Wanji Erotic

The Wanji are a Bantu-speaking people of Tanzania's southern highlands, and it is hard to talk about them without talking about the cold, high country they live in. Their home is Makete District in the Njombe Region, among the ridges of the Kipengere Range, which runs north from the mountains above Lake Nyasa. Frost is normal in the dry season. The Kitulo Plateau is right next door: a wide stretch of mountain grassland known for its wild orchids, protected as a national park since 2005. The Wanji are a small people compared with larger neighbors like the Kinga and the Bena, and they still speak a language of their own every day.

That language is Vwanji, often written Kivwanji with the Swahili prefix. It belongs to the Bena-Kinga group of Bantu languages, and its closest relatives are spoken nearby. Kinga shares Makete District with it, and Bena, Pangwa, Sangu and Hehe are spoken farther out. Swahili is the language of school, government and trade, so most Wanji move between the two as the setting calls for.

Most Wanji are Christian. Lutheran and Catholic churches are the main institutions of the Makete highlands, and they run schools and hospitals as well as Sunday services. Farming is the other constant. Irish potatoes, maize, wheat and beans grow on steep slopes, and cattle and smaller livestock are kept where the ground allows. The altitude keeps the air cool, and for much of the twentieth century it also kept the roads poor. Young people have long left for towns and estates elsewhere in Tanzania to earn cash.

Two recent changes stand out. In the 1990s Makete District became known across Tanzania as one of the places hit hardest by HIV. The deaths of many working-age adults left large numbers of children in the care of grandparents, and churches and aid programs spent years dealing with the aftermath. Then in 2012 the district was moved out of Iringa Region and into the newly created Njombe Region. Through all of it the Wanji have stayed rooted in the same hills, growing crops, going to church and speaking Vwanji at home, even as many of their relatives work in Tanzania's cities.