South Cushitic

South Cushitic is the name given to the Cushitic-speaking farming and herding peoples of the East African Rift Valley, including the Iraqw and Burunge of northern Tanzania. Their ancestors spoke Proto-South-Cushitic in southwestern Ethiopia, reached Lake Turkana by about 3000 BC and entered northern Tanzania early in the second millennium BC, becoming the first farmers and pastoralists east of Lake Victoria.

Bantu and Nilotic migrations overran most of their communities, and many South Cushitic tongues survive only as loanwords in the Bantu languages that replaced them. The ancestors of the Iraqw are traditionally credited with the stone-walled canals and terraces of Engaruka.

Engaruka was abandoned between 1700 and 1750 during wars with Barbaig herders; survivors withdrew into the Mbulu highlands. Groups such as the Burunge and Aasax held on in the Pangani valley under Maasai pressure from the eighteenth century.