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26-520: Ndere means "meeting place" in Dholuo . According to Luo folklore, early tribal migrants rested up near Ndere after their long journey south up the Nile River Valley. They found the lush shoreline so pleasing that they stayed. Notable fauna associated with the island include African fish eagles , swifts , hippopotamus , and Nile crocodiles . About fifty impalas have been introduced to

52-487: A second species of Proconsul , as well as Nyanzapithecus , Limnopithecus , Dendropithecus and Micropithecus , all of which show arboreal rather than terrestrial adaptations. The first true monkeys do not appear until around 15 million years ago, so it is widely supposed that the diverse Early Miocene African catarrhines like those found on Rusinga filled that adaptive niche. The phylogenetic position of these primates has been debated. It has been theorized that Proconsul

78-476: Is a tonal language . There is both lexical tone and grammatical tone, e.g. in the formation of passive verbs. It has vowel harmony by ATR status : the vowels in a noncompound word must be either all [+ATR] or all [−ATR]. The ATR-harmony requirement extends to the semivowels / w / , / ɥ / . Dholuo is notable for its complex phonological alternations, which are used, among other things, in distinguishing inalienable possession from alienable. The first example

104-585: Is a case of alienable possession, as the bone is not part of the dog. chogo bone guok dog (chok guok)   chogo guok bone dog 'the dog's bone' (which it is eating) The following is however an example of inalienable possession, the bone being part of the cow: chok bone ( construct state ) dhiang' cow chok dhiang' {bone ( construct state )} cow 'a cow bone' Rusinga Island Rusinga Island , with an elongated shape approximately 10 miles (16 km) from end to end and 3 miles (5 km) at its widest point, lies in

130-532: Is a dialect of the Luo group of Nilotic languages , spoken by about 4.2 million Luo people of Kenya and Tanzania , who occupy parts of the eastern shore of Nam Lolwe ( Lake Victoria ) and areas to the south. It is used for broadcasts on Ramogi TV and KBC ( Kenya Broadcasting Corporation , formerly the Voice of Kenya ). Dholuo is mutually intelligible with Alur , Acholi , Adhola and Lango of Uganda . Dholuo and

156-460: Is a stem catarrhine and therefore ancestral to both Cercopithecids (Old World monkeys) and hominids (great apes and humans), rather than a stem hominoid. Pleistocene mammal fossils, including an extinct antelope genus, Rusingoryx , notable for its nasal dome hypothesised to produce loud calls, known nowhere else, are also common in former shoreline deposits around the edges of the island, left behind as Lake Victoria has slowly subsided over

182-426: Is still caught, though this species (like all others native to the lake) has been decimated by the voracious Nile perch that was introduced into the lake in 1954. Constant onshore winds cool the lakeward side of the island and provide clean beaches with ideal swimming and boating conditions, but poor roads between Rusinga and the nearest town, Homa Bay , inhibit trade and tourism. The brightly glittering black sands of

208-559: Is widely known for its extraordinarily rich and important fossil beds of extinct Miocene mammals, dated to 18 million years. The island had been only cursorily explored until the Leakey expedition of 1947-1948 began systematic searches and excavations, which have continued sporadically since then. The end of 1948 saw the collection of about 15,000 fossils from the Miocene , including 64 primates called by Louis Leakey "Miocene apes." All

234-667: The ATR contrast and instead use [±ATR] in free variance. In the table of consonants below, orthographic symbols are included between angle brackets following the IPA symbols. Note especially the following: the use of ⟨y⟩ for / j / , common in African orthographies; ⟨th⟩ , ⟨dh⟩ are plosives , not fricatives as in Swahili spelling (but phoneme / d̪ / can fricativize intervocalically). Dholuo

260-640: The Dholuo written language and today's Dholuo literary tradition, as well as the modernization of the Joluo people in Kenya, began in 1907. It began with the arrival of a Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist missionary Arthur Asa Grandville Carscallen , whose missionary work over a period of about 14 years along the eastern shores of Lake Victoria left a legacy. (This applies only to the Luo of Southern Nyanza, which are to

286-654: The East of Lake Victoria). This legacy continues today through the Obama family of Kenya and the Seventh-day Adventist Church to which the Obamas and many other Joluo converted in the early part of the 20th century. The Obamas of Kenya are relatives of former US president Barack Obama . From 1906 to 1921, Carscallen was superintendent of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's British East Africa Mission, and

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312-541: The aforementioned Uganda languages are all linguistically related to Dholuo of South Sudan and Anuak of Ethiopia due to common ethnic origins of the larger Luo peoples who speak Luo languages . It is estimated that Dholuo has 93% lexical similarity with Dhopadhola (Adhola), 90% with Leb Alur (Alur), 83% with Leb Achol (Acholi) and 81% with Leb Lango . However, these are often counted as separate languages despite common ethnic origins due to linguistic shift occasioned by geographical movement. The foundations of

338-414: The beaches are made of crystals of melanite garnet , barkevikite hornblende , and magnetite eroded from the uncompahgrite lava fragments in the agglomerates that overlie the fossil beds. The island is also notable as the family home and burial site of Tom Mboya , who before his assassination in 1969 was widely pegged as Jomo Kenyatta 's successor as President of the new nation of Kenya. Rusinga

