1965: Northern Highlands Forest Reserve, Tanzania

Suddenly, ahead, a soft clunk sounded. Cowbell! The chief forest guard, an older man whose stiff curly hair was sprinkled with white, whispered that we should be especially quiet now. He and I were leading a group of forest guards and game scouts on a patrol for livestock trespassing in the forest reserve. Easing our way slowly around stumps, we carefully pushed branches aside to look ahead, studying each clearing before entering it, tense with anticipation.

“Wewe! Simama!” You! Stop!

“Kamata yeye!” Catch him!

Guards and scouts alike charged into the bushes . . .

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.

Now that I’ve grabbed your attention, and you’re wondering what happens next, I’m taking the opportunity to introduce some important background information before resuming the story. In my previous post, I promoted the scenery and wildlife of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) to the extent that some readers probably wondered why, if it was so great, it wasn’t a national park. The answer is that it once was. From 1951-1959 it comprised the western part of the Serengeti National Park.

However, difficulties encountered from having people, in this case Maasai pastoralists and non-Maasai cultivators, living in an area strictly devoted to the conservation of wildlife forced the then territorial government to remove the eastern Serengeti Plains and Crater Highlands from the park and place them within a separate entity, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. This allowed the Maasai to continue their pastoral existence while the government controlled the use of certain key areas, including Ngorongoro and Empakaai craters, the eastern Serengeti Plains, and the archeological site at Oldupai Gorge. Thus, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area became a multiple-use management area, the only one in Tanzania to protect wildlife while allowing human habitation.

The NCA’s montane forests provide an example of multiple use. Ranging in elevation from 5,000-10,000 ft (1,600-3,000 m), most forest cover occurs within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve, a 50 mile (80 km) band of green on the southern and eastern slopes of the Crater Highlands. Here, monsoonal air masses off the Indian Ocean 200 miles (320 km) away are forced to rise, cool, and condense into mist, clouds, and rainfall. This, together with cool high-elevation temperatures, is conducive to a moist environment. Thus, unlike elsewhere in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where green foliage is a seasonal phenomenon, montane forest remains green throughout the year.

The first thing that struck me upon entering an undisturbed (by cutting, fire, etc.) stand of montane forest was the dim light filtering through the dense canopy 50 to 60 feet overhead. Only here and there did a beam of sunlight slant down to brighten a patch of he forest floor. The next was how a dense understory of shrubs and small trees often hampered my movements, while at other times it was so scattered (or absent) that I could walk freely across the forest floor, the latter made soft and springy by several inches of decomposing organic matter. This made it easier to appreciate the trees, which I differentiated by their many types of bark, which ranged from silver to black, and from smooth to rough, including fissured, corrugated, scaly, flaking, and peeling.

Ngorongoro’s forests comprised many tree and shrub species. Some were worthy of note, if only for their descriptive names, including pillar wood (Cassipourea malosana), cheese wood (Pittosporum viridiflorum), brittle wood (Nuxia congesta), and black ironwood (Olea capensis). The latter, also called Elgon olive (for Mt. Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border), stands out because it is so dense and heavy that it will not float. (Check out the world’s ten heaviest woods at https://www.wood-database.com/top-ten-heaviest-woods/).

Cape chestnut (Calodendron capense) has beautiful flowers. East African pencil cedar (Juniperus procera) is the largest species of Juniper in the world. Mountain bamboo (Arundinaria alpina) is a very large woody grass. The fresh leaves and shoots of Khat or Miraa (Catha edulis) were chewed as a stimulant throughout much of eastern Africa, especially the Horn of Africa. Podo (Podocarpus milanjianus), African mahogany (Entandrophragma angolense), and East African pencil cedar woods were highly prized for construction and other uses. However, these species were not abundant enough in Ngorongoro’s forests to attract commercial operations.

