Mambwe Erotic

The Mambwe are farmers and cattle keepers of the high, open plateau at Zambia's northern tip. Their land runs up toward Lake Tanganyika and across the border into southwestern Tanzania. Most of their neighbors are larger peoples, and what sets the Mambwe apart among them is how they organize family. The Mambwe trace descent through the father's line and have long paid bridewealth in cattle, while the Bemba to the south trace kinship through women. Their center is Mbala, the colonial town once called Abercorn, and more Mambwe live across the border in Tanzania's Rukwa Region. In the 1890s the line between British and German territory was drawn straight through their country, and families still live on both sides of it.

Mambwe is so close to Lungu, the speech of their neighbors along the lakeshore, that the two are treated as one language. Together with Fipa they form a small Bantu cluster that looks north into Tanzania rather than south into Bemba country. Most Mambwe also speak Bemba, the common language of northern Zambia. They speak English or Swahili too, depending on which side of the border they grew up on.

The late nineteenth century hit hard. Bemba war parties raided the plateau, and missionaries came in the same years. The London Missionary Society set up near Mbala in the late 1880s, and the White Fathers opened their Mambwe mission in 1891, one of the first Catholic stations in what became Northern Rhodesia. Most Mambwe today are Christian, Catholic and Protestant alike. Going to church sits easily beside duties to the ancestors at funerals, harvests and chiefs' occasions.

The land shaped a distinctive way of farming. Nearby woodland peoples burn cut branches to clear their fields. Mambwe farmers instead have long hoed grass turf into large mounds that rot down into planting beds for beans and finger millet, a method known as fundikila. In the colonial decades many men left to work in the Copperbelt mines. The anthropologist William Watson published a study of the Mambwe in 1958 that went against what most people expected then. He found that wage work did not break up village life. The villages took in both the money and the missing men. Authority still runs through a line of chiefs headed by Senior Chief Nsokolo, whose people gather each year for Mutomolo, a thanksgiving for the new harvest.