Chagga Interacted with the Ongamo

A striking blending of features of ancient Afsan and Niger-Congo civilizations, with some features of Sudanic civilization contributed by the Ongamo, emerged out of this period of cross-cultural encounter. The dominance of the new highland planting agriculture ensured that the new communities came to speak the Chagga Language of the makers of that agriculture. Initially these communities took the form of villages built along highland ridges. This custom apparently preserved an old practice coming from the Kaskazi and Upland Bantu side of their ancestry. The chaga also circumcised boys and initiated them into age-sets of the typical old Bantu type, but at the same time they adopted from the Southern Cushitic side of their ancestry the practice of female clitoridectomy which they stopped after christianity/Islam came. In a variety of other aspects, Cushitic or Nilotic ideas prevailed in Chaga culture, notable case being music, in which drumming anciently typical of Niger-Congo civilization was entirely lost. The drawing of blood from cattle was a specifically Southern Cushitic addition to the sources of food. And like the Ongamo and Southern Cushites, the emerging chaga society was entirely patrilineal. The beginnings of chaga interactions with the ongamo date well before 1600, and at some point in time the Ongamo had even been the dominant people through much of the Kilimanjaro area. By seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ongamo were probably becoming increasingly restricted, by chaga expansion, to eastern kilimanjaro. Yet within that region they must have remained an important and still independent society, even as late as the second half of the nineteenth century and in the face of massive acculturation to the chaga about them, ongamo society retained sufficient cohesion to keep its age-set system functioning to some extent.