¹ Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Foreign Area Fellowship Program of the Joint Committee of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council Learned Societies for a Foreign Area Fellowship which permitted field-work in Kenya from January 1963 to June 1964; to the University Research Committee of the University Alberta for a grant which facilitated the preparation of this paper: and to Professor Victor Turner, Sheila Killam, and Elaine Wade for theoretical, editorial, and secretarial help.Google Scholar

² Saberwal, Satish C., Social Control and Cultural Flexibility among the Enlbu of Kenya, ca. 1900 (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, forthcoming), chapters 3 and 4.Google Scholar

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⁵ Lambert, H. E., The Systems of Land Tenure in the Kikuyu Land Unit, Part I: History of the Tribal Occupation of the Land (Communications from the School of African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1950), 19.Google Scholar

⁶ For four such immigration myths see Saberwal, op. cit. 15–18.Google Scholar

⁷ Saberwal, op. cit. 18–19; the validity of these testimonies is discussed in my ‘Oral translation, periodization, and political systems: some East African comparisons’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, forthcoming.Google Scholar

⁸ Middleton, John and Kershaw, Greet, The Kihuyu and Kamba of Kenya (London, International African Institute, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, 1965). See map there.Google Scholar

⁹ Huntingford, C. W. B., ‘The Bantu of east Kenya and northeastern Tanganyika’, in Hamilton, R. A. (ed), History and Archaeology in Africa (London, 1955), 48.Google Scholar Three chapters in Oliver, Roland and Mathew, Gervase (eds.), History of East Africa, vol. I (Oxford), take the same position: Huntingford, ‘The peopling of the interior of East Africa by its modern inhabitants’, 58–93;Google ScholarFreeman-Grenville, G. S. P., ‘The coast, 1498–1840’, 128–68;Google Scholar and Mathew, Gervase, ‘The East African Coast until the coming of the Portuguese’, 94–127.Google ScholarFage, J. D., An Atlas of African History (London, 1963), mentions Shungwaya, (21), but, in contrast to the excellent cartography in other parts of the Atlas, his meaning on this point is dimcult to guess.Google Scholar

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¹³ Ibid. 11–12 Laughton's monograph is apparently yet unpublished.

¹⁴ Ibid. 4–5.

¹⁵ Ibid. 27.

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¹⁷ Huntingford, ‘The Bantu of East Kenya…’, loc. cit. 48.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ Oliver, Roland, ‘Discernible developments in the interior, c. 1500–1840’, in Oliver and Mathew, op. cit. 169–211.Google Scholar

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²² For a summary of these contexts, see Saberwal, Social Control…, 22–5.Google Scholar

²³ Michuki, , Bũrũri wa Embu (The Land of the Embu) (Nairobi, East African Literature Bureau, 1962), 64. An English translation is being made and may be published.Google Scholar

²⁴ Low, D. A., ‘The northern interior 1840–1884’, in Oliver and Mathew, op. cit. 324–17.Google Scholar

²⁵ Wakefield, T., ‘Routes of native caravans from the coast to the interior of eastern Africa’, J. R. Geog. Soc. XL (1870), 317, and the map;Google ScholarNew, Charles, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa (London, 1874).Google Scholar

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²⁸ Ibid. 95–8. Also, during a visit to Kamba country in 1850, Krapf met and befriended an Embu man who was leading a ‘little caravan of Uembu people’. This man was a trader in wood from a poison-yielding tree. With his Kamba host, Krapf may have intended visit the Embu during that expedition, but about 120 ‘robbers’, armed with poisoned arrows, attacked and broke up his party (Rev. Krapf, J. L., Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labors during an Eighteen Years' Residence in Eastern Africa (Boston, 1860), 253–8).Google Scholar

²⁹ Michuki (op. cit. 98) says that Hobley in 1892, Boyes in 1892, Tate in 1902, and Dickson in 1902 came through Embu.Google ScholarIt is likely that he is thinking of the western divisions (Ndia and Gicũgñ) of what was the Embu District in 1962; the route map in Boyes's, JohnJohn Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu (London, 1911), supports this interpretation in Boyes's case. For the Embu Division, where the Embu people live, only the encounters summarized here are well remembered. One informant mentioned a third, rather uneventful trip briefly.Google Scholar

³⁰ Embu District Record Book (Kenya Govt. Archives, Nairobi,) 1917, 153.Google Scholar

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³² Meinertzhagen, R., Kenya Diary, 1902–1906 (Edinburgh, 1957), 339–22.Google Scholar

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³⁴ Ibid. 152.

³⁵ Low, D. A., ‘British East Africa: the establishment of British rule, 1895–1912, in Harlow, Vincent et al. (eds.), History of East Africa, II (Oxford, 1965), 25–6.Google Scholar

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³⁷ Embu District Record Book, I.Google Scholar