Featured image: Densities of goats November / December 1983
This announces the availability of free downloads of hard-to-find documents on the rangelands of Southern Somalia, an area larger than Great Britain. These include 2 published papers, 15 reports and 87 maps. Twenty-six of the maps compare wet and dry season densities of dynamic resources, including livestock, wildlife, cropping and seasonal habitation. Publication dates range from 1980 to 1992. https://storiesofeastafrica.com/the-southern-rangelands-of-somalia-2/
Featured image: Large trucks provided the primary transport for pastoralists and villagers within the Central Rangelands. Boards resting on the upright sides of the truck separated people (above) from small stock and other cargo (below).
A fourth set of free downloads of hard-to-find documents on the Central Rangelands of Somalia’s is now available. This installment includes eleven extension leaflets (five written in Somali) and nine monitoring and evaluation documents by the Central Rangelands Development Project. The period covered is from 1979 to 1988. https://storiesofeastafrica.com/?page_id=4229
Tanzania’s Chief Geologist, Alec McKinley, regarded me skeptically from behind his large wooden desk. “You’ll niver go into the field,” he announced in his Scots brogue.
It was 1964 and I, a Peace Corps volunteer (and newly minted geologist c/o Ohio State University) had just arrived in Dodoma, the headquarters of the Geological Survey of Tanzania (GST), to learn my duties. I had expected them to include fieldwork, so, naturally, I was disappointed. Just like every other geologist on Earth, I looked forward to working in the field. But I was a woman, and in those days female geologists everywhere faced uphill battles for acceptance.
Office of the Geological Survey of Tanzania (or Tanganyika as it was in 1964) in Dodoma.
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
Instead, I was given the task of assessing data in notebooks, obtained from Williamson’s Diamond Mines, containing spectrographic trace chemical data. And when I say notebooks, I mean piles of them, containing data from 60% of the country. Williamson’s Diamond Mines had removed all the gold and silver analyses but left the data on the other 15 chemical elements.
Norrie, GST Director, John Pallister and Chief Geologist, Alec McKinley. 1964.
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
In 1961, Tanzania had too few educated people to man top-level government positions. Therefore, many British colonial personnel stayed on until Tanzanian’s could be trained to take their places.
But fate later smiled on me. Alec McKinley took home leave. Officials posted to the far reaches of the British Empire typically did this once every several years but then did not resume their duties for up to a year. Therefore, Alec would be gone for some time. Fortunately for me, his replacement, Gerald Carter, had a different approach. For one thing, he wanted to “ground truth” the sites reported in the notebooks. Secondly, as the proud and often harried parent of two daughters, he was fully aware of the inherent capabilities of females. He was, in other words, a breath of fresh air. “I’m sending you into the field,” he announced. Thus was my place sealed forever as the first female field geologist with GST.
Gerald Carter Photo: Eleanora Robbins. 1965
He did put one restriction on me—I had to stay in someone’s house. To determine where this would be, I prepared a new map. On it I plotted the locations of my anomalies (ground-truthing sites), Peace Corps volunteers, schools, and missions. One anomaly was not too far from where another member of my Peace Corps group, a nurse, Diane Schultz, was posted in Kondoa, central Tanzania. I wrote to her, and she replied, “Come.” Therefore, my field crew and I stayed at her place. They camped out in her yard. It was a win-win situation for everyone, too, as Diane and I discovered the first morning when we peaked out the window and saw prostitutes / girlfriends leaving the camp. Camp in a city? Enjoy city life!
Dodoma, near the center of Tanzania. Kondoa is 95 miles north, on the road to Arusha.Map by Shakki. GNU Free Documentation license 1.2.
Norrie with her field crew. Dodoma, Tanzania.
