Digo Erotic

The Digo are the southernmost of the nine Mijikenda peoples and the most closely tied to the Muslim Swahili world of the East African coast. Their country runs along the shore and the low coastal ridge south of Mombasa, through Kwale County in Kenya and over the border into the Tanga Region of Tanzania. It is a country of coconut palms, cassava and maize plots, mangrove creeks and small fishing landings. These days it also takes in the resort strip at Diani, where hotel jobs are a short walk from farming villages that have stood for generations.

Like the other Mijikenda, the Digo remember a northern homeland called Shungwaya and a migration south into the forested hills behind the coast. There they built fortified settlements known as kaya: clearings deep in the forest, with a protective charm buried at the center and elders who governed from inside. The Digo moved out of the kaya into open homesteads long ago, but the forests were never cut down. Kaya Kinondo, near Diani, is still kept by elders under strict rules about who may enter and what may be taken out. In 2008 the Mijikenda kaya forests were listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

What sets the Digo apart from their Mijikenda neighbors most of all is Islam. Generations of trade, marriage and politics with the coastal towns made them overwhelmingly Muslim, and a Digo village typically has its mosque and Quranic school. Older institutions have not gone away, though. Spirit possession, healers and divination remain part of life for many families. Descent was traditionally traced through the mother's line, an arrangement that has long sat uneasily with Islamic inheritance law.

Their language, Chidigo, belongs to the Sabaki group of Bantu languages, the same branch as Swahili, and nearly all Digo also use Swahili every day. In the late nineteenth century the colonial partition drew the boundary between British and German territory straight through Digo country, and that line became today's border between Kenya and Tanzania. More than a century later it still divides two states, not two peoples.