Who Do the Ngimurok Say That They Are?

A Phenomenological Study of Turkana Traditional Religious Specialists in Turkana, Kenya

Lines

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498298032
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

How do missiologists describe the cosmologies of those that Christianity encounters around the world? Our descriptions often end up filtered through our own Western religious categories. Furthermore, indigenous Christians adopt these Western religious categories. This presents the problem of local Christianities, described by Kwame Bediako as those that "have not known how to relate to their traditional culture in terms other than those of denunciation or of separateness."Kevin Lines's phenomenological study of local religious specialists in Turkana, Kenya, not only challenges our Western categories by revealing a more authentic complexity of the issues for local Christians and Western missionaries, but also provides a model for continued use of phenomenology as a valued research method in larger missiological studies. Additionally, this study points to the ways that local Christians and traditional religious practitioners interpret Western missionaries through local religious categories.Clearly, missionaries, missiologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars need to do a much more careful job of studying and describing the contextually specific phenomena of traditional religious specialists before relying on meta-categories that come out of our Western theology or older overly simplified ethnographies. The research from this current study of Turkana religious specialists begins that process in the Turkana context and offers a model for future studies in contexts where traditional religion and Christianity intersect.

1

Introduction to the Problem of Ngimurok

Introduction

Christian faith among the Turkana people of northwest Kenya is currently varied and intermingled with traditional Turkana religious practices. During my eight years of living among the Turkana people of northwest Kenya, my experience was that many people, both Christian and non-Christian, continued to be heavily influenced by traditional religious specialists called ngimurok.1 While this influence seemed clear, numerous inconsistencies would present themselves, especially in light of Western missionaries and Turkana church leaders consistently teaching that ngimurok are dangerous, received their powers from the Evil One (Ekipe), Satan, and needed to be avoided. Yet, just as persistently, Turkana ngimurok continued to be sought out and consulted, even by many Christians, for a multitude of reasons: when there is an illness in the family, when animals become ill, when ancestors speak to the family through possession, when sacrifices and prayers are required for rain, before participating in a cattle raid, when animals are lost, when curses are cast, and at other times for various reasons. But in spite of these arguably benevolent roles ngimurok are known to play in the community, a tension remains between the traditional roles of the ngimurok and the doctrines of the Christian churches in Turkana.2

One controversial example is found in the person of Nayoken,3 an emuron with the ability to “read” tobacco leaves in the Kachala village near to where the Kalabata and Kerio rivers join. Church leaders from a nearby village would visit Nayoken’s village for times of informal teaching and worship centered on Scripture and God’s revelation of salvation through Jesus. Eventually an evangelistic event took place in Kachala, with nearly everyone accepting the message of Jesus together after four days of teaching, fellowship, the sharing of meals, and worship. Clear teaching was presented concerning the evils of ngimurok, with everyone mindful that Nayoken was himself an emuron. On the day when a decision was called for, there was little discussion; Nayoken and the other Turkana elders from the village decided to become Christians. Including the emuron Nayoken and the other elders, 130 people were baptized the week before Christmas, 2002, in the village of Kachala.

During regular Turkana church leader meetings and discussions I attended in 2003, Nayoken was mentioned numerous times. He was well known for his ability to answer people’s questions by reading tobacco leaves. People would hire trucks in the town of Lodwar, the district capital, and travel the difficult four-hour, 110 kilometer, trip into the “bush” to ask questions of Nayoken and pay for his services. The church leaders did not think he should continue his emuron practices as a Christian and requested that I go with them to talk to him. Although old, Nayoken was a very strong man, both physically and intellectually, and thus was more intimidating than many ngimurok I have met. His response to the request to stop the emuron practices was simple: it was Akuj, the creator God, who gave him the ability to read tobacco leaves, and he saw no reason to stop using an ability that God had given him.

Even after repeated visits (some were concerning this issue, but most were for teaching and worship in the community), the issue was not resolved in the minds of the Turkana church leaders. To this day, Turkana church leaders do not know what to do with Nayoken. He supports the church, attends most worship services held in his village, and his family is comprised of some very strong, faithful Christians; and although a leader in his community, his continued practice as an emuron is outwardly prohibited by the church and does not allow him to be recognized or trained as an official church leader.4

Reflecting on these difficulties, I began to notice other inconsistencies between Western missionaries’ Christian profession of faith and the daily practices of Turkana Christians in the Turkana context. While Turkana Christians agreed in church that ngimurok were evil and to be avoided, it seemed that the ngimurok still played an influential positive role in many of the small rural communities where a majority of the people had become Christians. Paul Hiebert, Tite Tiénou and Daniel Shaw recognize this as a common occurrence throughout the world, wherever traditional religion is practiced: “people who become Christians continue to turn to shamans, diviners, medicine men, witch doctors and magicians to deal with their everyday problems of life.”5

Many missiologists6 follow Hiebert, Tiénou, and Shaw in describing this condition as “split-level Christianity”: a form of Western Christianity adopted in non-Western contexts that focuses on the official teachings of the church but lacks the provision of answers to contextual problems, leading to simultaneously continued practice of folk beliefs, often hidden from the church leaders.7 Hiebert, Shaw, and Tiénou suggest that while our first reaction to traditional religious practices that seem to contradict the gospel is a desire to “stamp them out,” this would only lead to the practices being further hidden, making them even more difficult to address. The goal of missionaries and church leaders should not be to stamp out wrong practices, “but to transform churches into living communities where the gospel is heard and applied to all of life.”8 Christ has the power to transform and answer the questions raised by traditional religion, but the “answers must be rooted in a biblical, not an animistic, worldview.”9

From my years in Turkana as a missionary, and this subsequent research, my estimation is that Western missionaries and Turkana church leaders have tried to “stamp out” the role of the ngimurok in the lives of Turkana, but have been unsuccessful at either the stamping out or the equipping of the church to deal with the epistemological foundations that ngimurok symbolize in Turkana. Christian communities in Turkana have learned to relate to their traditional religion in patterns of “denunciation or of separateness” while “dialogue has been distinctively absent.”10 For Bediako, this was the pattern of mission in Africa, clearly defined when the Edinburgh 1910 ...