Ndau Erotic

The Ndau live on both sides of a border they had no hand in drawing. Their country runs from the hills of Chipinge and Chimanimani in southeastern Zimbabwe through the Buzi and Save river lowlands of central Mozambique toward the coast near Beira. The Anglo-Portuguese boundary of the 1890s split it between a British colony and a Portuguese one, and families and chiefdoms have straddled that line ever since. What holds the Ndau together is not a state. It is a shared speech, a shared history of being caught between larger powers, and a reputation for spiritual power that reaches far beyond their own districts.

ChiNdau is a Bantu language of the Shona cluster. Linguists long filed it as a Shona dialect, and speakers of standard Shona understand much of it. It also carries a heavy layer of Nguni vocabulary, and Zimbabwe's 2013 constitution names it an official language in its own right. The Nguni layer dates to the nineteenth century, when Soshangane's Gaza kingdom conquered the region. The name Ndau is usually traced to that encounter and is said to come from a greeting local people offered the newcomers. Gaza rulers drafted Ndau men into their regiments, and in 1889 Ngungunyane forced large numbers of Ndau to go south with him when he moved his capital to the Limpopo valley.

That history lives on. In southern Mozambique, among Tsonga-speaking families descended from the Gaza conquerors, spirits identified as Ndau are believed to possess the living and demand redress for old wrongs. People seek out Ndau healers and diviners well beyond Ndau country, including in Maputo and Johannesburg. At home, ancestral rites sit alongside Christianity rather than against it. The American Board mission at Mount Silinda, founded in the 1890s, built schools and churches in the Chipinge hills, and across Ndau country Apostolic congregations in white robes now gather to worship in the open air.

Muchongoyo, the dance most closely tied to Chipinge, keeps alive the shields, stamping and battle formations of the Gaza regiments. Politics has not left the Ndau alone either. Afonso Dhlakama, who led RENAMO for decades, was Ndau, and the movement's command relied heavily on Ndau speakers during Mozambique's civil war. Most Ndau today grow maize and sorghum, work the tea and coffee estates of the highlands, or go to South Africa to earn wages. In 2019 Cyclone Idai tore through Beira, Buzi, Chimanimani and Chipinge, hitting the Ndau heartland on both sides of the border in the same storm.