[4] 'Baroni' observed that by that time only two of the Chagga states had some autonomy from the king of Machame, namely, Lambongo (later Kibosho under powerful chief Sina) and Kilema.

Physically, the location identified today as Machame forms several of the wards of the Hai District, in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania.

The name Machame, which was already in use when the first European traveler Rebmann landed on the east bank of the Kikafu in 1848, was given to all the region that was encircled by this network of mountainous rivers in his honor.

[9] Machame was the largest and most populated kingdom on Kilimanjaro, according to German Dr. Bruno Gutmann's recorded history of the area.

The oldest ancestral temple is located on the Kikafu River's bank in a plain that extends past the motorway between Moshi and Arusha.

The straight line from this highly revered shrine bends towards Kibo's summit and points upward like a bent arrow to the mountain slopes and the chief's current house.

This forest rose above Mashame's wife's grave, from whose remains a powerful, crystal-clear spring emerged that supplied a lush sacrifice pond with water.

Close to the lowest farmhouse of the current chief, in the vicinity of the Kikafu valley, her son is interred beneath a linden tree.

After having a boy named Rengua, he finally sent him "to the Varoo on Mount Meru to the west of Kilimanjaro, which was also colonized from Machame" while dressing him as a lady.

There is visual proof, as one of the first two shrines cited by Gutmann, maybe the first and oldest of all is the lone upright smooth white stone standing in the Nkya clan's land in the plain.

[17] The third shrine, dedicated to the ancestor Mashame, was located farther away from the confluence of the rivers Namwi and Marire and higher up on the mountainside than the other two.

In other places, Gutmann claims that it was in the area Ngira, which is today a part of Mtaa Sonu, and that above it was the sacred grove Uroki, where the burial of Mashame's wife was.

[20] However, by 1960, the entire custom uniting the top clans in adoration of their shared ancestors Mashame and his wife had been subdued, if not completely abolished, and no man dared visit the location Sienyi.

Christian missionaries put an end to the ancient fire-worshiping community that had united the Shira plateau peoples to the west in Siha, but they did not attempt to ignore its historical significance.

All of these clans sprang from ancestors who had once resided in the triangular region of territory formed by mitaa Sonu, Uswa, and Shari, the compact center of the Kikafu system.

[25] The second region, which included the mitaa Uswa, Shari, and Keri, was a populous fertile enclave from which people who moved elsewhere had branched off.

What leaders it did have, however, have since been forgotten because this area was later the one most affected by feuds that had spread from the eastern bank of the Kikafu, serving as a base for different factions to seek refuge and exact revenge, and having the most erratic population due to migration into and out of it.

[26] The centrally established core of the population was to remain more stable in the third region, which was east of the Kikafu and was centered on mitaa Nronga, Foo, Wari, and Nkuu.

[27] The Kombe clan, which had resided between them, continued to hold sway in Foo and expanded lower down the hillside to the nearby Wari during the reign of Rengua's successor.

The core of these three great clans was to remain unchanged in the same mitaa up until the current day, despite leading individuals and in some cases, entire groups fleeing.

[32] Müller received land from the Kombe clan's then-chief, Mangi Shangali, on which to establish and further his mission as the major hub of Lutheran activity in and around Kilimanjaro.

The fact that Nathaniel Mtui, a Chagga historian, assumed control of this list after visiting Machame to gather information for Major Dundas.

Additionally, the Nkya clan produced the medicine men who blessed the nation and sprinkled the cattle and the goats with water mixed with herbs during times of famine or disease.

Since Mamkinga's Swahili magician, Nesiri, to whom he owed power, told Rebmann that he had been living there for six years, and because Rebmann's accompanying Swahili guide, Bwana Kheri, had personally seen a frost-bitten survivor of Rengua's silver expedition, we can infer from the record that Mamkinga had already established himself as the ruler when he visited Machame in 1848.

The oral tradition that Rengua passed away before he met his grandchild, that is, in his early middle age, is the only way to go backward from that date to the time when he had assumed authority.

[42] By that time, people were living in little clan groups on the fertile area between the ravines of the great Kikafu and its tributaries, spreading forth and higher on the mountainside.

One of the things that unite the peoples of the Kikafu basin is this tradition, which is kept with an odd intensity in contrast to the mild remnants of the same theme that can be found elsewhere on Kilimanjaro.

He also records in his diary of trouble in Kirua caused by one Kirumi who was supported by allies from Moshi (where his mother came from) to overthrow his father Marengo.

By the early 1870s he could declare to foreigners that the whole of Chagga was divided into two major powers; Machame under Ndesserua being the greatest in the West and himself an important chief in the east.

The ancestors who migrated to the Chagga at that time settled along the Kikafu river basin in an area today close to where the main road from Moshi to Arusha passes.