Kwaya Erotic

The Kwaya are a lakeshore people. Their villages line the eastern edge of Lake Victoria in Tanzania's Mara Region, around the regional town of Musoma, and their way of life follows from that position: farming on one side, fishing on the other. A Kwaya community is as likely to be known by its landing beach, with wooden boats pulled up and small silver dagaa fish drying in the sun, as by the cassava and millet fields behind it. They are a small group by Tanzanian standards, one of more than a hundred peoples in a country where no single ethnicity dominates. What holds them together as a group is their language, their clans and a shared stretch of shore.

Their language, called Kikwaya in Swahili, belongs to the East Nyanza branch of the Bantu family. It is closely related to Jita, spoken by the neighboring people to the south, and to Ruri and Kara, and speakers across this small cluster recognize much of each other's vocabulary. Swahili handles most of life outside the home: school, government offices, church and the fish market. As with most of Tanzania's smaller languages, it keeps gaining ground inside the home as well. The name also causes some confusion. In Swahili, kwaya is the everyday word for a choir, borrowed from English, so most Tanzanians hear the word in church before they hear it as the name of a people.

That overlap fits, because most Kwaya are Christian, the result of Catholic and Protestant missions that worked the Lake Victoria shore during the colonial period. Church life, choirs included, fills much of village social time. Older clan customs have not disappeared, and negotiations between families over bridewealth still go along with many church weddings. The Kwaya share their corner of Tanzania with the Zanaki inland. Julius Nyerere was a Zanaki: he led Tanganyika to independence in 1961 and later drove the villagization campaigns of the 1970s, which moved rural families into new villages across Mara. A later change came from the lake itself. The Nile perch export trade turned fishing around Musoma into an industry, with processing plants and outside buyers bringing cash and competition to beaches that had mostly supplied regional markets.