Taveta
Encyclopedia : T : TA : TAV : Taveta
Taveta is the name of a tribe of [East Africa], the name of the principal town in the land of the Taveta people, and also the name of the surrounding subdistrict of Kenya.
I. The People of Taveta
The Taveta tribe is one of the Bantu ethnicities in south central Kenya in East Africa. The people are sometimes referred to as the Wataveta, which is simply the plural name of the people in their own langauge, Kitaveta. The Tavetan population is commingled with other tribes, notably the Taita, Kamba, Chaga, and Maasai. Because of their frequent contact with these others, most Tavetans are fluent in (Ki)Swahili as a second language, and may also acquire some English or other local languages.
The Wataveta inhabit mainly the lands between Tsavo National Park and the Tanzania border, up to the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Many Tavetans are occupied by subsistence farming, but some work the local sisal plantations, and a few take advantage of special local commercial activities (see below, on the town of Taveta).
The Wataveta land and people won brief international attention during World War I, when German and British colonial forces clashed there. Author Isak Dinesen (a.k.a. Karen Blixen) and the film Out of Africa treat of this history.
Most Tavetans practice some form of Christianity, roughly thirty percent affiliated with each of the Anglican Church of the Province of Kenya, the Roman Catholic Church, and Pentecostal churches. While Tavetans rarely profess traditional animism, old customs concerning healing or cursing are not unknown.
Taveta remains close enough to the East African coast that approximately ten percent of Tavetans practice Islam. According to Tavetan lore, the tribe was first exposed to Islam when Kamba raiders began to seize members for Arabs managing the Indian Ocean slave trade.
II. The Town of Taveta
The town of Taveta is wedged into a projection of Kenyan territory surrounded on three sides (north, west, and south) by Tanzania. The irregularity in the border was created c. 1881 when Queen Victoria gave Mount Kilimanjaro away as a wedding present to her grandson, then Crown Prince of Prussia and later Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Subsequently, the border was adjusted so that Kilimanjaro would fall within the boundaries of the German colony of Tanganyika instead of the British protectorate of Kenya.
Taveta thrives as a point of commerce between Kenya and Tanzania, with a twice-weekly outdoor market especially large for a town of its size. The market is fueled in part by Taveta's distinctive rail connection through Voi with the Mombasa-Nairobi-Kampala line, built by the British during the era of the Kenya protectorate and celebrated in the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness. Large numbers of people walk across the border from socialist Tanzania to buy and sell wares in Taveta; smuggled goods such as Tanzanian rubies and coffee are occasionally available there.
In addition to Mount Kilimanjaro, Taveta also enjoys proximity to Lake Chala, a volcanic fresh-water lake of extraordinary depth.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.