Kalenjin

The Kalenjin are Southern Nilotic peoples speaking Kalenjin, among them the Nandi, Kipsigis and Pokot, whose heartland is the Rift Valley escarpments and grasslands of western Kenya. Their Nilotic-speaking ancestors drifted south from the White Nile basin in a movement that began around the fifth century and gathered pace in the eleventh, bringing pastoral Iron Age communities into Uganda and the Kenyan highlands.

They absorbed Cushitic influences, including circumcision and the ipinda age-set system, and by the eighteenth century their lands held the Lumbwa near Mount Kenya, the Chemwal between Mount Elgon and Uasin Gishu, and the Maliri farther west in Uganda, later displaced by the Karamojong.

Cattle pastoralists and grain farmers, they met the long Aoyate drought from about 1800, which peaked in the 1830s and brought the famine of 1836, opening the troubled period called the Mutai.