NYIKA. This Swahili word means "forest and thorn bush country" and is used by the Swahili to designate a set of Eastern Bantu tribes, who during the 16th century under pressure from the Galla migrated down the coast from the steppes on the left bank of the Tana river. It does not include the Taita, Pokomo, Segeju and Akamba, though these are ethnically connected with the tribes to whom it is applied. The nine tribes included in the term Nyika are the Giryama, now living about 3° south of the Equator, the Rabai, the Duruma and the Digo—all upper Nyika tribes and the most important of the group : the other five are the lower Nyika—the Kauwa, Chonyi, Dzihana, Kambe and the Rihe or Ribe.
Generally speaking they are tall, muscular, well set up and broad-headed. The Digo, however, though well built are slender and have refined oval faces. There are evident affinities with the Northern Hamites, and their general colour is dark brown, becom ing paler the nearer Mt. Kilimanjaro is approached. Waist clothes are worn by the men, and women wear many pleated-kilts, but are nude from the waist up, though now the tendency is to dress like Swahili women.
The kaya or fortified village was fundamental to their clan or ganization, but now that war is no longer anticipated, and vil lages are built outside the fortification, it has lost some of its significance, though still used for the assemblies of elders. The kaya is always situated on a hill or in a dense forest and is strongly palisaded. The Pokomo build circular huts like the Galla, but this group generally is characterized by rectangular huts, with a ridge-pole and a thatched roof extending to the ground and thus dispensing with walls. The houses are either gable- or hip-ended.
The Nyika tribes are divided into exogamous clans, which ob serve certain prohibitions and avoidances and share a general ven eration for the hyaena in which all the cognate tribes join except the Pokomo : but now at any rate there is no trace of totemism. The clans of the Digo and Duruma are matrilineal; the rest are patrilineal with the exception of the Rabai, who are in a transi tional stage. The Rabai have two sets of clans, male and female, and every man inherits the clan of his father and of his mother, but for all practical purposes he is reckoned as a member of his father's clan ; a woman, on the other hand, while she similarly in herits both clans, stresses the mother's. Every clan has its own
clubhouse (lwanda) and there is also the moro or council house, which is the general inter-clan meeting place for men, and houses the friction drum used for convening the council.
The Digo, probably under Arab influence, have hereditary sul tans, but otherwise there are no paramount chiefs. The govern ment is in the hands of elders, who wear an ivory armlet as a badge of office. Every 13 years males have to be initiated at cir cumcision into an association analogous to Masai age-grades and after passing through the preliminary degrees they eventually reach the status of elders, among whom there is an inner circle called the Hyaena, which alone knows all the magical spells and consequently inspires great terror. From this circle are selected the "owners of the land," who carry on the government during the space of a rika or circumcision cycle.
The bow is the most usual weapon and the arrows are often poisoned. They also carry swords which are, however, as much implements as weapons. The Giryama have a parrying stick unique in the eastern area. Agriculture is carried on by women who grow maize, millet, vegetables and sweet potatoes. They have sheep and goats but few cattle, and like most of the coastal tribes are careful not to take the cattle out till the heavy dew has dried from the grass, a precaution which does not seem to be necessary to the Bantu and Nilo-Hamitics living at higher altitudes.
The Nyika worship the typical Eastern Bantu deity mulungu, a vague abstraction of the sky combined with ancestor-worship with the main emphasis on the latter, the spirits of the dead (koma) surviving mortality and taking the world of the living under their charge. Mulungu is the dispenser and creator and from his union with the earth have sprung all things in the world including human beings, who are mulungu's hens and chickens. There are no professional rainmakers.