Sirikwa people

The Sirikwa were a people inhabiting the Great Lakes region of East Africa, in an area that is believed to have extended from Lake Turkana in the north to Lake Eyasi in the south. Most prominent from the 12th to 15th centuries, they are credited with having built many of the historic stone ruins and irrigation systems that are found locally.

Nomenclature

The vanished Sirikwa are referred to by various names by the Nilotic and Bantu peoples who today inhabit the vast majority of the eastern Great Lakes region. The Dorobo refer to them as the Mokwan, the Meru as the Mwoko, the Kikuyu as the Enjoe, and the Maasai as the Eboratta.

History

Kerio Valley

The Sirikwa have traditionally been viewed as descendants of the Neolithic Afro-Asiatic peoples who introduced domesticated plants and animals to the Great Lakes region – a succession of societies collectively known as the Stone Bowl cultural complex. Most of these early northern migrants are believed to have been absorbed by later movements of Nilotic and Bantu peoples. In the Kerio Valley of Kenya, among other neighbouring areas, there are vestiges of the Neolithic tillers' civilisation in the form of elaborate irrigation systems. Although these particular structures are today maintained by the Marakwet subgroup of the Nandi Kalenjin Nilotes, the latter aver that they were the work of a northern people of peculiar language called the Sirikwa, who were later decimated by pestilence. According to the Marakwet, the Sirikwa "built the furrows, but they did not teach us how to build them; we only know how to keep them as they are."