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
My crew and I spent three weeks working out of Kondoa, prospecting for mineral deposits by taking stream sediment samples from dry stream beds (it was the dry season). Going to a previously sampled area, we walked up the principal stream until we reached the mouth of a tributary, then walked a short distance up that to take a sample. Samples were analyzed in the lab using a spectrograph. And that was it: field work that was simple, straight forward, and routine. Nevertheless, we had to keep alert. I discovered this on my very first day in the field, when, somehow, we walked right into a herd of elephants and had to crawl away on hands and knees through sparse grass to escape. On the second field trip, a charging rhino caught us off guard and I was saved from being gored and trampled when one of my crew yanked me up a steep stream bank just before the heavy beast (they can weigh over a ton), trotted by, huffing like a steam engine.
Sampling sediments in a dry stream bed in Central Tanzania.(If spectrographic analysis in the lab found significant amounts of an important mineral in the sample, prospecting would continue up the tributary to locate its source.)
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
However, the encounter that’s most seared into my memory happened when, walking upstream in a wide, dry riverbed, we suddenly disturbed two cape buffaloes resting in the deep shade of an overhanging tree. One of them charged. Pandemonium ensued, with everyone but me rushing for the nearest tree and climbing as high as they could. “Panda mti!” my crew screamed at me, “Climb a tree!” Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Having had polio as a child, my stomach muscles aren’t strong enough. So, here I was, the only person still on the ground, the sole focus of a rapidly approaching beast with wicked-looking horns. What to do? Whatever adrenaline says! Remembering a knoll about a quarter mile back, I ran for it.
Cape buffaloes: Even lions are wary.
Photo: David Bygott
This put my field crew in an existential bind. As I learned later, they had been told their main job was to bring me back alive; samples were secondary. So, they climbed out of the trees. I have no idea what happened behind me. I know we had two big rifles but heard no shots. I know the men put themselves in danger for me. I ran in circles around the knoll trying to escape that buffalo before someone somehow diverted it, causing both animals to run away.
I sat down and started to cry. My field tracker, Issa Laibu, caught up to me and asked, “U mzima? (“Are you alive?”). I said, “Ndiyo” (“Yes”). “Kwahiyo kwanini unelia, mama?” Issa asked, “So why are you crying?”. I couldn’t think of a reason, so I stopped, got up and we went back to work. Of course, we were skittish for the rest of the day.
After all the samples were taken in the field, I spent the rest of my time at Dodoma, plotting more data onto maps (analyses were done by others). And I admit, it was fun being young and female, surrounded mostly by single men. Social life in Dodoma was good, plenty of parties given by my European and Asian colleagues, an ever-changing stream of visiting Peace Corps volunteers, trips to Arusha for milkshakes, and travel to Dar es Salaam to swim in the ocean.
Norrie and her assistant, Tony Petro, plotting data from the notebooks onto maps.
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
I also met Mary Cibaya, the health care worker at the GST there in Dodoma. She first sought me out to teach her English, then later invited me to visit her and the children of her Wagogo village outside Dodoma. (The Wagogo tribe occupies a large area around Dodoma in central Tanzania.) About once a week over the next two years, I strapped my guitar over my shoulder, jumped on my blue Peace Corps bike and pedaled out of town to her village.
It was fun! The village children taught me Tanzanian songs, bits and pieces of which I still remember. In fact, even now, many years later, I still sometimes find myself crooning “Malaika, na kupenda maliaka–Angel, I love you, angel,” a love song that was popular at the time, or “Baba na mama . . . Sita rudi—Father and mother . . . They won’t return,” a beautiful melody about remembering dead parents. In return, I taught them American folk songs, just as I did at birthday parties for my European and Asian colleagues’ kids. Soon all the kids in the village and Dodoma were singing American songs like Kumbaya, only with different accents: The African children singing Kum “ba” ya, (in Swahilli, the accent is on the middle syllable), and the other kids singing Kumba “ya.”
Wagogo children
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
Mary became my best friend in Tanzania. She taught me the first lesson I needed when working with kids—that mothers and grandmothers will do their best to attract anyone who will give their children a leg up in this world. Mary had six at the time but eventually nine over the years. She always told me, “Norrie, I’m going to send my children to you one day.” I was to learn that she meant it.
