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53-639: The area that is now Kilwa district has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. The area is the ancestral home to Four Bantu people groups, namely the Mwera people and the Matumbi people together with the Machinga people later Shiraz . The Matumbi being historically the majority native group inhabiting the most land in the district. They are the natives of the entire central and northern Kilwa district and Kilwa's islands. The Machinga people are native to

106-729: A hodiernal tense . The Mwera people have had a Traditional Religion that existed through the 19th century. With the arrival of the German colonial rule of Tanzania, the German Christian missionaries introduced Christianity among the Mwera, and gained converts. However, after the World War I, the British colonial rule of Tanzania began, which expelled all German missionaries. The Mwera missions were abandoned, Islamic missionaries filled

159-503: A publication now in the public domain :  Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). " Hottentots ". Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company. Mwera people The Mwera people are a Bantu ethnic and linguistic group . They are native to Ruangwa and Nachingwea Districts in Lindi Region . However they have also settled in northern Mtwara Region and eastern Ruvuma Region of Tanzania , as well as along

212-592: A result of these interactions. The Bantu migrations, and centuries later the Indian Ocean slave trade, brought Bantu influence to Madagascar , the Malagasy people showing Bantu admixture, and their Malagasy language Bantu loans. Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Sultanate of Zanzibar . With the arrival of European colonialists,

265-859: A significant clustered variation of genetic traits among Bantu language speakers by region, suggesting admixture from prior local populations. Bantu speakers of South Africa (Xhosa, Venda) showed substantial levels of the SAK and Western African Bantu AACs and low levels of the East African Bantu AAC (the latter is also present in Bantu speakers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda). The results indicate distinct East African Bantu migration into southern Africa and are consistent with linguistic and archeological evidence of East African Bantu migration from an area west of Lake Victoria and

318-484: A vast genomic analysis of more than 2,000 samples taken from individuals in 57 populations throughout Sub-Saharan Africa to trace the Bantu expansion. During a wave of expansion that began 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations – some 310 million people as of 2023 – gradually left their original homeland West-Central Africa and travelled to the eastern and southern regions of the African continent. During

371-656: Is also a cave system in Kipatimu ward, the Nan'goma Cave . The cave system is located in the Matumbi Highlands which are shared between Kilwa District and Rufiji District in Pwani Region. The climate of Kilwa District is a tropical Savannah climate with an average annual temperature range of 22 degree Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius. The annual precipitation is between 800 and 1400 millimeters per year. The north of

424-670: Is home to 55 health centers namely; 2 hospitals (including Kilwa District hospital in Kivinje), 48 clinics and 14 clinics currently under construction. Bantu peoples The Bantu peoples are an indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages . The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on

477-540: Is home to Pindiro Forest Reserve where albino hippopotamuses have been observed. The soil structure of Kilwa district is of low fertility is mostly made of well-drained, low-moisture retaining sedimentary sandstone. The [[Matandu River]] is the largest river running west to east of Kilwa district. The other rivers found in the district are the Mbwemkuru River , Matandu River and the Mavuji River . There

530-401: Is impossible to raise cattle. They get most of their meat from hunting and fishing. Cashew nuts are the main cash crop but marketing charcoal is good income too for those living within 20 kilometers of coastal cities. The Mwera are a matrilineal society in which marriage requires the husband to move to the wife's premises. The children are named after the mother's brother, the maternal uncle who

583-618: Is notable, and is called a Luliimba . This device is notable because its design and construction features are strikingly similar to Saron found in Southeast Asia and South Asia, suggesting a possible historic cultural exchange between the coastal southern Africa and the coastal southeast Asia. It is unclear if the exchange was from Africa to Asia, or vice versa. The Mwera area is one of the most sparsely populated regions in Tanzania with only ten people per square kilometer. Rainfall

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636-1876: Is reconstructed as *-ntʊ́ . Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba- ) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as bantu in Kikongo , Kituba , Tshiluba and Kiluba ; watu in Swahili ; ŵanthu in Tumbuka ; anthu in Chichewa ; batu in Lingala ; bato in Duala ; abanto in Gusii ; andũ in Kamba and Kikuyu ; abantu in Kirundi , Lusoga , Zulu , Xhosa , Runyoro and Luganda ; wandru in Shingazidja ; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele ; bãthfu in Phuthi ; bantfu in Swati and Bhaca ; banhu in kisukuma ; banu in Lala ; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga ; batho in Sesotho , Tswana and Sepedi ; antu in Meru ; andu in Embu ; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda and bhandu in Nyakyusa . Within

