1/20 #HistoryKeThread: These are Uganda railway labourers flanked by local Wakamba men at Mtito Andei, circa 1897. 
2/20 In the mid-eighteenth century, a large number of Akamba pastoral groups moved eastwards towards the coast.
3/20 This migration was occasioned by extensive drought and lack of cattle pasture.
4/20 The Wakamba would settle in Mariakani, Kinango, Kwale, Mombasa West, Mombasa North (Kisauni) areas of Kenya's coast, creating one of Kenya's earliest urban beginnings.
5/20 They are still found in large numbers in these towns, and have been absorbed into the cultural, economic and political life of Coast Province.
6/20 In the latter part of the 19th century, the Arabs took over the coastal trade from the Wakamba, who ended up acting as middlemen between Arab and Swahili traders and the tribes further in the hinterland.
7/20 This long distance trade and travel made them ideal guides for the caravans of early European explorers, ivory and Arab slave traders.
8/20 It is said that some European explorers also used them as guides in their expeditions southwards to explore due to their wide knowledge of the land.
9/20 Later on during the colonial era, British colonialists considered the Wakamba, who were also feared for their sorcery, to be the premier martial race of Africa.
10/20 Indeed, Kamba men enlisted in the colonial army in droves.
11/20 Once during the emergency in the 1950s, the East Africa Command sent out a communiqué to England describing them as loyal "soldiers of the Queen" in fighting the Mau Mau.
12/20 These sentiments were echoed by other colonial observers in the early 1950s who deemed the Kamba a hardy, courageous and "mechanically-minded tribe."
13/20 Considered by many officers to be the "best [soldierly] material in Africa," the Kamba soldiers were associated with a community that was also no push over.
14/20 The Wakamba successfully resisted an attempt by the British colonialist to seize their livestock in an obnoxious livestock control legislation in 1938.
15/20 Employing great tact, they peacefully fought the British until the law was repealed. Indeed, Akamba resistance to colonial "pacification" was mostly non-violent in nature.
16/20 Some of the best known Akamba resistance leaders to colonialism were prophetess Syokimau, Syotune wa Kathukye, Muindi Mbingu, and later Paul Ngei, JD Kali, and Malu of Kilungu.
17/20 Ngei and Kali were imprisoned by the colonial government for their anti-colonial protests. Syotune wa Kathukye led a peaceful protest to recover cattle confiscated by the British colonial government during one of their raiding expeditions on the local...
18/20 ...populations.
19/20 Muindi Mbingu was arrested for leading another protest march to recover stolen land and cattle around the Mua Hills in Masaku district, which the British settlers eventually appropriated for themselves.
20/20 Here's a toast to a community that gave our motherland, Kenya, its name. 🍷
