Capturing khandi: For the young men in Northern Kenya, initiation is no joke

After three days on the road, we arrive in Korr in the scrublands of northern Kenya, not far from the shores of Lake Turkana. It is a secluded and dusty settlement, which grew out of an Italian mission station established in the 1980s; a cluster of kiosks, squat houses, and camels waiting to be sold. There is neither electricity nor piped water.

Our car is laden with tents, fuel, food supplies – everything we’ll need for a month in the bush, we hope. But Korr is not its usual quiet self. All around us is the hum of expectation, and every now and then, as if out of nowhere, a band of young men come marching by dressed in animal skins that have been smeared with a thick coat of charcoal, singing together in call and response and fluttering their hands over their mouths with a sort of hypnotic vigour.

When we enquire, with the last of our energy, as to what, exactly, they are singing, we are told nonchalantly: “They are calling for anyone among them who is afraid of the blade to flee this land, and to never return.” Within a few weeks, these young men will have been circumcised, and khandi, a rite of passage that all Rendille men must undergo, will be over for another 14 years.

After their circumcision, the initiates will form an age-set – a social grouping in which they will remain for the rest of their lives, gradually rising through the ranks in seniority as the oldest surviving age-sets disappear and new ones emerge. Every 14 years is another step up. One day, they will sit with their grandchildren, or perhaps even with a band of interested visitors, and list the generations that came before them, just as men from the Ilkichili age-set do for us on our arrival, all the way back to the Ilkubuku, who underwent khandi in the 1860s.

But this ceremony is not just about status. For generations it has also been a doorway to warriorhood. Historically, it was the job of the most recently circumcised age-set – the moran – to defend their community from enemy raiders. They are not permitted to marry or settle down until the next generation are nearing the time of their circumcision.

The importance of this warrior class cannot be understated. Northern Kenya’s recent history is one of political and economic exclusion. It was only in 2012 that power was devolved to newly formed county administrations across Kenya; before this, successive governments were distant and inaccessible. The “Northern Frontier District”, a term that dates back to colonial times, remained in common parlance, carrying with it the implication that this region is nothing but a lawless buffer zone with little arable land and no resources.

For a community like the Rendille, which is much smaller than many neighbouring ethnic groups, a warrior class was simply a necessity – a form of social protection. Support never came from anywhere else.

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We are invited to set up our camp beside the Saale clan, who have themselves only recently constructed a village by a dry riverbed – khandi, we are told, must be done in a new place, somewhere the clan has never settled before. All around, boreholes are densely packed with herders negotiating access to water for their animals. It is the dry season, and herds of camels, cattle and donkeys that would otherwise be grazing distant pastures wait agitatedly for their only drink of the day.

At night we are invited into the central enclosure of the village, a sacred place called the naabo, which we can only enter through invitation. While our assignment is well known to our hosts, we stand one by one to give them a fuller account. Should it be acceptable, we say, we are here to document khandi for future generations, to create an archive for an open-access repository at the British Museum, work that is funded by the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. The mood is one of approval and encouragement, but a request is made: should the need arise, can we use our vehicle to transport initiates to the nearest clinic for medical attention? Of course, we say.

It is only over the ensuing days that we come to realise how demanding it will be to honour this pledge. Khandi is, after all, an extremely physically demanding trial. Initiates are required to live in the bush for a total of two months in the run-up to their circumcision, then for another month after it. During this time, they drink no water at all, only milk, and their diet consists primarily of meat, which they ceremonially beg for from friends and family.

Night after night, often in the early hours, we drive young men who have collapsed from dehydration or exhaustion to a small clinic on the outskirts of Korr, where a heroic doctor wakes up to plug IV drips into their arms and hand out medicine. When other clans begin circumcising their initiates (there are nine in total, and they do not circumcise on the same day) we are called to incidents of excessive bleeding, and we take young men to get stitches. Khandi is no game.

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Irbaley Ilmodi is the man who has been charged with organising khandi for the Saale clan this time round. He sets the process out for us in detail. “Soon,” he says, “the initiates will be told to go and collect two flat stones from the mountains, the stones upon which they will be circumcised. Then they will be sent to collect water, which will be used to shave their heads. In the meantime, elders from Saale will petition men from the Tubcha clan to come to perform the operation: it cannot be performed by any other clan.”

