This monograph deals with the verb in Nyakyusa, a Bantu language of south-western Tanzania. AsNurse (2008: 21) puts it, “Bantu languages are ‘verby’, thatis, they are morphologically agglutinating languages, expressing by verbal inflec-tion what other languages may express lexically or syntactically.” Grammaticalcategories marked on the verb include subject, object, negation, a number ofderivational categories and tense, mood and aspect (TMA).Perhaps one of the most striking features of verbs in Bantu are the highly nu-anced systems of marking tense and aspect distinctions.Dahl (1985: 185) evenspeaks of “the most complex TMA systems in general”. While most descriptiveaccounts of individual languages deal with formal aspects of these systems, theirmeaning and usage are commonly disregarded. Typically, the authors confinethemselves to giving a label for each construction and presenting a few exam-ples with approximate translations. Recent and noteworthy exceptions includeFleisch (2000),Kershner (2002),Botne et al. (2006),Botne (2008), andCrane (2011).Given this lacuna, the following description puts a special focus on TMA con-structions, encompassing both their sentence-level meaning as well as their pat-terns of employment in discourse. The description is synchronically orientatedand aims at scholars of comparative Bantu studies as well as the general linguisticaudience.In the following sections, the language and its speakers are presented (§1.2),followed by an exposition of the methods of data collection used (§1.3). Lastly,the theoretical framework is described (§1.4).