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.
Commiphora bushland in eastern Hiraan Region, Somalia (Photo: Peter Kuchar)
THE BURSERACEAE
Those of you who downloaded digital copies of The Burseraceae by Kuchar and Gillett on storiesofeastafrica.com will welcome the updated version now available at Kuchar & Gillett – The Burseraceae (Dec 2025).
For those unfamiliar with the term, Burseraceae is a family of shrubs and small trees. In Somalia, it comprises two genera, Boswellia and Commiphora, the latter probably the most diverse, abundant, economically important, yet worst understood and documented genus of woody plants in the Horn of Africa. This report not only explains why but also includes information (Somali names, uses etc.) about Burseraceae species in (pre-1989) Central Somalia, not to mention a very useful vegetative key for identifying them.
A commiphora tree showing the species’s iconic contorted appearance.
Author: JMK, C.C.C-Share Alike 4.0 International license
1965. A small group of tourists and I were in Tanzania’s Oldupai Gorge listening to an African guide talk about paleontological discoveries at the gorge. He was a young man, one of five trained by paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and was clearly enjoying his job. However, he really came alive at the discovery site of a nearly two-million-year-old species of ape, Zinjanthropus boisei, nicknamed Nutcracker Man because of its huge teeth. “A very important find” he excitedly announced. “Why? Because this ancient ape walked upright, just like us! This same creature may also have been the first to use rudimentary stone tools!” Then, gesturing to a small concrete monument at his feet, our guide proudly stated, “And Dr. Mary Leakey found the skull of Nutcracker man right here!”
Discovery site of Zinjanthropus boisei (Nutcracker Man). It has since been reclassified, first as Australopithecus boisei and then Paranthropus boisei. (Paranthropus means Robust Ape.)
The tour guides, in place since 1963, had been taken on to deal with a sudden surge in visits stimulated by artlcles about Oldupai Gorge and Nutcracker Man published in National Geographic Magazine. Safari companies, instead of driving their clients directly from Ngorongoro to the Serengeti National Park, were beginning to include Oldupai Gorge in their itineraries. Visitor numbers, already too high to be handled directly by on-site scientists, rose from 600 in 1963 to 3,335 in 1965, initiating a rising trend that continues to the present day.
The Oldupai Gorge Site and Visitor Center is only a short diversion from the main road about halfway between two of Tanzania’s most visited tourist sites, Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti National Park. (Graphic by (David Bygott and Jeannette Hanby.)
Of course, increasing tourism in Tanzania primarily reflected the allure of its wildlife, especially in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Serengeti National Park. For instance, in 1965, four of five visitors to Ngorongoro and the Serengeti bypassed Oldupai Gorge entirely. Nonetheless, findings excavated there continued to attract visiters by keeping it in the news. Examples not included in a previous post https://storiesofeastafrica.com/2024/09/20/the-leakeys-and-their-discoveries-at-oldupai-gorge-tanzania/ include:
A 1.75 million-year-old stone circle, the oldest-known evidence of a man-made shelter from weather.
A computerized depiction of the remains of a stone circle at Oldupai. It was built by piling basaltic rocks in a ring structure and was used as a windbreak and / or base to support upright branches covered by skins and grass. (https://www.dennisrhollowayarchitect.com/Olduvai.html)
Rudimentary stone tools, associated with Australopithecus apes, that are a million years or more older than those associated with Nutcracker Man and Homo habilis (Handy Man).
An array of extinct animal species that co-existed at Oldupai with early humans, who first scavenged their remains and later hunted them. Some of these animals were remarkably large.
Weighing up to two tons and with horns up to 2 m (6.6 ft) long, Pelorovus was one of the largest bovines (and even ruminants) to have ever lived.
(Mr. A. GNU Free Documentation License.)
At 4-5 tons in weight, Deinotherium (Greek for “Terrible Animal”), was one of the largest mammals that ever lived. Not directly related to modern day elephants, it probably browsed tree foliage in open woodlands. Its tusks weren’t used for digging but rather for removing branches that hindered feeding. Isolated populations survived until 12,000 years ago, possibly hunted into extinction by modern man (Homo sapiens). (Concavenator. C.C. Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.)