Norrie and Mary Cibaya
Photo: Eleanora Robbins
Almost 30 years later, in 1996, my husband, Brian, and I welcomed Mary’s 26-year-old son, Isaac, at Dulles Airport near Washington DC where we lived. After a few months with us, he moved to the Los Angeles area where there is a large Tanzanian community. We kept in touch. Isaac subsequently became a building contractor. He also married and, together with his wife, produced two bright children, a daughter who is presently interested in black holes, and a son in videography.
Then, 27 years after coming to the USA, Isaac asked me, now a widow living in San Diego, California, to formally adopt him. “My mother, Mary, always told us, her children, that we had two mothers—her in Tanzania and you in America,” he explained. I was intrigued. Having given Mary the money to build the house in which she raised Isaac and his siblings and having kept up with her and them over the years, I already regarded them as “family.” Also, Brian and I had never had children. Therefore, by adopting Isaac I would automatically gain some. On March 17, 2023, we legally became mother and son.
Gaining a ready-made family was a decided benefit of my working in Tanzania. I also benefitted in that my Peace Corps experience there gave me non-competitive eligibility for a 34-year-long government career with the U.S. Geological Survey. And an interesting career it was, too, especially in that, focused as it was on rocks and minerals of the world, it allowed contacts made so many years ago to become lifelong friendships which, thanks to the internet, are still intact.
No complaints!
This post is adapted from Warner, D. (Editor). 2024. We Came, We Saw, We Changed: Creating a Peace Corps Legacy in Tanzania 1964-1966. Library of Congress Control Number 2024907333 (with additional input from Eleanora Robbins).
This post includes surveys and maps carried out in 1979 by Resource Management and Research (RMR), London. Reports by other agencies will follow in future posts.
Editor’s note: Many of this website’s posts derive from my time as a volunteer in Tanzania in the mid 1960’s. However, I’m also interested in the experiences of other volunteers who devoted a few years of their lives in assisting communities and non-government and government agencies in East Africa. This post, by Paul Bolstad, is the second in this line. If you have a volunteer story you would like to have published please let me know at d_herlocker@icloud.com.
By Paul Bolstad, U.S. Peace Corps volunteer.
PROLOGUE
It was late afternoon and the Kilombero Settlement Scheme’s small, corrugated metal office building was hot and stuffy. Wiping sweat from my brow, I returned to trying to make sense of a farmer member’s accounts as recorded by the scheme’s clerical staff: Smudged pages, indecipherable scribbles, misplaced decimal points, numbers in the tens when all logic said they should be in the 100’s, columns that didn’t add up. . . Yuck!
“Hodi?” Can I come in? Our mechanic stood in the open doorway brandishing a greasy truck (lorry) part. “Imekwisha!” he announced. It is finished! He glumly added that: (a) the vehicle it came from couldn’t run without it, and (b) he had no replacement parts. Oof! Bad news: The scheme’s trucks had to be kept running to haul our farmers’ sugar cane to the processing factory. I knew exactly what Mr. Temu, the manager, was going to say: “Paul, please take the bus to Dar es Salaam tomorrow to get more vehicle parts.”
And I didn’t want to because it would delay sorting out the farmers’ accounts so they could be paid for cane they had produced last year, something the previous manager had failed to do. But the trucks had to be kept running, so . . .
Mechanic: How can I work without spare parts? Paul Bolstad
Just then another familiar face appeared, an older man with wispy beard and Muslim skull cap (kofia). Mr. Temu and I knew him as a loquacious troublemaker and probable cause of the removal of the scheme’s previous manager. He wanted to see Mr. Temu about a “problem.” Uh oh!
This was more bad news: I could see this request leading to a baraza or meeting, with Mr. Temu and I spending an entire morning or afternoon listening to farmers’ complaints about problems we already knew about and were trying to fix. It would keep us in touch with our farmers but otherwise solve nothing. For my part, I would worry the whole time about unfinished accounts and the need to keep our trucks / lorries running.
Dar es Salaam was beginning to look more inviting.
