Matengo Erotic

Among the peoples of southern Tanzania, the Matengo are the ones most closely tied to a single landscape. They are a Bantu-speaking farming people of the Matengo Highlands in Ruvuma Region. It is steep, rainy country, all ridges and narrow valleys, rising above the eastern shore of Lake Nyasa, with the town of Mbinga at its center. Who they are is bound up with that land and with the unusual way they learned to farm it.

That method is ngolo, usually called the Matengo pit system. On slopes that would lose their topsoil to ordinary hoeing, farmers cut grass and weeds, lay them out in a square grid, and heap soil from the middle of each square over the top. The finished field looks like a hillside waffle: rows of pits boxed in by ridges. The buried plants rot into fertilizer, and the pits catch rainwater and silt before they can wash downhill. Beans and maize take turns in the same field from one season to the next. Researchers have studied ngolo for decades as a working example of homegrown soil conservation, and Matengo farmers still build it by hand.

The highlands were partly a refuge. In the nineteenth century the Ngoni, descendants of Nguni migrants from southern Africa, settled around Songea and raided the surrounding country, and many Matengo pulled back into the mountains. Crowding onto steep ground helped push farming toward intensive methods like ngolo. Colonial rule brought other pressures: German and later British administration, and a steady stream of men leaving to work on plantations far from home. Arabica coffee took hold on the upper slopes during the twentieth century. Mbinga is still one of Tanzania's major coffee districts, and each season's prices shape household budgets.

The Matengo language, Kimatengo, belongs to a small group of related Bantu languages on the Tanzanian side of Lake Nyasa. Its closest relatives are Mpoto, spoken by lakeshore neighbors, and Manda. Swahili is the language of school, trade and government, and most people switch between the two without thinking about it. Religious life is strongly Catholic. Benedictine missionaries arrived early in the colonial period, and today the Diocese of Mbinga runs a dense network of parishes, schools and health centers across the highlands. In these hills the church is as familiar a sight as the pitted fields.