Chopi Erotic

What sets the Chopi apart, for most outsiders and for many Mozambicans too, is a sound: the timbila, large wooden xylophones played in orchestras that can reach dozens of instruments. The Chopi are a Bantu-speaking people of Mozambique's southern coast. Their center is the Zavala and Inharrime districts of Inhambane Province, a country of sandy soils, cashew and coconut trees, and lagoons tucked behind the ocean dunes. Farming has long anchored rural life, with cassava, maize and groundnuts planted against unreliable rains. Their language, Chopi or Cicopi, belongs to a small branch of Bantu shared with Gitonga, which the neighboring Tonga speak around Inhambane town. Inland and to the south, Tswa-Ronga languages such as Changana and Tswa take over, and Portuguese is the language of school and government. Christianity, mostly Catholic and Protestant, is widespread, but it has not pushed out the ancestors. Family spirits are still remembered and addressed, and people in trouble may consult a pastor and a diviner alike.

In the nineteenth century the Chopi faced the Gaza kingdom, a Nguni state that raided across southern Mozambique and demanded submission. Chopi chiefs resisted for decades. When Portugal moved against the Gaza king Ngungunhane in the 1890s, many Chopi fought on the Portuguese side, trading one overlord for another. Colonial rule brought forced labor and a steady flow of men to the gold mines of South Africa, where Chopi musicians kept orchestras going in the mine compounds. Independence in 1975 was followed by a civil war that killed people and scattered them across Zavala, and later droughts pushed more families toward Maputo and other cities. Through all of it the music held. Each mbila has keys cut from mwenje wood, set over hard fruit-shell resonators fitted with buzzing membranes. An orchestra runs from small treble instruments down to the deep chikhulu. The full performance, the ngodo, is a suite of movements with dancers and sung verses newly composed by a village master. The lyrics are what outsiders tend to miss. They carry news, grief and pointed mockery of local officials, colonial administrators included, sung in public with the whole village listening. UNESCO proclaimed timbila a masterpiece of intangible heritage in 2005, and the M'Saho festival in Zavala keeps new ngodo coming.