Central Tanzania
By the end of the eighteenth century a large number of rather small chiefdoms — many encompassed only 1,000 persons — had been established in the central interior. Most of them can be linked to ethnic groups as they were defined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by outsiders, hut the traditional histories of any group so defined indicate their diverse origins despite their similar cultures and common language.
They also indicate historical relationships between segments of one ethnic group and segments of another. Thus a section of the heterogeneous Kimbu (east and northeast of Lake Rukwa) may have provided the ruling group for some chiefdoms of the even more heterogeneous Nyamwezi to the north, and another section provided such a group to Hehe chiefdoms to the east.
From the southern shores of Lake Victoria to just north of Lake Rukwa are five ethnic groups—Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Sumbwa, Kimbu, and Konongo—in what scholars have come to call Greater Unyamwezi (Unyamwezi proper is the home of one of these groups) or the nterni region because many of the chiefs hear that title. By the mid-eighteenth century the region was the locus of a host of small chiefdoms as migrants of varied origin staked out territories for new chiefdoms, took over preexisting ones or, as losing claimants to chiefly succession in established chiefdoms, departed to establish new ones.
The chief in the senior chiefdom of a set of related chiefdoms might have a higher ritual status than the others, and in a few cases a chiefdom might owe tribute to another, but only in the nineteenth century, as trade with the coast intensified and firearms became available, did some chiefs seek to establish hegemony over wider areas.
Chiefs were, in the first instance, religious figures whose physical well-being and ritual activities were essential to the health and prosperity of their people. Sometimes a chief was also administrative head of a set of headmen and councillors. Perhaps more often a chief's political function reflected his primarily ritual role: decisions often required consideration of the supernatural.
At the southwestern edge of the central interior between lakes Rukwa and Tanganyika live the Fipa. Sites just outside the Fipa plateau suggest that the first occupants of the area were probably hunters and that early Iron Age cultivators may have lived in or near it. Fipa traditional history, however, begins around AD 1700 when the founders of the chiefdom of Milansi and related chiefdoms arrived. Their ultimate origin probably lies in Luba country, locus of a large kingdom in southern Zaire.
Cultivators of millet and iron smelters and smiths, these immigrants may have carried with them the notion of rule over territory as opposed to a pattern common in simpler societies in which a chief led a band of personal followers hut did not control a specific territory and all of the people in it. As in the case of sets of linked chiefdoms elsewhere in central Tanzania, the idiom of kinship was used in describing the relations between members of the set: the head of the senior chiefdom was thought of as father or elder brother of the other heads.
In the mid-eighteenth century a second set of migrants, probably stemming from the ruling group of one of the interlacustrine kingdoms, established their rule over the Fipa in a centralized system. The chief of Milansi became the chief priest of the kingdmn, and political authority passed into the hands of the newcomers who instituted a system in which subordinates, instead of inheriting their positions, were appointed by the paramount chief and therefore directly dependent on him. That pattern continued, but the unity of the Fipa did not: dynastic conflict in the early nineteenth century eventually led to the establishment of two chiefdoms.
Developments in the eastern and southern sections of central Tanzania resembled those to the west and north despite considerable differences in cultural detail. Here, too, multidirectional movement and mixing of Bantu-speaking agricultural peoples led to the emergence of many small chiefdoms, as among the Hehe and the Berta. Again ethnic consciousness did not arise until the nineteenth century.
At least one of the groups in the area, the Cogo on the eastern edge, was influenced in the late eighteenth century by the southernmost extension of the pastoral Paranilotic. Masai from whom they borrowed many aspects of costume as well as the age-set system. The Cogo, however, remained agriculturalists.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