Almost sixty years later, tourism at Oldupai Gorge is booming, with 3,000 visits a day during Ngorongoro-Serengeti’s five-month peak tourist season. (Thus, out of the nearly 1.5 million visitors to Ngorongoro and Serengeti last year at least 450,000 visited Oldupai Gorge.)
Traffic jam in Ngorongoro crater. Most of these vehicles later continued to the Serengeti National Park, a significant number visiting Oldupai Gorge along the way. (David Bygott.)
This good news, however, brought with it a need for upgraded infrastructure, not only to handle the large numbers of visitors, but also to interpret the findings that have made Oldupai Gorge a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the most important in the world depicting human evolution.
This led to the construction, in 2018, by the J.Paul Getty Museum, of the Oldupai Gorge Site and Visitors Center (replacing a smaller original museum dating from the 1970’s). Situated at the very edge of the gorge and under the jurisdiction of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA), its one of the largest on-site museums in Africa.
Oldupai Gorge Site and Visitor Center.
(David Bygott.)
Backed by a view of Oldupai Gorge, an interpretive guide does his bit at the visitor center.
(David Bygott.)
Also, to better direct tourists to Oldupai Gorge, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority erected a large monument depicting Nutcracker Man and Handy Man at the turnoff from the Ngorongoro-Serengeti Road. The junction is now so well marked that even tourists unaccompanied by experienced drivers and/or tour guides will notice it.
Monument to the discoveries at Oldupai Gorge of Nutcracker Man and Handy Man.
(David Bydgott.)
Thus, the NCAA has reason to be pleased about the present state of tourism at Oldupai. However, there is still room for improvement: Most Tanzanians can’t visit Oldupai Gorge. This is partly because it’s far from population centers, but also because of the NCAA’s prohibitively high entry fees (except for school field trips). Reducing entry fees for Tanzanian citizens would help the country’s small (10% of the population) but growing middle class better appreciate an important part of their (and the world’s) national heritage.
Featured image:A group of Australopithecus afarensis apes walking across newly deposited volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania.
(David Bygott photo of exhibit at Oldupai Gorge Site and Visitor Center.)
Laetoli, Tanzania, 1976. Returning to paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey’s camp after a tiring day in the field, Andrew Hill revealed his “inner boy” by lightheartedly biffing a colleague with a piece of dry elephant dung. During the ensuing high-spirited elephant-turd battle, Andrew, while trying to avoid a particularly large incoming chunk, tripped and fell, and in doing so, gained a measure of fame. With his face only inches from the ground, he saw footprints; human-like footprints impressed in hardened volcanic tuff; footprints that would ultimately prove to be 3.7 million years old.
Elephant dung–catalytic agent for paleoanthropological discovery? The presence of dung beetles indicates this pile is fresh.
(NJR ZA. GNU Free Documentation License.)
It was Andrew’s lucky day. However, Mary Leakey felt pretty good about it too, especially after she and her team investigated the site and uncovered a 75 foot (24 meter) line of footprints made by primates walking upright across powdery volcano ash. (Soft rain had preserved the footprints by cementing the ash to tuff.)
A section of the Laetoli footprints.
(Masao, F.T. et al. 2016.)
The Laetoli footprints were a major discovery. They were emotionally compelling. They also were the earliest pre-human footprints ever found. However, Mary also had another reason to celebrate. She and her team had previously found at Laetoli the well-preserved remains of an ancient species of ape of the same age as the footprints. The ape (eventually classified as Australopithecus afarensis) had an ape’s small brain but notably lacked its large mobile toes. Instead, its feet had arches typical of humans, indicating to Mary that it must have walked upright, its gait more human than ape-like. The Laetoli footprints, which showed a primate walking upright when Mary Leakey’s ape was alive, provided strong backing for her conclusions.
