Zaramo people

The Zaramo people, also referred to as Dzalamo or Saramo, are a Bantu ethnic group native to the central eastern coast of Tanzania, particularly the Dar es Salaam Region and Pwani Region. They are the largest ethnic group in and around Dar es Salaam, the former capital of Tanzania and the 7th largest city in Africa. Estimated to be about 0.7 million people, over 98% of them are Muslims, more specifically of the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam. Zaramo people are considered influential in Tanzania's popular culture, with musical genres like singeli originating from their community in Kinondoni District. Their culture and history have been shaped by their lifes in both urban and rural landscapes.

Language

The original Zaramo language, sometimes called Kizaramo, is Bantu and belongs to the Niger-Congo family of languages. However, in contemporary Tanzania, only a few people still speak it, and most speak Swahili language as their first language, as it is the trading language of the East African coast and the national language of Tanzania.
Kizaramo is still used in many Zaramo rituals, such as the mwali rites, though they often appear alongside Swahili translations.

History

Origins

By oral tradition, the Zaramo are said to be descendants of the Shomvi people under the lead of the warrior-hero, Pazi in the early 19th century. The Shomvi, a mercantile clan living in what is present-day Dar Es Salaam were attacked by an offshoot group of Kamba people from Kenya. The Shomvi sought help from the warrior, Pazi, who lived in the hinterlands. When Pazi defeated the Kamba, he asked for salt, cloth, and other luxuries in return. When the Shomvi could not meet his demands, they offered for him and his family to live with them on the coast, where they would receive an annual tribute instead. The war and its results were said to be the founding of the Zaramo.

Islamization

Undoubtedly after the Maji Maji rebellion, it was a period of significant Islamic expansion. Before 1914, the Ngindo, Zaramo, and Zigua peoples in the coastal hinterland had been heavily influenced by Islam. Since then, the region has primarily become Islamic, with the exception of Maasai, some of Bonde, and to a lesser extent, Matumbi. The last barrier to the Islamization of the Digo in the north was eliminated by the destruction of Lutheran artifacts. When missionary work began in the south after many Mwera and Makua stopped practicing Christianity, polygynous marriages and other barriers made it difficult for many converts to return, which led to Islam becoming the coastal area's major religion.
By 1913, Muslims were up half of the Zaramo population. Both from the coast and up north from the Rufiji, where Zaramo tracked the boys' jando initiation ceremony that contributed significantly to the spread of Islam, proselytizing had taken place. Zaramo started performing Islamic circumcision.
Islam in the coastal region and its hinterland typically made it difficult for missions to be effective. The Benedictines relocated their operations inland as a result of Zaramo's disregard. Resources for resistance were offered by indigenous religious organizations like the Kubandwa Cult and the Uwuxala Society. Long-established populations were not always opposed to Christianity, though.
Only eleven of the 150–200 waalimu in Uzaramo were reported to be able to interpret the Koran rather than merely recite it in 1912, when it was claimed that students at Koran schools learned the Koran in Arabic without grasping its meaning. Magic and literacy frequently intertwined. It was customary to read the entire Koran aloud to honor ancestors or to purify a community. A passage from the Koran served as a standard amulet, and ink diluted in water served as a standard medication.
A Zaramo Muslim immigrant worker named Abdulrahman Saidi Mboga is credited with introducing superior rice varieties and irrigation methods to South Pare.
It is simpler to map out Islam's political stance by the 1950s. Not only was it growing almost as quickly as Christianity, but Muslims also appeared to be adhering to their religion more rigidly than before. However, a lot of cultural resistance endured. Few Zaramo Muslims frequented mosques, and their female rituals remained largely non-Islamic. Urban Islam was occasionally quite superficial, notably in Dar es Salaam. Even the ostensibly Muslim Ngindo rarely performed Islamic marriage.

