Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana

Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana. By Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler. (University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. xxi + 365, preface, acknowledgements, list of illustrations, maps, photographs, introduction, conclusion, notes, bibliography, glossary of places and selected works, index. $24.47 paper, $56.00 cloth, $34.95 ebook.)Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler has produced a stimulating and wideranging consideration of the ways that storytelling traditions knit together many levels of a society's past and present. Before continuing this review I must also clarify that my field of expertise is the study of storytelling traditions from northern Zambia, amongst Bemba-speaking groups, and my work focuses more on oral art forms than it does on ethnographic or anthropological concerns. Further, my knowledge of the Turkana and Jie cultures is at best minimal and so I must leave the evaluation of the specific cultural observations and claims in this monograph to specialists in these societies.Having said this, I find much of what Professor Mirzeler asserts about these oral narrative forms to be compelling, often overlapping with my own observations of storytelling traditions. He does a good job of describing the many and varied cultural interactions that characterized his field work with the Jie and Turkana in these neighboring but ecologically diverse locations. Mirzeler specifies how he learned the various languages and the degree to which he depended on linguistic assistance from his local colleagues. His research was also characterized by traveling much of this region on foot and relying on the people he visited and lived with to provide him with lodging and food. This suggests the degree of intimacy and depth of local knowledge that informed his collection of stories and information.The book is divided into four parts and seven chapters. Part I focuses on introducing readers to the people Mirzeler works with in this study, including historical and cultural descriptions. The second chapter in this section provides an excellent and detailed portrait of storytelling amongst the Jie and Turkana, with focus on important functions of providing etiological roots for current practices and historical claims as well as the physical dynamics of oral performances. A key and recurring idea that is developed here is the close narrative parallels between history, biography, and folktales, both in substance and in form. The central narrative of the study and, by extension, of these people is the story of the young woman Nayeche who escapes famine and a difficult home life by following the trail of the magical and seminal Gray Bull Engiro. In one form or another, elements of this tale are overlain in varying permutations onto the cultural lives of the Jie and Turkana. An important claim here that recurs later in the book is the versatile and often flexible nature of the details in these narratives, as they are utilized by individual storytellers to make different assertions over time.The three chapters of Part II take different angles at the central question of where oral traditions intersect with and shape concepts and expressions of history, memory, and landscape. These concerns are examined in their real world applications to conflict resolution, firming up social practices, aligning of the several ethnic groups across time and physical terrain, and ecologies. …

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