akamba

The Kamba have deep-rooted traditions, which are practiced especially in their marriage customs. Under the Kamba customs, during a Kamba wedding, a man must show his respect for the bride’s family by first acknowledging that their girl has been brought up well and is therefore of great worth. Before a marriage ceremony is conducted, the […]

The Kamba were originally grouped into some 25 dispersed patrilineal clans (utui) of varying size, which were often mutually hostile. The Akamba have 14 major clans and 11 minor clans. This makes a total of 25 clans. When a family grows into a clan, it is natural that the clan grows and separates into several […]

  Individuals were organized in age-sets, but unlike the Kikuyu, Embu, Mbeere and Chuka, these were not based on initiation. Men and women of the grade of elders (atumia) formed political district councils that governed several utui. They also performed the function of priests, acting as ceremonial intermediaries between the living and God or the […]

The Akamba of the modern times, like most people in Kenya, dress rather conventionally in western / European clothing. The men wear trousers and shirts. Young boys will, as a rule, wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts, usually in cotton, or tee-shirts. Traditionally, Akamba men wore leather short kilts made from animal skins or tree bark. […]

In Akamba culture, the family (Musyi) plays a central role in the community. The Akamba extended family or clan is called Mbai. The man, who is the head of the family, is usually engaged in an economic activity popular among the community like trading, hunting, cattle-herding or farming. He is known as Nau, Tata, or […]

Although a large part of Kamba culture has become westernized, and the large towns and villages have greatly increased in number (the Kamba population itself is now five times larger than it was in the 1930s), the traditional pattern of family homesteads persists, and is one of the few traditional social structures to have survived […]

The Akamba were originally long distance traders s, but later adopted agriculture due to the arability of the new land that they came to occupy. x groups that introduced iron technology into East Africa. Krapf stated “The more precious metals have not yet been found in Ukambani; but there is an abundance of iron of […]

The ancestors of the Kamba can be said with some certainty to have come from the North, from the region beyond the Nyambene Hills to the northeast of Mount Kenya (Kirinyaga), which was the original if not exclusive homeland of all of central Kenya’s Bantu-speaking peoples, the Kikuyu, Meru, Embu, Chuka, and possibly Mbeere. The […]

The Kamba people speak Kikamba language which is a Bantu language belonging to the larger Niger-Congo language phylum. It is currently spoken by over 6 million people. In Kenya, Kamba is majorly spoken in four (3) out of the forty-seven (47) Counties of Kenya. These counties are Machakos, Kitui and Makueni. The Machakos variety is […]

Like all other Bantu, communities, the Akamba have a story of origin that differs greatly from that of the Kikuyu. It goes like: “In the beginning, Mulungu created a man and a woman. This was the couple from heaven and he proceeded to place them on a rock at Nzaui where their foot prints, including […]