I was part of a group of 13 Peace Corps volunteers assigned to the Rural Settlement Division in Tanzania’s Ministry of Lands and Settlement. Our charge was to help, in any way we could, in the management of resettlement schemes. The latter were assisting people to a better life by giving them an opportunity to produce cash crops alongside their normal food crops. This involved clearing land with heavy equipment, surveying plots, and supplying seeds, fertilizers, tools, and on-site agricultural advice. Schemes marketed the crops at negotiated prices and, after deducting the costs of inputs they had supplied, paid each farmer based on the amount he/she had contributed.
KILOMBERO SETTLEMENT SCHEME
The Kilombero Settlement Scheme, based at Sonjo 35 miles north of Ifakara, supported 250 families living in three villages. Settler members came from all over the country. The settlement scheme provided sugar cane to the privately owned Kilombero Sugar Company, which had extensive plantations of sugar cane at the base of the Udzungwa Mountains 17 miles away. Smaller sugar cane “out-growers” augmented the company’s cane production. At 1,000 acres, the Kilombero Settlement Scheme was the largest “out-grower.”
Location of the Kilombero Settlement Scheme. Map data@2014 Afrigis(Pty) Ltd, Google
Sugar cane growing on the settlement scheme.
Paul Bolstad
Planting sections of sugar cane, which will take root and grow up to 15 ft (4.5 m) high and 2 inches (5 cm) thick .
Paul Bolstad
I arrived in Oct. 1966, half-way through the harvesting season, to find the settlement scheme roiled by farmers so unhappy that they had forced the removal of the previous manager. They were especially angry about frequent breakdowns of settlement scheme vehicles which threatened the scheme’s ability to deliver its quota of cane to the sugar factory. Many had waited for over a year to harvest their cane and be paid.
Farmers discussing a problem
Paul Bolstad
However, there was a wider problem in that the farmers simply didn’t trust the government civil servants running the settlement scheme. They especially disliked the Tanzanian clerical staff, or “karanis,” who acted superior, treating the farmers with little respect. The farmers also felt the karanis were trying to trick them out of their fair shares in the proceeds. The leaders in fomenting and channeling this mistrust and anger were settlers from the coastal areas, the “Waswahili,” whose language, Kiswahili, was widely used throughout East Africa as a trade language. Not known for their commitment to hard physical labor, they were, on the other hand, accomplished attenders of meetings and discussions, and in sending delegations to headquarters bearing complaints and demands.
Settlement scheme farmers meeting to discuss problems. Note the predominance of Muslim Waswahili as indicated by their distinctive kofias or caps. Paul Bolstad.
THE NEWCOMER
I had no immediate assignment, which was just as well because I was, at the time, effectively useless to anyone. Thus, my first three months were devoted to improving my Kiswahili language skills, and in a crash course in sugar cane production and operational details of the settlement scheme.
Paul Bolstad
When the new settlement scheme manager, Mr. Felix Kitipo Temu, arrived, I found him to be friendly, helpful and highly competent. I became his administrative assistant, and we became fast friends while working together to understand and put right the troubles that plagued the settlement scheme. I soon found myself deeply involved in its operations.
Mr. Felix Kitipo Temu, in retirement many years later.
Paul Bolstad
AS A GO-BETWEEN
I acted as Mr.Temu’s “go-between” with the sugar factory whenever the scheme couldn’t fulfil its quota of cane. He also frequently sent me to Dar es Salaam, over 200 miles away, to obtain vehicle parts and get papers signed at the ministry. I became an expert in going from one desk to another in government offices, waiting out reluctant and/or slothful bureaucrats until I got what I needed. Because travel by bus to Dar es Salaam took a full day, and I averaged one trip a month, this aspect of my work took up much of my time.
AS AN ACCOUNTANT
Mr. Temu’s arrival coincided with the end of the harvesting campaign of 1966. Each year the sugar company set the dates of the “campaign, which usually started when the fields and roads were dry enough to support heavy equipment and continued for about seven months when the sugar processing factory, which ran 24 hours a day, shut down for five months of repairs and maintenance.
