Ritual topography, time reckoning, and overlapping chronologies: Boran Oromo jila gadamojji rites of passage in colonial and contemporary Kenya (c. 1930–2020)

This article examines jila gadamojji, the final rite of passage, which recurs every eight years in the Boran gada generation-set system. Drawing on field and archival research, it situates jila gadamojji within changing social and political contexts in Kenya from c. 1930 to 2020. Despite predictions of its disappearance, jila gadamojji’s persistence demonstrates its enduring importance in the Boran ritual landscape and experience of time and the state. In contemporary oral narratives, historical events are organised through gada cycles, with jila gadamojji forming a key temporal marker. Informants further incorporate political rituals and state timeframes, like elections and parliamentary terms respectively, into overlapping chronologies. These accounts draw on fragmented but interconnected forms of historical knowledge found in life-history interviews and group discussions. More recently, decentralisation in Kenya since 2013 and the designation of the ritual’s site as a national monument in 2018 have further aligned these temporal frameworks across different scales. In this context, the paper reveals how diverse age- and time-reckoning systems, together with the recounting of shared events in oral history, construct time in ways that shape social identity and relations with state institutions and representatives.