The

Twa Trans World Airlines (TWA) was a major American airline which operated from 1930 until 2001. It was formed as Transcontinental & Western Air to operate a route from New York City to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Kansas City, and other stops, with ...

of the

Kafue Flats The Kafue Flats (locally called Butwa) are a vast area of swamp, open lagoon and seasonally inundated flood-plain on the Kafue River in the Southern, Central and Lusaka provinces of Zambia. They are a shallow flood plain 240 km long and a ...

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, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most cent ...

are one of several

fishing Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment, but may also be caught from stocked bodies of water such as ponds, canals, park wetlands and reservoirs. Fishing techniques inclu ...

and

hunter-gatherer A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

caste Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...

s living in a patron-client relationship with farming

Bantu peoples The Bantu peoples, or Bantu, are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. They are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southern A ...

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 ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...

and perhaps the Ila, who build villages at the

ecotone An ecotone is a transition area between two biological communities, where two communities meet and integrate. It may be narrow or wide, and it may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and gras ...

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.

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. {{authority control African Pygmies Ethnic groups in Zambia

See also

Notes

References