The Kilombero Sugar Cane factory backdropped by the Udzungwa Mountains. The factory continues to operate to this day with 45% of its production supplied by 8,000 Kilombero Valley small holders. https://www.kilomberosugar.co.tz/en/about-us
The factory’s shutdown brought up the issue of payments to the farmers. Before any payment could be approved by headquarters in Dar es Salaam, we had to submit our accounts for each farmer, including how much cane was produced and transported minus charges for goods and services. But the scheme’s accounting system was a mess. Mr. Temu and I struggled for three months to make sense of seven months of receipt books and records before we satisfied the chief accountant. We then went to the bank and loaded up our Land Rover with a pile of money in small denominations and drove straight back to Sonjo. I still remember the line of expectant farmers waiting to be paid the next day.
Subsequently, Mr.Temu asked me to devise a new accounting system based on what we had learned, one any illiterate farmer could understand when he was paid. In fact, it only required the ability to add up a column of numbers twice and get the same result, as well as using a measure of common sense. (Mr. Temu’s favorite saying was “Common sense is not common.”) I don’t remember being involved in accounting after that.
AS A PLANNER
We spent much of each year preparing for the next harvest season, a major objective being to ensure that our cane was successfully loaded in the fields and hauled to the factory over 17 miles of bad roads.
The reason this was so important was that the settlement scheme had to supply its quota of a minimum daily tonnage of sugar cane to the factory or risk its quota for the next harvesting season being reduced, Furthermore, if not delivered within two or three days of being cut, the sugar content of the cane began to fall, causing the factory to reject it or pay a lower rate.
Farmers loading sugar cane.
Paul Bolstad
Trucks hauled cane to the factory on dirt roads like this.
Paul Bolstad
Thus, we had to ensure our government-owned trucks / lorries were adequately prepared for the long harvesting season by the scheme’s trained mechanic and his assistants. (We had a warehouse but no roofed garage, therefore repairs were carried out in the shade of a large tree.) We also had to order the correct quantities of spare parts for the coming season so that the scheme’s mechanics could quickly repair vehicles as needed.
Mechanic repairing truck
Paul Bolstad
AS A BUILDER
Mr. Temu and I came up with the idea of creating a shortcut to the factory and charging a small fee for each truck using it. This required digging a ditch of considerable length to drain low-lying sections of the proposed road. Our government division advanced funds to hire laborers, and our neighbor, Major Plett, another sugar cane “out-grower,” whose trucks would also use the short cut road, provided additional labor.
We devised a simple design for the ditch, a method of measuring the amount of earth removed by each laborer, and a way to keep the ditch drained of water while being dug (basically, start digging at the lowest spot and work upwards). We also paid each laborer as soon as he completed his day’s defined task. I remember being amazed at how much this speeded their work. The short cut was a success, significantly reducing the distance our trucks had to drive to reach the well-maintained roads of the sugar company.
Farmers building the shortcut road.
Paul Bolstad
We next decided to construct a proper office and a much better facility for servicing vehicles and storing spare parts. This required government funds for labor and for cement and bati (corrugated metal) sheets. We already had iron frames supplied years earlier for settler housing but never used. In addition, I secured a CINVA-RAM block-making machine from the Peace Corps office in Dar es Salaam, and prepared simple designs for the two buildings.
We then found a good source of soil to use to make “stabilized soil” blocks with the CINVA-RAM machine. Then I simply showed some laborers how to use the machine and paid them for each block produced. (See how a CINVA-RAM machine works at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMK3l8_VR4Q.)
The walls were formed by laying air-dried blocks between the steel frames, which, set every ten feet, supported the corrugated metal roof. Having learned to lay bricks during Peace Corps training, I not only could teach and supervise the workers but also, much to their amazement, do the job myself—I doubt any of them had ever seen an “mzungu” (white man) lay bricks. The speed of their work improved considerably after that. They were a great success, and we were very proud of them.
The results of this effort were two buildings of simple but durable construction; the office is still standing and in use today, over half a century later.
Constructing the new Kilombero Settlement Scheme office building in 1967.
