Safwa Erotic

The Safwa are the people of the highlands around Mbeya, in Tanzania's Southern Highlands, and they call their homeland Usafwa. It is cool, well watered hill country of steep farm plots and valley floors, where maize, beans and potatoes feed most households. Mbeya city grew up around the gold rush on the nearby Lupa fields in the 1920s, and it sits inside Safwa territory. That makes being Safwa a city identity as much as a rural one, and many families have a hillside farm as well as relatives in town.

Their language, Kisafwa, is a Bantu language from a small cluster spoken around Mbeya, and its closest relatives are Malila and Nyiha. It is clearly separate from Nyakyusa, spoken on the southern slopes that fall toward Lake Nyasa, and from the language of the Sangu on the plains to the northeast. Speech changes from one district to the next, and speakers recognize several dialect areas. Everyone uses Swahili as the national language, and in Mbeya itself Swahili does most of the daily talking.

The Safwa never formed a single kingdom. In the nineteenth century they lived under many small local chiefs, which left them exposed when the Sangu ruler Merere was pushed west by the Hehe. He moved into Safwa country and set up his capital at Utengule. Sangu rule gave way to German conquest in the 1890s and to British administration after the First World War. Moravian missionaries arrived in the same years. One of them, Elise Kootz-Kretschmer, stayed among the Safwa long enough to publish a multivolume German account of their lives and beliefs in the 1920s, which is still one of the fullest records of that period.

Christianity is now the main faith. The Moravian Church has deep roots in the region, alongside Catholic, Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations. Older ideas about why misfortune strikes have not gone away, though. They drew the attention of the anthropologist Alan Harwood, whose 1970 study of Safwa witchcraft and sorcery argued that the kind of accusation people made depended on how the accuser and the accused were related. For many Safwa, church life and those older explanations of illness, bad luck and family conflict still exist side by side, each used when the other seems to fall short.