The name is absent

chanting. The purification and rain ceremony was not directed to one person but
conducted for the entire community.⁴⁴

Joseph Muthiani explains cleansing as a process engraved into society as
a means to maintain balance:

“...purification concerned incidents in everyday life, personal or public. Public
incidents resulting in such observations were usually failures to observe
certain customs and traditions. Such failures were charged with the
responsibility of causing public disasters like a great famine, a bad epidemic
disease, and the like.”⁴

Purification ceremonies persist in some communities as a strategy for managing
the environment.⁴⁶ Purification is also used broadly to combat other unseen
forces that could endanger the community or individual. With this background it is
now helpful to consider how purification was understood across time.

Pre-Colonial Purification in Kenya

Purification ceremonies were pervasive in pre-colonial Kenya as a
strategy to maintain protection and environmental harmony. Although some of
the first written works on purification ceremonies surfaced increasingly after 1890
with European contact, oral tradition accounts suggest that these practices were
just as old as traditions associated with initiation, death, and birth. Gerhard
Lindblom provided one of the most detailed accounts on the purification process

⁴⁴Talla. KangundoDistrict. “Purification and Rainmaking Ceremony.” December 2008. Video tape
recording and notes. The ceremony consisted of an actual rainmaking ceremony responding to the drought
in 2008.

⁴⁵ Joseph Muthiani, Akamba From Within: Egalitarianism in Social Relations, (New York: Exposition
Press. 1973), 101.

⁴⁶Talla. KangundoDistrict “Purification and Rainmaking Ceremony.” December 2008. Video tape
recording and notes.

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