[2] Historically, the Fipa lived on the largely treeless Ufipa Plateau looking down on Lake Tanganyika, appearing as a bridge joining east to central Africa and the Congo.

The central chiefdom, Milanzi ("the eternal village"), was headed by a dynasty of ironsmiths, which exchanged its products for woven cloth.

It was, however, the Twa (after splitting into two chiefdoms) who exercised territorial and administrative authority through their appointed officials, with orders then transmitted to elected village headmen.

Nkansi (Nkasi), on the Ufipa Plateau, was a chiefdom with a particularly extreme and elaborate form of political organization, even having a prime minister, and according to some, had a life comparable to peasantry in the richest of European countries.

On the lowest administrative level was an elected village headman with a female magistrate whose special function was to decide breaches of the public order by either sex, particularly in regards to the use of obscene language and brawling.

Cases were first heard by a headman; from there a defendant could appeal to the district sub-chief, then to the royal court, and finally to the chief, queen mother, and council of elders.

The villages had become palisaded, and slowly chaos, terror, and warfare began to dominate the area, primarily as a result of the private army of Kimaurunga (Kimalaunga).

The Fipa were not aggressive, were said never to wage war, but generally obtained enough firearms to deter most potential aggressors by exchanging their grain for slaves, with which they then bought guns from the coastal traders.

[citation needed] The German explorer Paul Reichard, who visited the Ufipa around 1882, said that "calm, peace and order" reigned within the Fipa state.

The local weaving industry declined, while the Twa chiefs were able to enforce much heavier contributions in goods, livestock, and labor from their subjects.

In 1889–1890, British explorer H. H. Johnston wrote of the Ufipa area: "I...have seen all human life and culture stamped out for a distance of 50 miles along the road, where only a short time before the most flourishing villages existed."

The Wafipa tended to live in concentrated, widely spaced settlements of 20–30 round huts, no more than a few yards apart, each housing three to five each, with two surrounding corridor walls for small livestock.

With the Wafipa, each spirit cult was associated with rocks, mountain, groves, and lakes, and had a shrine where a priest tended a sacred python whose domestication represented man's control over nature.

The most important tasks for the men were hunting wild animals, building huts and granaries, collecting firewood, making and spreading compost piles, cutting grass, and threshing millet.

The Twa chiefs of the Wafipa, any of his family, and all women were forbidden to visit the site of a kiln or forge, while all other visitors had to acknowledge the smith's authority with a payment.

The smith and his assistants were supposed to abstain from sexual intercourse, for the smelting and forging of ironwork was a very specialized craft totally bound up with knowledge and magic, using very particular ingredients from doctors and sorcerers.

The cloth was open, heavy, strong, and durable, was white with a black-stripped border and five by six feet long, sufficient for the toga-like dress worn by men and women (somewhat as the Wahehe are said to look).

Katai could come as a dog with shining eyes, in dreams; a mouse in a hut corner; a beautiful youth; or even smoke (the African concept of deities included the souls of animals, spirits, and humans being interchangeable).

Truly large tame pythons, representing the spirits of these places, would coil themselves on specially made stools and receive offerings of millet porridge and meat from worshipers.

They were in fact so important as to be especially honored by having sacrifices offered at an altar erected by their parents outside their hut during harvest time or epidemics.