Mijikenda Erotic

The Mijikenda are nine related Bantu-speaking peoples of the Kenyan coast — the name itself means "the nine homesteads" in their own languages. They occupy the strip of country running inland from the Indian Ocean between the Tanzanian border and the Tana River: Mombasa, Malindi, Kilifi, Kwale. The branches usually counted are the Giriama, Digo, Duruma, Rabai, Ribe, Kambe, Kauma, Chonyi and Jibana, though the Segeju, who straddle the Kenya–Tanzania frontier, are often grouped with them by language and history. Each branch keeps its own dialect, but the dialects are mutually intelligible enough that "Mijikenda" functions as a working language as well as an ethnic label.

The defining institution of Mijikenda history is the kaya — fortified hilltop forest settlements established, by oral tradition, after the group migrated south from a place called Shungwaya sometime around the sixteenth century. Each branch had its own kaya, ringed by sacred forest and governed by councils of elders. The villages eventually moved down to lower ground, but the forests were left standing as shrines, and the elders' councils continued to meet inside them. Several of the surviving kaya forests are now UNESCO-listed, and they remain active ritual sites — burial grounds, oath-taking places, repositories of the wooden memorial posts known as vigango that mark the deaths of senior men.

Christianity is now the majority affiliation, the result of long missionary contact on the coast, but the older Mijikenda religion — focused on ancestor veneration and the authority of the kaya elders — has not been displaced so much as layered underneath. The Digo, the southernmost branch, are an exception: centuries of trade contact with Swahili and Arab merchants made Islam the dominant faith among them, and Digo culture sits closer to the Swahili coast than to the inland Mijikenda. The Giriama, the largest branch, are remembered politically for the 1913–1914 uprising led by the prophetess Mekatilili wa Menza against British attempts to conscript Giriama labor and tax their palm wine — one of the more sustained early resistances to colonial rule in East Africa.

Economically the coastal Mijikenda still farm coconut, cashew, and maize, tap palm wine, and fish; many work in Mombasa and the tourist towns. The relationship with the Swahili of the coastal strip is old and ambivalent — traders, neighbors, sometimes rivals — and much of what outsiders read as "Swahili coast" culture is in fact a long collaboration between the two.