StapleTanzania
Ugali
Maize meal cooked stiff and turned out as a mound, eaten with fish, beans or greens across the whole country. The measure of a cook is whether it holds together cleanly.
Serves 6 · 25 minutes
Ngindo
Beekeepers and shifting cultivators of the Selous wilderness, matrilineal, dispersed by design across the largest protected area in Africa, and the community whose killing of a German officer in 1905 is where the Maji Maji war is usually said to have begun.
Identity
Population: Estimated 250,000 to 350,000
Location: Liwale, Ruangwa and the Selous margins of Lindi and Morogoro Regions, southern Tanzania
Language: Kingindo
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (P14, Rufiji-Ruvuma group)
Traditional governance: Matrilineage heads and dispersed settlement without chiefship; Tanzanian local government; wildlife management authorities heavily present.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Ngindo of Liwale
The historic centre, and the Maji Maji heartland.
Ngindo of the Matandu valley
Communities on the river systems draining east.
Ngindo of the Selous margins
Households displaced outward by the reserve's expansion.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary and coastal dress; the beekeeper's smoke and climbing gear as working equipment; ceremonial dress at unyago.
Food: Cassava and sorghum ugali, honey in quantity, sesame, game historically, wild fruits and tubers, and the honey beer that is the community's ceremonial drink.
Ceremonies: Unyago initiation for girls with extended instruction; honey-harvest observances; ancestral offerings; funerals; the ngoma dances of the southern interior.
Marriage customs: Matrilineal with the mother's brother holding authority; bridewealth modest, with service to the wife's family more significant; residence historically with the wife's kin.
Initiation rites: Unyago for girls, a seclusion with instruction from senior women, still widely practised; boys' circumcision and instruction, in Islamic form in Muslim households.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Tanzania, at national rather than community level — 12 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
StapleTanzania
Makande
also Maize and bean stew
Maize and beans simmered slowly with coconut milk, the Chagga and Pare version of the East African staple. Richer and looser than Kenyan githeri.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes, plus soaking
National dishTanzania
Nyama Choma na Kachumbari
Goat grilled slowly over charcoal, chopped and eaten with a tomato and onion salad. Ordered by weight at a nyama choma joint and shared standing around the board.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
National dishTanzania
Mchemsho
also Boiled one-pot
Everything boiled together in one pot — plantain, potato, cassava, carrot, beans and meat — in a light broth. Northern Tanzania's household dinner, and what a Tanzanian cooks when feeding a crowd.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Chipsi Mayai
A chip omelette cooked flat in a pan and cut in wedges, sold from every street griddle in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Cheap, filling and universally eaten.
Serves 2 · 25 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Mishkaki
also Marinated beef skewers
Beef marinated in papaya, ginger and spice, threaded on sticks and grilled over charcoal on every Tanzanian street corner after dark. The papaya is what makes it tender.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Festival & feastTanzania
Pilau
Spiced rice with beef or goat, made for weddings, Eid and Christmas. The onions must be fried genuinely dark, which is where the colour comes from rather than from any powder.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Festival & feastTanzania
Mkate wa Sinia
also Vitumbua tray bread, Rice tray cake
A soft, faintly sweet rice and coconut cake steamed or baked in a tray, cut into diamonds and served at coastal weddings and at the end of Ramadan.
Serves 10 · 1 hour, plus 6 hours soaking and rising
Regional specialityTanzania
Mchuzi wa Samaki
Fish curry in coconut milk with tamarind, from the Swahili coast. The tamarind is what separates the coastal version from anything cooked inland.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Regional specialityTanzania
Ndizi na Nyama
also Machalari, Green banana and beef stew
Green cooking bananas stewed with beef until they take on the meat's flavour and thicken the pot. The Chagga dish of Kilimanjaro, and one of Tanzania's most beloved.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
Drink & sweetTanzania
Kahawa na Tangawizi
Black coffee boiled with ginger and sold from brass pots carried through the streets of Zanzibar and Dar, poured into tiny cups and drunk in one.
