[+/-] : 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....
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[+/-] : The Chagga tribe : a collection of Bantu speakers

The Chagga tribe is a collection of Bantu speakers. They moved to the slopes of Kilimanjaro about 300 years ago. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they were nomadic pastoralists. However, between the 18th and 19th centuries the Chagga began permanent settlements and slowly developed modern agriculture, on both small and large scale.

With their long term experience in farming, the Chagga have a unique style that helps conserve the land. They use terrace farming on steep slopes, growing tall tress and under them, planting Arabic coffee, bananas and many small crops like maize, beans and garden vegetables. Thus they can grom a cash and a food crop on the same plot of land. The Chagga have developed an extensive irrigation system using the large amounts of rainfall high on the mountain to irrigate their extensive farms.

Missionaries arrived in Chagga land in the 1800s and were accepted mostly because they brought schools, health centers and Christianity. With the first missionaries accepted, more and more Europeans wanted to visit the Kilimanjaro area. Since then thousands of tourists from all over the world have come to climb Kilimanjaro using Chaggas as guides, porters and cooks. Tourism on Kilimanjaro also provides a market for the agricultural products (food for climbers) that are produced by the local Chaggas. Many hotels have been built on the slopes of Kilimanjaro to accommodate tourists, and most of these hotels employ many Chagga.

Thus Kilimanjaro has shaped the history, economy, language and religion of the Chagga people living on the slopes of the mountain....
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