Australopithecus afarensis skull. (Imagine waking up one dark night to see this in your bedroom window.)
(. . . . or this!) Reconstruction of “Lucy,” a bipedal (walking upright on two feet) female Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1975 by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression. Her remains were 500,000 years younger than those found by Mary Leakey.
(Wolfgang Sauber. C.C. Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.)
Discovery sites of Australopithecus afarensis. “Lucy” was found in northern Ethiopia. Laetoli is the southernmost site.
(Chatep. C.c. Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.)
“Australopithecus” means Southern Ape, so named because the genus was first discovered in South Africa. The species name, afarensis, refers to Ethiopia’s Afar Depression where the type specimen (which best demonstrates the species’s defining features) was discovered.
The Laetoli footprints were an extremely valuable addition to an understanding of human evolution, demonstrating as they did that a pre-human primate species had competently walked one two feet long before evolution of the modern brain, nearly a million years before the earliest known stone tools. Mary Leakey thought them the most exciting discovery of her career.
That she felt this way says a lot because she and her husband, Louis, already were famous for paleontological discoveries at Oldupai Gorge 45 km (28 miles) north of Laetoli.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
REFERENCES
2005. A Yale Tale: Fossil Footprints. Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Yale University.
Bygott, D. 1992. Ngorongoro Conservation Area Guidebook.
Masao, F.T. , et al. 2016. New Footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominids. Evolutionary Biology. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19568
The Oldupai Gorge Site and Visitors Center. http://mainly museums.com
“Tembo!” exclaimed one of the men. A large elephant had unexpectedly materialized from the bamboo a few hundred feet away. Like a spirit, it moved silently across an arm of the glade and vaporized into the thicket on the other side. If the laborer hadn’t happened to look up when he did, we would have missed it completely.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
Elephants in a glade of manyatta grass.
It was 1964. My African crew and I were scouting a route for a track that would allow tourists to view wildlife on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater. The proposed route ran through light green bamboo thicket, spotted by dark-leaved pillar wood trees, and punctuated by sun-filled glades of tall manyatta grass. That this was buffalo and elephant habitat was evident from the abundance of their dung, tree trunks worn smooth by the rubbing of large bodies, trails forced through the dense bamboo, and mud wallows. (Refer to last page of blog for maps of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and of the vegetation of Ngorongoro Crater.)
Smoothing a stump while easing an itch.Photo by David Bygott.
Sometimes we heard them, especially elephants: snapping branches as they browsed, the low rumbles of their stomachs, an occasional sharp, thrilling trumpet. . . But we also saw them, and not just the elephant in the first paragraph, but also buffaloes.
Three times, while sticking tall lengths of bamboo into the ground to mark where the new track would go, we jumped buffalo herds of forty to fifty animals. Luckily however, we scared them more than they scared us. What a noise they made as they blundered away, grunting and snorting, heavy hooves rumbling across the ground–they were big animals. They always paused at the edge of the bamboo to look back at us. We could see the sun glinting off their horns. They were mean-looking critters!
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
Mean-looking critters.
Elephants and buffaloes also used open, grassy habitats. For instance it was not unusual to see elephants grazing the grasses, sedges, and herbs of Munge and Gorgor swamps on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. However, most of my encounters with the two species were either in or near forest.
Gorgor Swamp. The large plants are Cyperus immensus, a species of sedge.
Elephant in Ngorongoro Crater’s Lerai Forest. Fed by a stream flowing down the crater wall, the forest is dominated by yellow barked fever trees (Acacia xanthophloea).
For instance, there was that cool sunny afternoon, following a rainstorm, when several elephants on the crater rim, seemingly stimulated by the rain, became amusingly animated: trumpeting, and pushing one another about. I could hear the click of their tusks–ivory on ivory–as the large animals playfully sparred. The dry season was coming to an end and they were happy to see the rain.
Elephant near my house on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater.
“In or near forest” included my small house, around which buffaloes often grazed at night.