Every element of the event has been meticulously planned. There is an order that must be adhered to, just as there is an order to an expansive web of other rites and observances that, since anyone can remember, have organised the whole life of this community, from one month to the next. There are ceremonies to bless the new moon, others to protect the herds of camels, others to bring rain. If they are not undertaken on their specific days, in strict accordance with the rules, it is believed that misfortune will ensue.

“Around the time when the Ilkiroro age-set began to marry [in the early 1990s],” Irbaley says, “the rain began to change. Everything was suddenly more uncertain. The dry seasons grew longer and longer. People began to ask, ‘what have we done to bring on this badness?’”

The answer, he tells us, is that disunity and division spilled out into the world and made everything more precarious. “People argued and broke apart; they began to follow different rituals: one side followed theirs, the other followed theirs. That is why drought is so common now. But when camels begin to starve, and cows begin to die, and goats too, then people starve and grow thin, and they begin to shout, to say, ‘Lets pull together again, and be as one. Let’s leave the badness behind and search for good things.’”

The observance of customs here has never been about mindless convention or habit. For generations, this community has stuck together in solidarity in the face of chronic marginalisation, looking only inward for the answers to its problems. Its calendar of rites and institutions is as much a social bedrock as it is a spiritual one. Through it, people have been woven together in lifetime bonds of fellowship, which become even more critical during times of scarcity.

In the present era of climatic volatility, when everything seems less certain, it is small wonder that many point to the correlating fragmentation of a different, metaphysical world.

Hand in hand with prolonged droughts, this last decade has brought sweeping economic and infrastructural transformations to northern Kenya. A pristine tarmac road now passes within 30 miles of Korr, and telecommunications infrastructure has expanded around it. The world of social media lies at the fingertips of younger generations with smart phones, who now increasingly attend school and university. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is home to a large community of young Rendille professionals who are pursuing careers that are totally alien to their parents and many of their peers.

It is this metropolitan community that has largely spearheaded the Rendille Cultural Heritage Organisation, a group channelling existential anxieties about Rendille life and identity into social action. Lately, they have pushed to promote an older Rendille age-set naming system that was abandoned in favour of that of the neighbouring Samburu.

This is the context in which khandi is taking place this time round – 14 years and a whole universe away from what life was like during the last circumcision. A rate and scale of change that, on the surface, make the ceremony seem like a memento being clung onto; something passive and fragile that is being protected from the overwhelming pressure of the outside world. But this could not be further from the truth.

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When we return from filming the initiates collecting their stones (a journey of several miles, which, to our consternation, they take at a jogging pace) we find the senator for the whole of Marsabit County addressing the community. He has come to explain that he and the governor have delivered food for those undertaking khandi this year, to help them in the last weeks of their trial. It is an obvious tactic to buttress relations with the Rendille voting bloc, in what is an ethnically and politically complicated county.

In this moment, the superficial layers of khandi’s exterior begin to peel away, revealing it not as a timeless institution but a decidedly modern one, inextricably entangled with contemporary politics. “You know the people did not move here on their own for this ceremony,” we are informed by some of those who have gathered to listen to the politician. “The whole village was moved here; he sent lorries to carry everyone’s belongings.”

Other office-holders and political aspirants have funded medical equipment and sterile solution for the day of the circumcision, and in the main village of the Saale clan, fluttering outside the naabo itself, the Kenyan flag has been erected on a mast, not by anyone from the government but by the local community leaders themselves. It is a clear statement: you want power? Here is its source.

There is no question that, since devolution began in 2012, the government has got a lot closer to communities across northern Kenya. And perhaps it is also true that the days of self-reliance, and a warrior class defending the population from outside aggression, have passed. But this rite of passage is no less vital than it has ever been. Khandi remains the only path to elderhood that a man can take in this land – the only path to being listened to.

And surprisingly enough, this ceremony and all its political potency is not only about men. Amina Galboran, who originally came from the Dubsai clan but moved to Korr to set up a small business nine years ago, emphasises that khandi is shouldered by the whole community. Women make it possible as much as men, and in recognising its importance they are by no means eschewing a leading role in local development or politics.

