Mbwaa: The Meru Beginnings

“We began on Mbwaa,” the chronicles declare, then go on to describe an orderly, prosperous island community, set on the edge of a large body of water, the name of which is no longer recalled. “It was the time when the men of Ntangi [age-set] were warriors [ca. 1700]; a time when we lived near the mouth of a large river that ran red into a great sea. It was a time when we lived on an island we recall as Mbwaa.”^[2]
Traditions describe the island as having been encircled by bitter (salt) water that no one could drink. It lay sufficiently near a “mainland,” however, for both people and animals to have been visible from a northwestern shore. The island was irregularly shaped (“like a crooked gourd”), set in a circular coral reef, and small enough to cross on foot within a single day. The earth consisted of coral and sand, although freshwater springs near its center allowed small-scale herding and agriculture.
The islanders’ economy, however, was based largely on fish. Men carved small wooden hooks to catch tiny fish along the reefs. Larger fish would either crush or break the hooks, thereby sharply limiting what could be taken. Men of Mbwaa also kept goats, sheep, and short-horned cattle. Through trade they acquired donkeys from a people re-called as Cucu (Somali). The donkeys drew water from shallow wells dug near the island’s center. The wells also supported crops of millet and yams, supplemented by sugar cane, bananas, and sap from a palm that was brewed into beer.
The only “wild” animal on Mbwaa was a long-haired goat. Its skin was sought, periodically, to make simple bellows for forging iron. The chronicles declare that iron was found “everywhere” on Mbwaa. In consequence each clan contained ironsmiths who gathered the ore to forge into spear points and knives.
The island’s most unusual feature was the behavior of its tides. Informants from every Meru community described these with the phrase “ruuji rugwita kuria nyaki” (the water has gone to eat grass). The reference is to times, once in daylight and once at night, when the tide would flow swiftly toward the mainland (“to eat grass”), leaving an area recalled as “dry,” but which in fact was actually mud, sprinkled with tidal pools.
This dry period was very important to the economy. Women used it to gather cowry shells, which were worn on strings around their waists for use in trade. Little boys gathered larger shells for the community elders, who used them as containers for everything from snuff to magic herbs.
The tides served the islanders in other ways. After a certain time “it would return from eating grass” (from the mainland) with great force, flowing back into its channel with such speed that people caught out in the tide pools had to race for shore. Traditions dwell upon the water’s swiftness (“watchmen would shout”), as well as the fear that women, in particular, felt at being caught in its flow. This return tide would even sometimes catch and drown wild animals, most often elephants, which moved between Mbwaa and the mainland. The islanders seized such occasions with great joy, stripping each corpse of ivory and meat, then saving the tusks for subsequent trade with the mainlanders.

The economic portrait that emerges from these narrations is surprisingly consistent. Mbwaa is remembered as sheltering a relatively well-ordered community, which worked steadily to survive but never knew hunger. The availability of iron for tools permitted construction of a diverse economic base, in which fishing, shellfish gathering, herding, and grain production all had roles. Beyond that the island’s location, evidently adjacent to other communities on the mainland clearly provided both the desire and opportunity for trade. The occasional acquisition of ivory must have provided further stimulus for trade, although in subsequent traditions it appears to have contributed directly to the community’s eventual demise.