The rooms of the house (a main room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom) didn’t interconnect. Instead, each opened directly onto the yard. On foggy mornings, after carefully checking for the presence of buffaloes, I groped my way to the bathroom through heavy mist. At night, I checked again with a flashlight before going to bed.
Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika
My “yard” was mown at night by grazing buffaloes.
Not what one wants to meet while groping through fog to the privy. Photo by David Bygott.
At night, buffaloes also grazed the grounds of the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. To prevent mishaps, the lodge hired Maasai warriors, armed with spears, to escort guests to their scattered cabins, following the evening meal in the main building.
Tourist cabins on the grounds of the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. The main building, which included the dining room and bar, is at the far right.
While I commonly saw elephants in the swamps on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater, there were few buffaloes there in the 1960’s. In contrast, in terms of biomass, they are now the dominant herbivore, and for a very interesting reason. This significant change probably resulted from the removal of Maasai from the crater in 1974. With the Maasai went their traditional grassland management in which grazing and controlled burning kept grasslands short, palatable, and suited to small and medium sized grazers, such as wildebeests. Subsequently, grasses on the crater floor became longer, less palatable, and more suited to less selective grazers, such as buffaloes. Consequently, buffaloes became more abundant while the numbers of wildebeests, once the crater’s dominant herbivore, significantly declined. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority has since returned grass fires to the crater ecosystem through a program of controlled burning. (Also see https://storiesofeastafrica.com/2022/09/27/maasai-pastoralists-of-ngorongoro-as-they-are-now/)
Buffaloes are more difficult prey than wildebeests. Will this cause lions to prey more heavily on the latter? Photo by David Bygott.
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is thought to contain over 300 elephants. However, much of the habitat of Ngorongoro’s elephants is dense forest. This makes them hard to count. Thus, their true number is unknown. Although elephants are endangered throughout Africa by loss of habitat, and by poaching for ivory, little elephant poaching has been recorded in the NCA over the past several years. That said, on my last visit to Ngorongoro, in 2004, I was startled to see a tuskless adult elephant, something I had never encountered before.
Notice something missing ?
In well-protected areas, elephants without tusks may comprise as little as 2% of a population. This may be the case in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Let us hope so, anyway, because populations with significantly higher amounts of tuskless elephants (especially if the amounts are increasing), reflect heavy, unrelenting poaching. Simply speaking, elephants without tusks are less apt to be killed by poachers. Over time, therefore, their genes will dominate the population. Even thirty years ago, up to 25-38% of some African elephant populations were without tusks. A more recent study in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park reported over half of all female elephants in to be tuskless. For more information on this subject, check out the on-line articles by Garrigan, Preston, and Associated Press in the reference section.
MAPS
Ngorongoro Crater is in the Crater Highlands, east of Tanzania’s famous Serengeti Plains. Graphic by David Bygott and Jeannette Hanby.
Ngorongoro Crater vegetation. Light blue (wet meadows), dark blue (reed swamp), yellow (medium grassland), light yellow (short grassland), light brown (bushland), dark brown (high woodland), green (forest). ( Herlocker, D.J. & H.J. Dirschl. 1972.)
Herlocker, D.J. 2009. Buffaloes by My Bedroom:Tales of Tanganyika. iUniverse.
Herlocker. D.J. & H.J. Dirschl. 1972. Vegetation of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Canadian Wildlife Service– Report Series Number 19.
Oates, L. & P.A.Rees. 2013. The Historical Ecology of the Large Mammal Populations of Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, East Africa. Mammal Review 43(20013) 124-141.
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.)
Henry and I were enjoying the view from the veranda of the Lake Manyara Hotel. Perched atop the escarpment above Lake Manyara National Park, the hotel commanded sweeping views to the east, south, and north. The Park began almost at our feet, a jumble of trees, shrubs and rocks tumbling down a steep 1800 ft (545 m) escarpment to a narrow, irregular plain of forest, woodland, and grassland bordering the shallow muddy waters of Lake Manyara. Beyond stretched the dry, withered vastness of the Maasai Steppe, its occasional hills and dry stream beds obscured by a haze of smoke from dry-season grass fires.
