I mention this because Paul has recently published a memoir, Drawn to Africa, about his family’s time in East Africa.
Across oceans and cultures, one family’s journey unfolds, a testament to their resilience, wonder, and deep sense of belonging that will resonate with readers. Why would a mild-mannered Minneapolis printer take his wife and young children on a mission to British East Africa in the years immediately after World War II? Could they revive a Lutheran printing press, a symbol of faith and communication, that had remained silent during and after the war?
Drawn to Africa tells the remarkable true story of the Bolstad family, whose sense of calling carried them from the quiet heart of the American Midwest to the vast, unpredictable landscapes of Tanganyika. Their journey began with an ocean crossing and a harrowing flight aboard a converted B-17 bomber – complete with an emergency landing between Cairo and Nairobi. Drawn to Africa is a family memoir written by Paul Bolstad with memories contributed by sisters Rosanne and Marilyn and brother Daniel.
Even after resettling in America, the pull of East Africa remained strong, drawing them back to the land that had captured their hearts. The sequel,Drawn to Africa Again, continues their journey, exploring their ongoing connection to Africa. Available on Amazon.com in 2026.
Adventurous, heartfelt, and grounded in faith, Drawn to Africa is a vivid portrait of resilience, discovery, and the enduring ties between people and place.
Email Paul Bolstad – pbolstad43@gmail.com – for more news about Drawn to Africa Again. We’d love to hear your stories and memories of Africa, so please share them with us.
Sept. 1964. After completing a few weeks training with a number of other Peace Corps volunteers at Tengeru Agricultural School, I presented myself at the Ngorongoro Conservation Unit’s office in Arusha. My new boss, Henry Fosbrooke, a middle-aged, somewhat portly Englishman with glasses and well-worn sweater vest, greeted me with a business-like smile. “We go to Ngorongoro tomorrow morning,” he said. “Be at the office at seven sharp.” I was there at 6:30 AM. We left at 3:00 in the afternoon. Some unexpected matters had arisen, which Henry needed to attend to before leaving for Ngorongoro a hundred miles to the west.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
The road from Arusha to Ngorongoro as shown on the 1994 CMC Route Map of Kenya. Hard surface roads are colored red. Tarangire and Mt. Kilimanjaro were not national parks in 1964, but a game and forest reserve respectively. Ngorongoro Crater is at the far left of the map.
But leave we eventually did, and here are some sights we saw along the way.
This stop, not far from downtown Arusha, had something to do with the young man in red sweater, an employee of the Ngorongoro Conservation Unit. The elderly gentleman wearing a Muslim kofia or cap was possibly a relative. I like the contrast between the modern bright red tractor (and even brighter sweater) and weathered, dilapidated buildings.
Where buses go to die (several others were gently rusting away behind the building). Outskirts of Arusha at the edge of the dry Maasai Steppe.
Arusha Maasai farms on Kisongo Maasai land ten miles west of Arusha. The woman, a Maasai, is carrying a bundle of maize stalks.
By the 1960’s the numbers of Arusha people on Mt. Meru had grown to where all cultivable land was fully occupied. This forced them to mobilize relations with their pastoral cousins, the Kisongo Maasai, in order to access their land. One way was through marriage because pastoral Maasai did not farm but frequently married women from cultivating tribes who did. However, according to John Galaty, in the book, Being Maasai, this has not always been to the pastoralists’ advantage, especially the Kisongo, who often complain that the Arusha women they marry invite all their brothers to cultivate near them, and then evict the Kisongo husbands when their herds disturb the crops.
Our way smoothed by a two-lane asphalted stretch of colonial Britain’s Great North Road, we passed through open, often rocky grassland with scattered bushes and small thorn trees. We passed herds of livestock tended by small boys, Maasai women following loaded donkeys, and a single rangy warrior, walking with long, loping strides, carrying a spear. Grass fires were turning the air hazy with smoke.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
This was the land of the Kisongo Maasai, one of twenty or so Maa-speaking groups, or sections, of pastoralists who once dominated a region equal in size to Wyoming or, to take an example across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom.
Area occupied by Maa-speaking peoples in the mid-1880’s prior to European colonization (heavily shaded borders)., Arusha (A); Nairobi (N).
