Chaga people

The Chaga (also called Wachaga, Chagga, Jagga, Dschagga, Waschagga, or Wachagga) are Bantu-speaking indigenous Africans and the third largest ethnic group in Tanzania. They live on the southern and eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru, as well as in the Moshi area. Their relative wealth comes from not only the favorable climate of the area, but also from successful agricultural methods which include extensive irrigation systems and continuous fertilization practiced for thousands of years. They were one of the first tribes in the area to convert to Christianity. This may have given them an economic advantage over other ethnic groups, as they had better access to education and health care as Christians.
The Chagga descend from various Bantu groups who migrated from the rest of Africa into the foothills of Kilimanjaro. While the Chagga are Bantu-speakers, they do not speak a single language but rather a number of related Chagga dialects. These dialects are related to Kamba, which is spoken in northeast Kenya, and to other languages spoken in the east such as Dabida and Pokomo. The Chagga area is traditionally divided into a number of chiefdoms. The Chagga are culturally related to the Pare, Taveta and Teita peoples. They follow a patrilineal system of descent and inheritance. The Chagga subsist primarily by agriculture, using irrigation on terraced fields and oxen manure. Although bananas are their staple food, they also cultivate various crops including yams, beans, and maize. In agricultural exports, the Chagga are best known for their Arabica coffee, which is exported to American and European markets, resulting in coffee being a primary cash crop

Early history
Early migration patterns of the Niger-Congo Bantu's led the Chagga to settle in the North Pare Mountains. This is the Home of the ancestral chagga. The population growth by about eleventh or twelve century led a number of people to begin looking for a new land on which to live. They found it on the nearby and, in those days, still heavily forested southern and eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The movement of the early chagga banana farmers to Kilimanjaro set off a period of rapid and extensive cultural amalgamation, in which large numbers of the Ongamo people and the Rift Southern Cushites were assimilated into the newly expanding chaga communities. Though apparently growing in numbers and territory, the chaga remained organised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a great many very small and very local social and political units, whose histories are still largely unstudied by Western scholars. But if the Maasai settled in the open plains around much of the chaga country, they presently cannot be credited with great influence on chaga affairs during this period, another people, the Ongamo or Ngasa who were closely related in language to the Maasai, did have much influence in chaga history