Kore people

The Kore are a group of several hundred people who live on the island today Lamu and in Mokowe on the opposite mainland in the coastal region of Kenya. They are descended from Maasai who had been captured in the 19th century Somali. Their culture combines elements of the Maasai and the Somali.

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

History

Own traditions, according to the ancestors of the Maasai were Kore - possibly from the subgroup of Laikipiak - who were defeated by the Purko - Maasai. After this defeat, they fled their area northwest of Mount Kenya to the northeast over the Ewaso Ngiro and were caught in what is now the border area between the Samburu and Rendille Somali taken. This brought them into the area around Kismayo in Jubaland in Somalia today. There they were kept as slaves or clients until the end of the 19th century, the British colonial power - which until 1926 also controlled Kismayo, see Oltre Giuba - caring for her liberation. It is impossible to determine exactly when the ancestors of the Kore were brought to Kismayo; the heavy defeat of the Laikipiak against the Purko is situates about the mid-1870s, however, mentioned a source of 1858 Maasai among the Somali on the coast of southern Somalia. The traditions of Kore hand, point out that the captivity lasted several years.

It succeeded the vacated Kore, to form themselves into groups and to acquire cattle again mainly by livestock theft of sedentary groups. There was even a revival of their language KIKORE. They moved in a southerly direction, according to Hedio and further into the hinterland of Mkunumbi. This was used until the abolition of slavery in 1907 by the Afro- Arab residents of Lamu to agriculture using slaves, but was now left to a great extent. The Kore established there a settlement Koreni, they continue to spread from the off in the 1920s after Mokowe. It should be created, each with seven to eight families numerous scattered villages. The Kore came here with local former slaves in contact, who had settled in the area and agriculture. The loss of their cattle by an animal disease in the 1940s led them to become farmers and fishermen, and also draw on the island of Lamu.

Presence

As the linguist Bernd Heine 1976/77 investigations to the original language of the Kore hired, apparently had only two elderly knowledge of this language, which was part of the Maa group. Today the Kore Somali native speakers and also have some cultural traits such as Islam adopted by the Somali, in addition they have mastered Swahili as a lingua franca. They continue to form their own group in addition to the Somali and Swahili speakers and seem to have no marriages with Somaliland - which they regard as bandits - to respond, but marry descendants of former slaves to Lamu. They live mainly in the agricultural hinterland of the city of Lamu in very basic living conditions. The pieces of land ( Shambas ) on which they are based are, the majority of the Hadrami - whose ancestors end of the 19th century came from Hadramaut and initially had a low status - but partly also the old-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, p 455-472
• Bernd Heine, Rainer Vossen: The Kore of Lamu: A contribution to Maa Dialectology, in: Africa and overseas, 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 (S. 117-136 )

• Ethnic group in Kenya
• Ethnicity in Africa