I'm doing a research people on the Kikuyu tribe and people. I would like to interview a Kikuyu person online and get some information about them and their customs. I would also like to know how their lives were when growing up. The rituals that took place and what they are doing today.

KKillens,
First, let me point it out to you that to most people, the use of the word 'tribe' is unacceptable.

I do not know how much info you want, but I doubt you will get much online. Think of it, very few of the Kikuyu's who have passed through traditional istitutions where traditional norms were taught have online access. Many of us are what you can call 'hybrids', and the info we can give you woudl be highly deficient.

In any case, our knowledge comes from the books, which you can read. Go to the the forums on Kikuyu published works for some of these books.

My best bet is that you go for fieldwork and collect data among the ordinary Kikuyus. Once you have done that, and you need some clarifications, perhaps we can assist with the little that we know.

However, I am talking on my behalf. I cannot talk for others. Maybe someone else might feel competent enough to assist you.

Good luck!

Sajini,What do you mean by tribe being unacceptable? You are right.You can not speak for others. Cause let me tell you my friend.Iam of the Gîkûyû tribe and very proud.

The Gîkûyûs,the Maasais,Kambas and all the others were tribes long before them missionaries minced Africa.

Sure he/she can read the books.But most of them books were written the colonialists way so to speak .The best way for him/her to get any accurate info on the real Gîkûyû deal will be to interview those 80 and up yrs old Gîkûyû folks.And I do not think he/she will get them on line.If he/she is serious about the research,then he/she will have to go to the source.

And by the way KKillens,what kind of research are you talking about?What are you planning on doing with the info? Something about my tribe. We say,(Cia Mûciî ti comoo.) Meaning we do not go dishing out everything about our tribe and families to strangers.But that depends. On your Motives.

Oh,And KKillens,My tribe is not the Kikuyu.The colonialist could not pronounce Gîkûyû so he wrote it his way.Talk of Selfish good for nothing colonialists.They could not pronounce Kîrînyaga,My country so they called it Kenya.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Nyina Wa Bakhita,

KKillens,

I won't repeat all that has been said by the other contributors but all I can say is welcome to the archive of culutural wealth and hear it from the horses' mouths. We are hospitable people and will do something we call "kugagura" (to welcome/entertain, for lack of better translation).

Karibu.

Thank you for answering my question. I'm taking a Cross-Cultural African class. I'm going to college for my Bachelor's degree. What I need from you is any and everything you know about the Kikuyu people. Please forgive me for calling them a tribe. I have read some books and they called them a tribe. Tell me where you were born? Did you go through any rituals as you grew up? What was your responsiblities as a boy, then as a man. Did you marry a Kikuyu woman or are you married? What do you do now and what are the Kikuyu people doing? Tell me as much information as you want. It will surely help me and I pray that I get an A on my paper.
Thanking You In Advance
kkillens

Nyina wa Bakhita,
About the tribe issue, This is one of th edefinition from my Oxford American Dictionary of current English:

A group of (esp.primitive) families or communities, linked by social, economic, religious, or common culture and dialect, and usu.having a common culture and dialect, and a recognized leader

It all came from the colonial athropologists who actually defined 'tribe' as a group of primitive people living under a chief.

Now, Now, Nyina wa B. Kikuyus were not a feaudal society, or aristocratic but communal. This means that these definitions are fatally wrong. I I do not belong to a Kikuyu tribe if these are the senses we attribute in the word.

I agree there are other definitions where the negative connotations have been removed, but the thing is you never know when somebody has turned to shorwave.

In the mainstream, do we have Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, British tribes? ask yourself.

A group of (esp.primitive) families or communities, linked by social, economic, religious, or common culture and dialect, and usu.having a common culture and dialect, and a recognized leader

Kkillens
Academic work should be encouraged, but you have to be more specific in the kind of information you are seeking. People tend to turn on their antennas when you start asking for personal narratives.

Perhaps the best way to go about it would be like this; set questions for people to answer e.g.,

1. How are children named?
2. What are the roles accoding to gender, age, etc?
3. What are the most important rites of passage. Have you ever been involved, or witnessed any etc.

