Bena

By Marc J. Swartz and Ian Skoggard

WaBena or Bena. The core of this name, "Bena", is used to designate a variety of different things connected with being Bena. The prefix "Wa-" is the plural, a single individual is an Mbena, their territory is Ubena, and their language is Kibena.

The WaBena, hereafter called "Bena", dropping the prefix as is conventional in the literature, are Bantu-speaking hoe agriculturalists who live in two different ecozones. One is a high plateau where a large majority of the Bena live and the other is a plain, occupied by a small minority. An uninhabited broken escarpment, difficult to traverse on foot and just short of impassable by car, separates the two zones.

In both ecozones settlements are nucleated villages rather than the scattered settlement pattern characteristic of virtually all other East African agricultural societies. Population size cannot be reported with any confidence. In 1967 the District Officer's office in Njombe, the administrative center for Benaland, reported that there were 140,000 Bena. In 1988 The Summer Institute for Linguistics estimated the Bena population as almost 600,000, which seems far too high but, as with the earlier, lower figure, there is no published basis for a confident count.

The Bena speak a Southern Bantu language of the Niger-Congo language family. KiBena (or Ekibena) is not mutually intelligible with the languages of the neighboring societies but speakers say they learned the languages of their neighbors even if they had lived in their areas for as little as a few months.

Before the colonial peace was established, each village (KAYA) was ruled by its own hereditary and independent ruler called MUTWA, or "king". Each king viewed all other villages as enemies whose raids could be expected at any time so that a state of Hobbsian war existed for all of Benaland. The raids were aimed at capturing slaves, getting grain, cattle, and such other valuables as might be found. If a kaya was captured, all the males, including male babies and young children, were killed. This was because the men would be dangerous if left alive and the babies and children might be taught by their mothers that the new rulers killed their father and, when grown up, take vengeance. Some of the women might be kept as wives, but most were sold to other groups or to slave trading Arabs who traveled from area to area looking for slaves to be sold on the coast for resale in the Persian Gulf area.

In the pre-colonial era the Hehe, a fierce group on the northeast border of Benaland, conquered the Bena together with the first Bena conquerors, the Sangu, their neighbors to the northwest. Unlike the Bena intervillage wars the objective of the neighboring groups was not to pillage villages in hit and run raids but to make Benaland a tributary source of taxes and labor. The Sangu installed members of their own royal family, responsible to the Sangu king, as chiefs in ach Bena village. When the Hehe conquered the Sangu and with them their Bena subjects, they replaced Sangu village chiefs with their own "royals" responsible to their king.

The pre-colonial period ended with German rule reaching Benaland in the late 1890s. A Bena king who had been successful in defeating and bringing under his control a number of other villages decided to leave the high plateau and lead his people into the lowlands in order to avoid German control. The sparsely populated lowlands had a few residents from other ethnic groups who had found refuge there from the turmoil in the south associated with the expansion of the Ngoni peoples. These earlier residents, according to several lowland Bena elders, gladly joined the new comers under the authority of the Bena king.

The Bena live in nucleated villages rather than in scattered settlements. Currently villages are all made up of separate houses built only a few meters apart. The walls of the houses are formed of the soil in the vicinity of the house being constructed although some householders use with earth from the banks of any nearby river where the clay content of the earth is even greater. Fathers and sons often build their houses close to one another and are surrounded by other cognates, in what might be called a "patrifocal" grouping. This kin-based unit is a central part of village social organization, but after the father dies the sons rather often move away. In some cases this is due to the fact that the fraternal relationship is quite hierarchical with older brothers demanding respect from their juniors whose interests they are supposed to protect. The Bena did not always live in freestanding houses. In the pre-colonial era all the residents of a village were housed in a single building. This structure was built as a hollow rectangle with a single gate to the outside. One existing ruin of such a structure was about a hundred yards long and 35 yards wide on all four sides. Each nuclear family had its own set of rooms, usually two, with each room attached to the next in the family suite by an internal door.

The plateau Bena raise corn as their dietary stable but also grow sorghum and millet as insurance against pest and disease damage to the corn crop. It is a rare meal that is not based on corn meal. The lowland Bena favor dry-land rice, a rare luxury in the highlands, as their staple and eat corn only if the rice crop is insufficient. Both grow a variety of other food crops, especially beans of various sorts as well as potatoes, onions, and leafy vegetables. Cash crops are also grown in both ecozones such as pyrethrum and caster beans.

Chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, and cattle are raised as is the occasional donkey but animal husbandry makes only a very minor contribution to subsistence. Cattle are mainly used in bride wealth payments, as are also sheep and goats. Sometimes a cow is killed for a funeral or wedding and, in strapped times, for cash to buy food, pay debts or taxes and school fees. Eggs, although not taboo to most clans, are rarely eaten. Chickens are killed for important occasions, or to honor particularly important guests, but the other animals are only very rarely slaughtered. Extremely long hours and hard labor are required for a spare living in both of the Bena ecozones and even that is uncertain in the frequent years of draught or excess rain.