The Maa-speaking peoples are the most recent of a succession of Cushitic and Nilotic pastoralists who, over some three to five thousand years, have entered East Africa from Sudan and Ethiopia. For their part, the Kisongo Maasai have been in southern Maasailand only since the early 1800’s when they evicted or absorbed other Maasai sections, as well as Tatog pastoralists who, preceding the Maasai, had lived around Lake Manyara and in the Crater Highlands for at least a millennium.
Distinguished by a specialized form of cattle pastoralism, and by an age-set social organization that motivated cattle raiding and warfare, the Maasai were widely feared. However, they also raided and fought among themselves, their aggressiveness and ferocity climaxing during the mid to late 1880’s when they attacked one another so savagely that entire regions were depopulated. The winners, including the Kisongo, were checked only by the effects of rinderpest and smallpox epidemics in the 1890’s and by the onset of colonial rule. (The depopulation of highland grasslands in Kenya greatly enabled their subsequent occupation by white settlers who found no one there to contest the issue.)
Henry, who had previously been an anthropologist, enjoyed talking about the Maasai.
. . . who moved about the countryside looking for grass and water for their cattle. Unlike farmers, they did not want to settle down and send their children to school. Furthermore, although they owned large numbers of livestock, they were not interested in participating in the nation’s economy by selling them. “Yes, they are an obstinate lot,” Henry sighed. At least those were his words; actually, I think he was secretly pleased that the Maasai were keeping to their old ways.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
A Maasai warrior or murrani (photo by Herman Dirschl)
Leaving the Great North Road at Makutani Junction, we drove for twenty miles on a murram (a type of gravel) road to the village of Mto wa Mbu: Stream of the Mosquitoes. (It’s a name that would make an American real estate agent cringe; as a young boy I remember a petition being circulated to change the name of a nearby stream–from Mosquito to Harmony Creek–in order to increase property values.) Nestled below the Great Rift Escarpment at the entrance to Manyara National Park, the village served a small but densely settled area of farms watered by springs and a small stream that flowed down the escarpment.
The village of Mto wa Mbu (Stream of the Mosquitoes).
A few dukas (small general stores) lined the road, shaded by wide-spreading flamboyant trees (Delonix regia). In season, the trees produced masses of scarlet flowers that competed for the eye with the colorful kitenge cloth worn by the village women. Small groups of Maasai murran or warriors leaned lightly on their long-bladed spears, affecting little interest as a convoy of tourist vehicles slowed to enter the park. (A fence of strong cables blocked large animals in the park from entering the village.) Nearby, a small, open-air market displayed eight-feet lengths of sugar cane, bunches of yellow bananas and, on rough-wooden tables, piles of mangoes and pawpaws or papayas. Gunny sacks of charcoal stood or lay by the road.
Pawpaw (Carica papaya) trees in the yard of the Public Works Dept. (PWD) station at Mto wa Mbu.
I’ve mentioned pawpaw trees in previous posts. I think they look weird, like something one might see in a Dr. Seuss book.
Papaya fruits on a tree in India. (photo by Vackachan. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike International License.)
I had never seen a papaya (or mango for that matter) before coming to Tanganyika in 1964. Therefore, they seemed very exotic. Nowadays, of course, they can be found in most major grocery stores.
—TO BE CONTINUED—
Here’s a suggestion: consider giving my book, Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika, as a Christmas present.
Arusha, Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) was noted for its cool, healthy climate, proximity to scenic Mt. Meru, and being a center for tourism. However, it also was known for something else: its midpoint location on the rather grandly named Great North Road which ran the length of the African continent. A left turn set you on the path for South Africa. Turn right and you were headed for Egypt.
Probably named for the highway that has linked England and Scotland since the early middle ages, Africa’s Great North Road was originally proposed around 1890 by a number of British Imperialists, including Cecil Rhodes, who was so instrumental in Great Britain’s annexation of large areas of Africa that North and South Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) are named for him. (He is less well regarded these days as shown by the recent removal of his statue at Oxford University because it was felt to be symbolic of imperialism and racism.)
The Great North Road was meant to link Britain’s possessions in the eastern part of the continent in order to increase the empire’s economic and political power in Africa. At the time it was a visionary concept, seemingly unconcerned with any obstacles that might exist, such as Germany’s increasing control over Tanganyika through which the road would have to pass (see below).
