“Mgwame, a king of Tundwa in Pate and his millet baskets”

Abstract

Comparative and descriptive linguists, as well as anthropologist, literary scholars of the school of oral literature, and historians, have long held the view that there is an interelationship between language, food culture and the origins of a people. In this paper, centred around King Mgwame of Tundwa on Pate island, we take a journey through historical time and discover that the Waswahili or people called the Waswahili, who speak Kiswahili today, were indeed great Bantu cultivators, whose favourite staple food was the millet. We learn how a powerful king lost his kingdom and ended up selling baskets in the market place into which millet could be put to pay a millet tax. He lived in the 7th or 8th century A.D. The account about King Mgwame is revived in a Kiswahili historical and literary account in the 19th century Mombasa by no less a person than Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, a popular poet of his time, and the father of the modern secular verse tradition called the shairi. Muyaka makes us recall also the role of millet in the dramatic escape out of prison of another legend hero and literary figure of the Waswahili, by name Fumo Liyongo or Liyongo Fumo. He lived in the 12th century A.D. or in the 15th century A.D. We also learn that the rulers and people of Mombasa also exported millet to South Yemen. We conclude from these accounts that the evidence confirms the claim by historians and linguist to the effect that the ancestors of the North-East Bantu, like the rest of the Bantu, migrated from West African latitudes until they ended up in their present homelands on the East African coast and islands.