PEOPLE OF KENYA

 

The people of Kenya

The people of Africa belong to three main physical types: Negroid, Bushmanoid and Caucasoid. The last covers much of northern and north-eastern Africa, as well as western. Asia, India and Europe. The Negroid and Bushmanoid races are exclusively African — or were before overseas slave traders. As for pygmies, they probably do not constitute a race of their own, but a division of the Negroid specially adapted to forest conditions.

In Kenya the present people are entirely Negroid (excluding of course, the small numbers of

recent immigrants from overseas). An exception is north eastern Kenya, where the Gailla and Somali constitute representatives of the Caucasoid blood. This suggests that Caucasoid prople were once more widespread in Kenya. The Swahili people of the coast moreover have combined

some Caucasoid elements through intermarriage with Arabs.

The Bushmanoid type can nowadays be found among the Sandwe and their neighbors in central

Tanzania, but their distinct features are becoming rapidly blurred through Negroid expansion and absorption. The only pygmis-Negroes now in East Africa inhabit the forests above the western Rift Valley on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo. It seems clear that Bushmanoid people, and perhaps pygmies as well, were more widespread in Kenya and East Africa in the period before the introduction of food production, since the they have undergone gradual assimilation by Caucasoid and more particularly by Negroid people, expanding in large numbers with agriculture, do remnants have been forced into the least attractive types of country. The former in the Kalahari

desert and the latter in the Congo forest.

 

These physical differences are not very useful for classifying tribes or groups of tribes.

The distinction between racial types is vague, and individuals vary enormously. We can only make very general observation on how the Luo, for example, look different from the Kikuyu: we cannot attempt to define tribes in this way. A tribe is a tribe because it feels it is one. It must possess a common culture and a particular common language. It is not necessarily a high organized political unit. Tribes, moreover, are fluid groupings: some members are lost; others are absorbed through the continual processes of migration and interaction with neighbors. There is no such thing as a 'pure' tribe derived from a single founding ansestor .again ability division for administrative convenience or through the ignorance of, government officials, was not unknown in the colonial period.

Linguistic Classification

The most useful and objective method of classifying tribes and larder groupings is by language. The scheme that is used is based mainly on Greenberg's classification. The important groups to note are the Bantu, Nilotic and Cushitic.

The Bantu include:

1. Highland Bantu — Kikuyu, Embu, Meru, Tharaka, Kamba, Gusii, Kuria.

2. Coastal and Hinterland Bantu- Swahili, Taveta, Taita, Giriama, Digo, Pokomo.

3. Interlacusrine Bantu- Luhya. Suba. mestic herds and better tools.

 

 

The Nilotic include:

1. River-lake Nilotes — The luo.

2. Plains Nilotdes — Teso, Turkana, Masai, Njemps, Samburu, Kalenjin (Pokonit, Sebei, Marakwet, Elgeyo, Tuken, Nandi, Kipsigis, Opkiek (Dorobo).

3. CushitiC — Galla, Somali, Rendille, Mogogodo.

When the first food-producing communities began settling in parts of Kenya in the late stone age, they would have found thee country thinly populated by bands of hunters and gatherers. In many of the highland regions of Kenya, stories are told of dwarfs that once lived or hid in the thick forests. The reliability of these stories is difficult to assess, but they may refer to the former presence of pygmies.

Certainly the pygmies of the Congo, who extended right up to the Uganda border, descend, from populations that have for long been adjusted to gathering and hunting in the forests.

More important is the evidence of advanced late Stone Age hunters and perhaps also fishermen in the high savannahs of Kenya. These are known from finds of stone tools of the Capsian type, famous for blades, perhaps used as knives and spears-heads, made of the fine obsidian rock. These advances probably began reaching the Kenyan highlands ten thousand years ago. They may have connections with the Middle Nile region or with Ethiopia.

But their origins as well as the type of people responsible remain far from clear at the present stage of archaeological research.