Serves 6 small cups · 20 minutes
Drink & sweetTanzania
Togwa
also Fermented maize drink
Lightly fermented maize and millet drink, sour and faintly fizzy, drunk cold through the day. Non-alcoholic, probiotic, and given to children and the sick.
Serves Makes 2 litres · 30 minutes, plus 24 hours fermenting
Stories & Oral Literature
Where Maji Maji StartedColonial history
The Maji Maji war spread from the cotton-growing districts of the south-east in 1905, and among the events that ignited it was the killing of German officers and missionaries in Ngindo country. The war medicine — maji, water, which its prophets said would turn German bullets to water — spread through networks that ran along the trade and kinship routes of the southern interior. The German response was a scorched-earth campaign and a deliberate famine; the southern districts were depopulated and did not recover for decades.
Emptied for the GameLand history
The Selous Game Reserve, gazetted in stages from 1896 and vastly expanded through the twentieth century to some 50,000 square kilometres, was made possible in part by the depopulation the Maji Maji famine and later sleeping-sickness clearances caused. Ngindo villages were moved out of the reserve repeatedly. The community's account of the Selous is not one of wilderness but of a place their grandparents were removed from, and the reserve's later subdivision for the Julius Nyerere hydropower dam has renewed that argument.
The Honey EconomyEconomic tradition
Ngindo households hang hundreds of bark and log hives across the miombo woodland, and honey and beeswax were the region's principal export long before cashew or sesame. Beeswax from the southern Tanzanian interior reached European markets through the nineteenth-century caravan trade. The dispersed settlement pattern that outsiders read as backwardness follows directly from beekeeping: hives need distance, and a household's wealth is spread across the bush rather than concentrated in a village.
Proverbs
“A man's wealth is in the trees, not in the yard.”
On hives, and on why Ngindo settlements are scattered.
“The water did not stop the bullets, but it gathered the people.”
A judgement on Maji Maji that Ngindo tradition preserves.
“The elephant was given the land we were told to leave.”
On the reserve.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Mulungu as the high god; matrilineal ancestral spirits; named pools, trees and hills carrying prohibitions; the Maji Maji medicine as a documented religious movement of great reach.
Beliefs: Ancestral offerings at matrilineage sites; unyago instruction as a religious as well as social institution; healing and divination; Islam widespread, with Christianity present through Benedictine and other missions.
Ancestors: Matrilineal ancestors are addressed at grave sites; the mother's brother's line carries the ritual obligation as it carries the inheritance.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Mulungu
The high god
Matrilineage ancestors
Addressed at grave sites for health, harvest and honey
Bush and water powers
Presences of named pools, trees and thickets in the miombo
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Widely dispersed homesteads in the miombo woodland, each of a few houses and a granary, with hives spread across the surrounding bush.
Building techniques: Pole and mud with grass thatch, quickly built and readily abandoned as cultivation shifts; bark and log hives; raised granaries; woven honey containers.
Village layout: A house, granary and cleared plot with hives at intervals through the woodland for kilometres around, and the nearest neighbour often out of sight.
Artifacts
Bark hive
Craft
Cylinder of stripped bark hung in miombo trees, the basis of the honey and wax economy.
Unyago instruction objects
Ritual object
Figures and objects used in teaching girls during seclusion.
Selous Game Reserve
Contested site
Vast protected area gazetted from 1896 across Ngindo country, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Maji Maji sites in Liwale
Memorial
Locations associated with the outbreak and suppression of the 1905 war.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Ngindo communities occupy the miombo woodland of the southern interior as shifting cultivators and beekeepers.
1800s
Honey and beeswax move to the coast through the caravan trade; Ngoni raiding affects the region.
1905–1907
The Maji Maji war begins in the south-east; German scorched-earth suppression and famine depopulate Ngindo country.
1896–1970s
The Selous Game Reserve is gazetted and expanded across the region; villages are moved out.
2019–present
The Julius Nyerere hydropower dam is built within the reserve, reopening the argument over the land.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- UNESCO — Selous Game ReserveUNESCO World Heritage Centre
- Tanzania National Bureau of StatisticsGovernment of Tanzania
Premium & scholarly sources
- Iliffe, A Modern History of TanganyikaCambridge University Press