several years listening to elders across northern Kenya and had become increasingly familiar with the chronological world through which they remembered their past. This conversation consequently unfolded with an unusual fluency. I could move with him through sequences and events that would have been unfamiliar to me several years earlier, asking questions, testing relationships among remembered years, and comparing his recollections with what I had learned from others. 

What emerged was not simply another chronology, but a richly inhabited past. Yatani Rassa remembered years through the lives lived within them. 

 

Interview Summary

Yatani Rassa’s interview, recorded at Rageh in November 1981, was one of the culminating chronological conversations of my 1978–1981 field sessions. Organized around the sequence of named Gabra years, it ranged across much of Yatani’s remembered lifetime and into events he had learned from earlier generations. 

Yatani’s narrative began with years and events before Tite Guracha, the devastating cattle epidemic remembered elsewhere in these interviews, and proceeded year by year through a dense succession of environmental and social events. Yatani recalled periods of abundant rain and severe drought, epidemics among people and livestock, migrations in search of water and pasture, warfare with neighboring peoples, colonial encounters, and the deaths and movements of particular individuals and communities.  

What distinguishes the conversation is the density of experience Yatani was able to attach to these chronological markers. Years repeatedly opened into stories. Yatani recounted where people and animals were living, what happened when rains failed, how livestock responded to disease or hunger, where communities fled during conflict, and the particular people whose lives or deaths became associated with a given year. Even family events—a marriage or the building of a house—could help him locate a year within remembered time.  

His account of Ahad ka adun dote, the Sunday year of the solar eclipse, illustrates this quality particularly well. Yatani remembered not simply an eclipse but an experienced event: darkness falling during the morning, people wondering where their animals were, and daylight returning again. That astronomical event became part of social memory because people experienced it together within the ordinary circumstances of pastoral life.  

Throughout the interview, rainfall was one of Yatani’s principal measures of a year, but “rain” was never merely meteorological. Its significance lay in what followed: plenty or hunger, healthy animals or livestock mortality, staying put or moving, conditions of security or vulnerability. Rainfall varied sharply from place to place, and Yatani repeatedly located environmental memory geographically rather than treating conditions as uniform across Gabra country. 

Conflicts with Rendille and other neighboring peoples, livestock raiding, the arrival of armed forces, and flight from threatened areas also appear throughout the chronology. These events were presented alongside marriages, births, household movements, livestock conditions, and ordinary pastoral decisions. Conflicts were was part of the lived circumstances through which particular years became memorable.  

Near the end of the interview, our conversation turned from individual named years toward longer chronological cycles. Here Yatani worked through sequences extending beyond the familiar seven weekday names, attempting to locate the present within longer recurring patterns. This final exchange connected his richly detailed memories of particular years with a larger system through which Gabra historical time could be ordered across multiple cycles and generations. 

GHT031 offers more than another reconstruction of the Gabra calendar. Yatani Rassa’s chronology is densely populated with people, animals, places, movement, conflict, loss, abundance, and ordinary life. Through his testimony, named years became containers of social experience. 

Conversation notes

I met Yatani Rassa only once. Dabasso Idho had told me that I should speak with him, and finding his encampment at Rageh shortly before I was due to leave the region felt serendipitous. By then I had been conducting these interviews for more than three years. I had learned enough of the Gabra calendar that I could follow Yatani through long sequences of named years, recognize many of the events he mentioned, and ask questions that would have been impossible for me when I began this work. 

Reading the transcript now, I am struck by the fluency of our conversation. We moved rapidly through years, places, droughts, rains, epidemics, battles, migrations, deaths, and remembered individuals. Sometimes another person present supplied a name or corrected a sequence. Sometimes I suggested an association from another interview and Yatani accepted, rejected, or modified it. This conversation was no longer simply a matter of my asking an elder to tell me what he knew. We were able together to explore and expand a chronological landscape that  familiar to both of us. 

And yet, Yatani inhabited that landscape in a way I never could. 

For me, a named year had become a point in a reconstructed chronology. For him, it might contain a place, a drought, a dead camel, an enemy attack, a marriage, someone’s mother building her house, people fleeing toward better pasture, or the morning when the sun disappeared and people wondered where their animals were. His chronology was populated. Time was remembered through what happened to people and animals within specific locations. 

There is another reason this interview has remained unusual for me. I have no photograph of Yatani Rassa. I can only surmise that he asked me not to take one, although after so many years I no longer remember. More unsettlingly, I can no longer summon his face. 

Yet I remember vividly the conversation. 

There is something paradoxical about that. Photographs ordinarily help us recover the person behind the words. Here I have only the words, and they have become their own kind of portrait. Through them I encounterd something of Yatani’s intelligence, his confidence, the movement of his memory, and the world he carried with him. 

Perhaps that is also a reminder of what these historical texts can and cannot preserve. They cannot return an afternoon at Rageh, the faces of everyone who sat there, the gestures accompanying a story, or much of what passed between us beyond the reach of the microphone and transcript. But they can preserve a voice moving through memory. 

I no longer remember Yatani Rassa’s face. But I remember the world he showed me. 

Original Transcript

Transcript (pdf.)

Kenya National Archives Reference

KENYA NATIONAL ARCHIVES KNADS REFERENCE Tape Number: Not located Call Number: Not located Account Number: Not located Sides: Not located