There are three cases which will be examined in the application of this theory: the Maasai and Kikuyu in East Africa and the Lakota in the Great Plains of North America. In the way of further contextualizing this effort, it must be acknowledged that there is a great need for modern scholarship (particularly from indigenous perspectives) on these peoples. Many of the most 'authoritative' sources available on the subject of Native American or African indigenous religions are outdated and specifically European colonial in perspective. Sadly, it is all too frequent to find tomes of descriptions of religion on either continent lumped together as though the religious beliefs of all African societies or all Native American nations belong to a respective single 'traditional' religion.

The survival of the mobile pastoralist societies of Maasai and Kikuyu, despite specific efforts on the part of colonial powers to both settle and depopulate (a historically sanitized way of describing genocide) East African 'nomads' reveals, by itself, both the historical situation of the land and these societies. Human-ecology scholar Katherine Homewood describes the context in which mobile societies in Africa function: “African pastoralist groups have generally been mobile peoples, commonly exploiting lands that are marginal for agriculture, often operating outside formal administrative networks and maintaining few records.”¹ Both Katherine Homewood and Bruce Lincoln confirm that the economic foundation of the herding societies of this region is primarily possession of cattle.² Frachetti directly connects the variable ecotones of agriculturally marginal landscapes, such as those found in East Africa, with the strategic opportunities exploited by mobile pastoralists.³

Famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey authored a voluminous study of the Kikuyu in 'British East Africa', a mobile pastoralist society, the religion of whom he describes as being centered around one god: Ngai.⁴ In a fascinating lack of interest in the apparent monotheism of a culture, which anthropologists William and Katherine Routledge described as belonging to a “prehistoric people,”⁵ Leakey's description of the traditional religion of the Kikuyu seems to hardly gloss the conception of the deity while offering sections on subjects such as “Departed Spirits...Dreams...Ghosts...Animistic Beliefs...[and] The Spirits of Trees.”⁶ It is clear that, from an anthropological view, Leakey was not concerned with the development of monotheism in this society. It is hard to dissociate this lack of interest from the Eurocentric racism so prevalent in the British Empire.

Important to our discussion is the connection between the religion of the Kikuyu and the Maasai: according to both the Routledges and Leakey, the “term usually employed [by the Kikuyu] in speaking of the Deity (N'gaí) is of Masaí origin.”⁷ Most curiously, by whatever source, the monotheism of the Maasai even finds its way into a children's book by Russian author Sonia Bleeker: “Actually, the Masai believe in only one god, Enkai [i.e. N'gai] Enkai is spoken of as the Black God when he answers his people's prayers by sending them rain and tall grass.”⁸ It is worth noting that there are too many references to the monotheistic beliefs of these societies, in various odd sources, to deny the need for in-depth scholarship on traditional religions of the Maasai and Kikuyu.⁹

It is clear that further research is required to understand how monotheism is expressed in these cultures and how that information might affect theoretical models of religious systems across the globe. Additionally, it seems that the mobile societies of the Maasai and the Kikuyu, with their respective indigenous monotheisms appear to validate the theory presented in this chapter. It is not enough to simply check a box of 'validated', however, for there can be no question that the gaps in scholarship on these peoples are numerous and more research, specifically from non-European perspectives, is vital to understanding the complex reality of these religions. Having found preliminary support for the connection between agriculturally marginal landscapes, mobile societies, and monotheism within these two cases, we next must turn to the Great Plains of North America to explore the applicability of this theory to the religion of the Lakota.