Doe Erotic

The Doe are a small Bantu-speaking people of Tanzania's coastal hinterland. What sets them apart is not their numbers but a language of their own and a home ground they have kept while living beside much larger neighbors. That ground is Bagamoyo District in Pwani Region, a stretch of bush, farmland and river country north and inland of the old port town of Bagamoyo, reaching toward the lower Wami River. Most Doe live in villages and farm, and the Indian Ocean is close enough to have shaped both their trade and their faith.

Their language, Kidoe, belongs to the Ruvu group of Northeast Coast Bantu. Zigua, Kwere, Zaramo and Luguru are in the same group, and Kidoe is closely related to the speech of the neighboring Kwere and Zigua. Nearly every Doe also speaks Swahili, and that is the source of the pressure. Swahili runs the school, the radio, the market and the district office. For a language with this few speakers, the steady drift toward Swahili is the obvious long-term threat.

Islam came inland with coastal trade, and today most Doe are Muslim. Friday prayers, the Ramadan fast and Islamic names are part of ordinary life, and a smaller number are Christian. As among many coastal Tanzanian peoples, older ideas about ancestors and spirits have not simply disappeared. They tend to live on quietly inside a Muslim frame rather than compete with it.

In the nineteenth century the Doe lived near one of East Africa's great trade routes. Bagamoyo was the coastal end of the caravan road to Lake Tanganyika, and ivory and enslaved captives moved through the region under the sway of the Zanzibar sultanate. European travelers of the period passed along rumors that the Doe ate their enemies. Today that hearsay reads more like caravan gossip about an independent inland people than like evidence. German colonial rule followed, then British administration, then independent Tanzania. The new nation's Swahili-first policies have drawn the Doe, like every small community in the country, into a shared national life.

What is still distinctly Doe is local and specific: the language, in the homes where it is still spoken, family and clan ties across a cluster of villages, and a sense of belonging to one particular stretch of the coast's back country. In public they are often Tanzanians first. Among themselves, they are Doe.