Colonial period

During the British period, the founding members of the African Association included representatives from the three most influential African communities in Dar es Salaam in the 1920s: the Manyema, and Zaramo. Effendi Plantan, the former head of the ex-askari community, had raised its secretary, Kleist Sykes. Mzee Sudi, the Manyema leader for the Belgian Congo branch and the son of slave parents, was one of the committee members. He also had a significant home. Two notable leaders were from the Zaramo: Ramadhani Ali, the first vice-president and a trader, and Ali Saidi, a building inspector who served as the association's treasurer during the 1930s.
Both later served as leaders of the Wazaramo Union, with Ramadhani Ali serving as King of the Marini and one of the most prominent Africans in Dar es Salaam. These men had completely different interests and unifying principles than Watts or Matola did. The organisation was split throughout the 1930s between proponents of a territorial alliance of educated men and supporters of harmony between the various social classes in the city.
Africans in the town were governed by the Germans via a liwali. The British first established a Township Authority made up of selected Europeans and Asians before experimenting with a number of "native administrations." The town was made into a separate district and divided into six wards, one under each elder. Finally, in 1941, the Township Authority received a native affairs sub-committee and its first African members. These measures included making a Zaramo headman the chief of the entire township, establishing a council of six elders, each of whom represented a grouping of tribes from one direction, and making the town a separate district.
Population increase altered Dar es Salaam's entire character. Many Zaramo settlements, particularly Buguruni, were subsumed by the shanty cities the immigrants established. Magomeni had a population density that was more than double that of Nyamwezi, although many Zaramo lived in Buguruni in the far west, which blended into the surrounding landscape.
According to a survey conducted in 1956, the majority of homes were constructed using small business owners' or artists' money. It also revealed that several ethnic groups, like the Manyema, Yao, and Makonde who were among the town's first settlers, possessed a large number of homes. However, it is noteworthy that neither Shomvi nor Zaramo had much real estate because Dar es Salaam's explosive growth from humble beginnings had engulfed both native groups. Nobody took Shomvi and Zaramo seriously when they both occasionally asserted that they "owned" the town. Shomvi were primarily fishermen, while Zaramo, who came from a less developed educational region, were "very submerged"—a characteristic that set Dar es Salaam apart from the other capitals of East Africa.
The trible associations of the 1950s were heavily focused on rural improvement in addition to urban welfare. The Wazaramo Union was the best illustration. The Zaramo did not require an association to bury or care for them because he lived so near to the town. However, the Wazaramo Union was home to about 3,500 of the 6,500 tribal union members who were enrolled in Dar es Salaam in 1955. Its main priority was to promote rural Uzaramo.
The objective of the Zaaramo Union according to its secretary, was to construct the "UNITY, BESTIR LIFT UP", of the Wazaramo and their country in the essential matters. To this end, it purchased and operated two lorries to transport people and agricultural produce between towns and rural areas, established nine branches in the tribal area, and campaigned against "the old out-of-date Wakilis" recognized by the government, urging instead a paramount chief to guide the Zaramo toward progress. Urban ethnicity was not just a means of survival, but also a productive effort to forge groups that could work well together in colonial society.

Society

The term, "Zaramo," in scholarly studies also reflects a macro-ethnic group. The larger Zaramo group consists of Zaramo proper, but includes a number of related peoples such as the Kaguru, Kwere, Kutu, Kami, Sagara, Luguru, Ngulu and Vidunda peoples.
The majority of the peoples of Tanganyika were patrilineal, but there are signs that many of them were once matrilineal. Some of these matrilineal peoples, like the Zaramo, Luguru, Mwera, and Makonde, were able to survive in the south-east where tsetse may have prevented men from acquiring cattle to pass on to their sons.
The Zaramo society has been historically victimized by slave raids and slave trading by the Swahili-Arab traders of Zanzibar. To resist this persecution, they developed stockade-fortified villages. Many ran away from the coast, and would return during the daytime to farm and fish. Zanzibar Arabs, state William Worger, Nancy Clark and Edward Alpers, however pursued their slave raiding into the mainland, where they would seize pagan Zaramo adults and children, gag them so they would not cry out, and then sell them to the traders. Sometimes during famines, such as in the 19th-century rule of Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar, desperate Zaramo people pawned and sold each other to survive.
The Zaramo society's history has long been influenced by the coastal encounter between the Arab-Persian and African populations typical of East Africa, since the 8th century. During the colonial era, the influence came from the encounter between the African people, Arab-Swahili trader intermediaries and the European powers, but it broadly coopted the older slave-driven, social stratification model.
According to Elke Stockreiter – a professor of History specializing on Africa, the slaves seized from Zaramo people and other ethnic groups such as Yao, Makonde and Nyamwezi peoples from the mainland and brought to the coastal Tanzania region and Zanzibar sought social inclusion and attempted to reduce their treatment as inferiors by their slave owners by adopting and adapting to Islam in the 19th century. Conversion to Islam among the coastal Zaramo people began in the 19th century. These historic events, states Stockreiter, have influenced the politics and inter-ethnic relations in 20th-century Tanzania.