Paul Bolstad
The same building in 2024
Jono Jackson
YEAR 2
Transporting cane to the factory continued to be a problem. Therefore, we encouraged the farmers / settlers to obtain their own vehicles for hauling sugar cane. One farmer, who owned a duka (small store), had the financial resources to buy a new Ford 5-ton lorry. Another bought, with my financial support, an older used truck which often broke down. But we didn’t stop at that as we also recruited several transporters from Dar es Salaam to come to the settlement scheme during the harvest season and earn 51 shillings per load.
LOOKING BACK
I left the Kilombero Settlement Scheme in 1968 when my two years as a volunteer ended. A year later, in 1969, the government of Tanzania concluded its financial resources were too limited to continue supporting settlement schemes and abruptly converted the Kilombero Settlement Scheme into a self-supporting cooperative. This caused the poorer settlers, including most of the coastal Waswahili, to immediately depart, leaving their holdings to be taken over by the scheme’s more successful farmers. When next I visited, in 1974, the cooperative was struggling to survive.
Settlement scheme problems? Hakuna matata! Paul Bolstad
Looking back on my time at the Kilombero Settlement Scheme, I for years felt it difficult to conclude that the efforts of Mr. Temu and I in putting it on a firm operational footing were in any way part of an incremental building of a rural development process. One can even say that our efforts were largely wasted because of the abrupt abandonment of the settlement scheme idea so soon after I left. (Note: That said, my discovery that the office building we constructed still exists, that it is still occupied by a cooperative, and that recent data shows “out-growers” to be supplying up to 45% of total cane intake of the Kilombero Sugar Factory (https://www.kilomberosugar.co.tz/en/about-us) makes me wonder if Mr. Temu and I, weren’t perhaps more successful than we thought.)
In any case, I know I did the best I could and that what came of my efforts is more the responsibility of those that followed. I am content in the memory of the rich personal experiences and relationships I had with people such as Mt. Felix Kitipo Temu, who became a friend and acted like a co-worker rather than a boss. I was fortunate that I had to learn Kiswahili, (now Tanzania’s official national language), because it provided insights into, and appreciation of, Tanzanian culture I would not otherwise have had. Furthermore, I gained a perspective on rural development in Africa that proved useful in my subsequent studies and in living and working elsewhere in Tanzania. All in all, I consider myself the chief beneficiary of the two years I spent in Tanzania on the Kilombero Settlement Scheme.
(Featured image: Dr. Tom Thurow and Somalia National University students collecting rangeland composition data on the coastal plains of Central Somalia.)
Because Its rangelands are Somalia’s primary natural resource, a considerable amount of research has been carried out over the last several decades to determine their productive potential and how they may best be managed. Unfortunately, much of the resulting information was not widely published and is, therefore, now difficult to obtain. This post is the first of several to at least partially remedy this situation by making available digital copies of relevant publications and reports for free downloads
The two young Americans, Peace Corps volunteers with Tanzania’s Public Works Division (PWD), were venting their frustrations in a bar in Musoma. “PWD wants to construct culverts and bridges but won’t pay for labor,” griped a normally amiable Gil Crosby. “And we need at least thirty guys just to do the bridge on the Ikizu-Ikoma road” added his tall partner, Neil Christianson. Glumly, he took another swig of Tusker beer.
“Ehh, I hear you,” replied the dignified African sharing their table. “President Nyerere expects Tanzanians to volunteer labor for the good of the country. But of course, they do not. Therefore, little is accomplished. This hurts our district.” Then he mentioned a problem of his own. The district council for which he worked had difficulty collecting taxes because the people were so poor. “And if we took their cows as taxes they would make war on us,” he declared.
Silently, the three men pondered their respective situations. But then the eyes of the African council employee brightened. Leaning across the table, he grinned. “Sikia,” hear me, he said, “The district council will provide funds to hire laborers if you withhold half their salaries to pay their taxes. Then our district will get culverts and bridges as well as tax revenue.” The spirits of the two volunteers abruptly improved. Their new friend must be more than a mere employee of the district council. “Have another beer,” they chorused.
