Insights into the Ogiek Orature: first data emerging from an unpublished corpus

This paper deals with the contribution that the study of oral tradition can make, both in terms of content and morphological and lexical features, to the reconstruction of the complex linguistic and historical development of remote areas of the world inhabited by hunter-gatherers (HG). The topic will be addressed using the example of an unpublished corpus of 23 stories, 7 songs and 2 riddles collected from the Ogiek of Mariashoni. The Ogiek are a group of semi-nomadic HGs with a delayed-return economy living surrounded by sedentary agricultural populations between the highlands and lowlands of the Mau Forest Escarpment in Kenya. For a more comprehensive perspective, the Ogiek corpus is here compared with a similar corpus of 16 Akie texts published in 2020 by König et al. Given the position of both the Ogiek and the Akie as Dorobo living in symbiosis with the Maasai tribes of the region, the data on Maasai oral tradition contained in Kipuri 1993 is also considered meaningful for comparison.