The
Twa of the
Kafue Flats wetlands of
Zambia
Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa. It is typically referred to being in South-Central Africa or Southern Africa. It is bor ...
are one of several
fishing
Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment (Freshwater ecosystem, freshwater or Marine ecosystem, marine), but may also be caught from Fish stocking, stocked Body of water, ...
and
hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...
caste
A caste is a Essentialism, fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to marry exclusively within the same caste (en ...
s living in a
patron-client relationship with farming
Bantu peoples
The Bantu peoples are an Indigenous peoples of Africa, indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native Demographics of Africa, African List of ethnic groups of Africa, ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The language ...
across central and southern Africa.
In
Southern Province, where swampy terrain means that large-scale crops cannot be planted near the main rivers, only the Twa fish.
[This may once have been true of the entire country, but due to the commercial market for fish, immigrant fishermen now work the north and east of Zambia.] They exchange their catch for agricultural produce from their Bantu/village patrons, the
Tonga
Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands, of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in the southern Pacific Ocean. accordin ...
and perhaps the
Ila, who build villages at the
ecotone on the margins of the floodplain, which they call ''Butwa'' "Twa country".
The Kafue Twa have a dark-hut method of fishing unique in Africa. The sides of the river are covered with a thick mat of vegetation. The Twa raise a small reed platform about 3 square at the margin of the vegetation, with a tube in the center down to the water. They cover themselves and the tube with blankets, blocking out light as the adjacent vegetation does and enabling them to see the fish in the river clearly. They then spear the fish with bident and trident spears up to 6 m long, and occasionally longer, depending on the depth of the water. In the 1950s there were several hundred of these platforms raised in the Twa fishing grounds, and catches were reported to be over 100 kg per person per day when the fish were running.
Maho (2009) lists Kafue Twa as a dialect of Ila, ''Ethnologue'' of Tonga.
See also
*
Twa peoples
*
Classification of Pygmy languages
Notes
References
*Lehmann, D. 1977. "The Twa: People of the Kafue Flats". In Williams & Howard (eds.) ''Development and Ecology in the Lower Kafue Basin in the Nineteen Seventies'', 41–46. University of Zambia.
*Smardon, R. 2009. "The Kafue Flats in Zambia, Africa: A Lost Floodplain?", in ''Sustaining the world's wetlands''. Springer.
*Stefaniszyn, B. 1974. ''The material culture of the Ambo of Northern Rhodesia'', p. 472.
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African Pygmies
Ethnic groups in Zambia