Early Kenya - Peopling the Interior
People of three distinct language groups — Bantu, Cushitic, and Nilotic — are found in present-day Kenya. The interior of the country, extending from the nyika (Swahili for wilderness — applied to the climatically hostile area forming a barrier behind the coast) to Lake Victoria, is populated by intermingled groups of Bantu-speaking and Nilotic peoples, whose ancestors migrated to Kenya after the beginning of the second millennium AD.
The early Cushitic people who inhabited western Kenya and parts of the highlands area were absorbed or driven out during these movements. Elements of the present Cushitic-speaking population, which occupies the northern and northeastern parts of the country, began arriving sometime before the sixteenth century. Somali clans eventually ranged over most of northeastern Kenya. A particularly large influx of Oromo (Galla) people, moving out of Ethiopia, started toward the end of the nineteenth century and continued through the early decades of the twentieth.
In their oral histories, the Kikuyu, the nation's largest ethnic group, claim that their ancestors came originally from northeast of Mount Kenya in a migration that was probably under way in the fifteenth century. Archaeological discoveries in central Kenya, related to the presumed Bantu-speaking people who entered southern Kenya during the first millennium, indicate that these people preceded the Kikuyu in the region. Linguistic studies further suggest that they may have been the ancestors of several later Bantu groups in the area, including the Kikuyu.
During the three to four centuries after their migration began, the proto-Kikuyu moved slowly southwestward, splitting into new groups that by the late nineteenth century occupied a broad area in the central part of the highlands. In the course of their movement they absorbed other groups already in place. Such ethnic elements included the short - statured Gumba and the Athi (also Okiek or Nderobo), both hunting and gathering peoples.
The Gumba, believed to have been Cushitic speakers, were primarily hunters in the open grasslands. Oral traditions state that they were skilled at iron working and pottery making, a knowledge of which they imparted to the Kikuyu. The two ethnic groups seem to have lived in a symbiotic relationship, exchanging meat and skins for agricultural products, and considerable assimilation of the Gumba by Kikuyu groups occurred. The expansion of the Kikuyu, however, resulted in friction and eventually war, as land used for hunting was cleared for cultivation. Little is known about the fate of the Gumba after hostilities with the Kikuyu in the mid-nineteenth century.
The Athi were forest dwellers who seem to have had a relationship with the Kikuyu similar to that of the Gumba. They were only partly assimilated by the Kikuyu, however, and groups of them still survive, mainly in Rift Valley Province. The Athi are important in Kikuyu history; it was they who, according to tradition, sold the heartlandregion of Kabete to the Kikuyu in exchange for cattle.
The Bantu communities that eventually merged to form the Kamba appear to have been in the area of Mount Kilimanjaro about the fifteenth century, and they probably reached the Mbooni Hills, their ethnic heartland in present-day Machakos District, in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Initially hunters and gatherers, they turned to agriculture because of the fertility of the new territory. Population growth led to their expansion to areas less suitable for cultivation, including Kitui to the east, where they returned to hunting and readopted their earlier pastoralism.
Kamba hunting groups discovered the value of ivory as a trade item, beginning the systematic exploitation of elephants and eventually forming two-way trade caravans to the coast. From the late eighteenth century their trade increased greatly, and activities were eventually extended over a wide area stretching north to the Tana River, south into present-day Tanzania, and west to the forests of Mount Kenya and Kikuyu country.
At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, Kamba trade was the mainstay of the prosperity of the coastal port of Mombasa, but other groups were by then beginning to contest their monopoly. Feuds among the Kamba clans also began to affect trading operations, as did efforts by peoples in the Kenya Highlands to exclude the Kamba from their territory—in part because the Kamba had turned to raiding for slaves.
Depletion of elephants by the late nineteenth century had created a new problem, forcing Kamba hunters to go hundreds of miles for ivory. Moreover, a general state of unrest, which endangered caravan traffic, existed in the nyika, and caravans traveling safer routes farther south secured much of the interior trade. Kamba trade continued at a much reduced rate until competition from the Uganda railroad, which ran through their territory carrying goods between Mombasa and Kisumu, finally brought an end to well over a century of aggressive Kamba commercial activities.
Bantu-speaking peoples began arriving in the Lake Victoria region of western Kenya by about the eleventh century. Sometime during the next few centuries, separate agricultural groups that later came to constitute the Luhya occupied the lakeshore. During the sixteenth century the pastoral Nilotic Luo pushed into the area north of Winam Bay from present-day Uganda, displacing the Luhya eastward. Settled agricultural practices appear to have been adopted by at least some Luo, but by the middle of the next century others were on the move southward along the shore of the lake, conquering new territory as they went. There they came against the Bantu Kisii (Gusii), who were also expanding into this part of Kenya.
Territorial adjustments between these three peoples, as well as with Nilotic groups on their eastern fringes, often involved warfare and continued until the imposition of British control early in the twentieth century effectively brought an end to the forcible occupation of land by rival ethnic groups.
The time of entry and dispersion of the ancestors of various other Nilotic peoples in modern Kenya is uncertain. The first groups must have begun their in-migration—from the general area of southwestern Ethiopia—in the early centuries of the second millennium, for the ancestors of the Kalenjin peoples, among them the Nandi, appear to have reached the Mount Elgon region before 1500. By the early seventeenth century Maasai pastoralists were pushing southward through the Rift Valley and are known from oral records to have been at the southern end of the Kenya section of the rift in the eighteenth century, becoming the dominant force in southwestern Kenya.
Although weakened by internal warfare, the Maasai were so feared by neighboring groups that few dared challenge their control of the southern valley, plains areas, and surrounding plateaus. Among the latest major Nilotic arrivals were the Turkana pastoralists, who entered northwestern Kenya in the eighteenth century.
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