Figure 1. Lake Manyara National Park begins at the top of the escarpment, extends across Lake Manyara and halfway toits distant southern tip. The building on the right is the Lake Manyara Hotel.
It was 1964. I was a newly arrived U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and Henry was Henry Fosbrooke, old Tanganyika hand and conservator, Ngorongoro Conservation Area. He was driving me to Ngorongoro where I was to take up my duties as assistant conservator (forests). While Henry finished drinking his tea, I gazed over the park. Twenty-five miles long, it was only a few miles wide, and much of this was steep, rugged escarpment. This made me wonder what was important about the park besides a striking view. “Tree-climbing lions,” Henry stated, setting down his tea cup with a forceful clink. “Unique to this park; the only place in Africa where lions climb trees.” (Note: since then, populations of tree-climbing lions have been found elsewhere, including Ngorongoro, Tarangire, and the Serengeti in Tanzania as well as Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda.) Beckoning for a waiter to bring the bill, he added, “There also are rather a lot of elephants.” That did it: I would visit the park the first chance I got.
Figure 2. A tree-climbing lioness in Lake Manyara National Park. (Photo by David Bygott, co-author with Jeanette Hanby of the book, Spirited Oasis:Tales from a Tanzanian village.)
Lake Manyara National Park is a good example of how the escarpments, lakes, and volcanic highlands of East Africa’s eastern rift valley have influenced the region’s biological diversity, not to mention its scenery.
At 123 sq. miles (318 sq.km), 70% of them water, the park was small. In comparison, the Serengeti National Park, 55 miles to the west, could contain 46 Lake Manyara National Parks.
Figure 3. Lake Manyara National Park includes the northern half of Lake Manyara. The Tarangire Game Reserve (now a national park) lies to the southeast, across the Great North Road.
Nonetheless, it was ecologically diverse. The combination of rocky escarpment composed of ancient basement system and younger volcanic rocks, large shallow lake, and narrow plain watered by perennial streams and springs has created habitats ranging from closed canopy forest through deciduous woodland and thicket, to open grassland and swamp. Examples of three of the most important habitats follow:
Figure 4. Elephant dreaming in a forest glade. (Photo by David Bygott.)
Forest: Fed by springs flowing from volcanic rock at the base of the escarpment, groundwater forest consists of plants that could not grow under the existing rainfall. It also contains grassy glades and swamps. The spring water originates outside the park, from rainfall falling on the forested outer slopes of the Crater Highlands thirty miles away.
Figure 5. Acacia woodland. (Photo by David Bygott.)
Acacia woodlands: haunt of tree-climbing lions. No one knows for sure why they spend so much time resting in trees. The more plausible theories include keeping away from herds of buffaloes and elephants and/or from biting flies. (Another, possibly tongue-in-cheek, suggestion is that the trees are simply easy to climb.)
This raises a question: buffaloes are the principal prey of the park’s lions, so why should lions avoid them? Buffaloes are big, mean, and hard to kill. They can put up a real fight when attacked. Consequently, Manyara lions lead harder lives than their Serengeti cousins, who frequently feast off hyena kills. This probably accounts for their desire to keep clear of buffalo herds until hunger drives them to hunt again.
Figure 6. Open grassland. (License:: Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International [CCBY-SA 4.0]) OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Grasslands support a large proportion of the park’s animal biomass. One of the more important types is strongly influenced by Lake Manyara in that it occurs on alkaline soils of periodically flooded mud flats. Alkali grassland fluctuates widely in area depending on the level of the lake, but is, nonetheless, heavily grazed by buffaloes, gnus, and zebras.
Large and shallow (max. depth 12 ft or 3.6 m), Manyara, like other rift valley lakes, has no outlet, losing its water only through evaporation. Therefore, its area and depth can vary significantly over time. For instance, in 1961, the lake was so dry it could be crossed in a Land Rover, whereas in 1962 rising waters killed many trees along the shore and forced zebras and wildebeests, the latter then the principal grazers on alkali grasslands, into the woodlands where they were easy prey for lions. This destroyed the wildebeest population, which took several years to return. The lake gives, but can also take away.
