Mbugu

The Mbugu, who call themselves Va'maa or Ma'a, are a Bantu people of the western Usambara Mountains in north-eastern Tanzania, around Lushoto. Their speech is a mixed language, pairing Bantu grammar with a Cushitic vocabulary alongside a second register close to Pare.

Their traditions place their earliest home near Lake Victoria, or perhaps the Serengeti plains, from where the Kwavi drove them eastward to Lasa. There a Maasai attack split the migrants: the Dufu merged into the Zigua, the Nango became a Sambaa clan, while the six Mbugu clans doubled back into Pare before settling at Shume and spreading through Usambara.

Legend holds that the Mbugu already lived in Usambara before 1650, and the Nango were established there by the seventeenth century, when Mbegha founded the Kilindi dynasty of the Sambaa.