This dictionary of Northern Maa — specifically, of milk-related terms — was created over about ten years of intermittent visits to the Samburu Lowlands in Kenya. Roughly 260,000 people speak this version of Maa.
Dictionaries and a written literary tradition do not exist for this language. Some linguists record Maa, but do so using their own specialized alphabet and phonetic rules. A variety of Christian sects from the United States and Europe have Bible translation projects that require a written version of Maa, but no single accepted system exists. Samburu friends once showed me a Bible they had recently acquired. While I was able to read it aloud, they were not — and this was interesting to them as well as to me. Both friends are university educated and read and write English fluently. Clearly, something is wrong with that Bible’s spelling of Maa words. Native speakers stumble over it because it doesn’t accurately represent their language, while I can at least make sounds they understand. Literate Samburu have opinions about how words should be spelled, but they don’t always agree with each other. In seventeenth-century British texts, it is not uncommon to find the same word spelled differently in different instances; as English spelling had not yet been standardized at the time, different authors spelled words differently. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in Britain (1755), and Noah Webster’s dictionary in America more than 70 years later (1828), went a long way to standardize English spelling. In a quest to simplify and logicize spelling and to differentiate American English from the British version, Webster made numerous (though functionally minor) changes to a few words, such as “standardize.” Webster thought the “z” sound ought to be represented by a “z,” while the British continue to happily prounounce a “z” for the “s” in their “standardise” today. For the orthography in this Samburu dictionary, I have gone with the consensus amongst my Samburu friends. I have also recorded several native speakers saying the words, which I have posted on the internet so linguists and lexicographers can hear what the words actually sound like.
The biggest problem in developing a dictionary from a language that has neither a full lexicon of its own, nor a body of literature to draw nuance from, is that one is entirely dependent on oral speech, and that oral speech is via an English that itself might not be fluent, or which may have acquired its own idiosyncratic meanings. Tastes are notoriously difficult to articulate. Hence, the specialized and easily ridiculed vocabulary of the wine trade with its “blackberry and a hint of oak” — flavors few of us can clearly recognize and, even if we could when isolated, cannot differentiate them amongst the blend of flavors that is a sip of wine. That said, we have described by analogy: comparing one flavor with another to help clarify taste terms that lack direct analogues in English. Salty, sour, and bitter are easy — salt is salty; yogurt is sour; orange rind is bitter — because there is a cross-cultural understanding of these fundamental tongue-tastes. The difficulty comes when we encounter words for which we don’t have an English analogue. Probably the most frustrating Samburu word for us is keisukut, which is the taste of milk in the final state of sourness. The curds have solidified. If you don’t soon do something with it, the milk goes off and becomes kong’u (spoiled and inedible). The Samburu kept using “salty” to describe this term and, indeed, this is how it is defined in Jon Holtzman’s book on Samburu food. It took years of visits to tease out that there is no salty taste in keisiicho, but something more akin to the bitterness of the pith of an orange combined with an intense sourness.
I have done my best to reflect the understanding of my Samburu friends and informants. The culture is changing so rapidly that already a great deal has been lost since 2000, and like elsewhere, change is accelerating — humans are good at change in response to changing conditions. Short walks from Lengusaka, Wamba, Lodomoque, and other towns bring you to settlements and a way of life that seems eternal. But profound changes have already occurred, precipitated by the twin forces of ecological degradation and economic development. The loss of Samburu cow herds began with the drought of 1984, and has continued with each subsequent drought. Each of the major dry spells can be understood as a lottery. The cows are moved from drier places to wetter places. If your cows are well positioned to move to good pasture, and if the path to that pasture you choose has enough forage and water, then you win. If your path doesn’t work out, or the place you aim for can no longer support your cows once they get there, then you lose. In the conditions of the deep droughts, when you lose, you lose everything — dropping from 200 cows to zero. And it isn’t possible to build back. Demand for forage from goats and sheep is relentless. The land’s carrying capacity is reduced with each severe drought, as the land is both structurally damaged and its recovery retarded by continued grazing pressure. And thus, over the last thirty years, the cow-based pastoralism of the Samburu has been reduced to what it is today: at best, a peripheral economic and social activity.
Because the Samburu milk culture is cow-centric, the virtual elimination of cow milk from the Samburu diet has meant an erosion of milk-related connoisseurship and cultural practices. Once we recognized this, we began to focus our research on older women, the only people understood to still retain deep, milk-related cultural knowledge. Even then, lacking practice with cow milk, it is very possible that some of the data collected for this dictionary is derived from memories that may be a decade or more old. This is probably a general problem with all ethnographic or dialect dictionaries collected towards the end of cultural cycles.
As the cultural practices that underpin the Samburu milk-related culinary vocabulary, and, in fact, as Northern Maa itself is under pressure, we have made an effort to offer comparisons between words so that we can at least preserve some of the relationships between them to retain cultural information that will otherwise be lost.
Acknowledgements
These native Samburu speakers helped greatly with this project. In July, 2022, over a dozen people came to help push me over the top, completing aspects of my Samburu milk project that had seemed impossible to finish.
Longhiro Lekudere
Robin Leparsanti
More
Use the following links to explore additional content collected through the Samburu Milk Project.
Introduction to the Samburu Milk Project
Stages of Milk Fermentation
Milk Taste and Texture Terms
Botanicals for Lmala Preparation
The Culture of Milk — Idioms and Expressions
Other Samburu Words
Milk, Music and Religion — scheduled completion in late 2025
Milking Songs — scheduled completion in late 2025
This is the draft manuscript of the Samburu Milk Project, © 2024 William Rubel.
Samburu Research 