Zigula Erotic

The Zigula, usually called Zigua in Tanzania, are the people of Uzigua. That is the dry country of hills and plains behind the northern Tanzanian coast, between the Pangani and Wami rivers. They live close enough to the Indian Ocean to have been shaped by the Swahili towns, and far enough inland to have kept their own language, clans and farming year. Most live today in Handeni and northern Kilindi districts of Tanga Region and in northern Pwani Region. They grow maize, cassava, sorghum and beans on land where the rains can't be counted on.

Their language, Zigula, is a Bantu language in a small cluster with Shambaa, Bondei and Ngulu, which their neighbors to the north and west speak. Swahili, a close Bantu relative, is the language of school, market and government. Most Zigua speak it fluently, and that puts steady pressure on the home language, especially in towns. Islam came inland from the coast during the nineteenth century, and most Zigua are Muslim today. A Christian minority traces its roots to mission stations. Kinship was traditionally traced through the mother's clan, a pattern the Zigua share with several other peoples of eastern Tanzania.

The nineteenth century was the turning point. Caravan routes from Pangani and Saadani ran through Uzigua toward the interior, and Zigua strongmen grew powerful on that traffic. Kisabengo built a fortified town near present-day Morogoro. At the end of the 1880s, Bwana Heri of Saadani led armed resistance against the German conquest of the coast. The same routes also carried slaves. Famine and the coastal slave trade sent many Zigua north in chains to the plantations of southern Somalia. Some escaped and founded free villages along the Jubba River, where they kept their language for generations in a Somali-speaking country. Their descendants, known in Somalia as Mushunguli, became part of the Somali Bantu population. After the Somali civil war, many Somali Bantu were resettled as refugees in the United States, and Zigua descendants were among them. A Zigula-speaking community that held together in Somalia for well over a century, far from Uzigua, is one of the more remarkable survivals in East African history.