689-560: Is subsistence agriculture and fishing using traditional hand tools in small farmsteads and fishing villages. The main crops grown for local consumptions includes, cassava, maize, sorghum and African rice . High yield rice is grown along the Matandu river valley and upland rice is grown in Chumo and Kipatimu wards in northern Kilwa district. Cash crops grown for export include Sesame from Nanjirinji ward and Oranges and Coconut plantations in

742-453: Is the plural of the word 'umuntu', meaning 'person', and is based on the stem '--ntu', plus the plural prefix 'aba'. In linguistics, the word Bantu , for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans" . It was first introduced into modern academia (as Bâ-ntu ) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858 and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. The name

795-428: Is very light and the rivers flowing through their homeland dry up during the dry season forcing people to depend on waterholes for their normal supply of water. "Mwera" is a word which means "those living in the mainland" far from the coast. Generally Mwera are known to be very peaceful. They live in small oval-shaped huts with grass thatched roofs. Building a Mwera house is a family project. The men cut poles for framing

848-524: Is water. Kilwa district has 5 Islands, with the largest one being Kilwa Kisiwani . The other islands in the Kilwa archipelago are [Kati Island] and Songo Mnara Island. In addition, the Songosongo Islands archipelago is composed of 21 coral reefs including the 4 coral islands . The four Islands in the archipelago are Fanjove , Nyuni Island , Songo Songo and Okuza Island . Kilwa District

901-910: The Congo rainforest by about 1500 BC and the southern savannas by 500 BC, while the eastward dispersal reached the Great Lakes by 1000 BC, expanding further from there as the rich environment supported dense populations. Possible movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region could have been more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, because of comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas farther from water. Recent archeological and linguistic evidence about population movements suggests that pioneering groups would have had reached parts of modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa sometime prior to

954-678: The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g.the large majority of West Africa, notably the most populous African nation Nigeria , Rwanda , Tanzania , Uganda , Kenya , Burundi (25 million), the Baganda people of Uganda (5.5 million as of 2014), the Shona of Zimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), the Zulu of South Africa (14.2 million as of 2016 ),

1007-694: The Indian Ocean slave trade . The Swahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the many Afro-Arab members of the Bantu Swahili people . With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania – a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast – the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loanwords as

1060-706: The Kingdom of Matamba the Kuba Kingdom , the Lunda Empire , the Luba Empire , Barotse Empire , Kazembe Kingdom , Mbunda Kingdom , Yeke Kingdom , Kasanje Kingdom , Empire of Kitara, Butooro , Bunyoro , Buganda , Busoga , Rwanda , Burundi , Ankole , the Kingdom of Mpororo , the Kingdom of Igara , the Kingdom of Kooki , the Kingdom of Karagwe , Swahili city states , the Mutapa Empire ,

1113-714: The Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010 ), the Sukuma of Tanzania (10.2 million as of 2016 ), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1 million as of 2019 ), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (9.6 million as of 2011), batswana of Southern Africa (8.2 Million as of 2020) and the Pedi of South Africa (7 million as of 2018). Abantu is the Xhosa and Zulu word for people. It

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1166-528: The National Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies of apartheid . By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethnic-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speaking Africans , at about

1219-617: The Ruvuma River between Tanzania and Mozambique . According to their oral traditions , the Mwera people are a Bantu people who originated around Lake Albert in north Uganda . They migrated south in the late medieval era, and reached Lake Malawi (Nyasa). There they settled into two communities: the Mwera near Nyasa, and the coastal Mwera, who settled between the Lake and the Indian Ocean coast. The word "Mwera" literally means "inland dwellers" (far from coast). Those Mwera who live on

1272-589: The Zulu Kingdom , the Ndebele Kingdom , Mthethwa Empire , Tswana city states , Mapungubwe , Kingdom of Eswatini , the Kingdom of Butua , Maravi , Danamombe , Khami , Naletale , Kingdom of Zimbabwe and the Rozwi Empire . On the coastal section of East Africa, a mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab and Persian traders, Zanzibar being an important part of

1325-578: The 1866 the area of what is now Kilwa district was occupied by Germans who established their headquarters at Kilwa Kivinje and used it as a base to quell the Maji Maji rebellion that was based on the Matumbi Hills north of the Kilwa district. In 1918 when Tanganyika became a British protectorate, Kilwa Masoko was chosen as it is the district seat and they built a deepwater port to assist with their commercial vessels. To this day Kilwa Masoko remains

1378-412: The 3rd century AD along the coast and the modern Northern Cape by AD 500. Cattle terminology in use amongst the relatively few modern Bantu pastoralist groups suggests that the acquisition of cattle may have been from Central Sudanic , Kuliak and Cushitic -speaking neighbors. Linguistic evidence also indicates that the customs of milking cattle were also directly modeled from Cushitic cultures in

