The Sena people are an ethnic group, with origins in northwestern region of Mozambique in Tete Province, Manica Province, Sofala Province and Zambezia Province. They are also found in Malawi and Zimbabwe near their respective borders with Mozambique.
The Sena people’s total population is around 2 million. It is estimated to be about 1.4 million in Mozambique, and about 0.5 million in Malawi. The Sena people in Malawi and Zimbabwe arrived from Mozambique and settled there in early 20th century as migrant laborers.
They speak the Sena Language, also called Chisena or Cisena, which is part of the Bantu language family. The Sena language has many dialects.
Historically the autocephalous Sena people were those between the two large cultures of Shona people – a major ethnic group of Zimbabwe, and the Nyanja-Chewa people – a major ethnic group of Malawi and Mozambique. The Sena people have lived mainly in the Zambezi River valley. According to Isaacman, the Sena represent an admix of people, exhibiting “most, though not all, of the characteristics of Shona cultural groups”.
After the arrival in 1498 of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama on an Mozambique island in his search of a sea route to India, the colonial influence began on Sena and other ethnic groups in this part of Africa. Few years later, a storm hit a caravan of the ships of his countryman Pedro Álvares Cabral trying to repeat Vasco da Gama’s voyage, separating them. Some ships reached modern Brazil, where they founded a Portuguese colony. Others went around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and reached Sofala, a Mozambique trading town with a busy gold market.
Their reports triggered a gold rush and a commitment by Portugal king to settle Mozambique region where many ethnic groups including the Sena people lived. In 1514, Antonio Fernandez confirmed there were rich goldfields in middle Zambezi valley, the traditional home of Sena people, and the Portuguese interest in colonizing this region grew.
Starting with the 16th century, Portuguese traders, farmers and missionaries arrived in the Zambezi valley (stations in Sena, Tete, Zumbo, Quelimane). The Portuguese settlers built farm estates in the river valleys, working them with African labor which included the Sena people.
The interaction with the Portuguese settlers since the 1500s through the contemporary times have led to the Sena people absorbing many Portuguese customs. In 1531, Vicente Pegado founded a fair in a Muslim village along the Zambezi river, which then grew to become a major trading post, missionary center, colonial era garrison and market town. Pegado called this place Sena, and it is this Portuguese town after which the “Sena people” take their name.
The gold trade was lucrative, and of interest to both Arab traders and the Portuguese. By 1542, the Arabs who were established in northeast Africa, the Horn of Africa and along the Swahili coast regions of Africa had established alternate routes for the gold, bypassing the Portuguese towns in Mozambique coast and the Island of Mozambique.
The Portuguese attempted to get a larger share of the gold production and trading by establishing a larger presence in the Zambesi valley and by taking aggressive military action against small Muslim controlled sultanates along the coasts of East Africa. By late 16th century, particularly after Francisco Barreto 1569-1575 expedition, the Portuguese had gained control of all the major mining and trading regions along the Zambesi valley where Sena people have lived.
In the 17th and 18th-century, conflicts grew as did new causes for it. For example, the ivory demand and the ivory exports from Mozambique grew, followed by the demand for slaves outside Africa ravaging the Zambesi valley people as well as all others in the rivers of Sena region.
Sena people have been geographically distributed in a hot humid region. The heat means they traditionally wore few clothes, the women were bare-breasted and wore nsalu or chitenje cloth, which is a wrap around. Showing bare legs has been culturally considered as immodest, and both men and women try to keep it covered. During community dances, such as the Nyau dance, however, they wear very few clothing.
Sena people converted to Catholicism in bulk during the colonial era under the influence of Portuguese Christian missionaries, but some of the Sena people of Mozambique have held on to traditional beliefs in polygamy, child marriage and witchcraft. Their occupations have included farming, fishing and migrant labor.
The Churches operating among the Sena people use Africanized version of the Bible, and they ignore the other versions. The version of Bible used by the Sena people, states Rhodian G. Munyenyembe, is the Buku Lopatulika, an old Chichewa version of the Bible. Traditionally, death rituals have been burials. Similar to neighboring ethnic groups in Mozambique, wedding among Sena people of river valley region required a brideprice called lobolo which was a payment made to the family of the bride to compensate them for the loss of her work output in her birth home.
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