The varied habitats of Lake Manyara National Park provide optimal conditions for many species of wildlife: klipspringer and Kirk’s dik dik on the rocky escarpment, impala and giraffe in the woodlands, various waterbirds (at times an estimated two million) on the lake . . . However, none benefit more from this habitat diversity than elephants, which can use them all (except perhaps the lake). They can pull up tussocks of grass, forage branches up to 20 ft (6 m) high, wade into swamps to eat aquatic plants, and even carefully negotiate parts of the escarpment. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising that there were a lot of them in the park.
Figure 7. Elephant browsing an umbrella acacia (Acacia tortillis). (Photo by David Bygott.)
However, there was another, more ominous, explanation for their high numbers: hunting and loss of habitat to agriculture might be driving elephants into the park. If so, they could become so numerous as to outgrow their food supply. In such cases it’s the trees and shrubs that are most affected. If short on forage, elephants will strip bark and eat the cambium, push trees over to get at out-of-reach foliage , dig up tree roots, and gouge holes into baobab trees to access water stored in their trunks. Thus, the most visible impact of elephant overpopulation is the destruction of forests and woodlands.
Furthermore, this already was happening elsewhere. For instance, in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park some 1000 sq miles (2290 sq km) of woodlands would be destroyed by 1969. Worse yet, there were signs of damage to trees in Lake Manyara National Park where many Acacia tortilis (umbrella acacia) trees had been knocked down and/or stripped of their bark.
Figure 8. Elephants in the Serengeti browsing the upper branches of a fever tree (Acacia xanthophloea) they have pushed over.
This led Tanganyika National Parks to ask a young British zoologist, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, to study the situation. Iain spent the next few years identifying individual elephants and studying their behavior. He recorded what they ate and their impact on the vegetation. He learned how to age them and monitor their growth. He recorded births and when one died tried to find out why. He counted them and followed their movements. Large as they were, elephants still were hard to spot in areas of dense vegetation, so Iain immobilized a few of the big animals, fitted them with radio collars and tracked them from an airplane, which he also used to census their numbers.
Figure 9. Iain Douglas-Hamilton’s camp on the Ndala River
And, along the way, he had some exciting experiences. A partial list includes being hospitalized by an encounter with a rhino while on foot in dense bush, being swept downstream from a causeway while trying to cross a river in flood, and, on three occasions having his vehicle bashed up by elephants. As described in Among the Elephants, these incidents were scary enough to make a prospective wildlife biologist choose another career. That said, except for the rhino encounter, it was Iain’s Land Rover that sustained the most damage. Holed, ripped, bent, and lifted by angry elephants, its fenders were crumpled, roof squashed, and windows broken; the big animals sometimes pushed it around like a baby carriage. It’s a wonder the vehicle lasted through Iain’s study. Nonetheless, it did and here are some of Iain’s findings:
(a) Manyara had the densest elephant population of any park in Africa, well over 10 / sq. mile (3.0 / sq km). Elephants dominated the park’s large-mammal biomass (with buffaloes coming in a close second);
(b) Fortunately, the park’s elephants were not completely confined to the park but had access to the Marang Forest Reserve above the escarpment to the southwest. This reduced the chances, at least for the time being, of their numbers overwhelming the food supply;
(c) Nonetheless, Manyara’s elephant population still might someday outgrow their food supply, destroy their habitat, and starve.
Therefore, Iain proposed the acquisition of land owned by European farmers (many of whom were already leaving the country) at the south of the park. This would provide more room for the park’s elephants but also allow them access, across lightly settled land south of the lake, to the Tarangire Game Reserve (now national park) ten miles to the east (Fig. 3).
Over thirty years later, in 2009, Tanzania National Parks finalized this acquisition, providing hope for the future of Manyara’s elephants.
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)
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.
