Kuria seers

AbstractIn pre-colonial times ‘seers’, abarooti, played an important role in the political and especially in the military organisation of Kuria, harassed as they were by neigh-bouring Maasai and other Kuria. Seers foretold and in effect planned cattle raids undertaken by warriors, but they also acted more generally to warn of impending events and thus to influence the course of political action. They were distinguished by their more public role from diviners but theirs was not a formal office and it drew upon personal qualities, individual success and local renown. Their predictive ability was identified as ‘dreaming’ (okoroota) but the term is used freely in a metaphorical as well as literal sense. Seers varied considerably in their status and field of influence. The introduced term omonaabi, ‘prophet’, was in use by the 1950s to describe the more outstanding seers of the past, and they were credited with foretelling many of the circumstances that Kuria were later to experience. But by then it was only their prophecies and not they themselves, or their role, that had survived. A short postscript comments on the circumstances and use of these terms in 1990.