African Legends in 60 Seconds · Episode 7
Syokimau
Words from the story, in Kikamba
Read it, then say it
Say each word out loud as you read it. Pronunciation audio is coming soon.
mundu mue
= a wise one, a seer
What Syokimau was: a healer and seer, literally a wise person. The Akamba keep the mundu mue apart from the mundu mwoi, a witch (Lindblom 1920).
nzoka
= snake
The snake of her vision. Nzoka ya kyuma, the iron snake, is how the railway is remembered.
mwaki
= fire
The fire the iron snake breathed, and the fire the strangers carried in their pockets.
Read along
The story
She saw the train before there was a train.
In the dry hills of Ukambani, above Machakos, the Akamba tell of a woman named Syokimau, a mundu mue: a wise one, who could see what was coming.
People climbed the hills to ask her about raids, and rain, and the days ahead.
One day she told them: strangers are coming, pale as raw meat, whose talk sounds like birds, who carry fire in their pockets.
And after them, a snake, a nzoka, so long it reaches from one water to another.
Not a snake of skin, but of iron, breathing mwaki, fire.
She did not live to see it. But in 1896 the strangers began a road of iron from Mombasa toward the lake.
Smoke and fire at its head, it crossed Kamba land, just as she had said.
Today a railway station on the edge of Nairobi carries her name.
Syokimau. She saw the train before there was a train.
Other Kamba seers told of the snake too. It is her name the people kept.
Quick quiz
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