When next the call for laborers went out, over a hundred men showed up. Neil and Gill only needed thirty but when the taxes of the first group of men were paid, they hired new people. Never again did the two engineers have trouble finding laborers.
Building bridges was labor intensive. Photo: Neil Christianson.
Followers of Stories of East Africa will know that, from 1964-67, I was a Peace Corps volunteer forester in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Previous posts have described some of my duties and experiences. Now, however, I want to introduce volunteer colleagues who were engaged in other activities.
Probably the largest number of volunteers in my Peace Corps group, Tanganyika V, were engineers with the Public Works Division (PWD) and Water Development and Irrigation Division (WD&ID). The following is based on interviews with three of them.
Volunteers working for PWD constructed culverts and bridges on secondary roads, most of which were unsurfaced dirt and, therefore, often impassible during the rainy season (which kept farmers from getting their crops to market). They established work camps, ensured supplies were hauled, expedited the acquisition of trucks and bull dozers, hired laborers, and supervised construction. They also trained young Tanzanians to continue the work after the volunteers returned to the U.S. Work areas were large–200 miles (322 km) of road in the case of Neil Christianson and Gil Crosby.
Traffic halted by high water flowing over a ‘drift’ between Musoma and Mwanza. (A ‘drift’ is a layer of concrete placed across a seasonally dry stream bed to allow better traction for vehicles and prevent the road from washing out during the rainy season.) Photo: Neil Christianson.
A newly installed culvert. Culverts were adjusted in size to fit the circumstances of a drainage problem. Photo: Tom Meier.
Bridge construction. Photo: Neil Christianson.
This work camp began as a collection of tents but was upgraded to something more sturdy after visits by a roaring lion. Gil Crosby (left), Neil Christianson (right). Photo: Neil Christianson.
Volunteers working for WD&ID carried out surveys. These included geophysical surveys to find potential well sites, core drilling to determine if soils were strong and dense enough to support dams without leaking, and topographic surveys to find where to place dams, and how to distribute water from wells, dams, and rivers to users. Water development was especially important in Tanzania because large areas of the country are arid and semi-arid, with high temperatures and rates of evaporation, and erratic, unreliable rainfall. Many streams are seasonally dry.
Surveying a site’s topography to determine where to put water pipelines. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Repairing an earth dam to fix leaks. WD&ID engineers surveyed pipeline routes to distribute water from dams like this to nearby villages. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Some engineers were assigned Tanzanians to train. Neil Christianson and Gil Crosby were impressed, not only by them, but also by the ingenuity and teamwork displayed by the other members of their African crews. In some cases, a ‘trainee’ already was better trained for certain jobs than the volunteer. Bob Ferris states that his crew could do most of the work without him.
Bob Ferris and his crew. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Time spent in the field varied. For instance, PWD engineers Neil Christianson and Gil Crosby spent their first six months living in tents, choosing sites to upgrade, and establishing work camps before moving to Musoma, from which they visited each work site once a week to monitor progress. WD&ID engineer, Bob Ferris, based in Mwanza, made one to two week-long safaris to sites of interest within his district. Eric Ries, also with WD&ID, was away so much that he seldom used his apartment in Dodoma.
Breaking camp to go home. Photo: Bob Ferris.
When in the field, the engineers lived in tents, caravans, and small huts. Those working in teams generally hired an African mpishi or cook. Bob Ferris, with no team mate, cooked for himself. They boiled their drinking water or mixed it with Clorox (then covered the taste by drinking it with orange squash). Or, they brought jerry cans of town water, which was safe to drink, on safari but then had to ration its use. Bob Ferris managed on 2-3 gallons per day for up to two weeks. His baths were just a quick splash once a day with cold water. Whenever Neil Christianson and Gil Crosby saw heavy rain coming their way, they stripped naked and ran out into it with a bar of soap.
Eating ugali (maize flour cooked with water to a porridge-like consistency and served with a sauce). Bob Ferris’s crew insisted that it wasn’t proper for a white person to sit on the ground like them. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Field camp. Photo: Bob Ferris.