Some cash is essential in the Bena economy. Cash for school fees, unlike the personal tax, are optional, but most parents treat these fees as necessary for access to the sole means of escaping the endless poverty of subsistence farming in an area of infertile soil and undependable rain. The few clothes they own are purchased. Most villages have a DUKA, a little shop usually part of the owner's house, selling a limited inventory of such things as kerosene, matches, charcoal, salt, soap, cigarettes in packets or singly, rubber flip-flops, inexpensive, brightly colored cloth used for the main female garment, kanga and such. A final commercial activity is hunting, or, more accurately, poaching. The single shot 12-gauge shotguns hunter's use provide dried or smoked meat to be sold in the village for low prices. The most consistently profitable activity for women in rural villages is selling home-brewed beer. By no means as profitable as beer making, some Bena women weave baskets of all manner and sizes for their own use or for sale.

Most Bena women can make clay pots of the strictly utilitarian sort that was once the main cooking, eating, and drinking vessel. Every sizable village has a trained carpenter and many villages also have a tailor whose foot powered sewing machine sometimes repairs torn clothing but mainly makes new clothing to order.

Most trade outside the group was in agricultural products. Prior to independence the buyers were ethnically Indian businessmen, but with independence the Tanzanian government took over the trade with the initially result that for some time Bena cash crops could not be sold at all. When the government finally resumed the trade the prices paid were far below those of the independent buyers.

Bena women's work focuses around childcare, and growing and preparing food and cash crops. Men cleared new fields of heavy stones and the stumps of trees and participated in the arduous task of bringing new or long fallow fields into production. Men are responsible for house building although women sometimes help. The main responsibility of men is providing money, usually by getting paying jobs outside the village, so that villages often have only boys and young men in residence.

The Bena kinship system emphasizes patrilineal descent to some extent although there are no lineages. The clans all have food taboos, but there is no understanding that the taboo article, whether a plant or an animal, had a special relationship with the clan or its founders. Some clans have the same taboo as others but this is not taken as an indication of a special relationship between them. The main functions of the clans are to provide hospitality for members who find themselves in distant villages and to serve as a basis for a relationship with strangers who share a clan membership. There are a very large number of clans, the names of almost 200 were recorded in 1963, but even then many younger men and women did not know what clan they belonged to or what it was they were not to eat. The most socially important kin group in almost every respect is that made up of a father and his sons and, only rarely, the father's brothers and their sons.

According to what Bena say, the fraternal relationship is close and strong but no one is surprised when one brother accuses another of assault by witchcraft. Disagreements about inheritance and about who has use of incoming bride wealth are said to be the main sources of trouble. Envy and the eldest brother's exerting his authority as the dead father's successor in the family are also common.

Marriage only takes place after the father of the would-be bride accepts the groom's bride wealth payment, usually consisting of livestock and cash. A major source of the groom's bride wealth comes from the bride wealth a family obtains when marrying off a daughter or sister. Bena men often marry later than they want to because of difficulty in getting the bride wealth together. Bena women, however, marry early and, on their first husband's death, marry again leveratically. If the widow refuses to marry her dead husband's brother, the original bride wealth must be returned.

Around 20 percent of men in one village studied practiced polygyny. One of the reasons older women accept, even initiate, their husbands' taking of additional younger wives is that post-menopausal women are believed to be seriously harmed by coitus. Also an additional hoe in the hands of a young wife makes is a contribution to the polygynous family as a whole.

Most houses are occupied by spouses and their unmarried children, but some contain other kin, as well, generally unmarried or widowed, of either the wife or the husband. Some prosperous individuals build several houses together with the walls of the houses forming a rectangle. This sort of arrangement is most commonly built by polygynists with each wife and her children having their own house, but some monogamists also build in this way, providing separate domiciles for the families of the father and his married sons.

Two principles are central to the hierarchy of the domestic unit: males are superior to females and seniors are superior to juniors. Fathers are superior to sons and daughters and mothers are superior to daughters but in a rather mixed relationship with sons. The oldest brother is superior to other siblings with the rest ranked according to age but with less difference between them than between them and the oldest. When the father dies, the eldest son assumes his paramount position of authority in the domestic unit. All brothers are superior to their sisters with the partial exception that among practitioners of the traditional religion the oldest sister may have a special status. If she is the oldest surviving member of the senior generation she is the only acceptable link to the ancestors and, as such, enjoys considerable authority and prestige in relations with all her siblings, male and female. Relations among sisters follow age hierarchy but actual dominance in their relations with one another is far less than in other relationships.

