Africa & Asia, No 4, 2004, pp 115-141 ISSN 1650-2019 Dept of Oriental and African Languages, Göteborg University Vidunda people and their plant names Karsten Legère Department of Oriental and African Languages Göteborg University [email protected] S. Maganga & P. Mkwan’hembo c/o Vidunda Catholic Parish P.O. Box 92, Kidatu, Tanzania 1. Background 1 This is a first summary of on-going research2 on names of wild plants and wild plant uses among Vidunda speaking people in the area inhabited by the Vidunda ethnic group in Kilosa District of Morogoro Region (United Republic of Tanzania). Vidunda 3 is one of the Tanzanian languages where virtually no linguistic research has taken place. Nothing is known of its genetic relationship to other linguistic varieties spoken by neighbouring people. Neither has its grammatical structure been studied nor is there material on other relevant issues such as its lexicon. There is only one sketchy wordlist of 200 lexical items that was included in Last’s Polyglotta africana orientalis (Last 1885:113-115). Judging from the 1967 Population Census (Tanzania 1971) Vidunda people constitute a small ethnic group with below 20 000 members (exactly 19 585 people) who identified themselves as Vidunda. This fact is partly confirmed by the 2002 Population Census (however, no details about the ethnic composition 1 Karsten Legère is the author of the introductory part and compiler of the plant lists. S. Maganga and P. Mkwan’hembo are responsible for identifying the Vidunda names of plants and for specimen collection as well as providing details about plant uses. The data presented in the appendix are the result of their tireless and committed work. 2 The project “Vilda växter i bantuspråk – namn och användning: en lingvistisk, kognitiv, folktaxonomisk och etnobotanisk jämförelse” (Wild plants in Bantu languages – names and uses: a linguistic, cognitive, folktaxonomic and ethnobotanial comparison) is generously funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. This financial support is gratefully acknowledged. 3 G38 in Malcolm Guthrie’s classification. Chividunda is the autonym. 116 Africa & Asia, No 4, 2004 of the population were recorded), where 8 800 persons were counted in the Vidunda core area, ie. the villages Vidunda (the coordinates are: latitude 7º 34’ 60 S, longitude 37º 1’ 60 E),4 Chon’hwe and Udunghu.5 These villages are rather isolated even from each other, as they are situated in the mountains. Thus, Vidunda’s altitude is approx. 795 m above sea level. Immediately in its neighbourhood the Migomberama Bismarck Mountains reach an altitude of 1 600 m above sea level. There is a road to Vidunda which climbs up the escarpment and ends in the village. Only 4x4 cars manage to reach the place provided that the road which is regularly washed out when rain falls (and irreparable during the rainy season) is repaired and in good condition. Nonetheless, villagers do not much rely on any kind of transport, everything which is needed or for sale in other places is carried mainly on their heads. More Vidunda people live in adjacent places such as in the valley east of Vidunda in ethnically heterogeneous settlements like Kidoti, Kidatu or Kilombero, but their exact number is not known. In any case, in view of efficient linguistic and ethnobotanical research the project focus is on the aforesaid core area. There is a clear dominance of Vidunda people to the extent that one may speak of an ethnically homogeneous area with a few persons of non-Vidunda origin who, for various reasons (eg. marriage, job as a primary school teacher) have been living among Vidunda people for a shorter or longer period. Suffice it to note here that this situation is conducive for a far-reaching use of the Vidunda language and a comprehensive knowledge of project-related issues. However, as a matter of fact, Swahili is also widely used as a medium of communication among Vidunda people, the reason being that its official status and people’s frequent exposure to this language (including work outside the Vidunda area) have a strong impact on language attitudes and language use. Similar to the lack of linguistic work on Vidunda, botanical studies of the area are scarce. There is a research report by Frank Mbago (Mbago 2002) who is an experienced botanist working at the herbarium of the University of Dar Es Salaam. Mbago’s paper lists approx. 