“Since devolution, Korr’s growth has been led by women,” Amina says. “I came here nine years ago when things were very different; all I had was my intelligence. Now you’ll find that most of the shops in Korr are run by women – there would be nothing here otherwise. There are women standing for election too, in Logo-Logo and Khargi...”

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The day before the main event, the initiates sit down inside their families’ camel pens to have their heads shaved by their parents. Irbaley paces back and forth from house to house, his phone ringing constantly. The tension is palpable.

Just outside the village, members of different households have come together to build a structure called the gaim, the place where the young men will be circumcised. But for such a critical feature of this protracted event, there is very little pomp or fanfare to its construction. Brush is casually dragged to the spot and propped up into the shape of a dome, resting in small trenches dug with machetes and knives. It is all surprisingly nonchalant.

But then, there is no simple line here between what is ritual and what is mundane. There never has been. These two realms bleed into each other in the present moment. Everything from rain to politics is fathomed out through repeating patterns of performance that reach back through generations. Archetypal motifs such as sacrifice, trial and rebirth are not relegated to religious scripture and myth. They are made real, in the here and now.

When dawn breaks the next morning, the young men form a quiet line outside the gaim. Everything that happens now will be remembered; if you look away or make a sound during the procedure, they have been told, it will stay with you for the rest of your life. As will the two companions who accompany you into the structure, one of them to hold your head in place so that you do not divert your eyes, and the other to hold your legs. The roles these two men play will be woven into your life story.

Chorodo Maalimo was circumcised with the last generation, 14 years ago. Looking back, he’s come to see that it’s these bonds formed between peers that make khandi so important. “Nowadays there are more and more people deciding to go and get circumcised in the hospital, without doing khandi,” he says. “That’s fine, but those people never reach the same esteem amongst their peers. They are not treated the same, because it’s like they haven’t seen anything.”

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Maalimo now plies his trade transporting passengers around with his motorbike. Unlike many of his friends, he has not devoted his life to looking after livestock and travelling far out to the more remote parts of the region in search of fodder. But this has done nothing to fray the relationships he forged all those years ago, or to erode his position in the Ilmitili age-set, because he was there when it mattered.

When he does not have enough cash to buy medicine or pay school fees for family members, his khandi network is his first port of call. Among his generation, WhatsApp groups emerge and disappear on a weekly basis. Money is raised via the “Mpesa” mobile money platform, popular across Kenya, and sent to those facing tough times. There is nothing allegorical or mysterious about the power of an age-set.

Almost as quickly as it has started, it is over. Two months of preparation are concluded in minutes. Those who have come to perform the operation are commended for their speed and accuracy. In the past, they were paid with one goat per circumcision; these days it is cash – the equivalent of £20 per initiate. Some of this money has been raised in advance by family members working far away, in towns and cities across Kenya. A lump sum is handed to the elders to help foot the bill.

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Every initiate has a new pair of shoes made for them out of cow hide, and then a bow and arrows. Their final month will be spent wandering in the bush again, hunting wild birds, whose feathers they will use to make headdresses. More ceremonies will ensue in the months and years ahead, establishing their age-set’s name, and cementing it into Rendille history.

In the end, it is this – the telling of history – that makes khandi so urgent and so necessary today. Because this new age-set is also a whole new era in a timeline that is particular to this place and this people. On the surface, the ceremony may well be about preserving a particular social order or wrangling over political power, but underneath all this, on a much more fundamental level, it is another chapter in a local chronicle of change – one that contextualises everything taking place in the present day, however tumultuous it may be.

The 21st century has already brought radical economic and political transformation to this land. Children across northern Kenya will inherit new connections, learn new languages, and become custodians of new information; they will carve out a new place in the world for their communities.

For many here, the question is not whether this integration should take place, but whether it must also mean assimilation. Histories written far away have always painted this region as passive and unchanging; they have sought to contain it without understanding it. The drive to continue khandi does not stem from a common impression of how or what the future should be – only a conviction about whose terms it should be built upon.