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El Molo people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
El Molo
El Molo woman and baby 1979
Total population
1,104[1]
Regions with significant populations
Languages
El Molo•Samburu
Religion
Waaq,Christianity
Related ethnic groups

TheEl Molo,also known asElmolo,Dehes,Fura-PawaandLdes,are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the northernEastern ProvinceofKenya.They historically spoke theEl Molo languageas a mother tongue, anAfro-Asiaticlanguage of theCushiticbranch, and now most El Molo speakSamburu.

History

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The El Molo are believed to have originally migrated down into theTurkana Basinaround 1000 BC fromEthiopiain the more northerlyHornregion. Owing to the arid environment in which they entered, they are held to have then abandoned agricultural activities in favor of lakeside fishing.[3]

Historically, the El Molo erected tomb structures in which they placed their dead. A 1962 archaeological survey in theNorthern Frontier Districtled by Susan Brodribb Pughe[4]observed hieroglyphics on a number of these constructions. They were mainly found near springs or wells of water.[5]

Demographics

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The El Molo today primarily inhabit the northernEastern Provinceof Kenya. They are concentrated in theMarsabit Districton the southeast shore ofLake Turkana,betweenEl Molobay andMount Kulal.[6][7]In the past, they also dwelled in other parts of the Northern Frontier District.[5]

According to the 2019 Kenya census, there were 1,104 El Molo residents.[1]However, historians have noted that there are few "pure" El Molo left. Most group members are today admixed with adjacentNiloticpopulations, primarilySamburu,with only a handful of unmixed El Molo believed to exist. Many El Molo speakers have also adopted cultural customs from these communities.[8]In 1994, only eight people reportedly could still speak El Molo.[6]

Language

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The El Molo historically spoke theEl Molo languageas a native language. It belongs to theCushiticbranch of theAfro-Asiaticfamily.[6]

According toEthnologue,among other sources, the El Molo language is nearly extinct and there may already be no remaining speakers of the idiom. Most group members have now adopted theNilo-Saharan languagesof their neighbours.[6]

The El Molo language has no known dialects. It is most similar toDaasanach.[6]

Religion

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Many El Molo practice a traditional religion centered on the worship ofWaaq/Wakh.[6]In the relatedOromoculture,Waaqdenotes the single God of the early pre-Abrahamic,monotheisticfaith believed to have been adhered to by Cushitic groups.[9]

Some El Molo have also adoptedChristianity.[6]

In 2024, the population of the El Molo was recorded as at 300. They are based at theLake Turkanabasin.[citation needed]

Genetics

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Recent advances in genetic analyses have helped shed some light on theethnogenesisof the El Molo people.Genetic genealogy,a novel tool that uses the genes of modern populations to trace their ethnic and geographic origins, has also helped clarify the possible background of the modern El Molo. The El Molo group are characterized by a low haplotype diversity (0.88), close to that observed in Khoisan hunter-gatherers, and by the non-significance of neutrality tests and the multimodal mismatch distribution indicating small population size and strong genetic drift.[10]

mtDNA

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According to anmtDNAstudy by Castri et al. (2008), the maternal ancestry of the contemporary El Molo consists of a mixture of Afro-Asiatic-associated lineages and Sub-Saharan haplogroups, reflecting substantial female gene flow from neighboring Sub-Saharan populations. A little over 30% of the El Molo belonged to the West Eurasian haplogroupsI(23%) andHV1(8%). The remaining El Molo samples carried various Sub-Saharanmacro-haplogroup Lsub-clades, mainly consisting ofL3*(26%),L0a2(17%) andL0f(17%).[11]

Autosomal DNA

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The El Molo'sautosomalDNAhas been examined in a comprehensive study by Tishkoff et al. (2009) on the genetic affiliations of various populations in Africa. According to the researchers, the El Molo showed significant Afro-Asiatic affinities. They also shared some ties with neighboring Nilo-Saharan and Bantu speakers in eastern Africa due to considerable genetic exchanges with these communities over the past 5000 or so years.[12]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ab"2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census Volume IV: Distribution of Population by Socio-Economic Characteristics".Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.Retrieved24 March2020.
  2. ^Estella S. Poloni; Yamama Naciri; Rute Bucho; Régine Niba; Barbara Kervaire; Laurent Excoffier; André Langaney; Alicia Sanchez-Mazas (November 2009)."Genetic Evidence for Complexity in Ethnic Differentiation and History in East Africa".Annals of Human Genetics.73(6): 582–600.doi:10.1111/j.1469-1809.2009.00541.x.PMID19706029.S2CID2488794.
  3. ^Newman, James L. (1997).The Peopling of Africa: A Geographic Interpretation.Yale University Press. p. 166.ISBN978-0300072808.
  4. ^Gender and Diplomacy, ed. Jennifer A. Cassidy, Routledge, 2017, p. 124
  5. ^abPughe, S. Brodribb (1962).A Preliminary Report Concerning Problems on the Origins and Ages of Certain of the Man-made Structures in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya and Certain Regions of the Eastern Horn of Africa.p. 24.
  6. ^abcdefg"El Molo".Ethnologue.Retrieved14 December2013.
  7. ^"El Molo".BBC News.Retrieved9 January2020.
  8. ^Safari, Volume 4.News Publications. 1973. p. 14.
  9. ^Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi,Culture and Customs of Somalia,(Greenwood Publishing Group: 2001), p.65.
  10. ^Tosco, Mauro.What Terminal Speakers Can Do to Their Language: the Case of Elmolo.pp. 131–143.
  11. ^Castrí (2008)."Kenyan crossroads: migration and gene flow in six ethnic groups from Eastern Africa"(PDF).Journal of Anthropological Sciences.86:189–92.PMID19934476.
  12. ^Tishkoff; et al. (2009), "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans",Science,324(5930): 1035–1044,Bibcode:2009Sci...324.1035T,doi:10.1126/science.1172257,PMC2947357,PMID19407144;Also seeSupplementary Data

References

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Further reading

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  • Cronk, Lee and Dickson, D. Bruce. 2001. Public and hidden transcripts in the East African Highlands: a comment on Smith (1998). Journal of anthropological archaeology 20. 113-121.
  • Dalton, Merrell. 1951. The El Molo – a dying tribe on the shores of Lake Rudolph. East African Annual 1951-52. 45-47.
  • Dyson, W.S. and Fuchs, V.E. 1937. The Elmolo. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 67. 327-338.
  • Heine, Bernd. 1980. Elmolo. In Heine, Bernd (ed.), The Non-Bantu Languages of Kenya, 173-218. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
  • Heine, Bernd. 1972/73. Vokabulare ostafrikanischer Restsprachen, 1: Elmolo. Afrika und Übersee 56. 276-283.
  • Scherrer, Carol. 1974. Effects of western influence on Elmolo, 1973-74. (Discussion papers from the Inst. of African Studies (IAS), 61.) Nairobi: University of Nairobi.
  • Sommer, Gabriele. 1992. A survey on language death in Africa. In Brenzinger, Matthias (ed.), Language death: factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa, 340-341.
  • Tosco, Mauro. 2012. What Terminal Speakers Can Do to Their Language: the Case of Elmolo. In Corriente, Federico and Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Vicente, Ángeles and Vita, Juan-Pablo (eds.), Dialectology of the Semitic Languages. Proceedings of the IV Meeting on Comparative Semitics, Zaragoza, 131-143. Sabadell (Barcelona): Editorial AUSA.
  • W. S. Dyson and V. E. Fuchs. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 67, (Jul. – Dec. 1937), 327-328.
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