Nyiha Erotic

The Nyiha are the people of the Mbozi plateau, the high, rolling country in southwestern Tanzania that fills part of the corridor between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi, with the Rukwa rift dropping away to the north. Their settlement runs on across the border into northeastern Zambia and the northern tip of Malawi. The name is a cousin of the widespread Bantu word nyika, meaning open bush or grassland, which is why unrelated peoples elsewhere in East Africa carry similar labels. The Nyiha have nothing to do with the coastal Kenyan groups once called Nyika. What marks them out is their language, Shinyiha, and a political history of small independent chiefdoms rather than one kingdom.

Shinyiha is a Bantu language, closest to Safwa, Malila, Lambya, Nyamwanga and Wanda, the neighbors who ring the plateau. The varieties spoken in Zambia and Malawi have drifted far enough from the Tanzanian one that linguists often count them separately. On the Tanzanian side Swahili handles school, government and the market, while Shinyiha holds the home and the farm. Descent runs through the father, marriage is sealed with bridewealth, and each of the old chiefdoms was headed by a mwene, a chief whose own ancestors were held to answer for the wellbeing of the land.

The nineteenth century was rough. Ngoni war bands and then the Sangu raided the plateau, and the Nyiha pulled together into large defended villages. German administration arrived in the 1890s, Moravian missionaries settled at Mbozi at the end of that decade, and the church they planted is still a major presence in the district, alongside Catholics and a growing number of Pentecostal congregations. Most Nyiha are Christian today. That has not ended the quiet attention paid to ancestors within families, particularly around illness, misfortune and funerals.

Between the world wars European settlers planted coffee on the plateau, and Mbozi is now one of Tanzania's main arabica districts, with Nyiha smallholders growing it next to maize and beans. Finger millet, the old staple, survives mostly as the grain for beer. The main highway to Zambia and the TAZARA railway both cross Nyiha country on the way to the Tunduma border post, which has turned Vwawa and Mlowo into busy trading towns. Vwawa became the capital of the new Songwe Region in 2016. One landmark predates all of it: the Mbozi meteorite, a block of iron weighing roughly sixteen tons, lies on a hillside here and was known to local people long before it was written up in 1930.