Zinza Erotic

The Zinza are a Bantu-speaking people of the southwestern shore of Lake Victoria in northwestern Tanzania. They live on a border between two ways of life. To the west and north are the old lake kingdoms, including Haya country in Kagera, with its banana gardens and royal families. To the east are the open plains of the Sukuma, Tanzania's largest ethnic group. In language and in their history of kings, the Zinza belong with the lake kingdoms. In everyday life, their villages are now some of the most mixed in the region, and the Sukuma world is always close by.

Their language, Kizinza, is a Great Lakes Bantu language closely related to Haya and Kerewe. Most Zinza also speak Swahili. Many speak Sukuma too, especially where Sukuma farmers and herders settled in large numbers during the twentieth century, and in those places Sukuma is often the language of the market and the neighbors. The Zinza heartland is in what is now Geita Region, around Geita town and Chato, running down to the lakeshore. Zinza communities also live in nearby parts of Kagera and Mwanza.

Before colonial rule, Buzinza was a kingdom whose rulers traced their line back to Ruhinda, the founder claimed by several royal families around the lake, including Karagwe's. The kingdom later broke up into smaller chiefdoms. German and then British officials ruled through those local chiefs until Tanzania abolished hereditary chiefs after independence. The Ruhinda link still ties Zinza history to that of the Haya, and it is part of why the Zinza see themselves as a people of the lake kingdoms and not of the plains.

Most Zinza are farmers who grow cassava, maize, bananas and cotton, and families along the lakeshore also fish. The biggest recent change has come from underground. Geita sits on some of Tanzania's largest gold deposits, and both big industrial mines and small independent diggers have turned a quiet farming district into a mining economy. Workers come from across the country, which has mixed the population even further. Christianity is the majority faith, Catholic and Protestant, and there is a smaller Muslim community. In many families, older ideas about ancestors and traditional healing still exist alongside church life, especially when someone falls ill or a family has a run of bad luck.