# The peoples Kenya forgot: Taita, the Tana, the foragers, and the Nubians The smaller peoples left out of the big-tribe story: the Taita, the Pokomo and Orma of the Tana, the hunter-gatherer Waata, Boni, and El Molo, the Pokot, and the stateless Nubians of Kibera. *This story part of: Precolonial Kenya: peoples, states, and faiths* *This story parallel: The colonial map of Kenya: neglected regions and regional inequality* *This story part of: Demographics and family* *Dorobo is not one tribe: Okiek, Yaaku, and Kenya's forest peoples parallel this story* *Tana River and Lamu hinterland: Pokomo, Orma, Aweer and delta land continues this story* *Taita-Taveta and Tsavo: war corridor, sisal estates, parks and landlessness continues this story* *Turkana: pastoral resistance, lake heritage, oil and drought parallel this story* ## c. 1000 — Bantu farmers settle the Taita Hills The Taita are a Bantu-speaking people who settled the isolated Taita Hills, a set of forested mountain blocks rising above the dry Tsavo plains. They grew out of several waves of migrants who clustered into tight hill communities and terraced the slopes for farming. The exact make-up of these early groups is reconstructed from language and oral tradition, so the details are debated. *Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010* *Source: Sisal Profile* *Source: Taveta, Occupation of* ## c. 1500 — The Shungwaya origin tradition Like the Mijikenda of the coast, the Pokomo tell of an ancestral homeland called Shungwaya, somewhere to the north near the Somali coast, from which they were driven south by raiders. Historians treat Shungwaya as a real memory of migration wrapped in legend, not a fixed place and date. It remains a founding story rather than a documented event. *Source: The Kaya Complex: A History of the Mijikenda Peoples* *Source: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda* *Source: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925* *Source: Transitional Justice* ## c. 1600 — Orma and Wardei herders reach the Tana The Orma are a Cushitic people, a southern branch of the Oromo, who moved down from the Ethiopian borderlands as cattle pastoralists and reached the Tana region. The related Wardei were Oromo-descended herders, many held in servitude by Somali groups before returning to the Tana country. The timing of these movements is reconstructed from oral tradition and remains debated. ## c. 1700 — Pokomo farmers and the gasa council on the Tana The Pokomo are Bantu farmers strung out in villages along the Tana River, living off its floods to grow bananas, rice and other crops on the banks. Their society was ordered by age-sets and by the gasa, a council of senior elders that settled disputes and spoke for the community. They were riverbank cultivators in a land otherwise ruled by herders. *Source: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda* *Source: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925* *Source: Transitional Justice* ## c. 1700 — The Ilwana of the middle Tana The Ilwana, also called Malakote, are a small Bantu-speaking farming people of the middle Tana around Bura and Hola. Living among the far more numerous Cushitic Orma, they took on much of their herder neighbours' language and custom. They are one of the river's least-known communities, easily lost between larger groups. *Source: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda* *Source: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925* *Source: Transitional Justice* ## c. 1800 — Taita fighi charms and the ancestor skull caves Taita religion centred on the ancestors. When an elder died, the skull was later removed and placed with others in ngomenyi rock shelters and caves, where the living brought offerings and asked for help. Communities were also guarded by fighi, protective medicine-charms set at the boundaries of a settlement to keep out enemies and disease. These practices were recorded in detail by ethnographers. *Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010* *Source: Sisal Profile* *Source: Taveta, Occupation of* ## c. 1800 — The Ilchamus, Maa-speaking farmers of Baringo The Ilchamus, also called Njemps, live at the south end of Lake Baringo and speak a Maa language close to that of the Maasai and Samburu. Unlike their pastoralist cousins, they built irrigation furrows to farm and fished the lake from reed rafts, an unusual mix for a Maa-speaking people. Small in number, they held onto a distinct way of life in a corner of the Rift Valley. ## c. 1800 — The Pokot of the dry western borderlands The Pokot are a Kalenjin-related people of the West Pokot and Baringo drylands, split between hill farmers and plains cattle herders. Among the pastoral Pokot, the sapana ceremony, borrowed from Karamojong neighbours, marks a young man's passage into adult standing. Their reputation as fierce cattle raiders shaped both their culture and their long marginalisation on Kenya's arid edge. ## c. 1800 — The Taveta hold the Chala caravan corridor The Taveta lived in a dense forest belt near Lake Chala on the edge of Kilimanjaro, close to what is now the Tanzania border. Their fenced forest home sat on the caravan route between the coast and the Chagga kingdoms of the mountain. As a small people in a strategic spot, they made a living as traders, guides and hosts to passing caravans. *Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010* *Source: Sisal Profile* *Source: Taveta, Occupation of* ## c. 1800 — The Waata elephant hunters The Waata, also called Sanye or Watha, were hunter-gatherers of the coastal hinterland, famous as elephant hunters using long bows and poisoned arrows. Originally Cushitic-speaking, they lived scattered through the bush behind the coast and traded ivory to farming and herding neighbours. As game laws and farming closed in, they lost both their hunting grounds and much of their own language. ## c. 1890 — The Akamba pushed into drought-prone Ukambani The Kamba are a large Bantu people, yet colonial land policy confined