Ndali Erotic

The Ndali are a Bantu-speaking people of the hill country where southwestern Tanzania meets northern Malawi. Two things hold them together: their language, Ndali, which its speakers call Chindali or Kindali, and a stretch of highland that rises from the Songwe River into Ileje District. On the Tanzanian side, the old habit of naming land after its people survives in an administrative division called Bundali, the Ndali country. It sits beside Bulambya, the country of their Lambya neighbors. Across the river, in Malawi's Chitipa District, live Ndali who have answered to a different government since the 1890s. That was when German and British negotiators made the Songwe a colonial border.

Ndali is one of the Bantu languages spoken along the corridor between Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika. The standard classification groups it with Nyakyusa, the much larger language spoken on the slopes and lakeshore to the east. Nobody here lives in just one language, though. Tanzanian Ndali go to school, trade and deal with local government mostly in Swahili. Malawian Ndali deal with the state in English and Chichewa, and with the rest of the north in Chitumbuka, the region's working language. A century of separate schooling and government has pulled the two sides apart. Linguists who produced a grammar sketch and a dictionary of the Malawian speech treat it as a variety of its own. Like most smaller languages in both countries, Ndali lives mainly at home and in the village, while the national languages handle the classroom and the paperwork.

Most Ndali are rural farmers who grow maize, beans and other staples on the ridges and in the valleys. For a people split by a river border, having relatives on the far bank is ordinary. Christianity came to the region with Protestant and Catholic missions during the colonial period and is now the majority faith, and church congregations are a fixture of village social life. Next to the Nyakyusa, the Ndali are a small people, and outsiders easily fold them into broader regional labels. The language, the hills and the name Bundali keep the difference plain.