1431-831: The 9th and 15th centuries, Bantu-speaking states began to emerge in the Great Lakes region and in the savanna south of the Central African rainforests. The Monomotapa kings built the Great Zimbabwe complex, a civilisation ancestral to the Shona people. Comparable sites in Southern Africa include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique. From the 12th century onward, the processes of state formation amongst Bantu peoples increased in frequency. This

1484-573: The Bantu expansion, Bantu-speaking peoples extirpated and displaced many earlier inhabitants, with only a few modern peoples such as Pygmy groups in Central Africa, the Hadza people in northern Tanzania, and various Khoisan populations across southern Africa remaining in existence into the era of European contact. Archaeological evidence attests to their presence in areas subsequently occupied by Bantu speakers. Researchers have demonstrated that

1537-629: The Khoisan of the Kalahari are remnants of a huge ancestral population that may have been the most populous group on the planet prior to the Bantu expansion. Biochemist Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues found that the Khoisan population began a drastic decline when the Bantu farmers spread through Africa 4,000 years ago. Before the Bantu expansion had been definitively traced starting from their origins in

1590-613: The Matumbi hill valleys in Kipatimu ward. Due to Tsetse fly , livestock rearing is restricted on the west part of Kilwa district. Fishing plays a big role in the economic activities of Kilwa district. 4.5 million tons of fish are harvested annually with over 1700 registered fishermen using 600 vessels in the district. Songas company has begun extracting the natural gas field underlying the Songo Songo Island in Kilwa with

1643-509: The Mwera culture were known for their use of the lip plate , in which the upper lip was pierced in girlhood and gradually enlarged over time to hold various sizes of solid plugs. In this way they shared similarities with the neighboring Makonde people . The Mwera people, like the Makonde people who share the Rovuma valley, have a historic musical tradition. Their seven metal key lamellophone

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1696-408: The Mwera have adopted subsistence farming. A growing number of Mwera have also migrated to cities and work as wage laborers. Storytelling and riddles are important facets of the Mwera culture. They have rites of passage, such as Likomanga for boys, and Chikwembo for girls, which marks their entry into adulthood followed by a quick marriage shortly after the initiation. Historically, women of

1749-625: The Zanzibar Sultanate came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili Coast, leading eventually to the fall of the Sultanate and the end of slave trading on the Swahili Coast in the mid-20th century. In the 1920s, relatively liberal South Africans, missionaries, and the native African intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native". After World War II ,

1802-555: The area. Cattle terminology in southern African Bantu languages differs from that found among more northerly Bantu-speaking peoples. One recent suggestion is that Cushitic speakers had moved south earlier and interacted with the most northerly of Khoisan speakers who acquired cattle from them and that the earliest arriving Bantu speakers, in turn, got their initial cattle from Cushitic-influenced Khwe-speaking people. Under this hypothesis, larger later Bantu-speaking immigration subsequently displaced or assimilated that southernmost extension of

1855-432: The average highest household size of 4.4. As mentioned in the history section of this article Kilwa district is the ancestral home of the Mwera , Matumbi and Machinga Shira . Most of the population has been Swahilized and speak Swahili as their first language and practice Swahili culture . However, many elderly and people living in rural areas speak their native languages. The main economic activity in Kilwa district

1908-407: The capital of Kilwa district. During the British occupiation the district was one of six councils established in 1947 in lindi region. Post independence, in 1984 Kilwa was officially designated as a district council. Kilwa district is the second largest district in Lindi region. It has a total area of 13.347.50 square kilometers, of which 12,126 square kilometers is land and 1,221.25 square kilometers

1961-464: The coast are called "Wamwera" by other Mwera people. They are known to be peaceful people, whose migration and population distribution has been historically affected by violence and seizure inflicted on them. In 2001, the Mwera population was estimated to number 469,000. They speak the Mwera language , also called Kimwera , Mwela or Chimwera . This is a Bantu language that is part of the Niger-Congo family of languages. The Mwera language contains

2014-408: The continent by the 14th century. Kilwa district is known globally for its Middle Ages Swahili historical sites from Middle Ages on the islands Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara which are part of the seven Tanzanian World Heritage Site . The Swahili city-state of Kilwa was once the greatest Swahili port city that met an unfortunate end on July 1505 when the Portuguese burned and looted the city. In

2067-412: The definition of "language" or "dialect" , it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa , or roughly 5% of the total world population ). About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in

2120-410: The district being far wetter than the south with the former receiving an annual rainfall of 1000 to 1400mm. The latter receives around 800 to 1400 mm per year. According to the 2012 Tanzania National Census, the population of the Kilwa District was 190,744. of which 91,661 were male and 99,083 were female. Most residents of Kilwa district practice Sunni Islam . In Lindi Region, Kilwa district has

