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Showing posts with the label East Africa

Traditional Religion of the Kikuyu People of Kenya

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   The Mũkũyũ (Ficus sycomorus) was the sacred tree of Kikuyu. in its absence, the Mugumo (Ficus natalensis/thoningii)  The Kikuyu People of Kenya The Kikuyu people of Central Kenya believed in one God. They also had a concept of ‘being born again,’ and every child had to undergo a ritual of being born again to be a complete member of the community. When the firstborn child was ready for religious instructions, the child’s uncle from the mother’s side, known as  Nyar ũ me , charged a fee in goats to pierce three holes in the upper earlobe of the child. Three sticks, known as  ndũgĩra , were inserted in those holes like aerials that directed the new information into the ear for memorisation. In Kikuyu, God is called Ngai or  Mwenenyaga The Kikuyu religion was not separate from the ordinary lives of the people. One did not have the choice to either believe or not believe. There were no atheists. Everything a Kikuyu did or did not do impacted their relations w...

Kikuyu History: Ancient Egyptian Ties to Kenya’s Largest Ethnic Group

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The Kikuyu are the most populous community in Kenya The House of Mumbi The Kikuyu do not have a tradition of a migration from Egypt. Their Myth of Origin is a sort of Adam and Eve affair. It states that God created a man and a woman and placed them near Mount Kenya. The couple had nine daughters who miraculously received nine men to marry them after their father’s prayers. The Kikuyu call themselves  The House of Mumbi  in honor of this  Mother  who was also a potter. However, as I will show here, linguistic and comparative studies between Kikuyu culture and that of 18 th  Dynasty Egypt tell a different story. Leakey’s list of the Daughters of Mumi from the first born to the last born 1.Wanjirũ  - Anjirũ 2. Wambũi  - Ambũi 3. Njeri  - Aceera 4. Wanjikũ  - Anjiku 5. Nyambura  - Ambura or Ethaga 6. Wairimũ  - Airimũ or Agathigia or Aicakamũyũ 7. Waith ĩ ra  - Athirandũ 8. Wangar ĩ - Angar ĩ  or Aithe-Kahuno 9. Wangũi  -...

Hydro Electric Power and other Green Energy Options

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Power outages: A common feature in Kenya Each day of a very heavy downpour is usually followed by power failure in most areas covered by the rain. Sometimes the outages can last for more than five hours and in severe cases - three continuous days! In at least one very serious power failure, the whole country had no electricity for a period of six hours. One government hospital in the Coast Province lost a patient in the High Dependency Unit because the hospital’s emergency power generators were either non-existent or non functional. Besides the many hours of production lost in industries, homes with refrigerators not only loose tons of food running into millions of Shillings but also have electronic gadgets damaged. But the Power and Lighting Company is unapologetic. It blames vandals of its transformers, transformer oil and cables on the frequent power failures. While the KP & LC is the only agency that can prove that that is indeed true, the consumers of electri...

Nairobi City, in the Sun - the Capital City and Administrative Centre of Kenya

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Nairobi, Capital City and 47th County Nairobi gets its name from two Masai words that mean Land of cool waters - enkare Nairobi. The area covered by the city was marshland before the Mombasa Uganda railway was built. The City owes its existence to the railway line whose engineers decided that it was a good place for a railway station to serve the surrounding settler farms during that colonial period. At it time it was not even considered for a capital. The coastal town of Mombasa had played the role of capital before construction of the railway, but when the British established centres inland, the preferred capital was Machakos town, the capital of Machakos County Today. Nairobi is the only capital City in Africa with National park that is less than ten Kilometers from the Central Business District. From the humble beginning of a marshland, Nairobi has grown to a metropolis with over three million inhabitants. It is also the only City in Kenya to be accorded C...