UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
Nile basin and the Ethiopian borderlands. In these regions and in the
Kushitic zone it is likely that the knowledge of iron and the skills of working
it derived from a northerly source. 14 This would have been independent
of its adoption by the early Bantu, with whose expansion iron-working
was, as discussed above, probably in westerly and southerly parts of East
Africa.
Whatever may be the explanation of the success of the early Highland
Nilotes in the first millennium of our era, they took over a considerable
part, but certainly not all, of the Rift Valley and adjacent highlands and
plains which had previously been Kushitic territory. This was largely a
process of assimilation as much as of invasion and expulsion: it probably
continued well into the second millennium. Already these Nilotes had
herded cattle and cultivated grains: nevertheless, they doubtless had much
to learn from the Kushites on how to pursue these activities most successfully
in their new highland environment. Their social organization with cycling
age-sets, moreover, appears to be an amalgamation of Nilotic and Kushitic
elements, while the custom of circumcision as a mark of initiation into a
named age-set is specifically Kushitic. So is their prohibition against fish.
By climbing the escarpments with one's cattle, one was consciously turning
one's back on the lakes, swamps and rivers of the west.
The majority of the Nilotes remained in the Nile basin, in the southern
Sudan mainly. Here they were not directly influenced by Kushitic ways,
and they usefully combined stock-keeping, grain cultivation and fishing.
However, the Plains division eventually split into three principal branches,
and it is instructive to observe their range of cultural and environmental
adaptations from north-west to south-east. Among the Bari-Lotuko cluster
in the southern Sudan and the borders of northern Uganda a fairly typical
Nilotic life has been maintained. In the rather dry hills and plains which
cross from northern Uganda into Kenya, herded by the Itunga grouping
(Karamojong, Turkana, Teso, etc.), fishingis infrequent, though this may
be attributable to the scarcity of opportunities as much as to a cultural
prohibition. Beyond the Itunga, the third branch of the Plains Nilotes,
the Masai, has extended across a very large part of the highlands and plateau
grasslands of Kenya and northern Tanzania. Here in recent centuries they
have assimilated and been strongly influenced by the earlier settled
Highland Nilotes and, directly or indirectly, the southern Kushitic. They
have adopted then not only the fish taboo, but circumcision too. In these
fine pastures, in fact, the central Masai sections succeeded recently in
pursuing the pastoral ethic to its ultimate extreme.
These are by no means all the examples that could be cited of Nilotic
14. In northern Ethiopia and on the middle Nile iron became known around the middle
of the first millennium before our era. Iron trade goods are recorded as being imported
on the East African coast in the earliest centuries of our era (see Chapter 22). But there is
no indication that the skills of working iron were learned from such external sources or
carried inland.
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