Luhya

The Luhya, or Abaluhya, are a cluster of more than twenty closely related Bantu peoples living in the well-watered Lake Victoria basin of western Kenya around Mount Elgon, the Nzoia River and Kakamega. Bantu-speaking communities ancestral to them were settled on the slopes of Elgon and along the middle Nzoia by around 1000.

They combined shifting cultivation of sorghum, millet and bananas with cattle keeping, hunting and well-developed iron working, exchanging their produce through networks that reached the lake and eventually the coast.

Most Luhya communities lived in decentralised clan polities ruled by councils of elders and ritual specialists; the exception was the Wanga, a Luhya people whose Nabongo kings built a centralised tributary court at Mumias and dealt with neighbouring peoples. Around 1800 Maasai and Kalenjin raiders and expanding Luo groups pressed on their lands, sharpening competition between the clan strongholds.