You might also consider contacting people individually, especially those in the US and see whether they will give you phone interviews, but you must have specific questions that you want answered.

Sajini,It really doesn't matter what anybody says or thinks Iam. I know different.And them saying Iam primitive or whatever won't make me primitive. We had tribes or Kabira long before they put tribe in the dictionary.Kabira is a group of people that follows same rules,cultures, and speak the same dialect.

These people have come up with names most don't agree with like the third world and many more. It does not matter what they say it is. What matters is how the people see themselves.

Sajini and Nyina wa B,
I think it all depends on the (mis)conception of this term. I put "mis" deliberately there as it all bogs down to who is using this concept. Our forefathers (and mothers) used to have "rûrîrî rwa gikuyu, rwa meru..." as a way of identifying themselves.

On the other hand, the distractors came and used the same identity to turn one tribe against the other and hence the polarisation and inacceptance these days of identifying oneself with one tribe. Only because the term and the whole meaning was abused.

Kkillens:

It's good you have chosen to study the community in your degree course. I would still advise you to come up with a general reference questionnaire to guide you in your research. Make sure the questions will not allow room for personal opinions but will assist you find information on the community. And much as you will read the books, it will be very helpful to get information from interviewing some persons. The example that Sajini has given above suffice. Otherwise all the very best in your endevors

Nyina wa B,
In Kikuyu there is a popular proverb, "Riitwa ni Mbukio, na gutiri ritakuria mwana"

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Words cut where the sharpest knives cannot. They demolish edificues that the missiles cannot. All it takes it how the speakers manipulates them to suit his/her whims. If you don't believe it, just look at how the tribe discourse was used in the just concluded referendum.

You probably have heard them say that if you want to kill a good dog, begin by giving it a bad name.

Your argument that is that it does not matter as long as you do not share the same beliefs. However, I disagree, because we live in a social world, where our self esteem is detremine by the way we negotiates for the space. This cannot be done when one side comes to the negotiating table with preconceived notions about you, thanks to the vocabulary that reifies the widely-held irrational stereotypes.

email me at gkerubino@aol.com

Mwanga,
That link makes me want to throw up. Nobody should see it before eating. Sometimes I wonder what kind of pleasuer I seek in alcohol. I think I am lucky to have escaped with it when every fridays was was out time to carouse, and chang'aa was something we took with abandon.

Europian Tribes

The word tribe used to exist before the colonization. It is an English word. This shows that the English people identified that they were tribes, just as the Gikuyu people identified that there were Nduriri. To make it worse with the Gikuyu, just like the Israelites, who belief that they are Jews while the rest are Gentiles, the Gikuyu belief that, they are Ruriri, while the rest are Nduriri. This is scenario that many other communities have accommodated through the History.

In particular, the Bantu people almost always accommodate this scenario. That is why they call themselves the Bantu “the people” while the rest are Nyamu. Like you have heard about “Nyamu cia ruguru”.

Due to industrialization and subsequent urbanization, most European lost their tribal identity and only those who were not engaged in industrial activities retained their tribal identity. The European Urbanites started to view the rural Europeans as primitive. Given that the dictionary was written by the Urbanites, they interpreted the word tribe from their own point of view. Further more the urbanites had adopted a new language which was a hybrid of the tribal languages, Latin and Greek. This is the reason they didn’t regard them selves as a tribe because they were cosmopolitan and they were a mixed people without a common destiny, culture or background. Just like the Kenyan Urbanites.

Here are the British tribes and where they are settled:
1) Catevaullani: have settled just north of the Tamais River.
2) Dumnonii: have settled at South-western Britian at a place known as Caerwisc.
3) Silures: are the Western British tribe and inhabiting the mountainous western portion of the island.
4) Brigantes: are a Northern British tribe. Their main settlement is Eburac.
5) Votadini: are also a Northern British tribe. They generally live around Caledonian mountains

Here are the Spanish or Hispanic Tribe.
1) Lusitanii- settled at Olipso at the mouth of the Tagus River,
2) Vettones: : located in central Spain,
3) Astures: north-west coast of Spain at Bracara
4) Cantabrii northern mountains and coastline of spain
5) Vasates: around Pallantia in central Spain
6) Gallacai: north-western corner of the Iberian peninsula

