Sonjo Tribe/people Cultural Tour and Travel Guide, Tanzania Wildlife Safari Tour
Travel To the Sonjo people always termed "Maasai's Unknown Cousins", a Bantu people group numbering about 30,000, and living in northern Tanzania in the Ngorongoro district about 30-40 miles west of Lake Natron. The Sonjo Treibe/people have lived there for centuries isolated within Maasai territory. Their origins are in central Africa and are believed to have migrated to East Africa over 4,000 years ago.
The Sonjo Treibe/people's reason for their migration which took place gradually over hundreds and thousands of years is believed to have been the result of an expansion of their agricultural way of life which required fertile and well-watered land to cultivate their crops. As a result, Sonjo Treibe/people have influenced the people around them and assimilated the customs of their neighbors. Sonjo’s primary way of life is based on herding and agriculture. when farming they use a traditional irrigation system.
Women play the primary role in farming while men focus on herding livestock. Men are polygamists and their social system is mainly paternalistic. Marriage is the Sonjo’s most significant life cycle event that is celebrated. The Sonjo wear minimal clothing and have a variety of distinctive customs based on gender and eating.
Boys and men are often seen holding hands in public as a sign of friendship. It is prohibited for women to smoke, cross their legs while standing or sitting, or talk in a raised voice. Customs related to marriage and gender relations are currently debated within the community.
Music plays a prominent role in the Sonjo culture and is a widely practiced art in the community. Music shapes and permeates the entire Sonjo way of life. Music plays a functional role. It is used for various ritual purposes to cleanse the community of evil spirits, for rainmaking ceremonies, and chanted during divination and healing ceremonies.
It expresses pain and agony so music is performed during funerals, used to console mourners, and praise the dead. It is also used for joyful occasions such as ceremonies to welcome back warriors from battles, beer parties, wrestling matches, and courtship ceremonies. Music functions as work songs when building, weeding, and doing other forms of communal labor. Sonjo music is distinctive and different from the music of other communities.
This distinctiveness is expressed through sight and sound, felt through melodies, rhythms, and dance styles. Sonjo's melodies are lyrical and involve a lot of vocal ornamentation. Songs are usually presented in a call-response style. Its most common forms of expression are through solo performances and chants.
Sonjo Clothing:
The Sonjo wear minimal clothing. Animal hides cover the private parts of their bodies but there is no shame associated with nudity. Clothing is used to identify social class. In rural areas, Sonjo's dress is based on one's work. Women wear loose-fitting dresses with solid or printed cotton fabric while farming or when in the market. Sonjo wear sandals or walk barefoot, depending on their work.
Sonjo Culture:
Each Sonjo village is a separate entity, and there are no governmental mechanisms that connect Sonjo from different villages. Nonetheless, they had and continue to share a great sense of belonging together. A major feature of this connection and their identity as "the Sonjo" is in their religious tradition.
The group of traditional leaders (singular mwenamijie, plural wenamijie) who govern the usage of irrigation water, arable land, and trees is the most visible political organization in each community. Water control is the most valuable political power one can have because the economy is reliant on irrigated agriculture. One of the community leaders stated that whoever controls the water controls the entire town.
The wenamijie makes choices collaboratively, and the post is hereditary in the sense that a dead mwenamijie's disciple is chosen from his tribe. Each village also has a priest, who works closely with the mwenamijie and plays no significant political role. The Sonjo uses an age-grade system similar to the Maasai. Especially, the age- group of the warriors tended to play a large political role in the past. Today, as ethnic tensions between the Sonjo and the Maasai have subsided, the political relevance of the warriors has waned.
Sonjo Religious Beliefs:
Ghambageu is believed to be the central figure in Sonjo mythology and religion. If one relies on the Sonjo age-grade lists, one can estimate that he lived around 400 years ago. There is no single version of his life, but there are multiple, depending on the narrator and the moment of telling.
Ghambageu is believed to have appeared in the world without a mother or father. He was a poor man from Tinaga who worked as a babysitter. He refused to help with the collective labor of repairing the irrigation channels and played tricks on the Tinaga residents. The Tinagans became enraged with him and intended to murder him. Ghambageu learned of the plot and treated a blind old lady before transporting her to the village of Samunge.
Tinagans followed Ghambageu into Samunge. He persuaded the people of Samunge to support him by shooting burning bird feathers towards Tinagans. That had a terrible effect, and Tinagans fled, while the people of his new village saw him as a God as a result.
Ghambageu settled in Samunge as the hero and the leader, married, and got so many children that he no longer could endure with them. He transformed his children into stones, except two of his sons, of whom he later exiled one. Only his favorite son Aka remained. Aka decided to flee his father one night, so he transformed into a bird and flew away. This upset Ghambageu so much that he decided to leave Samunge and move to Kisangiro.
When Ghambageu died, he insisted on being laid out on a flat stone to dry in the sun rather than buried. The Kisangiro people, on the other hand, buried him. When the Samunge villagers learned of Ghambageu's death, they hurried to Kisangiro and demanded that the burial be opened. Except for Ghambageu's footwear, the burial was discovered to be empty. As a result, they assumed he had risen from the grave. Ghambageu is expected to return at the end of time to save all Sonjo.
Ghambageu, according to the wenamijie, created their leadership. For those who seek to call the wenamijie's religious, political, and economic leadership into doubt, there are two options: either cut the link between the wenamijie and Ghambageu or discredit Ghambageu.
On the outskirts of Samunge, adjacent to the road leading to the neighboring village of Digodigo, there lies a stone under a thatched roof. Passers-by left grass as a sacrifice on the stone. This stone, according to one belief, is one of the children who were turned into stones.
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