As I never attempted to take any sort of census during my “reign,” I can only give approximately the population, but I should say, as far as I was able to ascertain, that the total number of the tribe would be about half a million—rather more than less—of whom the women outnumbered the men considerably, the constant warfare tending to keep the number of the male population at a fairly steady figure.
The accounts given of the origin of the Kikuyu tribe vary considerably, and the nigger’s talent for fiction, and his readiness to oblige any one—particularly a white man—who asks for a legend, make it extremely difficult to distinguish where truth ends and fiction begins; but I will give the two principal accounts as they were given to me, and my own opinion of the credibility of both, and let the reader judge for himself.
The first story is that given me by Karuri, the chief who was my first friend among these interesting people, who was certainly one of the most intelligent natives I have ever come in contact with. His account was that the original inhabitants of the country, a tribe called the Asi, were hunters who took no interest in agriculture, and that the Kikuyu were a tribe who came into the country, and purchased tracts of land from the Asi for purposes of cultivation. Gradually more and more of the Kikuyu came in until they had cleared most of the forest land of which the country originally consisted, while the Asi were gradually absorbed into the Kikuyu tribe by marriage, or wandered farther afield in search of the game which the increasing population and the clearing of the forests had driven away to new retreats. Karuri himself based his strongest claim to his chieftaincy on the fact that he was a direct descendant of these Asi.
The other account, which was given me by a headman named Kasu, now a powerful chief under the new regime, reminds one somewhat of the story of Ishmael. The legend runs that a Masai warrior, living on the borders of what is now the Kikuyu country, but was then a vast forest, inhabited by a race of dwarfs, of whom the Kikuyu speak as the Maswatch-wanya, was in the habit of ill-treating one of his wives to such an extent that she used from time to time to take refuge among the dwarfs, returning to her husband’s kraal after each flight. Finally his treatment became so bad that she fled to the dwarfs and remained there, giving birth to a son shortly after her definite settlement among them. Later on, the story runs, she had children to her own son, which children intermarried with the Maswatch-wanya, and from their offspring the present Kikuyu race derive their descent.