In most cases a woman's possessions include nothing of great value. These possessions are divided into parts with each sister and each daughter getting some. Following the same procedure used for men, the goods are spread out on the ground and each item's heir is announced by a senior man related to but not an heir of the deceased. The same procedure is used for men. If the intended recipient is dissatisfied with the object displayed, and says something to the effect that other heirs need it more, he or she is urged to accept it. A refusal to accept what is offered is very serious and other kin may take the refuser to a settlement session and demand to know what prompted the refusal. Some say that the concern about a relative rejecting an inheritance is based in the fear that the refuser may resort to witchcraft.

The crops on the deceased's field are inherited although the land is not. However, an heir who wishes to continue using the field, needs only to inform the village chief and, baring the highly unlikely possibility that somebody else has told the chief he wants it, the chief will tell the heir to continue using it.

From the hour of birth until an infant can walk, he or she is with his mother 24 hours a day. When the mother returns to the fields after giving birth, she takes the infant with her in a cloth sling on her back. The breast is always available for nursing and at the slightest indication of hunger the infant is moved to the mother's front.

At night she takes the infant to bed with her, a choice made easy by the fact that the postpartum sex prohibition removes her husband from their bed. This idyllic condition, however, lasts only until the child can toddle when the mother returns to full time hoeing and leaves the child in the charge of his siblings. The siblings, mainly sisters who may be only a few years older than their charge, feed it a corn and water gruel, rice and water in the lowlands or, since the 1960s, prepared baby formula.

Although the child-minding children do tease and neglect the toddler, it never seems to be either severe or frequent. Little girls help their mothers with all their work, including pounding corn to flour and cultivating with the heavy hoe against the adamantine soil. Little boys have no strenuous or difficult work but they are put in charge of grazing cattle, which they must keep from straying and return them to their krall at dusk.

The largest social unit whose members are in frequent interaction with one another is the village with its social organization based in a combination of kinship and neighborhood ties under the authority of a chief and, if large enough, headmen. The kinship ties used in forming groups larger than the nuclear family are those between a father and his married sons. These men and their wives ideally and often live in adjacent houses and sometimes carry out joint and cooperative activities. The cluster does not usually include the father's brothers and their sons since each of the brothers forms his own his cluster when his sons marry and have children. Although there is no rule demanding that it be so, the great majority of marriages are between residents of the same village. This promotes kin based bonds within villages and reduces bonds between villages in a way weakly reminiscent of the precolonial kaya.

In the pre-colonial kaya when all Bena lived on the high plateau, every village had its own king whose interest in other villages was limited to raiding them and being raided by them. When a raid was successful, the result was not conquest and the addition of a village and people to the winning king's domain but rather, the destruction of the losers' village and enslavement of its people. According to available evidence, the king had unlimited authority, but it did not extend beyond his own kaya. This, however, did not apply to the lowlands where a single king ruled a number of different villages rather than only one as in the highlands.

With the coming of the British colonial administration after World War I the Bena political system changed in the highlands to a single ruler. A hereditary village chief was selected and installed in the newly created office of Paramount Chief under whose authority were the new offices of District Chief, Village Chief, and Headman. After independence, the government changed this administrative system by abolishing hereditary succession and shifting authority to the office of Area Secretary and a new popularly elected office, Member of Parliament.

When someone behaved in ways others found unacceptable, such as rudeness, theft, assault, failure to return love, the person or persons bothered and the one cited as the source of bother discussed the matter publicly in what is called a BARAZA. Solutions are proposed at any time in the discussion and the matter is considered settled if the litigants both accept a solution. If such acceptance is not achieved, the matter must be considered further until it is. There is no means of enforcing the solution save returning the matter to the baraza for further consideration.

The most common sources of conflict since the end of warfare and raiding are usually between close kin. For example, it is considered wrong for a father or a senior brother to use the bride wealth received for a daughter's or sister's marriage to take another wife when a son or junior brother is still unmarried. This does not happen frequently, but when it does, a rupture in the father-son or older brother-younger brother relationship can occur, and become permanent, if publicly declared at a baraza. The relationship between spouses is also hierarchical. Husbands are expected to direct many aspects of their wives' activities. If a wife displeases her husband, he is considered not only within his rights but well advised to beat her without causing injury and the same is true for parents as concerns their children. This is because the beating "teaches, " as Bena say, in a way o amount of talking can.

In general, conflicts are to be avoided. The baraza is used to end conflicts when they cannot be avoided and is remarkably effective in achieving at least superficial solutions. One of the reasons for this is that many group members emphasize the virtues of peaceful relationships and view conflict as something to be avoided even at the cost of loss of prestige or material goods. The fact that the ideal person is one who visits neighbors and kin often and "talks a lot and laughs a lot," suggests the powerful informal forces in social relations that contribute to curbing the extent, duration, and intensity of conflict.

