MADAGASCAR'S MIKEA (original) (raw)

Hunter-gatherers in the hinterland of Mombasa: notes on the Maumba of Chonyi and related traditions

Azania, 2003

In the introduction to his ‘Notes on the History of Vumba’, A. C. Hollis made the following tantalising remarks about traditions of earlier populations on what is now the Kenya coast: "The aboriginal inhabitants of this country are thought to have been the Wasi, who were divided into three groups, the Wamaraka, the Wamaumba and the Watwa. A few Wamaraka are now settled at Ada, a town some fifiy miles west of Gasi, the Wamaumba live with the Wachonyi, one of the Wanyika tribes, some thirty miles north of Mombasa, whilst the Watwa are to be found in small numbers round Lamu, a well-known town not far from the mouth of theTana river." None of the ethnonyms given to Hollis is now in common use on the Kenya coast. ‘Wasi’ and its cognates (including Gikuyu Atbz] is a widespread term for hunter-gatherers in the Bantu languages of central and eastern Kenya and north-eastern Tanzania - but it is not used in contemporary Mijikenda or Swahili. Derek Nurse has speculated that it may be the origin of the name Wasini (i.e. ‘Place of the hunter-gatherers’), though there is no other evidence to support this at present. Twa is an even more widespread Bantu term for aboriginal peoples. By ‘Watwa’, Hollis was apparently referring to the former hunter-gatherers generally known in the modern literature as the Dahalo. The Dahalo are speakers of a Cushitic language with a ‘click‘ substratum, who still live, albeit in dwindling numbers, in the north of the Tana Delta (Nurse 1986, Tosco 1991). The name Twa seems to have been formerly much more widely used on the coast, and it appears in the Mombasa Chronicle as a term for the local washenzi or ‘barbarians’ (Knappert 1964). The ‘Wamaraka‘ were first noted in the mid-nineteenth century under the names Masaka and Madhaka (these are all cognates). More recently the Maraka / Madhaka have been identified with the Degere and/or Vuna who live to the south and west of the Shimba Hills respectively. The Degere and Vuna are former hunter-gatherers related to the Oromo-speaking Waata, but now largely assimilated to the Mijikenda-speaking Digo and Duruma (Walsh 1990, 1992/93). The Waata once hunted and gathered in various coastal forests (including the Arabuko-Sokoke) and throughout the drier thorn-bush country to the west, but lost much of their hunting grounds in the latter area when they were ejected from Tsavo East National Park (Ville 1995). Although Hollis was quite specific about the location of the ‘Wamaumba’ (i.e. Maumba), described as living among the Chonyi to the north of Mombasa, the literature on coastal history has otherwise been largely silent on their identity as a group of assimilated hunter-gatherers. The following notes gather together existing sources on the Maumba and discuss these and related traditions, with a view to enhancing our understanding of the history of the Kenyan coast and the role of hunting and gathering groups in that history (see the existing syntheses by Stiles, 1981, 1993).