50 common plant names and information about how some of these plants are used by traditional healers in treating wounds resulting from circumcision and female genital mutilation as well as curing various diseases. However, most common plant names were not properly recorded in Mbago (2002) – either the Swahili name was given or an inaccurate Vidunda spelling was produced. Hence, these common names were initially revised and subsequently added to the plant list that is included in this paper. It may be argued that before dealing with something language-specific like 4 As given by: www.traveljournals.net/explore/tanzania/map/m3543059/vidunda/html 5 Personal communication by Father Peter Mkunambi of Vidunda Parish, Sept. 2003. Legère, Maganga & Mkwan’hembo · Vidunda people and their plant names 117 plant names linguistic groundwork needs to be done. However, when designing the research project it was taken for granted that in the course of the project implementation a bulk of linguistic material in Vidunda (such as the description of plant uses) becomes available. This material was supposed to be the backbone of a stringent linguistic analysis and a subsequent description of salient aspects of Vidunda structure. From a retrospective this assumption has proved to be correct, as eg. the information on how plants are used by Vidunda people is remarkably comprehensive (to date totalling approx. 70 pages of typed text in Vidunda) and an important source of linguistic information. From a linguistic perspective this material sheds in particular light on the noun class system, grammatical agreement and aspects of the verb structure. There are other important aspects which are documented in this Vidunda material (such as revealing the folk-taxonomy) that are not discussed here. So far, since February 2002 (when the research project started) several field trips have been made to Vidunda village. During two field work periods (Sept. 2003 and January 2004) 260 plant specimens and plant names were mostly collected in the Vidunda area, some of them also on the way to or near Chon’hwe which is situated further up in the mountains. The local experts decided to make this trip, as the area (montane grassland, montane forest) is known for being the habitat of species that do not grow in Vidunda.6 During the field trips, the use of most plants was described by S. Maganga (at a later stage also assisted by by Nestorius Nikas) and recorded in Vidunda. The tapes were subsequently transcribed by P. Mkwan’hembo who presented a summarized version of how plants are useful for human consumption, feeding animals, building purposes or manufacturing objects, as fuel or in herbal medicine. Upon return to Dar Es Salaam all specimens were handed over to F. Mbago for the botanical identification. In a few cases the identification failed, as the quality of the collected samples was poor. Furthermore, it was not always possible to determine exactly which particular plant was found, hence just the genus name. All botanical names that are used here in the text and included as appendix were provided by F. Mbago. His contribution to the project is gratefully acknowledged. It is not intended to present here a detailed discussion of the linguistic or ethnobotanical issues that revolve around the plant names and plant uses, as long as further research will be done later in the year and probably in 2005 too. But in the context of the common names that are reproduced in the appendix some remarks should illustrate various linguistic aspects with reference to the structure of the nouns denoting plants supplemented by a few etymological data. 6 In addition to S. Maganga and K. Legère, Nestorius Nikas was part of the team also. 118 Africa & Asia, No 4, 2004 It should be borne in mind that Vidunda (like most other languages in Tanzania) has not been reduced to writing. For the time being, a slightly modified version of the Swahili orthography is used here. The modification has been necessary to account for the graphic presentation of those sounds that are specific to Vidunda. The syllable structure of Vidunda is similar to other Bantu languages and of the type CV. Thus, open syllables produce [+ATR] vowels. These vowels are [, , , , ] which are rendered as a, e, i, o and u. Sounds that are not found in Swahili are, for instance, the voiced alveolar affricate [dz] written as dz which corresponds to Swahili [z], but also Sw. [d], such as in ifungandedzi (Panicum laticomum Nees, POACEAE) where ndedzi is Sw. ndezi ‘cane rat’, and madzi is maji ‘water’. Problematic (and to be optimized in future) is the appropriate transcription of voiceless aspirated (emphatic) nasals which are obviously much alike those found in Ngh’wele or Luguru. P. Mkwan’hembo uses an apostrophe (which indicates aspiration) whenever these nasals occur in plant names, but there is still inconsistency of whether this apostrophe follows h or precedes it. Neither is it clear why the apostrophe is inserted, as probably the use of h for aspiration could also express voicelessness. Tone is another issue that is not properly covered for the time being. So far it seems that Viudunda is a pitch-accent language where the penultimate syllable of the noun bears a high tone. Exceptions from this rule are marked with an acute for high pitch, such as in isadásada (Holarrhena febrifuga Klotzsch, APOCYNACEAE).