By the 1960s after three-quarters of a century of missionary activity the Bena were overwhelmingly Christian. The Protestants constituted the majority in the highlands and Roman Catholics the majority in the lowlands. Islam was only beginning to win serious numbers of converts in the early '60s, mostly in the highlands. An important appeal of Islam, sometimes mentioned by Bena Muslims who have converted from Christianity, is its acceptance of polygyny.

A sizable proportion of Christian missionaries and ordinary clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, are Bena. Another sort of practitioners, called WAGANGA (MGANGA, sing.) are healers and providers of medicine used to cure illness and bring good fortune. Despite this waganga are almost always suspected of also being WACHAWI (MCHAWI, sing.), or witches. Witchcraft and witches are an almost obsessive concern. Witches afflict people because they have been offended by them even if the offense is a fairly minor one. Also witches kill close relatives because they are envious of their victim's success.

Church services and funerals constitute the few public rituals. A traditional ceremony consists of a yearly report by the head of the kin group to the dead grandfather and father on the food supply, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and serious illnesses. What the forebears want is an understanding of how their descendants are faring and, if they think it wise to do so, they have the ability to influence the rains and the crops, which, they can use to benefit their living kin. If, however, no news giving ritual is held, their beneficial influence may not be forthcoming.

The Bena show little interest in the arts. Some men are skilled in wood carving but this seems to be used only in making three legged stools from a single log which, though actually quite handsome in their unadorned simplicity, are taken as things to sit on and nothing more. Women make pottery, which, like the stools is purely utilitarian. As of the 60s there was no dancing other than adolescents dancing to rock music and if there was dancing previously no one asked bout this knew of it.

Naturally caused illness is treated by the patient himself, his family members, or by a waganga. Both use medicines from an impressive list of local plants. Witch-caused illnesses are treated by a waganga making counter magic, or by identifying the witch causing the illness and making him stop the action of his medicines.

Christian and Muslim understandings about the afterlife were widespread and accepted in the 60s. Traditional understanding of the afterlife is evident in the continued interest in the supernatural powers of deceased kin.

Documents referred to in this section are included in the eHRAF collection and are referenced by author, date of publication, and eHRAF document number.

There are two major Bena groups, one lives in the highlands of Njombe District, Iringa Region, Tanzania ("Bena of the Hills") and the other, the "Bena of the Rivers" live in the Ulanga valley in southwestern Morogoro Region. There are eight documents in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography collection on the Bena. Marc Swartz who wrote seven of the articles in the collection studied the highland Bena. His research focuses on Bena politics, social organization, and psychology, especially in regard to rural development projects. Swartz examines the relationship between leaders, people, and power (Swartz 1968, no. 1); the psychological underpinnings of power relations (Swartz 1966, no. 7); the exercise of power in two local institutions (Swartz 1977, no. 4); and the continuity of rural institutions and leadership under various overlords (Swartz 1962, no. 6). He also discusses Bena kinship terminology (Swartz 1968, no. 3) and provides a general monograph on Bena culture (Swartz 2002, no. 5.) Culwick (1935, no. 1) has written a major monograph on the other Bena group living in the Ulanga valley covering a variety of topics. For more detailed information on the content of the individual works in the collection, see the abstracts in the citations preceding each document.

This culture summary is from the article "Bena of Southwestern Tanzania" by Marc J. Swartz, in the Encyclopedia Of World Cultures Supplement. 2002. Carol Ember, Melvin Ember, and Ian Skoggard, eds. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co. The synopsis was written by Ian Skoggard in 2002.

• BARAZA-village dispute settlement sessions-627

• JUMBE-village headman-622

• KAYA-village-621

• LIBETU-bride wealth-583

• LUKOLO-clan-614

• MABONGOLI-shrine-346, 778

• MTEMA-paramount ruler-631

• MUGOVE-work party-476

• MULUNGO-creator god and supernatural power-776, 778

• Simsim-oil-bearing crop-249

• TANU-an anagram for a national political party-665

• VATWA-petty ruler-631

• VEO-village executive officer-631

• WALONGO-mutual aid-476, 571, 602

• WANALA-slave-567

• WANYAMBIKI-village officials-624

• WENYEWAHA-warriors-701

Culwick, A.T. & G.M. Ubena of the Rivers. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1935.

Swartz, Marc J. Continuities in the Bena Political System. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 20:241-253, 1964.

Swartz, Marc J. Bases for Compliance in Bena Villages. In Local Level Politics. Marc J. Swartz, ed. Chicago: Aldine, 1966.

Swartz, Marc J. The Bilingual Kin Terminology of the Bena. Journal of African languages 7:41-57, 1968.

Swartz, Marc J. Legitimacy and Coercion in Bena Politics and Development. In Government and Rural development in East Africa, L. Cliffe, J.S. Coleman, and M.R. Doornboch, eds. The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1977.