Where Was Mbwaa?
No living elder recalled the location of Mbwaa. Nor, informants declare, did their grandfathers remember it. Nothing in the entire body of tradition speaks directly of the island’s location. Yet the narratives are rich in clues. Much of the existing oral evidence suggests that the Meru ancestral homeland lay off the northern Kenya coast, on the northwestern edge of the contemporary island of Manda.
Linguistic evidence supports this contention. H. E. Lambert, a notable linguist and former commissioner of Meru district (in 1933–1935 and 1940–1941), suggests, for example, that the Meru word Mbwaa (or Mbwa ) is derived from the Swahili term pwani (beach, shore). Linguistically, the only difference is that the Swahili word “has [added] the locative ending (-ni) while . . . discarding the nasalization (“b”) in favor of aspiration (“p”), whereas the Meru word . . . having retained the “m” has kept the “b”; “n” becomes “m” before a labial.^[3] Lambert also believed that the fundamental meaning of the Swahili stem pwa denoted not only “shore” but also “place where the tide ebbs.” As an example he gives the term pwayi , which in the dialect of neighboring Pate Island suggests a creek that dries up at low tide.
Lambert, writing in the 1940s, was unable to locate Mbwaa. Yet his linguistic suggestions are supported by examination of historical variants of the word. The most recent recordings of this specific tradition, those collected between 1930 and 1970, spell the island of origin as “Mbwa.” The very earliest, however, collected between 1917 and 1925, use the longer variant “Mbwaa.”^[4] In many Bantu languages, including those of the contemporary Meru region, the ground, or r or l (the intervocalic ^*d ), has tended over time to disappear when surrounded by vowels within a syllable; the three letters run together, gradually evolving into a single short vowel.^[5]
Before this century, for example, the Tharaka, the tribe adjacent to contemporary Meru, were known as the Thaaka , both by neighboring African societies and the earlier European explorers. Logically, they should be known as the Thaka today, but the r was restored by conscientious twentieth-century British administrators who inquired into their past. Similarly, if Mbwa (1930s–1960s) was once Mbwaa (1920s), it may have been expressed still earlier as Mbwara , having gradually contracted in the same manner as Tharaka . The linkage is made stronger by the existence of a specific region—on the western side of Manda Island—known as Mbwara Matanga.
Similarity in names, of course, is inconclusive. Yet the word matanga is also worth examining. In the Manda dialect it means “sands” but refers to a type of sand containing iron ore. This type of sand has also been discovered on the adjacent island of Pate, particularly within an area similar to one on Manda. An iron-based technology could have developed with ease.^[6] This seems to mesh quite clearly with the Mbwaa traditions, in which frequent references to ironworking (e.g., spear points, smelting, ironsmiths) suggest that easy access to the ore had made its use routine.
Geographic evidence also suggests Manda as the Meru point of origin. The most striking argument lies in the behavior of the island’s tides. Two-thirds of Manda is surrounded by coral reefs, corresponding to the pattern described in the Mbwaa tradition. Northwest of Mbwara Matanga, however, lies a narrow channel known as the Mkanda. The term Mkanda does appear within the Mbwaa chronicles, to describe a people living separate from the ancestral Meru, on the mainland.
The modern Mkanda Channel, however, fills and empties twice daily from the action of a tidal bore. When empty, it leaves a landscape of steaming mud and tide pools, which hinders rapid movement. One investigator, surveying the phenomenon in 1913, remarked, “An enemy must come at high tide through this (Mkanda) channel . . . and in the event of defeat has no opportunity to retreat until next tide, lest he be caught in a sea of mud.”^[7] This surging tidal flow is central to the Mbwaa narrations and is constantly referred to. As examination of subsequent traditions reveals, knowledge of the ebb and flow of tides proved instrumental in allowing Meru supernatural specialists to rescue their entire community from what tradition records as enslavement.
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Tidal patterns of this type are found elsewhere in Kenya, but nowhere are they so closely associated with a specific oral history.
Historical evidence also points to Manda, in this instance within the oral traditions of a neighboring people. The Pokomo-speaking peoples currently inhabit both banks of Kenya’s Tana River, which reaches the Indian Ocean just south of the Lamu-Manda region. Meru traditions say nothing of contact with the Pokomo. They do, however, speak of the peoples of “Buu,” “Nderi,” and “Dzunda,” who lived on an island near Mbwaa, remembered as “Bua.”
Buu, Nderi, and Dzunda are names for contemporary sections of Pokomo. Oral traditions recorded among all three groups confirm that several of their clans did live on islands in the distant past. One group recalls that its home island was once called Bua; it is known today as Lamu Island and is located only a mile or so from Manda’s western shore.^[8]
No traditions predate existence on Mbwaa, and informants did not recognize place names or tribal names associated with the region or even the name itself. The pre-Meru home island lies within the Lamu Archipelago, however, less than one hundred miles south of Bur Kao.^[9] It is thus theoretically possible that the pre-Meru peoples may have trekked southward prior to the 1700s, perhaps as part of an entirely different group of whom all oral record has been lost. Until proof of this appears, however, it seems wise to restrict the Meru point of origin to Manda Island.