It is an incident that took place in the 19th century at Kenya’s mid-west. It happened after young warriors from a sub-tribe of Kalenjin community went to war against the advice of their elders. Almost all of them perished in the war. The war is still remembered and well documented. Because most of the men who died came from a crucial generation necessary for communities’ survival and continuity, this made older men and women to yell, advising women to open the doors and allow the boys to come in and sleep with them for the purpose of procreation. According to the community, boys were still children until they undergo initiation whereby they were now allowed to have sex and go to war. But this time the norm had to be broken!
Among the same community, which is patrilineal, if there is only one boy in a family, an early marriage is encouraged for him since there is fear that if he dies; there is no remaining boy to guarantee the survival and continuity of the family through producing new generations. The community has even gone to an extent of having a woman without children or with daughters to marry so that the other lady can bear children on her behalf. Women who marry will at least have authority over the married woman and the sired children will be assumed to belong to her.
What threaten community’s survival and continuity are wars, diseases, and natural disasters. Some are of genocide nature, a form of ethnic cleansing as it happened during the Jews Holocaust, Tutsi-Hutu wars, and the wars in Kosovo. The Jews facing difficult circumstances, through collaborative effort, help some to escape from German prisoner-of-war camps. And for Tutsi-Hutu wars, each community had to fight for its survival. Though many Tutsi were killed, many afford to escape to safety and unite as a community with their own future dreams.
And the Kosovor Albanians facing ethnic cleansing, they fought back. They organized underground movement to fight, stood for their rights and brought their plight to international attention.
Survival may also involve a small group of people of a particular ethnic racial or a national group fighting for survival. Philip Toney, a Lieutenant Colonel in Command of the 13th regiment of the British army’s eighteen division, when he and the allied forces find themselves prisoners of war at Tamarkan near a major river called the Kwai Rae and was supposed to build a bridge across the River Kwai, being tortured and being forced to do hard work, asked the prisoners to cooperate with Japanese captors, determined to reduce those who will die there. He risked his life daily by standing up for his men and arguing for increased ratios, regular working hours and a day off each week. He worked with the black market in order to obtain medical, food and other supplies, even though detection would have meant certain death. His efforts paid, though, he suffered considerably. During the ten months that work was being done on bridge, only nine prisoners died. Survival of a group of people of an ethnic or racial group also contributives to the community’s ideal for survival and continuity.