 

The First Cultivators and Herdsmen

These advanced hunters lived in precisely those highland regions which towards the close of the late Stone Age experienced the first introduction of agriculture and domestic herds into Kenya. Dating by the radio-carbon method indicates that these developments had began by 1,000 BC in the Kenyan highlands. The newcomers were of a Caucasoid physical type: that is shown by skeletons excavated from a number of their burial site. In fact, most of our knowledge of these earliest food-producers comes from burials, for very few living sites have been discovered. The burials are usually under cairns (stone mounds). Large ones measure 12 feet in height and 50 feet in diameter, but many are much smaller. They can be found either singly or in groups, occasionally numbering a hundred and more. Their distribution extends from northern Kenya to central Tanzania, the whole length of the Rift Valley and the highland on either side, as well as across the plains that stretch away to the east and north as far as Ethiopia. Often the burials contain offerings or some of the belongings of the dead man or woman. These include grindstones and pestles, earthen ware ports and stone bowls which apparently contained food. From this we conclude that these people cultivated grain crops, presumably types of sorghum and millet. Animal bones show that they kept cattle and probably goats and sheep.

Nor was hunting despised, it continued to supplement the diet. It seems that there was considerable interbreeding between the newcomers and the indigenous hunters and gatherers of the highlands and adjoining plains.

A very famous communal burial site of this period is the Njoro River cave in the elevated part of the Kenya Rift Valley. It was excavated by Dr. and Mrs. Leakey. They found that the bodies had been cremated — an unusual practice, but one which ensured that many grave goods that would normally have rotted were carbonized and thus preserved.(they are now in the National Museum in Nairobi) these include basketry, cords, gourds, and a beautifully carved and decorated wooden vessel, presumably a milk container. Also famous from this site are pendant and hundreds of beads belonging to necklaces. The beads were made from bone, ostrich, eggshells, nut, sedge-seeds and various semi-precious stones, all obtainable locally.

The Njoro River Cave is only one of many burial sites of these late Stone Age cultivators and herdsmen, one of which provides however, an unusually rare insight into their material culture and economy. Like the hunters and gatherers, they lacked all knowledge of metals. Their knives, scrapers and spears were made of stone, principally obsidian that provided beautifully sharp edges. Their axes would also have been of stone, their hoes of stone and wood. They preferred, therefore, the more open country with light soil, where fields could more easily be cleared and dug and where grazing was more available. Possibly it was in this pre-iron period that the first irrigation works were constructed for agriculture in the highlands.

 Many systems of irrigation channels exist in Kenya and Tanzania to this day, both in the hills themselves and more valuable, at the base of escarpments where rivers flow into the drier plains. We do not know how old these complex feats of engineering may be, but it is certain that many of them are ancient, and their present users often attribute them to tribes that have now vanished or been absorbed.

Of similar antiquity, perhaps, the big dams in the plateau grasslands that doubtless provided reservoirs for watering cattle and the deep rock cut wells in the drier plains of north-eastern Tanzania and eastern and northern Kenya.

 

Many of these wells are still used and enlarged by the present inhabitants of the plains, Masai, Galla and Somali. But the reservoirs have fallen into disuse. There is a fine series of these old reservoirs dams at Ngorongoro, just above the crater.

The burials with their grave-goods, the red ochre with which the corpses were often adorned and the special placing of skulls or jaw bones, provide clear evidence of religious beliefs connected. with cults of the dead. The burials are so numerous both male and female that is difficult to believe that they represent important persons only. Quite probably, the societies of the highlands, then as now, were mostly chief-less.

Can we identify these late Stone Age food-producers more precisely? The Ethiopian highlands would have been the most likely direction from which seed-agriculture and domestic livestock would have diffused into the highland of Rift Valley regions of Kenya. The Caucasoid physical type also points to an Ethiopian origin type, so do the methods of burial, for cairns are constructed in Ethiopia to this day by Cushitic speaking people. The practice of circumcision as an initiation rite, and certain other social and cultural traits widespread among the present people of Kenya highlands and northern Tanzania also indicate earlier Cushitic influences in these regions.

 The southern Cushitic mainly found in Tanzania provides the obvious answer. Only a few pockets survive, the largest tribe being the Iraqw, but it is clear on linguistic grounds that they are remnants of a population that expanded from Ethiopia a few thousand years ago. Physically they should be classified as Negroid, doubtless through intermarriage with other stocks in East Africa, but they still betray many Caucasoid features.

 

 

As far as we can trace it at present, this late Stone Age food production was confined to the highland, Rift Valley and plains of Kenya and northern Tanzania. It seems certain that most of the rest of the country remained the territory of hunters and gatherers until the beginning of the Iron Age.

