The Segeju people : The Segeju are a Bantu ethnic group that is mostly found in Kwale County, Kenya, and the Tanga Region of Tanzania, mainly in the Mkinga District. The majority of Segeju live in the narrow coastal region between Tanga, a city in Tanzania, and the Kenya-Tanzania border. Some Segeju, however, have moved to urban areas in other regions of Tanzania or Kenya such as Mombasa, in search of better job prospects and a better quality of life. The two East African nations are known to be the best places to visit for safaris, both game drive safaris and bird watching safaris are excellent. Due to the frequent separation of community ties brought on by Segeju migration to metropolitan regions, vital cultural traditions and languages are frequently lost.
Fewer than 25,000 Segeju people were reported to be living there in 2012, and fewer than 7,000 of them were known to speak the language. The Digo people, one of the nine tribes of the Mijikenda, are related to the Segeju. In addition, the Segeju are friendly with the Shirazi and Swahili people who live nearby. As a result, many Segejus have started using Digo and Swahili as means of communication.
According to legend, the Swahili words kusega, which means “to draw,” and juu, which means “up” or “high,” were combined to create the ethnonym Segeju. According to legend, the Segeju were given the name after coming into touch with the Shirazis in the 17th century due to their custom of wearing skin cloths around their loins higher than usual.
The Segeju History
Oral Segeju traditions mention a long-standing relationship with the Dhaiso, a people who live mostly at the foot of the Usambara Mountains. The mother tongue of the Dhaiso people is a Bantu language called Thagic, which is linked to Kamba and other Bantu languages spoken in central Kenya. Some Segeju are aware of their distant ties to the Kamba, Kikuyu, and other Thagic peoples as well as the fact that their ancestors also spoke this Thagic language. The same language heritage of the Segeju, Dhaiso, and Central Kenyan Bantu people strongly suggests that they all originated along the Tana River’s upper reaches.
However, the Segeju claim that Shungwaya is where they first lived, according to Segeju traditions documented by Mhando (2008). Legend has it that Shungwaya is in Southern Somalia today, roughly north of Kenya’s Paté Island. According to a different account, they originated in Arabia, most especially Yemen.
The Swahili city of Malindi known today for it numerous tourists attraction and a town known for great tourism in Kenya, employed the Segeju as a hired army. The Zimba, a military branch of the Maravi Kingdom, goes on the rampage and plunders Swahili cities in the sixteenth century. After plundering Mombasa, the Zimba move on to Malindi but are wiped off by the Segeju as they attempted to scale the city walls. As a result of this accomplishment, the Segeju become famous, and Malindi later hires them as warriors to help him attack Mombasa on behalf of his sheikh. Shehe bin Misham and his three adult sons are murdered during the struggle for Mombasa. Soon after, the Segeju took control of Mombasa before giving it up to the Sheikh of Malindi, who invited his allies, the Portuguese, to establish a stronghold there.
The Segeju were assaulted by the Galla in the second half of the 17th century, according to Mhando. Their culture was divided into at least three different groups as a result of this. One of the parties made its way to Lamu Island, where they settled and gave origin to the Bajuni people through intermarriage. The third group escaped to the lower Tana region, while the second group took refuge in the Mwangea region. As a result of prolonged droughts in the Tana region, the final group would subsequently relocate to their current areas of habitation.
The Segeju culture
Due to a sequence of historical encounters and intermarriages with the nearby Vumba Swahili in the 17th century, almost all Segeju are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’ite school of thought. The Segeju of Kenya comprise a tiny Christian minority.
The Digo
The Digo people of Kenya and Tanzania speak Digo (Chidigo), a Bantu language, particularly along the East African coast between Mombasa and Tanga. According to Mwalonya of 2004, the ethnic Digo population is estimated to number 360,000, with the bulk of them likely speaking the language. All adult Digo speakers are multilingual in Swahili, the common tongue of East Africa. Since the two languages are closely related, many words in Digo have been taken from nearby Swahili dialects.
A good example of the challenges linguists sometimes experience when attempting to distinguish between languages and dialects is the categorization and sub-classification of Digo. The majority of current scholars categorise Digo as a dialect of Mijikenda, one of the Northeast Coast Bantu group’s constituent languages, in the same way as Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993). The Mijikenda dialects are comprehensible to one another, despite the fact that they are typically thought of as different languages. The closest relatives of Digo, a member of the southern Mijikenda sub-group, are Duruma and Rabai, its neighbours. However, speakers believe it to be sufficiently distinct from other Mijikenda dialects to have its own literature and orthography.
The various named dialects or variants of the Digo language are each recognised by the speakers of that dialect. They are:
- Chinondo (Northern Digo), spoken in the Shimba Hills of Kenya between Vuga in the east and Ng’onzini in the west; Ungu (or Lungu, Southern Digo), spoken on the coastal strip south of Msambweni and across the border into northern Tanzania; Ts’imba (or Chw’aka), spoken in and around the village of the same name on the Shimoni Penins; and Tsw’aka (or Chw’aka).
- Tsw’aka was formerly assumed to be a regional variation of the Swahili dialect known as Vumba, but it is now thought to be a variety of Digo that is transitioning to Vumba. As a result of language shift, it is also claimed that certain absorbed Segeju and Degere speak their own unique variants of Digo (Nurse & Walsh 1992).
In order to represent some of the sounds unique to Digo, such as the voiced bilabial fricative or approximant, additional letter combinations are utilised in the Digo alphabet, which is based on the Latin alphabet used for Swahili. The Bible Translation and Literacy (East Africa) Digo Language and Literacy Project has expanded on this. The effort resulted in the publication of basic literacy resources, a Digo-English-Swahili dictionary employing the new orthography, and a linguistic analysis in A Grammar of Digo (Nicolle 2013).2007 saw the completion of the Digo New Testament. These resources are all based on the dialect of Northern Digo used in Kenya.
With translations into Swahili, English, and French, Margaret Wambere Ireri compiled and published a collection of one hundred Digo proverbs.
