Zaramo Erotic

The Zaramo are the people whose farmland became Dar es Salaam. When the Sultan of Zanzibar laid out a new harbor town at the fishing village of Mzizima in the 1860s, he was building on Zaramo ground, and the city that grew out of it has been swallowing Zaramo villages ever since. That fact organizes most of what can be said about them. They are a farming people absorbed into a metropolis, and absorbed into the Swahili coastal world so thoroughly that the line between Zaramo and generic coastal Muslim is now a matter of what a family says at home rather than anything visible on the street.

Their country is the low, hot plain between the Indian Ocean and the Uluguru foothills, in Tanzania's Pwani Region and the sprawl of the city itself: cassava, rice, coconut, mango and cashew, with palm wine tapped from the coconut groves. Kizaramo belongs to the Northeast Coastal branch of Bantu, close kin to Kwere, Kami, Doe, Kutu and Ndengereko, all of them near enough that the groups shade into one another at the edges. Swahili has largely displaced it. Most Zaramo now speak Swahili first and treat Kizaramo as the language older relatives use among themselves.

They are overwhelmingly Muslim, having taken Islam from the coast in the nineteenth century, and they are also matrilineal, which produces an arrangement worth noticing: by custom a man's heirs are his sister's children, while Islamic law points elsewhere, and families negotiate the gap case by case. Descent through the mother still frames clan membership and who has a claim on whom.

The best known Zaramo institution is female initiation. A girl at first menstruation enters a period of seclusion under an instructor, the kungwi, and emerges in a public ceremony that is among the largest events a family stages. Bound up with it is the mwana hiti, a small carved wooden figure abstracted almost to a torso and a head with a distinctive crested coiffure, given to the initiate and kept afterward as a fertility object. These carvings sit in museum collections worldwide and are among the most recognizable objects from the East African coast. Alongside the mosque, the mganga, the diviner and healer, is still consulted for illness and misfortune, and offerings at ancestral shrines have not disappeared. The Zaramo were among the coastal populations that rose against the German East Africa Company in 1888, and then spent the colonial century as the immediate neighbors of somebody else's capital.