The Kutu are a matrilineal ethnic and linguistic group based in the Morogoro Region of central Tanzania.
According to Peoplegroups.org the Kutu population is estimated to number 119,000 in 2023.
The Kutu are one of the individual groups in the Zaramo cluster of the Northeast Bantu-speaking people of East Africa.
The Kutu live south of Morogoro in the Mbeta River Buffer Zone on foothills of the Uluguru mountains.
Most of Kuku people work as hoe farmers, producing maize, sorghum, and rice, and raising sheep, goats, and poultry. Coconut and banana trees are a cash crop. Cotton was a main crop until 1989. Now sesame seed has been introduced to this area.
During the nineteenth century, the Kutu were victimized by the East African slave trade; in response, they built fortified villages protected by stockades. In the twentieth century, those settlement patterns gave way to a homestead system in which rural Kutu scattered out more widely.
They live in mud-and-wattle homes char- acterized by high, thatched, cone-shaped roofs; those thatched roofs are giving way today to tin roofs.
The vast majority of the Kutu are Muslims, although they are considered to be only marginally loyal, confining their religious observances to fasting at Ramadan taking on Arab names, and wearing the white skull cap. Still, several Kutu villages have schools where children study the Koran.
Since the mid-1970s, the Kutu have been dramatically affected by the Tanzanian government's ujamaa policy, which is designed to gather rural people from their scattered homestead settlements into more concentrated villages, so that public education and public health campaigns can be more effective. Rates of malaria and schistosomiasis are high among the Kutu, and only improved public health programs can alleviate the crisis.
The Kutu people have also been affected in recent years by the East African drought of the late 1980s and early 1990s and by the threat of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the disease of AIDS.
Sources: