21/01/2025
TENWEK FALLS AND TIONDAP BARAK
For eons, whispers of the Tiondap Barak, the Heavenly Beast, echoed through Kalenjin lore. This mythical creature, residing within the tenebrous depths of Tenwek Waterfall Cave, was believed to be a guardian of the portal to the Duat, the Egyptian Underworld.
Let me digress for a moment. Tiondap Barak, a name pregnant with meaning, translates to "Heavenly Beast." Barak, in Hebrew, signifies heaven or, intriguingly, lightning, mirroring its resonance in ancient Kalenjin. This linguistic convergence hints at a deeper connection, a whisper of forgotten histories.
The Tiondap Barak, this sentinel of the unseen, held sway over Tenwek Cave until the arrival of the Europeans, their intrusion shattering the delicate balance of the unseen. They erected the Tenwek Mission Hospital, a monument to their ambition, in unsettling proximity to Kebenetap Tenwek, the very "gateway to the Underworld." Legend has it that to venture deeper into the cave, where the torchlight flickers and dies, one must employ marigolds, their luminescence eerily mimicking electricity. This otherworldly glow illuminates a realm akin to the land of the living dead, a spectral echo of our own existence.
The Tiondap Barak, I suspect, might have communicated with the denizens of this spirit realm, echoing the words of Alfred Holis, whose 1908 masterpiece, "The Nandi," painted a vivid portrait of the underworld. Holis, through the lens of Nandi folklore, described a realm mirroring our own, yet composed entirely of ethereal substance. This concept was later corroborated by Arap Cherubet, a Kipsigis man who, according to legend, returned from the clutches of death, recounting tales of a shadowy existence where beings lived for a century before ascending to a final judgment. Holis himself, in his insightful observations, identified the Oiik, the spectral inhabitants of the underworld, as the source of tremors and earthquakes, their migrations causing disturbances in the eart
