Who Were The Nguo Ntuni?

The Nguo Ntuni were most likely East African coastal Arabs, descendants of one of the earlier Middle Eastern migrant groups that had formed numerous commercial communities along the Kenya-Somalia coast. Descriptions of their appearance, clothes, and weapons tend to confirm this identification, as do the informants themselves.

A variant of the Nguo Ntuni tradition suggests non-African invaders. In some versions the conquerors are recalled as "Nguruntune," a pejorative with the implication of "red legs."^[2] In the past, light-skinned non-Africans such as Europeans, Persians, and Arabs were commonly perceived as red by Bantu-speaking peoples. Thus, if the tradition refers

to the invaders' skin color rather than their clothes, they may well have been non-African.

Linguistic data also provide clues to the invaders' origin. Informants state that the Nguo Ntuni did not speak Swahili yet could be quickly understood. In fact subsequent traditions recount considerable and often heated dialogue between victors and vanquished. This would seem to eliminate the possibility of an invading group that had sailed from distant regions in favor of one of the more local Arab communities that had settled adjoining island or mainland areas.

Nor would such a community have spoken Swahili. That language, since its inception, has always been a lingua franca, rather than a mother tongue, for many coastal peoples, including those of the Lamu Archipelago of which Manda Island (Mbwaa) is a part. It seems probable, therefore, that the invaders spoke a seventeenth-century variant of the dialect (Ki-Amu) then current in the archipelago, which islanders could understand.

Further support for this contention can be drawn from examination of a related Meru tradition that deals with the Mbwaa period ("when the men of Ntangi . . ."), the story of Mukuna Ruku. This tradition appears within the oral histories of the Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru peoples of Mount Kenya, as well as the adjacent Tharaka, Kamba, and Mbeere. The Meru version, however, appears at two widely separated points of tribal history. During the first (Ntangi age-set, ca. 1700), Mukuna Ruku is described as having lived behind a log stockade that the Nguo Ntuni had constructed on the mainland. He had red skin, which he kept covered at all times with cloth, a fact the islanders found odd.

Mukuna Ruku was also unique in that he never appeared or spoke to the islanders. Instead, men of Mbwaa who appeared at the barricade with heavy loads of ivory were instructed to drop them at the narrow gate. Then they beat upon a piece of wood that hung nearby (gakuna ruku: to beat a piece of wood). Having drawn attention, they withdrew from view.

The gate then opened, and Mukuna Ruku took the tusks, leaving prescribed amounts of beads in exchange ("placing tucu, marutia , and ngambi [beads] into the horn"). He beat the wood once more to attract the islanders' attention, then left. No word was spoken on either side, and the islanders, never able to learn the identity of the figure within the stockade, may gradually have raised it first to literary and then mythological stature.^[3]

The figure of Mukuna Ruku disappears, however, from the traditions of subsequent age-sets. The story recurs only in narrations that deal with the mid-nineteenth century, when interest in ivory was reawakened by the initial appearance of Kamba traders in the Meru region. Men of that era (Kubai age-set) inquired as to where the tusks would be taken. The Kamba replied with a story similar to that which the Meru themselves had brought from Mbwaa. In this version the tusks were taken, by middlemen recalled as the Baruku, once again to Mukuna (or Mukuno) Ruku, this time explicitly identified as an Arab trader who had come from the direction of the sunrise and who required the "silent" trading system to do business.

It seems probable that the Meru, recalling their own experiences with "silent" traders, simply incorporated the Kamba tradition into their own body of folklore, where it has overlaid and perhaps distorted the earlier Mbwaa version. Nonetheless, the fact that the nineteenth-century accounts explicitly identify the figure of this silent trader with the Arabs makes it possible to identify the earlier pre-Meru trading figure with them as well.

The ultimate check on the validity of Meru tradition, of course, is the degree to which it corresponds with other historical data for the area. For instance, informants are unable to identify significant Arab towns, either on the mainland or adjacent islands. At first glance this inability seems hard to understand, in view of the proximity of Lamu, Pate, and other Arabized trading centers, each of which should greatly have influenced their immediate African neighbors. However, the period immediately prior to that in which Meru history begins (1770) was marked by continual conflict between the Arabized populations of all archipelago principalities and the Portuguese, struggles in which the latter were usually successful.

The rulers of Pate, to select only one example, revolted unsuccessfully against Portuguese domination in 1637, 1660, 1678–1679, and 1686–1688. The conflict of 1678–1679 cost the rulers of Pate and Lamu their heads. The battles of 1686–1688 took the life of Pate's next king and twelve of his counselors. Two years later Lamu was ravaged, with the Portuguese taking huge numbers of prisoners.^[4] In short, the era was marked by rebellion on one side and repression on the other, a situation that ended only when the Portuguese were defeated at Mombasa in 1698, thus allowing the archipelago communities to regain their strength.

It seems possible, therefore, to accept the Meru assumption that the Nguo Ntuni of this era lived in scattered and heavily fortified stockades rather than in a few large towns that might well have been sacked, evacuated, or destroyed. If we further assume the attack on Mbwaa to have taken place around 1700, as tradition suggests, it would fit in with that period in which Arabized trading centers throughout the archipelago were merely beginning to reorganize their resources and expand.

It also seems possible to assume that the first need of a resurgent commercial community would be the acquisition of sufficient farmland to feed its rising population as well as whatever labor might be needed to till it. These needs would logically be sought on the community's own or adjacent islands, because their population could be more easily controlled than mainland societies with the chance to flee.

This type of speculation fits rather easily into the Meru tradition of their conquest. The Nguo Ntuni may originally have come merely to plunder, perhaps attracted by the occasional tusks the islanders brought to trade. They remained, however, to force their victims to herd, fish, and cultivate. The ultimate goal was production of food.