The Mbooni and Kilungu hills and the dry plains of Machakos and Kitui, later the Kamba country.
Kamba traditions bring their ancestors from the Kilimanjaro side to the Mbooni hills in about the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so in 1200 the hills were most likely held by Bantu farmers related to the Thagicu, with hunter-foragers and Southern Cushitic or Southern Nilotic herders on the plains: all inferred, nothing attested. The Kamba's later role as long-distance ivory traders to the coast is later.
Who holds it
- Name
- Not named
- Title
- Lineage elders
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
What it holds
- The Mbooni, Kilungu and Kitui hills
- The plains between the Athi and the Tana
How things stand that morning
Self-governing; peoples not identified with confidence.
Customs
Not recorded for 1200.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Inference from linguistics and later tradition only.
On the map: Rough outline; includes the dry lowlands south of the Tana.
Sources and studies
- C. Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (1998) and History and the Testimony of Language (2011), on the language families of East Africa
- J. E. G. Sutton, A Thousand Years of East Africa (1990)
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.