Eastern Rift and Northeastern Highlands
To some extent developments in the Eastern Rift Valley and the largely Bantu-occupied highlands ilumediately to the east were influenced by the incursion of the pastoral Paranilotic Masai in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Organized into age-sets, making for an effective military organization, the Masai began to move south from the tripoint area of Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia in the Lake Rudolf basin and came for a time to dominate the Eastern Rift Valley grasslands from the lake as fa,' south as the Cogo country near present-day Dodoma. The Kisonko, as the southern section of the Masai is called, reached that point toward the end of the eighteenth century.
As Alpers and Ehret have noted, the nature of Masai relations with their neighbors ranged from chronic warfare to economic exchange to intermarriage, sometimes simultaneously. For the most part Masai interactions with Tanzanian Bantu speakers, such as the Chaga and the Pare, were peaceful, entailing the exchange of cattle and hides for iron, iron products, and the like, but the traditional history of Chaga chiefdoms on the eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro does indicate Chaga-Masai warfare in the late eighteenth century.
In some cases the Masai age-set system and the associated initiation and circumcision rites were taken over in whole or in part by their Bantu neighbors, perhaps as a way of organizing themselves to cope with the Masai. Among the Tanzanian groups that may have been so influenced were the Chaga, although their age-set system may have been borrowed from the Eastern Paranilotes who preceded them on Mount Kilimanjaro.
In the environs of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru there have long been groups, most of them quite small, of settled agricultural people called Kwavi who speak a Masai dialect. Whether they preceded the Masai in the area and took on the language of the former (who dominated the area) or whether they were offshoots of the Masai is not altogether clear. The largest such group is the Arusha, settled on the southwestern slopes of Mount Meru and in the adjacent plains. The first settlers came to Mount Meru as late as 1830, but there had been Masai-speaking settled peoples before that, chiefly in the plain south of Mount Kilimanjaro,
Indirect effects of the arrival of the Masai may be seen in the history of the Shambaa of the Usambara Mountains. Masai raids apparently forced Shambaa living on the lower slopes of these mountains into the higher areas and encouraged the formation of large central communities for protection. In addition cattle-keeping peoples, the Mhugu and the Nango (the former, at least, Cushitic speaking), entered the area after having left their homelands in the west under Masai pressure. The Mhugu herded their cattle above the settled zone, but the Nango lived among the Shambaa and, in places, dominated them. These conditions of Masai pressure and increasing population density and heterogeneity set the stage for political centralization.
Traditional dynastic history and other Shambaa sources give somewhat different pictures of the development of political hierarchy, but it seems that a hunter called Mhegha, originating elsewhere, became a provider of meat and a dispute settler among the Shambaa sometime in the eighteenth century and married the daughter of a Nango leader. Their son established the Kilindi dynasty.
Kilindi effectiveness as dispute settlers in a divided society and as organizers of defense against the Masai led to their acceptance by many Shambaa, but there was also resistance. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a dispute over succession led to the founding of a small independent kingdom in the far northeast part of the mountains where it could be defended against attempts to reincorporate it into the larger kingdom.
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