Tanzania’s mountain marvels

Dar es Salaam moves past me like a filmstrip as I drive out west. I pass railway tracks, a shopping mall, and second-hand clothes for sale hanging from the mwarobaini trees. Street vendors slip into the interstices of the traffic jams like water, their arms held aloft where the spaces are too tight, young men looking for pockets of opportunity in the shifting network of supply and demand.

They all sell something different: footballs, ice creams, avocados, chef hats, cotton buds, battery chargers, cassava chips. The catchy melodies of Bongo Flava — a blend of Afrobeat, Swahili, English slang and American hip-hop — roll out of a radio, mixed with police sirens and the hollow sound of a train’s horn. I close the windows to keep out the dust, but somehow it still seeps through the gaps to cover me in a pale film that will cling to me for weeks.

I could have taken the Dar-Dodoma train, which can take up to eight hours to get to Morogoro. This is the gateway to the Uluguru mountains, sitting midway between two of Tanzania’s largest cities. Instead, I’m travelling west by car, meandering into the dips and hollows of the landscape to research a new book.

The journey is straightforward: if you leave Dar in the late morning, taking the most direct route by the main A7 highway, you should reach Morogoro in time to catch the falling light. It’s a spectacular moment to arrive. The Ulugurus rise out of the plain as sharp as an etching. As the sun slices across the land, the earth reddens, and the greens deepen to emerald. The mango trees, the shuttlecocks of sisal plants become more vivid, their colours intensifying. Driving through a tunnel of moringa trees, a Verreaux’s eagle-owl swoops up towards me, its wingspan caught in the last of the gilding light.

For a few days, I’m basing myself at a local farm-stay called Mbuyuni Farm Retreat, or Place of the Baobabs, which is located a 20-minute drive east of town. There are four cottages in total: one- and two-bedroom bungalows, with glass doors that open on to a lawn. Weaver birds dart to and from nests that hang like baubles from trees. There’s a pretty pool set among the acacias, and food largely supplied from the owners’ own organic farm: breakfasts of fresh fruit, farm eggs, homemade bread and locally made cheese; a leg of roasted lamb for dinner.

The lodge, recommended to me by a local friend, is sometimes used as a stepping stone on the southern safari circuit (including Nyerere National Park — carved from about two-thirds of the Selous Game Reserve in 2019 — Ruaha and Mikumi), though I’d wager a brief stop-off misses the point: the region stands on its own for a much longer holiday, combining Mbuyuni’s farm-stay comforts with camping and hiking in the nearby hills.

The Ulugurus are, in fact, a bizarre oversight in modern tourism — the result of an out-of-date emphasis on the classic megafauna of the Out of Africa safari industry, which means that more nuanced cultural encounters are neglected.

Fertile and densely populated, the Ulugurus are made up of two main ranges that form a steep ridgeline running along a north-south axis, with a kind of saddle-like dip, the Bunduki Gap, at their waist.

They are part of a broken chain of ancient forests scattered over the Eastern Arc Mountains, which stretch from the Taita Hills in Kenya to the southernmost Udzungwa in Tanzania. It is thought that tens of millions of years ago, the forests extended east to west across the African continent but, with climatic and geological shifts, they gradually reduced to these isolated patches at higher elevations, giving a feeling of a lost world.

There are numerous plant and animal species unique to the Ulugurus: at least 135 plants, three amphibians, and two spectacular birds, the Loveridge’s sunbird, with its bottle-green head and reddish neckerchief, and the yellow-breasted Uluguru bush-shrike, which you will find nowhere else on earth. There are numerous other rare animals, including the critically endangered Uluguru mountain grasshopper — thought by some locals to have inspired Tanzania’s national flag, given its striking blue, green, yellow and black colourway — and the Abbott’s duiker, an antelope so elusive it was reportedly only photographed in the wild for the first time in 2003.

The Axmann family, which owns Mbuyuni, have put me in touch with a local guide and tour operator called Charles Masunzu — a jovial, round-faced enthusiast who knows the Ulugurus intimately. Masunzu is busy preparing for a Pentecostal pastor’s upcoming “crusade” into the mountain villages. He also helps scientists, having worked as a field researcher for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

It was around this time that Morogoro also became one of the bases for South Africa’s anti-apartheid leaders

People come and go from these parts, says Masunzu. They always have. Morogoro is a crossroads, a melting pot. It was a critical staging post for 19th-century caravans travelling into the interior from the coast. A place that belongs “to everywhere and nowhere”, observed the Guyanese writer and anthropologist Ivan van Sertima in the late 1960s: “scraps from Asia, the Arab world and Europe pasted hastily across the face of an African mural of fields and mountains”. It was around this time that Morogoro also became one of the bases for South Africa’s anti-apartheid leaders. Morogoro and the surrounding villages, sympathetic with the African National Congress’s ambitions, granted refuge and political asylum.

I like the feel of the place: the town’s wide avenues flanked by leafy mango trees, and the slot machines that trill in the front of the street-side bars where boda boda drivers hang out waiting for trade. We chat in a restaurant where Turkish railway workers come to eat. Masunzu pats his belly, pleased with the eating we’re getting done as we plot our course for the week.

