Tonga Erotic

The Tonga are a Zambezi people, which is both a geographic statement and the source of their central grievance. They farm the plateau of southern Zambia and the hot valley floor on both banks of the river, and in the late 1950s the river was taken from them. The closing of the Kariba Dam flooded the Gwembe Valley and moved roughly 57,000 Tonga off ground their families had worked for generations. Compensation was promised and largely not delivered; at Chipepo in 1958, colonial police fired on Tonga who refused to leave and killed eight of them. Nearly seventy years later the resettlement is still the hinge of Tonga self-understanding, and Nyaminyami, the river spirit held to have been separated from his wife by the dam wall, has become an emblem well beyond the valley. They speak Chitonga, a Bantu language in the group Zambians call Bantu Botatwe, the three peoples, which binds Tonga closely to Ila and Lenje and more loosely to Toka-Leya, Totela and Subiya. It should not be confused with the unrelated Tonga of northern Malawi, or with Polynesian Tongan. There are two broad branches: Plateau Tonga around Monze, Choma and Mazabuka, and Valley or Gwembe Tonga in the trough of the river and across the border in Binga.

Descent runs through the mother's clan, the mukowa, and before the British arrived there were effectively no chiefs. Authority sat with rain shrine keepers and with mediums through whom the basangu spirits spoke about drought and calamity, an arrangement that left the Tonga exposed to Ndebele and Chikunda raiding in the nineteenth century and frustrated administrators who wanted someone to sign things. Chiefs were duly appointed. On the plateau, cattle and maize built a genuine commercial farming economy, Tonga growers having taken up the ox plow early. Most Tonga are Christian, with a notably deep Seventh-day Adventist presence in Zambia, and church life sits alongside the annual Lwiindi rain and harvest ceremonies rather than having erased them. Two things rarely make the summaries: ngoma buntibe, the funeral and procession music in which dozens of antelope horn players each sound a single note in interlocking patterns over drums, and the coiled ilala palm baskets woven by Binga women, now the district's best known product. The two halves of the people have had different luck. Southern Province is politically central in Zambia, and Zambia's president since 2021 is Tonga. Binga, in Zimbabwe, remains one of that country's poorest districts, sitting beside the lake whose power it went without for decades. Tonga was recognized as an official Zimbabwean language only in the 2013 constitution.