Great Britain’s African possessions prior to 1918 when Tanganyika (shown in black) was still a German possession. Tanganyika came under British control following the First World War. (Sudanation–Wordpress.com.)
Other obstacles included the sheer length of the road–approximately 6,392 miles (10,228 km), or more than twice the distance across the USA–and the fact that, in the 1890’s, very little was known about the areas through which it would pass. The magnitude of the undertaking was demonstrated in 1924-26 by the first successful journey from Cape Town to Cairo which took a year and four months (The first attempt, in 1913, ended when the expedition leader was killed by a leopard in Rhodesia).
Also, financial resources were limited; Britain expected its various colonies, protectorates and trusteeships, including those through which the road would pass, to be largely self-supporting, and some, such as Tanganyika, with few resources to generate revenue, were quite poor. Furthermore, their administrators often had higher priorities, as for instance, those in Tanganyika and Kenya who emphasized east-west railways linking the interior of their colonies to seaports on the Indian Ocean. The Great North Road’s lack of urgency was tellingly revealed in this quote from a Tanganyika government publication in 1955–By and large, before the 1939-45 war, the problem of communication was not as pressing or important a matter as it is today.
Consequently, the Great North Road was more an idealized concept than on-the-ground reality. Instead of being constructed all at once and all at one go, progress was faster in densely populated areas but less so in lightly settled areas where road standards evolved, improving over time. Some examples of how the latter might have occurred are presented below:
Early travel was by foot, often along animal trails, such as this one near Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika
Many of the earliest roads were just ruts worn by pioneering carts and vehicles, in this case in arid northern Kenya. Furole Mountain, marking the border with Ethiopia, rises in the distance.
The first constructed roads were usually dirt, the more important ones being drained and graded. This road is the B2 between Dar es Salaam and the Rufiji River in coastal Tanzania. (Photo dates from about 2000.)
Dirt roads, however well-maintained, can present problems in the rainy season, as here in Northeastern Province, Kenya sometime in the 1990’s. The Acacia seyal trees shown here typically grow on poorly drained. heavy clay soils that can become impassible when wet.
The next upgrade would be to murram (a type of gravel) roads, which sometimes allowed all-season use. However, they had the irritating characteristic of forming washboard corrugations, which forced drivers to maintain speeds of about 40 mph. Slower than that caused extreme bouncing; higher speeds caused vehicles to “drift,” and drivers to lose control. Possibly that’s what happened here, near Lake Manyara, on the road to Ngorongoro.
The final upgrade was to all-weather tarmac highways as here in Turkana District in northwest Kenya. (Note: this is the only example that is actually part of the Great North Road.) The principal problem with these highways is that they induce fast driving: hence the sign.
Consequently, the final all-weather links of the Great North Road were still incomplete when Sudan became independent in 1956 and Great Britain’s empire began to dissolve.
However, the dream lives on, only now in the minds of independent African nations who realize the importance of cross-border trade in improving their economies. Thus, the Great North Road, in the form of the Pan-African Highway, still exists, implemented under the auspices of international agencies and the countries through which it passes.
That said, it should be noted that road conditions in South Sudan are still frequently impassible during the rains, forcing the highway to be routed through Ethiopia (see map below). However, newly independent South Sudan is improving its road system, making it likely that sometime in the not too distant future, the original dream of a Great North Road linking Great Britain’s contiguous (but now independent) dominions in Africa may finally be realized–well over hundred hears after its conception.
Present-day Pan-African Highway. (By Rexparry. Wikipedia Commons license)
The two-lane tarmac highway over the Nyandarua Highlands west of Nairobi boasted fine views of the Great Rift Valley: Mt. Longonot, a cratered volcano rising from the valley floor a thousand feet below, Lake Naivasha’s shallow waters glinting in the sun, the distant slopes of the Mau Escarpment . . . Nonetheless, on that day some thirty years ago, my eyes were fixed firmly on the road.
Mt. Longonot. (Photo by Valerius Tygart. Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.)
Several miles back I had seen my first dead man. Killed by a hit-and-run driver, he lay staring sightlessly at the sky, oblivious to the crowd gathering around him. Possibly he was drunk and stumbled onto the road at the wrong time, or he could have been struck by an erratically driven vehicle while walking at the edge of the road. Either way, his misfortune emphasized my need to stay alert, a decision that paid off when two small buses, or matatus, one trying to pass the other, swept around a blind curve and hurtled, side by side, downhill towards me, one squarely in my lane. Even then, I barely had time to pull off the highway before the matatus, neither of which even attempted to slow down, whooshed past, only a few feet away, rocking my car with displaced air. I spent the next few minutes turning the air blue with words, best forgotten, about matatu drivers.
