Subiya Erotic

The Subiya are a river people, and the river explains most of what makes them a group. Their country is the wedge of floodplain where the Chobe runs into the Zambezi, which three borders now carve up: the eastern end of Namibia's Zambezi Region (formerly the Caprivi Strip), the Chobe District of northern Botswana around Kasane, and the Sesheke side of Zambia's Western Province. They call themselves Vekuhane, after a founding ancestor named Ikuhane, and their language Chikuhane. Subiya, Subia, Masubia and Basubiya are what neighbors and the three governments call them. Under any of those names, daily life is organized around water. Men fish from dugout canoes, cattle are walked between floodplain grazing and higher ground as the annual flood rises and falls, and gardens go in on the wet soil the water leaves behind. Reed cutting, fish drying and the timing of the flood still set the village calendar, even where tarmac and phone signal have arrived.

Chikuhane is a Bantu language of the Botatwe group, which makes it a cousin of Tonga and Ila in Zambia and of the smaller Totela and Fwe languages nearby, rather than of Lozi, which outsiders often assume is the language here. Lozi is nonetheless everywhere. It was the language of the Barotse court that held the Subiya as tributaries, and it remains the language of early schooling, church and radio in the Zambezi Region, so most Subiya are bilingual and younger people increasingly reach for it first. The political inheritance is the kingdom of Itenge, whose ruler, the Munitenge, still leads the Masubia Traditional Authority from Bukalo in Namibia and presides over the khuta, the customary court that settles disputes and allocates land along the river. Botswana's Subiya have their own chief in the Chobe District, and Zambia's sit inside the Barotse system. The nineteenth century was hard on them. Sebitwane's Kololo, a Sotho-speaking army pushed north by the wars in South Africa, took the upper Zambezi around 1840 and made Linyanti, in Subiya country, the capital of their state. That is where David Livingstone arrived in 1851. The Lozi restoration of 1864 returned the Subiya to Barotse overlordship, and in 1890 a treaty signed in Europe handed the strip to Germany without consulting anyone who lived on it. Most Subiya today are Christian, spread across Lutheran, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist and newer Pentecostal congregations, while ancestral observance and traditional healers keep a place alongside the churches. They are not numerous, but the canoe, the khuta and the Munitenge give them a clearer sense of who they are than their numbers would suggest.