In the case of the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve, a lack of commercially exploitable tree species didn’t matter because its principal purpose, ever since its establishment in 1927, was the protection of forest catchments for water production. Thus, although the forest fulfilled local domestic wood product needs, such as building poles, and firewood, it was far more important for the water (twenty-four small streams and seven springs) it provided beyond its boundaries to coffee and wheat estates, tourist facilities, Mbulu farmers, and Maasai pastoralists. Water infiltrating into the forest’s soils also sustained important groundwater forest habitat over ten miles (sixteen km) away in Lake Manyara National Park (see earlier post, On the Road to Ngorongoro: Part III)

However, the main reason for including the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve in the Serengeti National Park (1n 1951) and then the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (1959), was its value as wildlife habitat, especially for buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos. At the time it was thought that the large animals living in the forest seldom left it, although tourists would often see them along the road. However, subsequent studies revealed that rhinos often traveled back and forth between the forest and the floor of Ngorongoro Crater. Furthermore, before their access routes were blocked by new farms, elephants once moved between the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve and the Rift Valley floor near Lake Manyara .

Finally, the montane forests of Ngorongoro supported yet another use, a great deal of it illegal. Much of the forest within the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve was discontinuous, separated by secondary scrub and grassy glades. Possible causes included cultivation carried out many years ago, fire, and grazing/browsing by livestock. Maasai herders were sometimes allowed, under permit, to pasture their livestock in forest glades during droughts. Fires, set in the glades to remove dry grass often escaped into the forest, damaging trees. Browsing by livestock destroyed tree seedlings. Trampling hooves compacted soils, reducing their ability to absorb rainfall. These impacts had the potential to seriously reduce the forest’s water catchment value.

It was for this reason that Henry Fosbrooke, the conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, wanted me, the NCA’s assistant conservator (forests), to stop forest trespass by Maasai livestock. “The forest guards aren’t doing their job properly. You must shape them up.” This explains why, in the first paragraph of this post, I and a group of forest guards and game scouts are portrayed sneaking through the trees trying apprehend trespassing herders and their animals. We now return to that story.

The person caught by the scouts and guards was a Maasai herd boy. Soon afterward, they caught another herder, and then another. We nabbed six herders and roughly a thousand cattle that day. Together with those apprehended a few days earlier in another part of the forest, this made ten people and two-thousand cattle. No wonder the forest reserve was degraded. Three days later, the herders and I appeared in a magistrate’s court in the town of Karatu where the African magistrate levied such a small fine that a relative of the herders paid it on the spot.

“They treat these fines as grazing fees” whispered a senior staff member of the NCA, Solomon ole Saibull, into my ear. “They would willingly pay even greater amounts.” Keeping his voice low, he told me that in his experience, African magistrates seldom imposed heavy fines for forest trespass because they didn’t think it was a very important offense. Most Africans, educated or not, considered forest reserves to be relicts of colonialism, set aside by the ‘wazungu’ for their own purposes, not the African’s. “He [the magistrate] probably thinks the reserve should be converted to farms,”Solomon hissed.

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.

Here was another factor contributing to degradation within the forest reserve. Now I understood why the forest guards weren’t interested in braving elephants and buffaloes to catch trespassing livestock. Why bother if it did no good? Consequently, despite our efforts, I and the forest guards were to have little impact on the numbers of trespassing livestock during my time at Ngorongoro.

We now jump ahead thirty years. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) general management plan, published in 1996, emphasized, among other things, the continuing need to better control both fire and forest grazing. Apparently, the NCA foresters who came after me also had trouble controlling forest trespass.

Furthermore, the management plan also stated that Ngorongoro’s forests were under considerable pressure from illegal harvesting of trees for local domestic use. This to the extent that Mafu (Fagaropsis angolensis) and Khat or Miraa (Catha edulis) were listed as ‘threatened’ tree species in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area due to extensive logging of the former for building materials, and heavy harvesting of the latter for its drug properties.

This undoubtedly reflects rapid population growth, both within and outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania’s population approximately tripled from 1960 to 1996), which has created a higher demand for forest products. (For information on population growth in Tanzania, go to https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/tanzania-population.)

I wonder what the situation is now, twenty-six years later.