Sonjo Erotic

The Sonjo, who call themselves Batemi, are a small Bantu farming people living as an island inside Maasai country. Their handful of villages sit in the dry hills of Ngorongoro District in northern Tanzania, west of Lake Natron and just short of the Kenyan border, and every one of them is placed where a spring or stream comes off the escarpment. That water is the whole point. The Sonjo are irrigation farmers in a landscape given over to cattle herders, channeling water through hand-dug furrows onto plots of sorghum, millet, beans and sweet potatoes. Rights to the water are hereditary and tightly held: a council of elders in each village decides who irrigates and when, and a man's standing has long depended on where he sits in that queue.

Their language, Temi, is a puzzle on the map. Its nearest relatives are generally taken to be Kikuyu, Kamba and the other Bantu languages of central Kenya, a few hundred kilometers to the north across land that has been Maasai for centuries. How the Batemi ended up where they are is not settled. Some archaeologists have linked them to Engaruka, the abandoned stone-built irrigation settlement farther south along the Rift, but that connection is argued rather than proven. What is clear is that long neighborhood with the Maasai shaped them. Villages were once ringed with thorn fences and guarded gates against raids, men defended them with bows and poisoned arrows, and the Sonjo borrowed the Maasai system of age sets, with a warrior grade of young men, along with a good deal of Maasai dress. For a long time they kept goats rather than cattle, and bridewealth was counted in goats. Disputes with Maasai neighbors over land and grazing have not entirely gone away.

Religion centers on Khambageu, a figure who in Sonjo tradition appeared among them as a man, worked wonders, moved from village to village, died, and left an empty grave. He is expected to return at the end of the world. The parallels with Christ have struck nearly every visitor, and Lutheran missionaries, present since the mid twentieth century, found both an opening and a rival in him. Many Batemi are now Christian, yet the village temples, the priestly lineages and the yearly festival honoring Khambageu continue. The outside world noticed the area briefly in 2011, when a retired Lutheran pastor in the Sonjo village of Samunge began handing out a herbal drink said to cure chronic disease, and lines of vehicles stretched for kilometers through the bush.