Sometimes reckless driving didn’t pay. (Photo by Bloomberg Philanthropies.)
Dating from the 1960’s, matatus are a major means of public transport in the cities and more populous rural areas of East Africa. The name derives from the Swahili word for three, tatu, and refers either to a vehicle fitted with three rows of benches or to the 1960’s fare of three cents (or perhaps both).
These one-cent and ten-cent East African copper coins (Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda shared the same currency prior to independence) would have been used to pay matatu fares in the 1960’s. The holes allowed the coins to be threaded on a string, a useful feature for people whose traditional clothing lacked pockets. The 1952 ten-cent piece pictures elephant tusks.
I first encountered matatus in 1964 when I and several other Peace Corps volunteers spent a few weeks at Tengeru Agricultural School in Tanganyika. In our free time, we took matatus to Arusha several miles away. (Peace Corps volunteers weren’t allowed to own cars, and couldn’t afford them, anyway.) Matatus with beeping horns patrolled the nearby highway, stopping wherever potential customers appeared, their conductors, always young men, hanging out the doors, waving and calling out their destination: “Arusha, Arusha!” Jumping down to take fares before their vehicles even stopped, they continued their spiel until the last person boarded. Then, banging on the side of the minibus and yelling “twendi–let’s go!” they sprinted beside the accelerating matatu to jump on at the last moment, reveling in their youthful vigor.
Matatu and buses at Moshi bus station.
Crowded in among the African passengers and their baskets of produce, chickens, and bunches of bananas freshly cut from the tree, we spent the eight-mile drive into town speaking halting Swahili with the locals (who were rather surprised we didn’t have cars like other wazungu or Europeans) while also taking in what was passing by outside: British cars 2/3 the size of American Chevrolets and Fords, school children in green and pink (boys in shorts, girls in dresses), unhurried bicyclists (thinking back I can’t remember ever seeing a fast-moving bicycle) . . .
Huts of the Meru people backdropped by banana trees and the lower slopes of Mt. Meru. (As seen from a matatu between Tengeru and Arusha.)
But then I moved to my official posting at Ngorongoro a hundred miles away and never used a matatu again, although in subsequent years I encountered them in and around Nairobi. During that time matatu crews became known for reckless driving (even by Nairobi standards where obeying stop signs could lead to being rear-ended), rude behavior, and sometimes outright criminality, including theft, physical abuse and sexual harassment. In my case, there always seemed to be a matatu, overloaded and blaring loud music, tailgating or cutting in front of me–when they weren’t forcing me off the road passing on blind curves. Naturally, such behavior generated matatu jokes and stories, one of which, courtesy of fellow PCV, George Cummins, and the Iowa Peace Corps Association, I share with you here:
A pastor and a matatu driver died and went to heaven where the former was allocated a humble cottage with few amenities and the latter a mansion on a gilded street. Incensed, the pastor complained to St. Peter. “How is it that I who have served the church my whole life is given a humble cottage while this matatu driver who never darkened the door of a church is living in such opulence?” “It’s very simple,” St. Peter replied. “While you were preaching, your congregants were sleeping. While the matatu driver was driving, his passengers were praying.”
The matatu industry remains widely unregulated to this day and matatu crews can still be rowdy, a situation enabled by the absence of any real competition, such as trains, trams, buses, or bicycles (the latter due to unsafe roads). On the other hand, things have improved somewhat since the government of Kenya introduced reforms in 2004. Also, Kenyans can be proud that the matatu industry is the only one in the nation that is almost entirely locally owned and controlled. More practically, it also provides employment for thousands of people, including artists (see below). Nairobi finds it hard to function without matatus.
“Pimped-out” matatu. (Photo by Jociku. Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 International License.)
And, here’s something else: Over the past two decades matatu owners have spent large sums of money to “pimp out” their vehicles, making them more eye-catching. Thus, next time you’re in a Nairobi traffic jam, and a matatu swerves off the road to pass around you with two of its wheels in a drainage ditch, you can at least admire its artwork.