The Iron Age It is not clear just how and when iron-making first reached Kenya. The commonly accepted view is that it was brought from the north, on the presumption that it diffused through sub-Saharan Africa from Meroe on the middle Nile (north of Khartoum) where there was a large iron-smelting industry two thousand years ago. This view is clearly over simplified and no convincing evidence has been produced for a line of diffusion from Meroe to Kenya. The eventual answer will doubtless be more complex and it is now being suggested that iron-working was introduced to East Africa from several directions — the south-west, the Indian Ocean and the north during the first millennium, AD.

This supposed by a few recently obtained ratio-carbon dates. One thing is certain: there was no rapid or absolute change-over from a stone to an iron till very recently. And many iron using people for long supplemented their tool-kit by continuing to work stone. Throughout the Iron Age, iron tools were never tool plentiful.

Intermingling and Assimilation of peoples

More extensive process of assimilation by Bantu and Nilotes has taken place in the highland regions of Kenya already occupied by the southern Cushitic- speaking food-producers. The first and most important Nilotic group in the highlands was the ancestors of the present Kalenjin tribes Lingustic and archaeological studies show that certain times in the past they have been more widespread in the highlands and Rift Valley than they are now.

 The Bantu approach to the highlands was from the opposite's direction — the south and the coastal region. The Cushites were not simply overthrown by the successive waves of newcomers; there were some very long process of intermingling. Though as we have seen, the distribution of southern Cushitic languages is today very restricted, the people have left a deep mark on the customs, beliefs, economies and social and political organizations of the Bantu and Nilotes now inhabiting the highlands.

We should not envisage the history of the peopling of Kenya in the Iron Age merely as a process of Bantu and Nilotes absorbing the earlier Bushman — type hunter —gatherers and southern Cushitic food — producers. There was also considerable interaction, both peaceful and hostile, between various Bantu and Nilotic groups. There has been assimilation of Bantu and Nilotes on the edges of western Kenya highlands, in both directions over many centuries in both directions over many centuries.

The Bantu who live in the highlands east of the Rift Valley (Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru e.t.c), have absorbed many non-Bantu elements. These include besides hunters — gatherers and southern Cushites, pastoralists of diverse origins — Highland Nilotes. Gafla and other Eastern Cushitic groups, and in the last century or two Masai of the plains branch of the Nilotes.

Whereas Nilotes have tended to dominate the highland and Rift Valley grassland, Eastern Cushites, expanding from Ethiopia and the Horn, have for several centuries roamed the dry plains of northern and eastern Kenya, stretching from the highland edges right down to the coast.

 

Pressure from Eastern Cushites was one of the factors that induced kikuyu and other Bantu groups to move from the coastal regions and rift valleys into the highlands. Surrounded by Nilotes and Eastern Cushites, both jealous for the grasslands, the highland Bantu. have been mainly confined to the fertile forested hill slopes where few cattle can be kept. But here they provide refuge for pastoralist who from time to time fall on hard times and lose their cattle or are driven by stronger rivals from the grasslands. For instance many of the highland Bantu, have absorbed numbers of Masai, or in some cases have themselves been absorbed by the Masai.

Lastly, Nilotes have absorbed Nilotes and Bantu have absorbed Bantu. In the highlands and rift valley, Masai have assimilated some of the previously far-ranging Kalenjin, while the Kalenjin have been constantly interacting among themselves and thus forming new tribes. For an interesting example of inter-Bantu fusion, we might observe the region to the East and south-east of lake Victoria. Here Bantu who have come around or across the lake have mixed with others who have crossed from the eastern highlands through the Nilotic zone of the Rift Valley. Elsewhere there have been constant and numerous inter - Bantu movements.

Though, as we have seen, the main Bantu penetration into East Africa appears to have been from the south-west, thus has not prevented secondary migrations in the opposite direction. Some of these movements were connected with increasing populations and the need to open up more land for agriculture. Because of these movements and interaction among the peoples of Kenya, it is not surprising that, although there have been Nilotes and Bantu East Africa for one or two thousand years, the traditional histories of individual Nilotic and Bantu tribes usually go back only one, two or three hundred years, and never for more than six hundred.

 

Thus we see the complex nature of tribe origins and compositions. Though we may for convenience classify tribes by their language as Bantu, Nilotic, Cushitic etc., the more we examine them, the more mixed we find their ancestries to be. A tribe emerges not by maintaining the pure blood of its ancestors; not by sedulously avoiding contact with its neighbors, but by successfully assimilating its diverse elements. To survive, a tribe must continually adjust itself to surrounding circumstances.