Kore (ethnicity)

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The Kore are a group of a few hundred people who now live on Lamu Island and in Mokowe on the opposite mainland in the coastal region of Kenya . They are descended from the Maasai who were captured by Somali in the 19th century . Their culture combines elements of the Maasai and Somali.

The origin of the name Kore is unclear. Kore is an Oromo name for the Maasai; However, the Kore themselves are of the opinion that it is not a foreign name, but an old Maa word for "wanderer".

history

According to their own tradition, the ancestors of the Kore Maasai - possibly from the Laikipiak subgroup - were defeated by the Purko Maasai. After this defeat, they fled their area northwest of Mount Kenya to the northeast via the Ewaso Ngiro and were captured by Somali in what is now the border area between the Samburu and Rendille . They brought them to the area around Kismayo in Jubaland in what is now Somalia . There they were kept as slaves or clients, until the end of the 19th century the British colonial power - which also controlled Kismayo until 1926, see Oltre Giuba - ensured their liberation. It cannot be determined exactly when the ancestors of the Kore were brought to Kismayo; the heavy defeat of the Laikipiak against the Purko is located around the middle of the 1870s, but a source from 1858 mentions Masai among the Somali on the coast of southern Somalia. The traditions of the Kore, for their part, indicate that the captivity lasted several years.

The freed Kore succeeded in forming a group and acquiring cattle again, mainly by stealing cattle from sedentary groups. There was even a revival of their Kikore language . They moved south to Hedio and further into the hinterland of Mkunumbi . Until the abolition of slavery in 1907, this was used by the Afro-Arab inhabitants of Lamu for agriculture using slaves, but was now largely abandoned. The Kore established a settlement Koreni there , from which they spread to Mokowe in the 1920s. Numerous scattered villages with seven to eight families each are said to have emerged. The Kore also came into contact with local former slaves who had settled in the area and worked on agriculture. The loss of their cattle to an animal disease in the 1940s prompted them to become farmers and fishermen, and also to move to Lamu Island.

present

When the linguist Bernd Heine carried out research into the original language of the Kore in 1976/77, apparently only two older people had knowledge of this language, which belonged to the Maa group. Today the Kore speak Somali as their mother tongue and also some cultural features such as have Islam taken by the Somali, besides they have mastered Swahili as a lingua franca . They continue to form a separate group alongside the Somali and Swahili speakers and do not seem to marry Somali - whom they consider bandits - but do marry descendants of former slaves on Lamu. Most of them live in the agricultural hinterland of the city of Lamu in very simple living conditions. The majority of the land (Shambas) on which they reside belong to the Hadrami - whose ancestors came from the Hadramaut at the end of the 19th century and initially had a low status - but some also belong to the long -established Afro-Arabs.

swell

  • Patricia Romero Curtin: Generations of Strangers: The Kore of Lamu , in: The International Journal of African Historical Studies , 18/3, 1985, pp. 455-472
  • Bernd Heine, Rainer Vossen: The Kore of Lamu: A contribution to Maa dialectology , in: Afrika und Übersee , 62, 1979, pp. 272–288
  • Gerrit J. Dimmendaal: Reduction in Kore reconsidered , in: Matthias Brenzinger (Ed.): Language death: factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa ( Contributions to the sociology of language 64), 1992, ISBN 978-3110134049 (p 117-136)