Sunday, April 20, 2008
Agĩkũyũ
With the following posts I'm trying to trace our roots before the coming of the White man. What were our customs and traditions and our way of life? I have read Jomo Kenyattas book, facing Mt. Kenya Africa . Our forefathers in whole heartedly embracing the western way of life made a mistake, by not looking for ways of preserving our history, culture and customs in todays world. They sent us all to school and the way our history was transmitted broke down. School in post colonial Kenya couldn't really cater to the needs of the preservation of Gĩkũyũ culture because of the multi-ethnic nature of modern day Kenya
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2 comments:
This site is long overdue. We do not have such a well done and researched site about the Kikuyu. l have only one suggestion to make, if someone is seeking to learn about the Kikuyu people he is unlikely to search it under the words Nyeri-Kiambu. l think you need to change the name of the Blog to attract readers to your website. Thank you though for this helpful website.
Mayaka thank you for your very encouraging words. And thank you for the suggestion about the name of the website. If you are a Kenyan citizen then you'll be aware that Nyeri and Kiambu are the traditional districts in Kenya where the Agikuyu reside. Between these two disticts is Murang'a district the 3rd district, where the Gikuyu are said to have originated from according to tribal legends.
These three districts form the traditional Agikuyu districts in Kenya. Our people have since spread their wings and can be found almost anywher in the globe and in Kenya itself they have moved into other places. That was my motivation for naming the blogsite so.
I do agree with you that good information on the Agikuyu is hard to come by. It's surprising since of all the Kenyan tribes, we've been probably written about more than anyone else out there in Kenya and beginning quite early too.
Books written at the earlier periods can now exclusively only be found in libraries, which is a great shame. Worse, books written by Gikuyu authors are now slowly falling out of circulation. Thus an extremely important book like A history of the Kikuyu, 1500 - 1900 first published in 1974 is totally ou of circulation.
Of course the Gikuyu existing in these pages or in most ethnographies disappeared a lon time ago. In Kenya I don't believe there was any other tribe that embraced the ways of the white man more than the Gikuyu. Nothing wrong with that but there was little effort to conserve and as such the only link we have with the distant past is the language and a couple of books.
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