Unbeknownst to most, the Luyia Nation is a congeries of Bantu and assimilated Nilotic clans principally the Luo, Kalenjin, and Maasai. Created seventy years ago, the Luyia tribe is still evolving in a slow process that seeks to harmonize the historico-cultural institutions that define the eighteen subnations in Kenya alone. Available records indicate that geophysical spread of Luyia-speaking people extends beyond the Kenyan frontier into Uganda and Tanzania with some Luyia clans having extant brethren in Rwanda, Congo, Zambia, and Cameroon. The 862 Luyia clans in Kenya are amorphous units united only by common cultural and linguistic bonds. The political union between these clans is a pesky issue that has eluded the community since formation of the superethnic polity. Although postindependence scholars dismissed oral accounts of Egyptian ancestry, new anthropological evidence links the Bantu, including those in West Africa, to ancient Misri (Egypt). A major historical and cultural change in Buluyia occurred a little more than a century ago when natives first made contact with the Western world. The meeting in 1883 by a Scottish explorer, Joseph Thomson, with Nabongo Mumia, the Wanga king, laid the foundation for British imperialism in this part of Africa.

This book provides a unique perspective on the linguistic relationships between the Ancient Egyptian and Bantu languages of East/Central/Southern Africa. It will be of interest to readers of Egyptology, linguists, students, and the wider public who wish to find out more about the structure of the Ancient Egyptian language and how it connects with other languages, particularly with Bantu languages. The subject matter is different from other books as it examines the etymology of words, together with their sound/meaning relationships and shows by using verifiable hieroglyphic forms how Ancient Egyptian words may be pronounced by inserting Bantu vowels which fit the meanings derived from the skeletal templates of consonants in the Ancient Egyptian language.

"In Thomas's skilled hands, and in her unabashed love of story-telling, intimate events in Kenya help us think more clearly and more critically about Africa in the twentieth century. The politics of the womb are at the core of the colonial experience and of colonial politics…. Africans struggled amongst themselves over the regulation of reproduction, and these layers of intimate strife, and the policies and protests emanating from London and mission hospitals and African homesteads, give us something we haven't had before-- a gendered and transnational colonial history."—Luise White, author of Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa

How can a black people, who do not even profess to Islam, claim to have originated from Egypt, which is such an Arabic and Islamic geographical setting? But the Kalenjiin people of Kenya have held on fast to a tradition that their ancestors in antiquity were part of ancient Pharaonic Egypt, which they variously call Tto and Misiri. As unlikely as it may sound, the persistence in keeping this oral tradition alive does not seem to be dying with time and distance from the claimed place of origin. The Misiri Legend Explored: A Linguistic Inquiry into the Kalenjiin Peoples Oral Tradition of Ancient Egyptian Origin establishes the Kalenjin oral tradition of Misirian origin on the basis of linguistic evidencea genuine tool which Egyptology scholars and researchers need to have relied on much more to bring greater and more final results to their investigations. Students of ancient Egypt willing to accept that there is an irrational prejudice against the concept of ancient black African ingenuity will upgrade their stock of knowledge regarding ancient Egypt with the numerous discoveries laid out here. They will discover a powerful new tool for their trade in the form of the African languages and cultures that now lie South of the Sahara.