them to the semi-arid reserves of Ukambani in Machakos and Kitui, land that dried out and eroded under pressure. Once famed as long-distance ivory traders, they became one of the main sources of soldiers for the King's African Rifles and of porters for colonial expeditions. A big community was turned into a labour and military reserve on poor land. *Source: The history of settlement, land use, and environment (1890-1990)* *Source: A brief economic history of the Akamba, with particular reference to labour supplies* *Source: Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93* *Source: Kenya Railways: History* ## c. 1900 — The Aweer of the Boni forest The Aweer, or Boni, are a small hunter-gatherer people of the Boni-Dodori forest in Kenya's far northeast. They lived by foraging, hunting and gathering wild honey, long tied as clients to Oromo and Somali herders around them. In recent decades they have been squeezed by forest conservation rules and by army operations against militants in the same forest, cutting them off from the land they depend on. ## c. 1900 — The El Molo, fishers of Lake Turkana The El Molo live on the southeast shore of Lake Turkana near Loiyangalani and are among the smallest peoples in Kenya, numbering only a few hundred with unmixed descent. They fished the lake and hunted hippo and crocodile from reed rafts, a rare fishing life in a region of herders. Their Cushitic language has all but died out and most have intermarried with the neighbouring Samburu, leaving the group close to full assimilation. ## c. 1900 — The long Pokomo-Orma contest over the river Farmers and herders on the Tana have long competed for the same narrow strip of watered land. The Pokomo plant crops on the banks, while the Orma need to bring cattle to the river to drink, especially in drought. This clash of farming and grazing along one river has been a recurring source of tension for generations. *Source: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda* *Source: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925* *Source: Transitional Justice* ## c. 1910 — Taita-Taveta becomes a colonial labour reserve Colonial rule alienated much of the plains land around the Taita Hills for settler estates, railways and sisal plantations, penning the Taita into their hills. With little room to farm, men were drawn into wage labour on the sisal and the Voi railway works. The community was pulled into the bottom of a cash economy that it did not control. *Source: Land Conflicts in Taita Taveta, 1963-2010* *Source: Sisal Profile* *Source: Taveta, Occupation of* ## c. 1912 — Nubi soldiers settled at Kibera The Kenyan Nubians descend from Sudanese soldiers, the Nubi, who served the British in the King's African Rifles. From around 1912 the colonial government allotted them land on the edge of Nairobi as a military settlement, in a forested area they called Kibra, meaning bush or forest. Brought to Kenya as servants of empire, they were left as a community with no clear home of their own. *Source: Nairobi County: History* *Source: Nairobi: National Capital and Regional Hub* *Source: Kenya Railways: History* *Source: The Nairobi General Strike 1950: From Protest to Insurgency* *Source: Harry Thuku* *Source: Transitional Justice* ## c. 1930 — The Yaaku lose their language in Mukogodo The Yaaku were hunter-gatherers and beekeepers of the Mukogodo forest in Laikipia, speaking their own Cushitic tongue. In the early twentieth century they gave up hunting and honey for cattle and adopted the Maasai language and way of life, becoming known as the Mukogodo Maasai. The Yaaku language is now nearly extinct, remembered by only a handful of elders despite recent efforts to revive it. ## July 1938 — The Kamba resist forced destocking In 1938 the colonial government ordered the Kamba to sell off large numbers of cattle, claiming their herds were destroying the land. The Ukamba Members Association, led by Muindi Mbingu, organised protests and a march of around two thousand people who camped in Nairobi to demand a hearing. The campaign forced the government to back down, a rare early victory against colonial rule. ## c. 1963 — Nubians left stateless after independence Independent Kenya did not count the Nubians as one of its native communities, treating them instead as foreigners. For decades they were denied identity cards, passports and citizenship, forced through special vetting, and given no secure title to the Kibera land they had lived on for generations. Statelessness locked many out of schools, jobs and property. ## c. 1970 — Kibera grows into Africa's best-known slum The Nubian settlement of Kibera swelled as migrants poured into Nairobi and put up shacks on land the government still refused to formally hand over. Without title, the original Nubian community could not stop the growth and became a minority in their own place. Kibera turned into one of Africa's largest and most photographed informal settlements, a byword for urban poverty. ## March 2011 — African committee rules for Nubian children On 22 March 2011 the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child ruled that Kenya had violated the rights of children of Nubian descent to nationality, to equal treatment and to protection from statelessness. The decision pressed Kenya to grant citizenship at birth and end the special vetting. Recognition came slowly, with the community finally issued a title deed for part of Kibera in 2017. ## August 2012 — The Tana River massacres In August 2012, raids and reprisals between Pokomo farmers and Orma herders in Tana River County killed more than a hundred people, including women and children, in some of Kenya's worst communal violence in years. The bloodshed carried into early 2013 and was sharpened by drought, land disputes and looming elections. Old competition over the river had turned into mass killing. *Source: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda* *Source: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925* *Source: Transitional Justice*