Luguru

Teferi Abate Adem

Lugulu, Ruguru, Waluguru

The Luguru are an ethnic group in the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania, about 180 kilometers west of Dar es Salaam. Their preferred name, “Waluguru,” means “people of the [Uluguru] mountains.” A majority of the Luguru live in in the heart of the mountain range, at 4000-8000 feet above sea level.

In 1934 the Luguru population reportedly numbered about 150,000. By 1957, just few years before the end of British colonial administration, the Luguru population had increased to 202,297. There are no comparable demographic data for recent years. In 2009 the total number Luguru speakers was estimated to be about 404,000.

Luguru people speak Kiluguru, a Bantu language with only slight dialectal variations from those spoken by the culturally similar, matrilineally-organized Zaramo, Kami, Kwere and Kutu. Most Luguru, like other Tanzanians, also speak Swahili, the national lingua franca.

The Luguru consider themselves descendants of refugees who settled in the Uluguru Mountains in reaction to the northward expansion of Ngoni invaders. Originally believed to have hailed from different ethnic groups, the settlers gradually evolved to become the distinct people known as Luguru.

In the early nineteenth century some Luguru expanded down from the central mountains to the adjacent valleys and plains, forming splinter groups distinguished by their adaptation to specific environments: the Kutu, Zaramo, Kwere, Sagara, Vidunda, Ngulu, and Zigua. Collectively referred to as the matrilineal peoples of eastern Tanzania, these groups speak mutually intelligible languages, adhere to the same traditional religion, and share a range of material culture traits.

Prior to German colonial occupation in the 1880s, the Luguru had very little contact with either Arab traders or European travelers. Their relative isolation gradually came to an end, starting in the mid-nineteenth century when Kisabengo, the leader of an army of raiders, established a fortified settlement at the present-day town of Morogoro, using it over the ensuing decades as a base for taxing caravan traders, raiding neighboring peoples on the plains and, eventually, collaborating with the Germans.

Traditionally, the Luguru lived in dense villages, typically consisting of the closely-related descendants of a matriline, together with their spouses and children. The size of a settlement reportedly ranged from 50 to 800 households, depending on the availability of sufficient water and arable land. In 1934 the commonest type of house in the area was the typical East African beehive hut with a grass-thatched roof. By the turn of the twenty-first century, well-off Luguru farmers owned rectangular, urban-style homes with cement floors, plaster walls, and corrugated metal roofs.

The Luguru were hoe cultivators. Their traditional farm tools were wooden hoes (kibode) and digging sticks ([n]muhaya[n]). Crops planted varied across local agro-ecological zones. Important cereals included rice, maize and sorghum. Many Luguru also cultivated beans, peas, cassava, bananas, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables. Domestic animals included chickens, and some sheep and goats. They kept no or very few cattle, even though the mountains appear to be tsetse-free.

Opportunities to engage in commercial agriculture varies by local agro-climatic zones. Some farmers in the central mountains grow coffee. Households along the main road grow considerable amounts of vegetables and fruits for sale, both in regional market towns and in the distant city of Dar es Salaam. Sisal is extensively cultivated commercially on the lower, drier plains surrounding the Uluguru Mountains.

The Luguru make excellent sleeping mats and baskets. In the past, when traditional religion was widely practiced, the Luguru carved ceremonial staffs, combs, and other utensils of considerable artistic value. Prior to the advent of iron tools, the Luguru used a range of tools made from hard, locally-available ebony.

Some Luguru traded craft products for food and other desired goods. In each village one finds retail shops crammed full with a range of imported goods, including beauty products, canned soda, kerosene, pasta, tea, spices, and condiments.

Both sexes performed agricultural activities, although women tended to spend more time in cultivation than men. Tasks specifically defined as women’s work included brewing beer, preparing food, and making sleeping mats and baskets. Both sexes participated in building houses. Men tended to spend more time in activities outside the household, like attending local meetings, engaging with government representatives, wage labor, and organizing seasonal rituals.

Each lineage collectively owned the land on which its matrilineally-related members lived, often together with their spouses and children. Only members of a local matrilineage enjoyed inalienable rights to access and use specific plots of lineage land. The periodic distribution and transfer of land rights required the approval of the lineage head.