During the internecine wars of the Maasai which disturbed southern Kenya and northern and central Tanzania in the early 1800’s, a group of Arusha Maasai, cattle herders who also practiced agriculture, left the plains and settled the southwestern slopes of Mt. Meru, where they prospered. By the late 1890’s they were powerful enough to dominate both the mountain and surrounding plains, sending raiding parties as far as eastern Kilimanjaro fifty miles away. It is no surprise, therefore, that they have a city named for them.
Arusha dates to 1900-1905 when the government of German East Africa built a fort or boma to protect German settlers attracted by Mt. Meru’s fertile volcanic soils and cool temperate climate (Arusha is 4,593 ft in elevation). By 1964, when I arrived, Tanganyika had been under British control for forty-five years and Arusha was a bustling little town of about 10,000 people (878 of whom were whites / Europeans).
Downtown Arusha (1964), with its iconic clock tower centered in a traffic roundabout. Other structures include Barclays Bank (right), provincial government headquarters (building with blue front) AGIP petrol station (yellow and black sign), and Naranjan Singh’s greengrocery (building on far left).
Arusha’s economy was based on agricultural products including Arabica coffee, pyrethrum, sisal, and papain. (I’ve dealt with coffee and sisal in my posts, Going Upcountry and Mt. Kilimanjaro, but pyrethrum and papain need some explanation.) Pyrethrum is a pesticide made from the flowers of a species of chrysanthemum. Effective against insects (I used aerosol cans of it to kill tsetse flies) it has a more soporific effect on larger animals, as in the case of a rhino which, encountering a field of pyrethrum (this was in the 50’s when rhinos were still abundant), ate some and promptly slumped over and went to sleep. Papain is an enzyme extracted from Papaya fruits for use in meat tenderizers.
Tourism also contributed. Tanganyika National Parks and the Ngorongoro Conservation Unit were headquartered in Arusha, and the town’s New Arusha and Safari hotels catered to tourists headed for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Ngurdoto Crater, Lake Manyara, and Serengeti national parks. (These will come up in future posts.)
National parks (dark green) and game reserves (light green). Map reflects the present situation: some present-day national parks were game reserves in 1964.
Arusha appealed to me, partly because I’ve always been drawn to small towns, but also for its interesting mix of cultures–European, Indian (south Asian), African–and, on clear days, its views of nearby Mt. Meru.
Mt. Meru is named for a Bantu farming people who colonized its southeastern slopes over two hundred years ago. Photo taken at the edge of a plantation of fast-growing Mexican pines (right). The Hagenia trees on the left are indigenous.
Arusha had leafy suburbs where Europeans, and better-off Indians and Africans, lived in large houses with lush, well-kept yards, often behind high walls or dense hedges. They were nice, often lovely, places, but not especially interesting. Here are some snapshots taken elsewhere in town.
Corrugated tin roofs, vehicle skeleton and mosque: a common sight in Tanganyika
An Ismaili mosque (at far end of street).
Ismailis are a branch of Shia Islam noted for the their enlightened views on the rights of women and the values of secular education, modern medicine, and Western culture in general. Their leader, the Aga Khan, periodically gains notice when Ismaili communities donate funds for charity equal to the value of his weight in gold, diamonds and platinum. A single weighing event of the previous Aga Khan, who weighed 243 pounds, brought in $1,400,000.
Fruit stalls at Arusha market. I remember mangoes, papayas (pawpaws) and at least four different kinds of bananas, including three that were new to me: cooking bananas (plantains), small, intensely sweet bananas, and thick bananas with red skins. Note the woven baskets, which were used instead of sacks or boxes.
I have fond memories of Arusha as it was in 1964. However, its population has since burgeoned to over 400,000 people. It’s a big city now with attributes one expects of such a place. Some are positive, as, for instance, numerous quality hotels (tourists visiting northern Tanzania’s national parks have become the city’s major revenue-earner http://www.tanzaniaparks.go.tz), a shopping mall, international conference center, and two sports teams; others, including an increased crime rate and award-winning traffic jams, not so much.
Arusha traffic jam. (This photo, by Sydney Combs, won first place in the University of Chicago Study Abroad photo contest.)
Times have changed.
But, the market’s still there. If you ever visit Arusha, check it out. Maybe it still sells those small, sweet bananas.
