Vinza Erotic

The Vinza are known for one thing above all, and it is salt. Their country, Uvinza, lies along the Malagarasi River in the Kigoma Region of western Tanzania, inland from Lake Tanganyika, and at its center are brine springs that people have been boiling down for a very long time. Archaeologists found salt working there that goes back well over a thousand years, into the Early Iron Age, which puts Uvinza among the oldest known salt works in East Africa. The Vinza themselves are a small people, put at roughly ten thousand in a 1987 estimate, but for centuries they sat on something that everyone across a wide stretch of the interior needed.

That shaped how the chiefdom worked. In the nineteenth century the Vinza chiefs did not so much make salt as control access to it. Each dry season, when the water dropped and the springs could be worked, outsiders walked in from many directions to camp, cut firewood, and boil brine in clay pots, and the chiefs took a share of what they carried away. The same rulers held the ferry crossing on the Malagarasi, which lay on the main caravan road from the coast through Unyamwezi to Ujiji on the lake. European travelers, Burton and Stanley among them, complained about the tolls. Seen from the Vinza side it was sound business: a small polity living off a river crossing and a set of springs.

Colonial rule ended that arrangement. A German concern took over the springs in the early 1900s and built a modern works, the central railway to Kigoma was laid through Uvinza shortly before the First World War, and salt became wage labor rather than chiefly revenue. A commercial salt works still operates there, and the town gives its name to a district.

The language, Kivinza, is Bantu and sits in the same cluster as Kirundi and Kinyarwanda, closest of all to Ha, spoken by the much larger people to the north. Other neighbors include the Jiji toward the lake, the Tongwe and Bende to the south, and the Nyamwezi to the east. Swahili does most of the daily work now, and a language with so few speakers is under obvious pressure. Islam, which arrived with the caravans, and Christianity are both practiced in the area, and older accounts describe rites for the spirits of the springs before the salt season opened. Little has been written about the Vinza since, and much of their present life is simply undocumented.