Children of lineage members residing with their father’s clan and other “outsiders” may be allowed to use some plots in the lineage landholdings. However, such rights were perceived as temporary, and involved a token annual payment (ngoto, as well as a one-time initial payment (rubaka) to the head of the land-owning matrilineage.

In the 1990s, both spouses of many households held plots through membership in their respective lineages. As a consequence, each household’s lands were often widely scattered across different communities.

Luguru society in 1934 was divided into 50 exogamous matriclans and about 800 sub-clans or localized matrilineages. Clan members claimed to have descended from the same apical ancestress for which the clan was named, but clans lacked common totems or dietary prohibitions. In addition to avoiding intra-marriage, clan membership was expressed in organized ceremonials, such honoring deceased ancestors and pooling resources and labor for the proper burial of deceased clan members.

It was not the clan but the sub-clan or lineage that functioned as a corporate kinship group. The lineage consisted of people who acknowledged actual descent, traced through the female line from a common ancestress. Unlike clan members, lineages members lived in the same area belonging exclusively to their lineage. Each lineage had a head, often a male, selected from the family of the most senior high-ranking women. Prior to the establishment of the current Tanzanian system of local government, the lineage functioned as the basic political unit of Luguru society. In addition to owning land, each lineage possessed its own sacred insignia, often consisting of a stool, an axe, and a staff.

As early as 1934, many of the kinship terms that the Luguru used to refer to different categories of persons were borrowed from Swahili language, which has a strongly patrilineal orientation. For the matrilineal Luguru, this has created ambiguities and inconstancies in differentiating between maternal and paternal relatives.

The preferred mode of marriage was cross-cousin marriage, while still strictly adhering to clan exogamy. This pattern has become outdated with the rapid expansion and revival of both Christianity and Islam, especially during the 1990s. Traditionally, marriage involved the husband leaving his natal community to live with his wife’s lineage. After the birth of the first child, he often preferred to rejoin his own matrilineage, in which he held land. The wife either stayed on her own, or moved to be with her husband. If she chose the latter, she would have yet another decision to make later on, when her son married and moved out to live with her (his mother’s) lineage. All these moves and cycles contribute to the relative instability of marriages.

While the most common domestic group is the nuclear family, filial ties between children and their father appear to be very weak. Instead, the mother’s brother was the most important authority figure affecting a person’s wellbeing, including marriage choice and access to land and other economically important lineage resources. In the past, the rights of the mother’s brother reportedly included pawning or selling a disfavored nephew as a slave.

The house and movable wealth (including stored foods) were kept intact so long as a parent and children survive. This rule meant that the husband of a deceased woman, although not a lineage member, would take control of her land until their children matured. When the children became adults, they would divide the property (land and economically useful trees) among themselves equitably, regardless of gender or birth order. The wealth of a person who died with no children to inherit was distributed to close relatives. Land held by deceased slaves and non-lineage members (aliens) reverted to the land-owning matrilineage, not to their heirs.

Children learn about basic domestic and farming skills by accompanying adults performing routine chores and seasonal activities. Girls learn skills such as cooking, hoeing, and basket-making by observing and imitating their mothers and to other women in the household. Similarly, boys acquire economically important skills and social etiquette by accompanying adults both at work and in other settings, such as lineage meetings, informal dispute management proceedings, religious celebrations, and funerals.

A series of rites served as opportunities to inculcate desired values and skills in children. Boys’ initiation into adulthood involved extended isolation as a group in a remote forest, with rituals conveying secret instructions on a range of issues, such as sexual intercourse, personal hygiene, knowledge of deceased ancestors, courtesy to elders, etc. For girls, in contrast, initiation required living in isolation in a dark room inside the home that, in the past, could last as long as two years, but by the 1990s had been reduced to several weeks. While in seclusion, girls received life lessons that prepared them to perform expected gender roles as wives, mothers and caretakers of the ancestors.

Luguru society was organized into localized lineages that, in turn, belonged to exogamous clans.

Prior to colonial rule, Luguru society was politically decentralized. Each local matrilineage functioned as a largely autonomous political unit. Occasionally, however, an outstanding lineage leader or a powerful rainmaker in a particular clan wielded power beyond their lineage and received tribute from other lineages.

