I have been circling Mount Unangu this week, conducting interviews on the territorial chieftaincies that rose to power in this area in the mid-1800s (before the arrival of the Portuguese) and the oral narratives of the first chiefs and acibiibi.
Unsurprisingly, Mount Unangu also features prominently in this oral history.
The mid-1800s was a violent period. The small Yaawo chieftaincies of northern Niassa were being attacked by Angoni groups coming from present-day Malawi and Tanzania. Makwangwala and Masito were names given to them by the Ayaawo. The Angoni war parties would attack the villages raiding for slaves. Especially women going outside the villages to cultivate or collect firewood were in danger of being captured and taken as slaves.
The Ayaawo were also no innocent party in the slave raiding wars. Yaawo chiefs attacked the Angoni and other Yaawo chiefs. In those days people were the main source of power and strength. Some of the captured people were further sold as slaves for cloth, ivory, and weapons, while others were forcefully assimilated into their new communities. Slaves were made to marry slaves and thus the population of the respective chief grew.
This period of history is remembered as the time when the Ayaawo lived in the mountains. Seeking refuge, the chiefs moved their populations to live on higher ground. Unangu was a good mountain because it was taller than many others, and it also had a water source up high. From the top of the mountain the people could see their enemy approaching from afar. While the Angoni fought with zagaias and bows and arrows, the principal mode of defense of the Ayaawo was rolling huge rocks on their enemies (a strategy that turned out quite successful!).
There were three chiefs living together on Mount Unangu: Ce-Nam’paanda, Ce-Kalanje, and Ce-Cipango. According to the oral narrative being told by Ce-Nam’paanda’s council these days, Ce-Nam’paanda and Ce-Kalanje were brothers and Ce-Cipango was their brother-in-law having married into the family.
The same story also tells of how the first chief was a woman called Ce-Ngulupe. She was the sister of the first Ce-Nam’paanda (then known as Ce-Dipiindimule). These two people arrived together from the direction of what is now the district of Mecula (in northeast Niassa) to Mount Mbemba (less than 20 kilometers southwest of Unangu).
When they arrived, Ce-Ngulupe was chief. As the story continues, at Mbemba, Ce-Ngulupe married Ce-Kawina (who was never a chief, as my interviewees stressed). Yet the group left Mbemba for Unangu because of lack of water. According to another narrative I heard in Malulu, as Unangu was bigger, it also offered a better viewing point from where to see approaching enemies.
Ce-Ngulupe became the founder of the Nam’paanda dynasty. Her children became rules and she the biibi, the mother of régulos (chiefs). She died an old woman when the population had already moved down from the mountain.
This is when the three chiefs divided the area so that each had their own side of the mountain and the land stretching out from their respective sides. They became the territorial chiefs, and smaller chiefs (usually a headman with his sisters and their children) came to them asking for land on which to settle with their small family groups.
This week I was conducting interviews in Mapudje, Miala, and Malulu.
When I asked the interviewees for their interpretation of the shift of Ce-Ngulupe’s role from chief to biibi, they said it was because she didn’t have time to attend and resolve matters of the community. She was busy cooking for all the visitors!
After she died, according to our interviewees, her name also died in the sense that the tradition of choosing a successor from her female line to continue in the role of biibi also ended. As we were told, the role of biibi was assumed by the wife of the chief. It was she who offered the sacred flour mbopeesi (prepared from usanji, or milho fino in Portuguese, in the old days) at the sacred tree n’solo.
In this ceremony the chief together with the biibi called on the spirits of their ancestors (and through them to God) to protect and defend their population from wild animals (in those days lion attacks were very common!), illness, and to grant them rain and favorable weather conditions for their crops to yield well.
This shift of the sacred role of the biibi from the sister of the chief to his wife is not very common, but I did come across another case last week in Macaloge, north of Malulu.
It is also important to note that this was the first interview that I conducted in Mapudje on the history of the Nam’paanda chiefly dynasty. This was an interview with an all-male group: one elder narrator was 70 years old and the other three were born between 1960 and 1970. Régulo Ce-Nam’paanda had recently died, and these men are the ones taking care of matters until the selection of his successor.
It is very possible that other narratives also circulate, but this is something that requires further study and more interviews also with female elders. The meaning of oral historical narratives is something that continuously negotiated in the present. Also, in this interview, the younger men were asking their own clarifying question trying to make sense of what the elder narrator was explaining.
I cannot, of course, study the meaning of this single narrative in isolation. As I continue my oral history research, I will try to understand how this narrative relates to the other gendered historical narratives of the same time period, especially those featuring female chiefs and acibiibi.