UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

East Africa before the seventh century
African highlands, keeping all the time a little to the east of the cultural
divide. Ethiopia is the ancient home of the Kushitic language-family; and
most of the present Bantu and Nilotic languages of Kenya and of northeastern
and north-central Tanzania reveal evidence of borrowing from
Kushitic tongues. In a few places, notably at the southern end of this zone,
such southern Kushitic languages actually persist, though of course highly
diverged from the old Kushitic forms. Among the important culturalhistorical
messages which the word-borrowings provide is the contribution
to cattle-keeping made by the early Kushitic populations in East Africa.
The Kushitic cultural element in East African history is reflected in other
ways, and up to a point in the non-chiefly social and political institutions,
based on age-organization, of the peoples of the plains and highlands of
Kenya and parts of northern Tanzania. But this observation is a very general
one, and not all aspects of these systems need be traceable to the original
Kushitic settlement. 6 Of more specifically Kushitic origin must be the
custom of circumcision in initiation, whose distribution coincides remarkably
closely with that of substantial word-borrowings from Kushitic and
the normal aversion to fish in the same broad region, whose significance
in the East African historial experience was argued above.
We gain then a picture of a pastoral Kushitic-speaking people, tall and
relatively light-skinned, expanding southwards and making themselves
masters of the rich grasslands, the plains and more especially the plateaux,
of Kenya and northern Tanzania about three thousand years ago. All this
may sound just like a restatement of the now rejected Hamitic myth. The
point is that, while the more illogical and romantic aspects of the various
and vaguely stated Hamitic hypotheses do derive from prejudiced European
scholarship and grotesque attitudes towards Africa and black peoples, the
factual bases of these views were not entirely fictitious. Some of the
observations were acute and certain of the historical interpretations very
judicious. The error of the Hamitic school lay in its presuppositions and
its obsession with origins of peoples and ideas. Failing to appreciate the
local scene, it emphasized a particular set of external influences, that is
the Kushitic element and the pastoral prestige rather than seeing this as
but one of many parts of the East African historical and cultural experience
- an experience in which the old savannah hunting tradition, the aquatic
one established during the wet millennia, and more recently the Bantu
with their attachment to iron and agriculture, have been equally important
complements.
6. Some may result from later contact with eastern Kushitic peoples of southern Ethiopia
and the Kenya border, notably the region of Lake Rudolf. In the present millennium
certain eastern Kushitic peoples, notably groups of Galla and Somali, have extended a long
way into northern and eastern Kenya. Such movements should be distinguished from the
much more ancient southern Kushitic expansion discussed here.
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