SUMMARY

The Batabwa (also known as Tabwa, Taabwa, Batambwa, Itawa, Waitawba, or Rungu) were a Bantu people living in southeastern DR Congo, southwestern Tanzania and northeastern Zambia. In DR Congo they live close to Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mweru on the grassy plateaus of the Marungu highlands.in today’s Tanganyika and Haut-Katanga provinces. They spoke the Tabwa language, a Bantu language with several local dialects, and numbered in the hundreds of thousands across the three countries. Historically, what later came to be known as a unified Batabwa identity encompassed a collection of separate chiefdoms and village communities; the more coherent Batabwa ethnic identity that emerged in the twentieth century was in part a product of colonial administrative categorisation and missionary and ethnographic work.

The Batabwa were predominantly agriculturalists who grow cassava, beans and maize. They also raise cattle for meat and milk, and fish on the Tanganyika and Mweru lakes with traditional lines and nets. Batabwa villages are led by chiefs who inherit their positions of power matrilinearly and who justify their authority by tracing their genealogy to the original founders of Batabwa society. Similarly to the Baluba, the Batabwa have developed a religious system honoring the ancestors which benefits the chiefs, who use this remembered power to explain their current authority.

The Batabwa were not organized in any armed groups. Their relations with neighbouring communities, including Luba-speaking groups and Pygmy Batwa, were shaped by local competition over land, fishing grounds and access to administrative posts. In the contemporary period, Batabwa youth and local leaders, like those of other Bantu communities in Tanganyika, were drawn into communal self-defence mobilisations in response to insecurity and inter-communal tensions, particularly in areas where conflicts with Batwa populations over land use and forest resources escalated into violence.