How about the Germanic Tribes
The chief German tribes included:
The Alemanni, the Angles
The Burgundii
The Lombards
The Saxons
The Visingoths
The Chamavi
The Cimbri
The Eruli
The Gepidae
The Suebi,
Etc.

quite enlightening,that.
honestly, it has never occured to me that britons could have had tribes.
boy aint i glad am on this site.
Mucho gracias signor

In fact English is not one of the British languages. It is just like Kiswahili or Sheng. It is a mixture of Germanic Languages spoken by Anglo Saxony people of East Germany around Dresden and Leipzig. If you know the history of Napoleon you might remember the Battle of Dresden and the Battle of Nations at Leipzig (1813). These two battles were fought in this Anglo-Saxony region of Germany. The Anglo-Saxony is not only the origin of the English language but also the origin of protestant it Christianity. It is in Leipzig that Martin Luther started protesting.

Sorry, I was saying that English is a hybrid language of Germanic Languages, Latin and Greek. It was only adopted by Britons as a trade language. Currently, there is no tribe which can claim English as their native language, just as there is no tribe that can claim Kiswahili and Sheng as their native language. However, people who lose tough with their culture (and in particular language) tend to form a new cosmopolitan culture like the Swahili culture. In future we expect that the children of all Brayos and Kevins in our urban areas will develop a Sheng culture and they will no longer identify themselves with any tribal culture.

Just look at nearly all English language words and you will notice that their roots is not English.

Riara
Hau ningwenda tukararanie hanini, no ti haaro

Start with Swahili
There are some people who can claim Swahili as their native language. Indeed the Swahili people have been in existence for around two thousand years. One etymology for the word Swahili is the Arabic word Saahel which means 'coast'. The plural of Saahel is Sawaahel, but the Coastals pronounced it Swahili or Sawahili. This should not be a problem; the fact that Waswahili came to be referred by the name given by outsiders does not mean that the group did not exist as a distinct entity before then.

All we have done is adopting Swahili as a lingua franca, but its native speakers are there, only that they are a very small minority compared to all the people who speak Swahili today.

One great falsification of history is that Swahili is a bastardization of Arabic and Bantu languages, and this has been proven to be linguistically unsupported. Evidence has shown that Swahili evolved around the mouth of River Tana at the Northern coast of Kenya. Its earlier predecesor is called Kingozi, but it has undergone a lot of changes since then.

No uthome wega hari ibuku riri ria Thomas Hinnebush na Derek Nurse.

Swahili and Sabaki: a Linguistic History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 780 pages (1993).

Regarding English,
I agree that the introduction of Germanic elements began with the Anglo-Saxon conquest. In fact one of the Anglo Saxon (Germanic) tribe that overran England around the 5th Century was called Angul from where the name England derives. England hence means the land of the Angles or Angle-land.

While I do accept the Latin and Greek influence, I still would not give those two languages a lot of weight. While what counts as a langauge is more of a political rather than a linguistic fact, the language is normally recognized from its structure rather that its lexicon. For this reason, I would prefer to regard English as purely Germanic.

In a sense, Latin predates the Anglo-Saxon invasion during the Roman empire, but this is of little or no consequence to English as we know it. We can attribute the Latin and the Greek influence to the rennaissance around the 16th and 17th century. In any case, during the Normady conquest, French exerted a lot of influence on English, and French itself is descended from Latin.

So, what I am trying to say that English is a descendant of the proto-germanic, and has been influenced, or call it enriched if you will, by all these other languages. Some of the borrowed vocabulary is actually synonyms which are introduced as a result of socio-political factors rather than lexical defficiency. I do not think that the roots of words would tell us much, considering that Germanic languages are themselves descended from proto-germanic, which together with the Latin, Greek and many others are ofshoots of proto-indo-European. Finally, reconstruction of lexical roots would only show us the proto-forms which none of the languages can claim ownership

Regarding Sheng, let me reserve my comments for now.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sajini,