Bantu People
The Kenyan Highlands are in the south-central part of Kenya. They are surrounded by dry areas to the south and north, plains that go to Lake Victoria to the west, and the plateau east of Mount Kenya to the east. The Rift Valley divides the Western Highlands, which are mostly home to Southern Nilotic people of the Kalenjin group, from the Central Highlands, which are mostly home to Bantu people like the Igembe, Meru, Tharaka, Chuka, Embu, Mbeere, Kikuyu, and Taita.
The Nyandarua (Aberdare) Range and Mount Kenya in the west, and the Tana River in the northeast, mark the edges of the Central Highlands. The Taita live in the upland valleys and slopes of the Dawida, Saghala, and Kasigau regions. They grow bananas, sugarcane, and yams in the fertile valley bottoms and raise cattle in the higher areas.
The Kikuyu live on the ridges of the Central Highlands. They grow perennial crops like arrowroot and sweet potato, and they also raise livestock. The Embu live on the fertile, well-watered slopes of Mount Kenya above 1200 meters, and the Mbeere live in the lower, dry savanna. The Embu live in a good place for intensive agriculture, but the Mbeere raise cattle and grow drought-resistant field crops like maize, millet, and sorghum.
The Chuka and the Meru are two tribes of highland farmers who live close to each other on the northeastern slopes of Mount Kenya. From the few pieces of information we have about the history of these Bantu people during the Iron Age, we still don’t have a full picture. Most of these pieces of evidence come from historical linguistics, archaeology, and people’s own stories. Putting together a timeline of historical events and making sure that historical findings from different disciplines fit together is especially hard.
According to the most popular theory about where these people came from, they came from Zare and settled in the Kenyan Highlands. Their languages belong to the Thagicu group of northeastern Bantu. Based on the number of words they have in common, the highland Bantu languages must have started to develop from proto-Thagicu around the 10th century. There is no single origin story for the Bantu people of the Central Highlands. The Chuka, Embu, Mbeere, and Kikuyu people who live south of Mount Kenya say they came from Igembe/Tigania, which is in the northern Meru region.
At the beginning of the migration, they were herders and hunters. After they settled in the higher forest areas of the Highlands, however, they turned to farming. Kikuyu oral traditions keep track of age groups going back into the past. Based on today’s age groups, it could be said that the Kikuyu left Igembe/Tigania in the fifteenth century and moved to the northern part of their modern settlement areas in the early seventeenth century.
The Meru say they came from an island called Mbwa, but many scholars think it is Manda Island, which is off the coast of northern Kenya. It is thought that these migrations happened in the first half of the 1800s. Several highland Bantu groups agree, based on their oral histories, that the highlands were bought from southern Nilotic Okiek hunters.
Also, the oral histories of the Kikuyu, Chuka, and Embu talk about the Gumba, who raised cattle and made iron. The Kikuyu are said to have tried to settle in the highlands, but the Gumba fought them off, and it wasn’t until the 1800s that the Kikuyu won. The Kikuyu are very clear that they learned how to make iron and how to do circumcision from the Gumba.
Archaeological finds near Gatung’ang’a in central Kenya, which have been tentatively attributed to the Gumba, point to a population that raised cattle, worked iron, and used obsidian and Kwale-like pottery. The finds are dated to the 12th–13th and 15th–16th centuries. The culture shown by these artifacts is a mix of things from the later Stone Age and the Iron Age. If it really was a Bantu culture, it must have been in the highlands before the migrations that the stories talk about. When you try to put the results of historical linguistics and oral traditions together, you can see that they don’t match up.
On the one hand, the overall picture that comes out of the oral traditions shows that the highland Bantu came from many different places, including Igembe/Tigania, the coast, and Mount Kilimanjaro. On the other hand, the uniformity and current spread of the so-called Thagicu languages suggest that they all came from one place in the Highlands and then spread out from there. The Kikuyu also use words from southern Cushitic languages to talk about circumcision, but Bantu words are used to talk about working with iron.
This, along with the fact that the origin stories of the different clans are very different, makes it clear that Kikuyu culture is a mix of different traditions that overlap. The ecological and topographical diversity of the Highlands is probably what explains why the languages are so similar and the migration stories are so different. This can be seen in the way that governments are set up. After the Kikuyu took over the highland ridges, for example, they created localized lineages that were linked to specific ridges.
Each ridge is home to a certain group of lineages that live in a fortified settlement. On the other hand, the neighborhood is the main political and social unit of the valley-dwelling Taita. It is made up of a number of lineages that all have the same rights and live in the same valley. So, local cultural institutions came about as a result of people adapting to their own ecological and geographical niches and cultures coming together on a small scale.
This could have caused people to remember different things about where they came from and where they went. If and when the problems of chronology and interdisciplinary synchronisms are solved, it is almost certain that many of the “contradictions” listed above will be shown to be successive layers of historical events.
Also Read: Chadic language and People: The Amazing Untold History Of The Chadic People and Their Culture
