Chaga People - Early History

Early History

Early migration patterns of the Niger–Congo Bantus led the Chagga to settle in the north Pare Mountains. This is the home of the ancestral chagga. Their population growth by about the eleventh or twelve century led a number of people to begin looking for new lands. They found it on the nearby and, in those days, still heavily forested southern and eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The movement of the early Chagga banana farmers to Kilimanjaro set off a period of rapid and extensive cultural amalgamation, in which large numbers of the Ongamo people and the Rift Southern Cushites were assimilated into the newly expanding Chagga communities. Even though the Maasai settled in the open plains around much of the Chagga country, they cannot be credited with great influence on Chagga affairs during this period. Another people, the Ongamo or Ngasa who were closely related in language to the Maasai, did have much influence on Chagga history.

Although growing in numbers and territory, the Chagga in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained organised into many very small and local social and political units, whose histories are still largely unstudied by western scholars.