Bororiet
Open-knowledge reference entry
A bororiet (pl., bororiosiek) was a kind of geographic division of the traditional society of the Nandi people of Kenya. It had military and political functions in addition to the territorial element. Each bororiet was made up of kokwotinwek (sing., kokwet) which were groups of homesteads within the same locality, roughly equal to a hamlet but smaller than a village. The bororosiek were, in turn, grouped into emet (pl. emotinwek) but these were only of territorial significance.
History
The emet division of the Nandi and the wider Kalenjin seems to be of ancient origin. From linguistic evidence, it seems probable that the Southern Nilotes, the linguistic ancestors of the Kalenjin, organised themselves into clans or at least different clusters of associated clans – what could be called tribes – which coincided with particular territories. These "tribes" and the territory they occupied were called *e:m. The Kokwet concept and division also appears to be of ancient heritage found as it is among the other Kalenjin groups, including the Pokot society whose heritage is estimated to have separated from the main Kalenjin society more than a millennium ago.
The concept of the bororiet, however, was unique to the Nandi and is presumed to have begun sometime after the settlement in Aldai by Kakipoch and his followers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bororiet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.