Adjective
Pronunciation: XXX
A disgusting bad smell or taste so extreme it makes you gag or want to vomit. 

Examples of things that are kelili are rotten food, donkey’s milk, and the smell of rancid fat and sweat emanating from women’s bead necklaces that have been polished with butter or rubbed with sheep fat or ghee to protect against lice. Beads cleaned with cow or goat fat tend not to get as stinky. 

Kelili can be the taste of milk fermented in a poorly prepared lmala. This milk tends to be super keirapirap (astringent) and is usually attributed to the careless work of a woman who is nkalani (sloppy, slovenly, and dirty).

“That is alani but still developed to kule nawato, with flies or cockroaches in it.” — Robin Leparsanti, Longhiro Lekudere, in conversation with William Rubel, April 1, 2016.

Return to Milk Taste and Texture terms.

This is the draft manuscript of the Samburu Milk Project, © 2024 William Rubel. 

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Published by William Rubel

I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.

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