Mbeere Erotic

The Mbeere are the people of the dry side of Mount Kenya. Their country begins where the mountain's green southeastern slopes give out and the land drops, hot and thorny, toward the Tana River, in what is now the lower, larger part of Embu County. That position defines them. Their closest kin, the Embu, farm tea and coffee in the rain uphill. The Mbeere got the lowlands: thin soils, unreliable seasons, and a farming tradition built around crops that forgive drought, such as millet, sorghum, cowpeas, green grams and pigeon peas, backed by goats, cattle and log beehives hung in trees. Oral tradition holds that the two were once a single people who parted after a conflict, and the languages bear that out. Kimbeere and Kiembu are close enough that linguists usually treat them as one language, part of the central Kenyan Bantu cluster that also includes Kikuyu, Kamba and Meru. The 2019 census counted a little under 200,000 Mbeere.

Older Mbeere society ran without chiefs. Authority sat with councils of elders, with patrilineal clans, and with two alternating generation classes, Thathi and Nyangi, whose work was largely ritual. Clans mattered most where land was concerned, and they came roaring back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Kenyan government converted communal land to individual title. Descent groups that had been loosely organized suddenly compiled genealogies, swore oaths and argued their claims before adjudication committees, an episode the anthropologist Jack Glazier documented in detail. Administrative borders have moved around them too. Colonial officers folded the Mbeere into Embu District, a separate Mbeere District existed from 1996, and the 2010 constitution merged the two again, so the split of seats and budgets between uphill and downhill remains the live question in county politics.

Most Mbeere today are Christian. Anglican and Catholic missions came in the colonial period and Pentecostal churches have multiplied since, though diviner-healers still have clients and Ngai, the god tied to the mountain, has not been wholly displaced. The main towns are Siakago, Kiritiri and Ishiara. Two things have reshaped the economy. The Seven Forks hydroelectric dams on the Tana, long a mainstay of Kenya's power supply, flooded riverside farmland, and the Kiambere project in the 1980s displaced thousands of people. And muguka, a cheap, leafy variety of khat, has become the cash crop that millet never was. Mbeere farms grow much of the national supply, which is why a 2024 attempt by coastal counties to ban the leaf was felt here as a direct threat to school fees and household income.