REPORTS BY RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH, LONDON.
This announces the availability of free downloads for the first set of hard-to-obtain reports on the rangelands of Central Somalia. https://storiesofeastafrica.com/reports-on-the-rangelands-of-central-somalia/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Tanganyika, East Africa. 1964.
Man, it was cold! Dense fog had formed during the night to wrap my little house on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater in a silent, gauzy blindfold. Peering through the window, I shivered, something I hadn’t expected to do so close to the equator. But then I also hadn’t expected to be living at 7,000 ft elevation ( 2,134 m). On the other hand, a fire in the fireplace was beginning to making its presence felt. Pulling up a chair to huddle near its warmth, I reviewed what I had learned from my first staff meeting as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area’s new assistant conservator (forests).
Wearing a sweater to ward off the cool morning air, Henry Fosbrooke, conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, addressed the assembled officers from behind his sturdy African olive-wood desk. He confirmed that I was to oversee a large forest reserve, ten forest guards, a tree nursery, and a small fuelwood plantation of eucalyptus trees. He emphasized the need to stop livestock trespassing in the forest reserve, but he also wanted me to locate game-viewing tracks for tourists in and around Ngorongoro Crater. Then, he said something I hadn’t expected. Pausing to wipe his glasses, Henry admitted that neither activity would be possible until he obtained more vehicle fuel and a bulldozer. In the meantime I was to take over the conservation area’s rain gauge system and set up a meteorological station near the office. Also, I was informed, Richard Leakey had ordered a lorry load of bamboo for the archeological site at Oldupai Gorge; buffaloes had broken the fence around the tree plantation again; and I needed to familiarize myself with the files in my office. After the meeting, John Goddard, a Canadian wildlife biologist, and my neighbor, invited me to accompany him into the crater while he studied rhinos. Checking the fog again through the window, I decided I was in little danger of being bored. I also decided to borrow a heavy sweater from John.
In fact, I was never to be bored for long at Ngorongoro, especially when my official duties expanded to take me throughout the entire Ngorongoro Conservation Area. And, what a place it was, too!
Bracketed by three rift valley lakes, Manyara, Eyasi, and Natron, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, at 3,200 sq. miles (8,300 sq. k), is nearly as large as Yellowstone National Park, which it rivals in scenic appeal and biological diversity (both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites). And how could it not what with the high peaks, plateau, and volcanic calderas of the Crater Highlands in the east, the vast sweep of the world-famous Serengeti Plains in the west, and, in the southwest, Lake Eyasi and the rugged Eyasi Escarpment (not to mention extensive areas of thorn tree bushland and woodland).
For instance:
Pretty cool, eh?
(The authors/artists Jeannette Hanby and David Bygott lived for nineteen years in Mangola Village near Lake Eyasi’s eastern shore just a few miles east of the area pictured above. Their books, Spirited Oasis: Tales from a Tanzanian Village, and Beyond the Oasis: Safaris of Song and Stone, relate their experiences during this time. Check them out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU1L-sZJs8Q; David and Jeannette tell a good story.)
(For more information on the present-day Ngorongoro Conservation Area see https://www.ncaa.go.tz/
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
—Next post: Ngorongoro—
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
But leave we eventually did, and here are some sights we saw along the way.
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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve mentioned pawpaw trees in previous posts. I think they look weird, like something one might see in a Dr. Seuss book.
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).
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:
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.
