Rungwa Erotic

The Rungwa are a small Bantu-speaking people of southwestern Tanzania. Their home is the Lake Rukwa basin, a low trough in the western branch of the Rift Valley that lies between Lake Tanganyika and the Mbeya highlands. No kingdom or famous ruler put them on the map. What sets them apart is a language of their own and a clear sense of being Rungwa, not Fipa or Pimbwe, even though they share much of their history and land with those neighbors. The name gets mixed up easily. It also belongs to a river that drains into Lake Rukwa and to a game reserve to the northeast. People often confuse it with Rungwe, the volcanic highland district to the southeast, but Rungwe is home to the Nyakyusa, a different people.

Their language, also called Rungwa, belongs to the Fipa-Mambwe cluster of Bantu languages, which reaches from the Rukwa country into northern Zambia. Its relatives include Fipa, Pimbwe, Mambwe and Lungu. In practice most Rungwa speak two languages. As everywhere in Tanzania, Swahili is used in school, in government offices and at the market. A small language like Rungwa tends to hold on at home, in the villages and among older speakers, while younger people switch between the two without thinking about it.

Daily life follows the seasons of the valley. Most households farm, and Lake Rukwa supports fishing. The lake is shallow, and its level can rise and fall sharply from one year to the next. A single long rainy season largely decides how the harvest and the catch turn out. The nineteenth century brought upheaval. Ngoni war bands moving north from southern Africa reached neighboring Ufipa, and trade caravans from the coast pushed deep into the interior. German rule came next, then British. After independence, the villagization campaign of the 1970s moved much of rural Tanzania into planned settlements, and the Rukwa countryside changed along with the rest of the country.

Christianity is the main faith in the region. Its most visible roots are the Catholic missions that took hold around Lake Tanganyika and Ufipa from the late nineteenth century, and older beliefs about ancestors still live alongside it. With more than 120 ethnic groups in Tanzania, many of them far larger, the Rungwa are easy to overlook. The most telling thing about them is that they have survived as a named people with a language of their own, in a country where Swahili has long drawn everyone toward a shared national identity.