A bath in the bush. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Tanzania’s official workday ran from 7am to 2:30pm (in any case, WD&ID engineers couldn’t survey on hot afternoons because heat waves rising off the ground made it impossible to get accurate readings with their transits). Afternoons were spent writing up field notes, reading, and napping (in the shade of a nearby tree on hot days), evenings drinking beer, orange squash or gin and tonic, and listening to the radio while insects beat against the brightly lit glass of their Petromax and hurricane lanterns. Sometimes they just sat in the dark wondering at the stars before crawling under mosquito nets to fall asleep to the whine of mosquitoes, or, if deep in the bush, the mournful whoop of a prowling hyena.
However, even volunteers who spent most of their time in the bush periodically got into town for at least short periods. Bob Ferris’s idea of heaven was returning to Mwanza from a long safari and soaking in a tub of hot water while sipping an ice-cold drink, listening to Johnny Mathis, and reading his mail. Never again, he says, will he take flush toilets for granted. Bob fondly remembers the Liberty Cinema, which showed Elvis Presley and old Western films (The cinema in Musoma was named The Diamond Talkies), the Fourways Grocery Store, which let volunteers pay when they could, and the Barclays Bank manger, who once let Bob overdraw his account before going on vacation.
Mwanza, Tanzania, 1965. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Some memories:
Experiencing that anxious what do I do now? feeling when, on his first day in the field, Bob Ferris, a greenhorn with no practical engineering experience, stepped from his tent to find four men waiting for instructions.
Watching tribal dances on Saba Saba Day. Bob Ferris was especially impressed by the booming drums.
Dancers performing on Saba Saba Day, which commemorates the formation of the Tanzanian political party, TANU, on July 7, 1954. ‘Saba’ is the Swahili word for ‘seven.’ Bob Ferris, Neil Christianson, and Gil Crosby were the only white people there. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Their vehicle halted by high water crossing the road, Neil Christianson and Gil Crosby finding the occasion becoming a social event. They made many new friends that day with African lorry drivers and bus passengers, whose vehicles also had been stopped.
African friends of Gil and Neil joking that PWD stood for Punda Wengi Dunia, which roughly translates as “The World is Full of Jackasses.” (The Swahili word for ‘many’ is nyingi but in the Musoma area was pronounced ‘wengi.’)
Bob Ferris giving an impromptu demonstration to students at a primary school where he was surveying a water distribution system. The kids became so excited that the headmaster adjourned classes to let them watch Bob and his crew work. Chattering away like little mice they exclaimed in surprise and awe when allowed to look through his transit scope at a crew member 100 yards (90m) away.
An impromptu demonstration. Photo: Bob Ferris.
Ever since leaving Tanzania over half a century ago, members of our Peace Corps group have periodically posed the question: Did Tanzania benefit from our presence?
The PWD engineers think so, possibly because they were able to see their efforts bear visible fruit in the form of new dams and culverts, not to mention trained Tanzanians capable of carrying out engineering duties. For instance, Neil Christianson and Gill Crosby completed over 90% of the culvert and bridge construction they were assigned. Furthermore, they trained five young Africans who proved capable of continuing the work after the two volunteers left. Consequently, Neil and Gil felt good about their impact on the country. (Using Google Maps, Neil recently discovered that at least one of the bridges that he, Gil, and their crew constructed still exists).
The two WD&ID engineers were less positive, probably because their outputs, being in the form of maps and tables, were less strikingly visible. Furthermore, they suspect that few of the dams, which they (and Eric’s partners, Richard Russell, Jeff Gabiou, and George Frame), surveyed, were ever constructed. Consequently, other than training two assistants to take on his duties, Eric feels he didn’t do much for Tanzania. Bob Ferris thinks his major contribution may have been in showing Tanzanians that not all whites felt superior to them.
I wonder what the volunteers’ British supervisors and Tanzanian work crews thought?
September, 1964: Leaving the LakeManyara 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.)
