Vidunda Erotic

The Vidunda are a small Bantu-speaking hill people of central Tanzania, and the surest way to identify them is by the ground they stand on. Their name is also the name of their country: the Vidunda mountains of Kilosa District in Morogoro Region, a steep block of high ground north of the Great Ruaha River, above the lowland towns of Kidodi and Kidatu. An estimate from the late 1980s put them at about 32,000, a modest number beside larger neighbors such as the Luguru, Sagara and Hehe. Most are smallholder farmers, working food crops on the slopes, with rice and sugarcane on the valley floor below, where the Kilombero sugar estates and the Kidatu hydroelectric dam have drawn wage labor for decades.

Their language, Chividunda, belongs to the Ruvu cluster of Northeast Coast Bantu, which makes it close kin to Sagara, Kaguru, Luguru and Kutu, and a more distant cousin of Gogo and Zaramo. A speaker can hear the family resemblance across the region, but Chividunda is its own language, not a dialect of a bigger neighbor. Like most small Tanzanian languages it lives at home and in the village, while Swahili handles school, market, government and worship, and the younger generation leans steadily toward Swahili.

Ethnographers have long grouped the Vidunda with the matrilineal peoples of eastern Tanzania, a belt running from the coast up into the highlands of Morogoro. In that tradition clan membership passes through the mother, and a mother's brother carries real authority over his sister's children, including a say in marriage and inheritance. State law, the world religions and cash farming have all pushed toward father-centered households, so the older pattern now tends to show more in clan identity and family obligation than in the daily running of a home.

Christianity and Islam both have followers here, as they do across Morogoro Region, and neither has entirely displaced regard for ancestors. The nineteenth century was rough on this corridor: caravan routes ran through the lowlands and Hehe raiding parties pushed in from the southwest, which goes some way toward explaining why hill country was worth holding. Today the main highway to Zambia and Mikumi National Park sit at the Vidunda doorstep. Very little has been written about the Vidunda specifically, and much of what outsiders say about them is borrowed from better-documented neighbors. That gap is worth keeping in mind before trusting any confident summary.