Shungwaya (also Shingwaya) is an

origin myth An origin myth is a myth that describes the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the creation or cosmogonic myth, a story that describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stor ...

of the

Mijikenda peoples Mijikenda ("the Nine Tribes") are a group of nine related Bantu ethnic groups inhabiting the coast of Kenya, between the Sabaki and the Umba rivers, in an area stretching from the border with Tanzania in the south to the border near Somalia in ...

. Traditions known collectively as the "Shungwaya myth" describe a series of migrations of

Bantu peoples The Bantu peoples, or Bantu, are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. They are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southe ...

dating to the 12th-17th centuries from a region to the north of the Tana River. These Bantu migrants were held to have been speakers of Sabaki

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. T ...

. Other Bantu ethnic groups, smaller in number, are also suggested to have been part of the migration. From Shungwaya, the Mount Kenya

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language *Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for Nationali ...

( Kamba, Kikuyu, Meru,

Embu Embu may refer to: Places ; in Brazil * Embu das Artes * Embu-Guaçu ; in Kenya * Embu, Kenya * Embu County Other * Embu people of Kenya *Embu language Embu, also known as Kîembu, is a Bantu language of Kenya. It is spoken by the Embu peopl ...

, and

Mbeere The Mbeere or Ambeere people are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting the former Mbeere District in the now-defunct Eastern Province of Kenya. According to the 2019 Kenya National census, there are 195,250 Ambeere who inhabit an area of 2,093 km� ...

) are then proposed to have broke away and migrated from there some time before the Oromo onslaught. Shungwaya appears to have had its heyday as a Bantu settlement area between perhaps the 12th and the 15th centuries, after which it was subjected to a full-scale invasion of Cushitic-speaking Oromo peoples from the Horn of Africa. From the whole corpus of these traditions, it has been argued that Shungwaya comprised a large, multi-ethnic community. The "Zhongli" (中理) of Zhao Rukuo's ''

Zhu Fan Zhi ''Zhu Fan Zhi'' (), variously translated as '' A Description of Barbarian Nations'', ''Records of Foreign People'', or other similar titles, is a 13th-century Song Dynasty work by Zhao Rukuo. The work is a collection of descriptions of countri ...

'' (13th century) may be a Chinese transcription of Shungwaya. From Zhao's description, the place seems to be in the south of modern

Somalia Somalia, , Osmanya script: 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘𐒕𐒖; ar, الصومال, aṣ-Ṣūmāl officially the Federal Republic of SomaliaThe ''Federal Republic of Somalia'' is the country's name per Article 1 of thProvisional Constitut ...

.Paul Wheatley (1964), "The land of Zanj: Exegetical Notes on Chinese Knowledge of East Africa prior to A. D. 1500", in R. W. Steel and R. M. Prothero (eds.), ''Geographers and the Tropics: Liverpool Essays'' (London: Longmans, Green and Co.), pp. 139–188, at 150.

References

;Bibliography * *{{cite book, last=Pouwels, first=Randall L., title=Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iyw-_NMk0bgC&pg=PA11, date=6 June 2002, publisher=Cambridge University Press, isbn=978-0-521-52309-7

References

Further reading