Category: buses/matatus

ON THE ROAD TO NGORONGORO: PART IV (THE MBULU PLATEAU)

ON THE ROAD TO NGORONGORO: PART IV (THE MBULU PLATEAU)

September, 1964: Leaving the Lake Manyara Hotel, Henry Fosbrooke and I continued west on the murram (a type of gravel) road to Ngorongoro. We were now on the Mbulu Plateau, 1,500 ft (455m) above the Maasai Steppe.

The plateau is named for the Mbulu (Iraqw) people, who, in contrast to the pastoral Maasai, are mixed farmers with large numbers of cattle, and a variety of crops, including wheat. They are noted for their system of intensive cultivation (possibly including at Ngaruka, a 500-year-old [at least] abandoned settlement at the base of the escarpment north of Lake Manyara, where there are remnants of a sophisticated irrigation system and terraced stone houses). They speak a Cushitic language so ancient it no longer exists in its ancestral home, southern Ethiopia (their nearest Cushitic-speaking neighbors are 400 miles [approx. 645 km] away). Their ancestors introduced livestock (and, perhaps also agriculture) into East Africa at least 2,000 years ago. They’ve assimilated so many foreign groups that only three of an estimated 150-200 Mbulu clans are thought to be of Mbulu descent. In 1959, five years before my arrival, they comprised about 100,000 people.

Figure 1. The Mbulu Plateau extends from the Crater Highlands (upper left) seventy miles south to the Mbulu Highlands (purple area at lower left).

My impression of the plateau was of a wooded savanna rumpled here and there by small hills and shallow valleys. The trees were a mix of thorny acacias and broadleaved species (they had been small and thorny on the Maasai Steppe). The grass was dry and tawny. Scattered fields of golden wheat punctuated the savanna, as did occasional buildings roofed with thatch or shiny corrugated metal (mbati). There was one exception: Low, dark, and rectangular, plastered with a mix of mud and cow dung, and with a flat roof supported by wooden posts, it crouched defensively against a low ridge. “That’s a tembe,” Henry informed me. “It’s the traditional Mbulu dwelling. There aren’t many around anymore.”

Figure 2. A traditional Mbulu dwelling (tembe). In this case, it also served as a small store (duka).

Henry went on to say that this part of the plateau had once been held by the Maasai who called it Ngotiek. The German colonial government removed them in the late 1890’s, possibly to allow the development of German-owned farms near Karatu and Oldeani.

Figure 3. This farm near Karatu, originally developed during the German colonial period, now focuses on tourism. (Photo by David Bygott, co-author with Jeannette Hanby, of Spirited Oasis.)

The Maasai, decimated by losses of livestock to the cattle disease, rinderpest, and to the effects of a serious drought, were too weak to resist. They did, however, return to the Ngotiek in the early days of the British administration following the First World War, only to be forced out again. This time it was by another cattle disease, probably nagana, a trypanosomiasis carried by tsetse flies which meanwhile had invaded the area. The 15-20 year absence of Maasai from the Ngotiek where they routinely set grass fires to kill ticks and remove dead grass, had likely resulted in fewer fires, allowing trees to become dense, creating habitat for the tsetse flies.

Figure 4. An Mbulu man escorting donkeys carrying sacks of flour. It’s difficult to see here but he has a flat-top hair style that was then common among the Mbulu.

In 1929, the British territorial government allocated the Ngotiek area to the Mbulu people. Noted for their intensive cultivation--vistas of alternating fields, neat strips of green pasture, homesteads, and well-tended plots of woodland–they were at the time concentrated in highlands far to the south where their rapidly expanding population had outgrown the carrying capacity of the land, causing it to degrade.

Figure 5. Bus taking on passengers at Karatu, an Mbulu settlement on the road to Ngorongoro. Bulky items went on the roof, accessed by a ladder at the rear of the bus. They would be well-covered by dust at journey’s end.

Initially assisted by a colonial development project, the Mbulu, over the next thirty-five years, cleared tsetse-infested bush, reduced the numbers of their livestock, instituted soil conservation measures, took up the use of tractors, and, in doing so, spread throughout the rest of the plateau, including the Ngotiek. So successful was the project that jump-started it all that the head of the department of agriculture, sounding pleasantly surprised, reported that, the native authority (i.e., the local native-run administration) will now inherit not an embarrassing burden but a scheme with a momentum of its own.) For his part, Henry was impressed by how the Mbulus had adapted to tractors. “They’re now one of the best examples of mechanical farming by Africans,” he enthused.

Figure 6. Karatu’s bus station: packed earth, eucalyptus trees, blue and white matatu or passenger van, corrugated metal roofs, on-lookers, and, in the distance, wooded savanna.

Nonetheless, despite the presence of wheat fields and buildings (including the settlement of Karatu), the area through which we passed that day was still largely savanna. The occupation of the Mbulu Plateau by its namesake people was still underway.

However, that is no longer the case. Leap ahead now to the present, over fifty years later. The area once named Ngotiek is wall-to-wall cultivation (Figure 7). Karatu, only a village in 1964, is a large town. The Mbulu (Iraqw) population is in the region of a million people. Times have changed.

Figure 7. Mbulu cultivation between the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve and the Great Rift escarpment near Lake Manyara National Park. (Photo by David Bygott.)

—Next post: Ngorongoro—

ON THE ROAD TO NGORONGORO: PART I

ON THE ROAD TO NGORONGORO: PART I

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.

MATATUS

MATATUS

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.

 

Unknown-1 (3)
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. 

1*HDePUYOiydA2aSHF1zAYcg
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).

 

British_East_Africa_Currency
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.

01_008
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) . . .

Page 01_014
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.

 

A_matatu
“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.