History
Meru of Kenya say that, before they settled in their present land, they had came from the North, ruteere rwa urio. This correlates with the oral history of other closely related groups such as the Kikuyu, Kamba and Embu who may have come from the north or south following the Bantu expansion from Central Africa.
Meru of Tanzania, or Wameru people, have shared the slopes of Mount Meru with the Waarusha people for about 300 years. Wameru came first. They were established on the slopes of Mount Meru before Waarusha arrived in the 1830s. Waarusha and Wameru cleared and settled most of the south eastern slopes of Mount Meru. In the 1880s, a series of disasters swept across northern Tanzania, driving the Maasai into the slopes of Mount Meru.
Read more about this topic: Meru People
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)