364-461: The centuries due to erosion in its outlet. The fossil beds are layers of volcanic ash produced by a succession of explosive eruptions during the earliest stages of a volcano that eventually covered an area 75 miles in diameter. The volcano is now eroded down to the frozen magma in its vent that makes up the Kisingiri hills on the mainland opposite Rusinga, and the surrounding remnants of the cone:

390-503: The eastern part of Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Winam Gulf . Part of Kenya , it is linked to Mbita Point on the mainland by the new Rusinga-Mbita bridge which replaced the old causeway. The local language is Luo , although the ancestors of the current inhabitants were Suba people who came in boats several hundred years ago from Uganda as refugees from a dynastic war. Many Rusinga place names portray Suba origins, including

416-646: The island's name itself and its central peak, Lunene . There was an extinct language of Uganda called Singa, alternatives Lusinga and Lisinga, spoken only on Rusinga Island (which, of course is in Kenya). It belonged to the same group of Niger–Congo as Suba. As of 2006, estimates of Rusinga's population ranged between 20,000 and 30,000. The entire island is part of the Homa Bay County . Most residents of Rusinga make their living from subsistence agriculture (maize and millet), as well as fishing. The native tilapia

442-595: The island. Located on the Lake Victoria, this island is a haven for birds. Covered mostly in grassland, Ndere Island provides beautiful scenic views of the Homa hills to the south, Mageta Island to the east and the glimpses of Kampala in Uganda beyond the south west horizon. The lake shore supports a wide variety of animals including hippos, monitor lizards, Nile crocodiles, several fish species, snakes, baboons, impalas,

468-427: The linguistic foundation that Carscallen established in 1910. Dholuo has two sets of five vowels, distinguished by the feature [±ATR] which is carried primarily on the first formant. While ATR is phonemic in the language, various phonological vowel harmony processes play a major role and can change the ATR of the vowel at output. A current change in certain dialects of Dholuo is that certain pronouns seem to be losing

494-487: The rare sitatunga antelopes, water bucks, zebras and warthogs. Over 100 different species of birds can be seen here including African fish eagles, black headed gonoleks and grey headed kingfishers. 0°13′S 34°30′E  /  0.217°S 34.500°E  / -0.217; 34.500 This Kenya location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Dholuo The Dholuo dialect (pronounced [d̪ólúô] ) or Nilotic Kavirondo ,

520-544: The region. Over a period of about five years administering to largely Jaluo congregations, Carscallen achieved a mastery of the Dholuo language and was credited with being the first to reduce the language to writing, publishing the Elementary grammar of the Nilotic-Kavirondo language (Dhö Lwo) , together with some useful phrases, English-Kavirondo and Kavirondo-English vocabulary, and some exercises with key to

546-702: The same in 1910. Then, a little more than two years later, the mission translated portions of the New Testament from English to Dholuo, which were later published by the British and Foreign Bible Society . In 2019, Jehovah’s Witnesses released the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures in the Luo language. The Bible translation is distributed without charge, both in print and online . The grammar textbook Carscallen produced

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572-465: The semicircular Rangwa mountain range, and the islands of Rusinga and neighboring Mfangano Island . This rift valley volcano on the southern flank of the now-inactive Winam Gulf tapped much deeper in the mantle than oceanic or subduction zone volcanos, and its lavas and explosive ash clouds thus contained much more carbonate and alkali than normal. This meant that even though the Miocene environment

598-514: The species of Proconsul were among the 64 and all were given the name africanus , although many were reclassified into nyanzae , major and heseloni later. Mary Leakey discovered the first complete skull of Proconsul, then considered a "stem hominoid", in 1948. Excavation of the fossil was completed by Louis' assistant, Heselon Mukiri (whence Walker's 1993 name heseloni). Many thousands of fossils are now known from five major sites, with abundant hominoids including an almost complete skeleton of

624-462: Was a tropical rainforest, the chemistry of the successive ash beds was that of a desert dry lake, preserving everything from caterpillars and berries to apes and elephants in an unusual situation found only in a few other East African volcanos, notably Menengai and Homa Mountain in western Kenya, Napak and Mount Elgon in Uganda, and the much younger Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania, which created

650-499: Was charged with establishing missionary stations in eastern Kenya near Lake Victoria and proselytizing among the local population. These stations would include Gendia, Wire Hill, Rusinga Island , Kanyadoto, Karungu, Kisii (Nyanchwa), and Kamagambo. In 1913, he acquired a small press for the Mission and set up a small printing operation at Gendia in order to publish church materials, but also used it to impact education and literacy in

676-521: Was widely used for many years throughout eastern Kenya, but his authorship of it is largely forgotten. It was later retitled to Dho-Luo for Beginners and republished in 1936. In addition to the grammar text, Carscallen compiled an extensive dictionary of "Kavirondo" (Dholuo) and English, which is housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London , UK. Neither of these works has been superseded, only updated, with new revised versions of

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