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The Ngoni Raiders

In the 1840s two contingents of Ngoni — South Africans who had fled their homeland to escape domination by the Zulu under the warlord chief, Shaka — reached Tanzania. They brought with them the military organization, tactics, and weaponry developed in the southern African conflicts of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Characteristically, as they migrated, the Ngoni incorporated some of the people they conquered as slaves and wives and others as soldiers.

One section, the Maseko, having reached the area near modern Songea, incorporated the local peoples in their system, but by the 1660s internecine conflict, stimulated in part by elements of the second section, the Jere, led to their deposition. Some of the groups that had been under Ngoni rule and had been trained in the Ngoni military style went off on their own as raiders soldiers of fortune, devastating the hinterland of the coast between Kilwa and Lindi and leaving parts of it uninhabited.

The Jere section moved initially to Fipa country where their leader died in 1848. Two subsections turned east and settled near Songea where eventually they took over from the Maseko section. Two others moved up the eastern and western shores of Lake Tanganyika, some reaching northern Tanzania where remnants were still to he found in the mid-twentieth century. Many of the Ngoni became involved in the slave trade, independently, as allies of local chiefs or in conflict with them.

Whether in alliance with the Ngoni or in conflict with them, a reasonable degree of security came only to those who were quick to adopt Ngoni techniques, above all the idea of a professional army. This was in good part the basis of Mirambo's success, and the adoption of Ngoni tactics enabled the patrilineal cattle-keeping people of southcentral Tanzania, such as the Bella, Ifehe. and Satign to repel the Ngoni and, in the process, to build sonic-what larger states.

By the end of the nineteenth century the most important Ngoni elements in Tanzania were those in the Songea area, but the population of the two chiefdoms there numbered only 20,000 in the 1880s, and only 10 percent of these were descendants of migrants from Fipa country. As elsewhere in that part of Africa, the Ngoni were a minority among the people they ruled, often speaking the local language rather than their own, hut retaining an extraordinary tradition.