He talks excitedly, in a gentle stream of consciousness. The Ulugurus are fertile ground, he says. The iron in the soil — have I noticed how red it is? It’s used by pregnant women all over Tanzania to prevent nausea. I wonder if it has anything to do with the cave that the 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton made mention of, where local women came to improve their chances of having a child. There are various such places, says Masunzu, sacred to the local Waluguru, if they’ll let us in. We’ll camp near Kinole, he says, and meet the traditional leader of the people, Chief Kingalu Mwanabanzi, who lives close to the mobile tower on the Ulugurus’ eastern flank.

Over the next few days, Masunzu is true to his word. A kind and knowledgeable naturalist, he takes me hiking among the villages, where his warmth sparks conversations with strangers. We sleep in the forest under simple mosquito nets — a thin wall between me and the stars. I dip my feet into the water where the source of the Ruvu River spreads over black rocks into a haze so thin it’s like paddling in warm light. We visit a cave with a labyrinth of cool corridors and nesting bats where, during the first world war, the Waluguru chief hid from the Germans.

At another cave, a crowd gathers. A village elder explains why. There’s a rock shaped like a woman inside, he says, but it’s missing a breast; the people say a white woman stole it. A long time ago, some missionaries built a church close to this sacred place, but one evening they were beaten by invisible sticks. The mountain spirit drove the white people away.

I get the point, and take my leave in order to camp close to the Mvuha River, where we find locals panning for gold in the chocolate water. I get talking with a group of eight young men covered in red mud, among them graduates in forestry conservation who can’t find government jobs. They have permits for pit-digging the banks with spades.

“‘The first time we found a piece of gold, I cannot tell you the feeling,” says one of the men. “Once you touch gold, you can feel how powerful it is, even when you close your eyes.”

“The colour of gold is very strong,” says another. “When you see it in the earth, it’s a shining yellow, like a sun in the mud.

“Last month, we only got 2.9 grammes between the eight of us. But you have to keep digging.” 

We head for Kinole, winding into thick jungle punctured by the bare trunks of Sterculia appendiculata trees, which are the colour of bleached bones. We pitch our tents in a clearing, play football with the local kids, then head into higher elevations on a path shaded with waxy leaves. The trees are festooned with seed pods, and the scent of cloves and pepper.

Chief Kingalu is waiting for us in a clutch of houses beneath the radio tower. Sitting next to him in a semi-circle of plastic chairs is a young woman in a cream dress printed with red lilies. There are two other elders present and, in the shadows, a lizard with turret eyes, which holds its pose throughout.

Chief Kingalu is an older, soft-spoken man, with a slim build and a thoughtful frown. He looks at an 1879 map of the region I’ve brought with me. He strokes his chin, and translates some of the place names in the 19th-century diary I’m working with, which records encounters described by the European imperialists in his people’s ancestral lands. In the 1870s, it would have been a different kinship line in control of the area, says Chief Kingalu, because if there’s no daughter, the chieftainship passes into another branch.

“You mean son,” I remark.

“No, I mean daughter. Since women give birth to the child, they are powerful in our culture. Women hold the clan. A mother divides the land between her daughters. If she only has sons, then it goes to her sister’s family.”

A mother divides the land between her daughters. If she only has sons, then it goes to her sister’s family

There’s a recipe, explains one of the elders, which helps: medicines from the forest that make it easier for women to conceive girls.

I want to talk about it with the only other woman in our gathering — the one in the lily-printed dress, but she doesn’t speak. I’ve noticed she doesn’t even look me in the eye.

“Bibi,” says Masunzu. “We address her as Bibi. We can’t know her real name. She’s the chief’s wife. No one in the village ever speaks her name.”

The group explains how female clan power commands the Waluguru’s traditional relationship with land, although resource pressure continues to shift the balance, as it does all over Tanzania. It’s becoming an increasingly hot topic — the coexistence of community, conservation and traditional land use. In July, Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, hosted the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s first Africa Protected Areas Congress. More than 2,000 delegates called on African governments to implement more inclusive conservation models, which recognise the role of indigenous peoples and traditional practices in building and maintaining successful conservation policies.

The history of this is loaded. In the first instance, it was the colonial period that profoundly disrupted the old system of land rights, cutting locals out. After independence, other Tanzanian tribes moved into new areas, such as the Ulugurus. A population boom means the land is now harvested more intensively than was traditional for the Waluguru, although there is formal protection of about 240 sq km of the Uluguru Mountains as a forest reserve.

I want more than ever to hear the female point of view on this unique matrilineal culture; instead, I can only observe where the modern lines of power lie. The chief and the elders stand up and show me where the old-growth forest used to be — way down below us — and where that boundary has moved to above the village. The chief describes the wild animals he remembers from his childhood, which have since disappeared.

“Some of us still worship the trees,” he says, “and we still mention our traditional gods by name. Even though we are Christian and Muslim, we haven’t lost that connection.” 

I ask Chief Kingalu if he is optimistic. He pauses and strokes his chin.

“In the Uluguru Mountains, our streams never run dry,” he replies.

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