2173-588: The fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into a designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"." Bantu languages derive from the Proto-Bantu reconstructed language, estimated to have been spoken about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago in West / Central Africa (the area of modern-day Cameroon). They were supposedly spread across Central, East and Southern Africa in

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2226-511: The gap particularly in the coastal regions, gained Muslim converts and introduced polygyny among the Mwera people. Most contemporary Mwera adhere to Sunni Islam with small minorities practicing Christianity or their traditional religion. The Mwera do not keep cattle or domestic animals, as their traditional region has been infested with Tsetse flies. They have hunted and fished instead. They live in clusters of oval huts made from wooden poles, grass thatch and local mud. In contemporary society,

2279-730: The gas being piped to Dar es Salaam to generate electricity, and continuing efforts to locate hydrocarbon reserves (oil and/or gas) along structural trends around the Songo Songo group at least as far north as the island of Nyuni. The western frontier of the district is part of the Nyerere National Park . this park is home to wildlife such as the Big five game . As of 2012, Kilwa District was administratively divided into 21 wards . As of February 2017, there were 140 Schools in Kilwa district, 113 of are primary schools and 27 are secondary schools. Intotal there were 52,127 registered primary students and 5,906 registered secondary students. In Terms of Healthcare facilities, as of 2021 Kilwa district

2332-494: The house, the women gather grass for thatching the roof and the young boys dig clay used to fill in the mud walls. Tradition dictates that certain tree species cannot be used for building houses. It seems the reason for this ban is the belief that an evil spirit would haunt such a house. The apparent benefit of the prohibition is protecting those selected trees from extinction. The Mwera are mainly subsistence farmers with beautiful fields of maize and peanuts. Due to tsetse flies it

2385-411: The incorporation of Khoekhoe ancestry into several of the Southeast Bantu populations ~1500 to 1000 years ago. Bantu-speaking migrants would have also interacted with some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast (mainly Cushitic ), as well as Nilotic and Central Sudanic speaking groups. According to the early-split scenario as hypothesized in the 1990s, the southward dispersal had reached

2438-518: The larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as "people" or "the true people". That is, idiomatically the reflexes of * bantʊ in the numerous languages often have connotations of personal character traits as encompassed under the values system of ubuntu , also known as hunhu in Chishona or botho in Sesotho , rather than just referring to all human beings. The root in Proto-Bantu

2491-782: The range of Cushitic speakers. Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded: Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of the Sahara , amid the Kiffian period at Gobero , and may have migrated southward, from the Sahara into various parts of West Africa (e.g., Benin , Cameroon , Ghana , Nigeria , Togo ), as a result of desertification of the Green Sahara in 7000 BCE. From Nigeria and Cameroon, agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began to migrate , and amid migration, diverged into East Bantu peoples (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo ) and West Bantu peoples (e.g., Congo, Gabon ) between 2500 BCE and 1200 BCE. Irish (2016) also views Igbo people and Yoruba people as being possibly back-migrated Bantu peoples. Between

2544-460: The region between Cameroon and Nigeria, two main scenarios of the Bantu expansion were hypothesized: an early expansion to Central Africa and a single origin of the dispersal radiating from there, or an early separation into an eastward and a southward wave of dispersal, with one wave moving across the Congo Basin toward East Africa, and another moving south along the African coast and the Congo River system toward Angola. Genetic analysis shows

2597-450: The same time that the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all non-European South Africans (Bantus, Khoisan, Coloureds and Indians ). In modern South Africa, the word's connection to apartheid has become so discredited that it is only used in its original linguistic meaning. Examples of South African usages of "Bantu" include: [REDACTED]  This article incorporates text from

2650-413: The so-called Bantu expansion , comparatively rapid dissemination taking roughly two millennia and dozens of human generations during the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, together with a broad international consortium, retraced the migratory routes of the Bantu populations, which were previously a source of debate. The scientists used data from

2703-407: The south eastern section of the district to the border with Lindi District. The Mwera inhabit the south west part of the district.The Shiraz people inhabit central coast mainly Kilwa kisiwani,Songo mnara and Pande Division. The Four tribes became swahilized in the 9th century with the arrival of Islam in the region transforming the region to its being one of the wealthiest Swahili city states on

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2756-557: Was said to be coined to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *ntʊ̀ - "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person" abantu "people", Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people"). There is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group . People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms, which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for

2809-449: Was the result of several factors such as a denser population (which led to more specialized divisions of labor, including military power while making emigration more difficult); technological developments in economic activity; and new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualisation of royalty as the source of national strength and health. Examples of such Bantu states include: the Kingdom of Kongo , Anziku Kingdom , Kingdom of Ndongo ,

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