Yatani Tocha

Gabra Historical Texts (1978-1982) Number: 007

Dukana

November 3, 1978

INTERVIEWED BY: Paul W. Robinson TRANSLATION BY: Wata Guyo Ibrae  

 “The Gabra, ever since God created them, do not just stay at a place where there is a government police post. They are not interested in these settlements; they look after their animals: goats, sheep, cattle and camels. They look, after these. These animals need food. Water is food and grass is food for these animals, and they follow this food. They take [the animals] to it. If they finish here today, they are taken there. If they finish here, they are taken there. They follow [their animals] to where there is grass or rain. They do not look after them in one place. 

Messages are sent around. Somebody inspects the land. While they are in this place, somebody inspects the land. He inspects there, he inspects there, where there is food – a lot of grass and a lot of water which can satisfy these animals. A message is sent around saying, that place has got [these things], let us move the animals to it. The ola moves to it and settles.” 

Biography

As it was with Yatani Sorale in the Chalbi lowlands, so it was with Yatani Tocha in the Dukana borderlands. After a long and arduous day-long drive over rough tracks, I asked community members who I should interview if I wanted to learn about the past. Without exception, the answer was that I should seek out and speak with Yatani Tocha. 

 

I asked someone to look for him while I spent the following day visiting a group of encampments at Sorr wells, a few kilometers from Dukana. That evening, I returned to find Yatani Tocha waiting for me. We talked late into the evening. His voice was quiet and confident. He was unhesitant.  

Among the elders interviewed during the Gabra Historical Texts project, Yatani Tocha occupies a distinctive place. Many elders possessed deep knowledge of particular events, places, genealogies, rituals, or social relationships. Yatani’s special gift was different. He remembered how events fit together. In that first conversation he immediately demonstrated an unusual ability to organize the past chronologically. Rather than recalling isolated incidents, he reconstructed sequences of named years and connected them to rainfall, drought, migration, conflict, disease, leadership, and settlement. His knowledge extended beyond personal experience into traditions inherited from earlier generations. More importantly, he understood relationships among events. He knew not only what happened, but what followed and why. 

Equally important for me was what I came to recognize as Yatani’s intellectual integrity. Unlike some narrators who felt compelled to provide answers, he readily admitted uncertainty. When he did not know something, he said so. This willingness to distinguish memory from speculation enhanced the reliability of his testimony and reflected a disciplined approach to historical knowledge. 

I met Yatani Tocha again three years later, in 1981. That second conversation confirmed the impressions formed during our first meeting while also revealing a deeper dimension of his historical thinking. For Yatani, years were never simply units of chronology. Each possessed its own character, remembered through distinctive patterns of rainfall, drought, migration, conflict, disease, ritual, or settlement. History was not an abstract sequence of dates but a landscape of lived experience, in which people, animals, land, and climate remained inseparably connected. 

If Ganya Hurri was a storyteller and Dabasso Idho a teacher, Yatani Tocha was something closer to a historical cartographer. He mapped the past. Through his knowledge, scattered memories became chronology, chronology became history, and history became a guide through an uncertain world.  

Finally, I distinctly remember his quiet authority as one who was deeply rooted in pastoral life. He was comfortable and confident in discussing historical events, relationships among neighboring communities, livestock, movement across the landscape, and the practical responsibilities of everyday existence. For Yatani Tocha, history was never abstract chronology. It was the remembered relationships among people, livestock, landscape, and season through which pastoral life was continually lived and renewed. 

Interview Summary

My two conversations with Yatani Tocha focused primarily on historical chronology and the reconstruction of named Gabra years. Across both interviews, he identified significant years through patterns of rainfall, drought, conflict, migration, disease, leadership transitions, and major social events. Rather than recounting isolated stories, he reconstructed sequences of named years and demonstrated how individual events were remembered within a broader historical framework. 

Yatani gave particular attention to the relationship between environmental conditions and human responses. Recounting year after year, Yatani linked rainfall and drought to movement between grazing areas, changes in settlement, encounters with neighboring peoples, livestock losses, episodes of conflict, and periods of cooperation. Ecological history and social history emerged as inseparable dimensions of pastoral life. 

Yatani’s willingness to distinguish clearly between what he knew and what remained uncertain is another notable feature of these interviews. His careful attention to chronology, together with his reluctance to speculate beyond his knowledge, gave the conversations an unusual historical reliability. 

The second interview (GHT026), conducted three years after the first, extended rather than repeating the earlier conversation. Returning to familiar themes, Yatani added further detail, clarification, and reflection. Together the two conversations provide a rich account of how one elder organized historical memory and understood the relationship between environment, society, and time. 

 

 

Conversation notes

Some conversations are valuable because they reveal new information. Others are valuable because they reveal the persistence of memory across time. My two conversations with Yatani Tocha have become demonstrations of both. Interviewed on two occasions several years apart, Yatani emerged as a thoughtful observer of pastoral life whose greatest strength lay not in dramatic storytelling but in the quiet consistency with which he related personal experience to broader historical processes. 

Readers may notice the measured quality of Yatani’s responses. He rarely sought to impress through vivid narrative or sweeping interpretation. Instead, my understanding developed gradually through his careful description and thoughtful recollection. The significance of his observations were most clearly seen in the cumulative picture they created of pastoral life, environmental change, and historical continuity. 

Our second conversation demonstrates the value of returning to an elder after time has passed. Familiar themes reappeared, but within a changed context. Both of us brought to the exchange the experience of our earlier discussions, allowing the conversation to move beyond simple repetition toward deeper understanding. The rapport and trust we had established during our first meeting made possible a more relaxed and reflective exchange, enriching both the historical record and my understanding of Yatani himself. And perhaps his understanding of me. 

Looking back nearly half a century later, it has become clear to me that Yatani Tocha’s greatest contribution extend beyond the historical information contained in these interviews. His conversations illustrate one of the central strengths of long-term ethnographic work. Returning to the same narrator makes it possible to observe not simply what is remembered, but how memory itself continues to mature. Earlier themes are not abandoned; they are revisited, reconsidered, and enriched by additional experience. 

These conversations affirmed to me very early on in my study, that historical knowledge within Gabra society was never carried by a single individual. Like many of the elders represented in this collection, Yatani contributed one part of a larger intellectual tradition. His particular gift was the ordering of time: the ability to relate people, places, and events within a coherent sequence of remembered years. His knowledge complemented that of other elders whose strengths lay elsewhere – in genealogy, ritual, pastoral practice, or oral tradition. Together they illuminated a community in which historical understanding was shared rather than concentrated in a single authority. 

Looking back across the completed collection, Yatani Tocha’s most significant contribution may well be the opportunity his conversations provided me to observe historical memory unfolding over time. Together they reminded me that understanding is rarely complete at the first telling. Like the pastoral journeys he described, conversations themselves return, deepen, and continue. 

Original Transcript

Transcript (pdf.)

Interview Recording

🎧 Listen to interview part 1
🎧 Listen to interview part 2
🎧 Listen to interview part 3

Kenya National Archives Reference