Early in the colonial period, German officials coopted selected rainmakers, making them local administrators. Beginning in the 1920s, the British gradually merged some of the previous autonomous local administrative units to create a larger Luguru district. For administering the new district, colonial officials strategically selected the most prominent traditional authority from among the leaders of the resident lineages. By 1936, British officials had consolidated the power of the district administrator by recognizing him as the Sultan (Paramount Chief) of all Luguru-speaking peoples and other minority communities living among them. The Sultan was aided by a British-educated Luguru who held the title of Deputy Sultan.

As part of this program of modernizing local administration, British colonial officials also formally recognized selected lineage leaders as sub-chiefs and village headmen. One of the lasting legacies of this cooptation was the emergence and consolidation of multi-lineage (and in some cases multi-ethnic) administrative units by merging adjacent territories previously associated with single, dominant lineages.

As recently as the 1990s lineage heads continued to have a role in managing minor disputes over the inheritance and transfer of lineage lands. This is noteworthy considering that decades of policy reform in Tanzania, as in many African countries, sought to replace traditional authorities through increased local presence of elements of the national bureaucracy, including the judiciary system.

By custom, a murderer's matrilineage paid the victim's kin some compensation. In pre-colonial times, the murder’s matri-kin also were required to hand over two persons to the victim's kin, who could then pawn or sell them as slaves. Serious theft was punished by cutting off the hands of offenders. Adultery was atoned for with monetary compensation paid to the husband by the offender.

In pre-colonial times, the Luguru were reportedly raided by the Kamba of Kenya to the north, and by the Ngoni who were expanding outward from the south. Luguru traditions also refer to past wars and minor feuds that occasionally occurred among local lineages. However, we lack detailed historical accounts of the dynamics of both external and internal conflicts.

Prior to conversion to Christianity and Islam, the Luguru believed in a supreme being called Mulungu. Most religious rituals were devoted to managing relations with ancestral ghosts. Ambitious clan members seeking good fortune could invite the ghost of one to dwell within their bodies by ritually naming themselves after a favorite ancestor. Having as many ancestral names as possible advanced the social standing of a person by making them an important medium between the living and the dead. It was generally believed that the ancestors would protect their namesake from all evil forces, so long as the host individual continued to regularly organize the required feasts and offerings. Independently of the living, ancestral ghosts ostensibly controlled local rainfall patterns critical to agriculture. By the 1990s a majority of the Luguru were either Muslim or Christian, with Roman Catholicism dominant thanks to its control of most of the formal education and its pervasive influence on most aspects of local life.

The Luguru recognized certain traditional practitioners who were believed to possess special spiritual powers as rainmakers and diviners, and who exerted control over spirit forces, ancestral ghosts, and witches.

In addition to life cycle events like initiation rites, traditional Luguru culture included a series of naming rituals, the goal of which was to invite the ghosts of favorite lineage ancestors to inhabit their namesakes.

In addition to the performing arts such as traditional music, dance and storytelling, the Luguru made ornaments and ceremonial objects of considerable artistic value, including figurines, staffs, and combs.

Traditional Luguru medicine includes amulets obtained from diviners for protection against witchcraft and misfortune. Some Luguru also place medicine-bundles in their fields to prevent outsiders from stealing crops. Trespassers are believed to become ill from these bundles.

In the pre-contact period most deaths and many illnesses were attributed to witchcraft. Suspected witches were detected through divination and were subjected to various ordeals. Each clan had a joking partner from another clan who would be called to conduct certain mortuary rites, usually involving sweeping the floor of the deceased’s hut, washing the corpse and wrapping it in a burial shroud (sanda), and proclaiming the circumstances of death; additional tasks could include shaving mourners, performing sacrifices at the graveside, and rekindling household fires at the end of mourning. Each lineage owned a designated burial site marked by a sacred grove of trees. Corpses of men were laid on their right sides, those of women on their left sides. Each grave was marked with stones. The deceased's kin mourned for a week, during which they observed a number of restrictions, such as work and cooking, ending with feasts and rites held at the grave.

The culture summary was written by Teferi Abate Adem in June, 2020.

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