Luguru Erotic

The Luguru are mountain farmers, and almost everything about them follows from that. Their homeland is the Uluguru range in eastern Tanzania, a steep block of ancient rock rising behind Morogoro town, close enough to the Indian Ocean to catch its moisture and wring it out as rain. The slopes are sharp enough that fields have to be cut into them at angles that look impossible from the road below. Luguru households farm those angles anyway, raising maize, cassava, bananas and enough vegetables to keep the markets of Morogoro and Dar es Salaam supplied. The forests above their gardens hold plants and animals found nowhere else, and the rivers that rise there water a coastal city of millions, which has kept Luguru land at the center of national argument for the better part of a century.

They speak Kiluguru, a Bantu language of the northeastern coastal cluster that shades into the speech of the Kami, Kutu, Kwere and Zaramo around them. Almost everyone also speaks Swahili, and the two have been trading vocabulary for generations. Descent is matrilineal: land belongs to the clan and passes through mothers and mothers' brothers, so a man's claim to a plot usually runs through his sister rather than his father. That arrangement has outlasted colonial land law, cash cropping and a century of mission preaching about how a household ought to be arranged. Catholicism arrived with the Holy Ghost Fathers in the late nineteenth century and took deep hold in the highlands. Islam came earlier and from the other direction, along the caravan roads from the coast, and holds the lower slopes and the plains. Neither displaced the older business of rain. The Kolelo shrine in the Ulugurus, a cave oracle tied to rainfall and fertility, was consulted well beyond Luguru country, and the water medicine that gave the Maji Maji war of 1905 its name is traced back to it. Fifty years later the Luguru fought a smaller war of their own. British agricultural officers ordered compulsory terracing across the range, households refused to build it, and the confrontation of 1955 ended the scheme and handed Tanzania's nationalists a case study in what colonial improvement felt like from underneath. Luguru now are farmers, traders, teachers and migrants to the coastal cities, and the mountains remain the place people are from.