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Location Nearest town: Moshi is a bike-ride away. Arusha and Kilimanjaro International Airport are about two hours away. Where will I be staying? We are the guests of the local “Folk College” which is a secondary school combined with a technical college. The student age-range is 16 to late-twenties and a mixture of academic and applied courses are taught. It is a campus college and our HQ is a residential block that has twin-share rooms, a kitchen & dining area and a shower block.
Our host community: The Chagga people. Chagga land ownership: Africa’s original cultivators! Land is privately owned and farmed in smallholdings. They have developed a wonderful multi-layered system of farming where the fertile volcanic soil supports ground-growing crops, beneath bushes (such as coffee) in turn below fruit-bearing trees. Thus one piece of land yields food from three separate levels. Chagga Society: originally they were 30-odd warring chieftains. Under German colonisation, and latterly British influence, they developed coffee and tea cultivation which are now the mainstays of the local economy. Today, the Chagga people yield significant political power in Tanzania because they tend to be better educated than neighbouring tribes. They are also instrumental in coffee production and export. Languages: Chagga and Swahili, some English. The Chagga ethos: The Chagga hold the environment in high esteem, believing that the relationships within nature are closely connected. They utilise a rich mixture of domestic plants and have evolved a form of land use known as Vihamba, multi-story gardening. Vihamba originated on patches of forest land where useful species remained standing, while other parts of the natural forest were gradually replaced by cultivated plants from Chagga nurseries. Irrigation is an integral part of the landscape. Long before the colonial period, the Chagga tapped the water in steep, remote gorges, digging canals and hollowing out tree trunks to conduct it to settlements on mountain ridges. This provided them not only with drinking water, but with water for domestic cattle. Cattle dung in turn, was available to fertilize crops. In 1885 a packet of coffee seeds from the island of Réunion arrived at the mission in Kilema and within a few years, the Chagga were successfully growing coffee as a cash crop. By 1925 they had integrated well over one million shade-tolerant coffee bushes into the Vihamba, and 20 years later the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union had grown to include almost 30,000 members. The Chagga have become masters at combining many types of plants which not only require different amounts of light but also have roots of varying depths. For example, yams, a liana with starchy nodules, tolerate the shade of neighbouring trees, and also need the trunks of these trees as climbing supports. Today, a Chagga farmer may cultivate up to 60 different species of tree on an area the size of a football pitch. Chagga women and children attend to domestic needs, including the production of food and firewood, while the men are more concerned with cash enterprises such as banana, beer and coffee. One of the most intriguing aspects of Vihamba gardens is the way in which they spread risk by balancing food crops and cash crops. The fluctuating prices of coffee on the world market taught the Chagga at an early stage not to concentrate exclusively on coffee as a source of income. This is why bananas and other products which ensure basic subsistence never disappear from tree gardens even when coffee prices are high. As soon as the price of coffee drops below a certain level, the coffee plants are no longer fertilized, and the rust-fungus which grows on them is no longer treated with expensive fungicides. At this point yams and taro are dug up from "storage". Thus the Chagga system of resource use is not only ecologically but also economically sound. Vihamba could be the starting point for an improved method of land use in tropical ecosystems such as the rainforests of Costa Rica, Indonesia or Brazil. Ebony - The Tree of Music: Ebony is a dense, hard wood that is black: it’s so heavy that it doesn’t float in water. The African ebony tree is a member of the rosewood family, a member of the family Leguminosae genus Dalbergia, species melanoxylon. Its name refers to the dark colour of its heartwood, which is black and the name is derived from the Greek mela, or melanos, which means “black”! Ebony also grows in Mauritius, the East Indies and Sri Lanka. The West Indian green ebony (Brya Ebenus) is different altogether. The characteristics of East African ebony make it ideal for clarinets, flutes, bagpipes and oboes: it can be finely worked and turned on a lathe, almost like metal, and it is this characteristic that gives mpingo its local name, “the tree of music”. Mpingo takes 70 years to reach commercial maturity and not only is it prized by the world’s top musicians, it is much sought-after by Tanzania’s Makonde carvers. Ebony as a feed: In the savannah ecosystem ebony has three primary roles: as a feed source for herbivores such as elephants, giraffes, and wildebeests; as a soil stabilizer (via its root system); and as a soil enricher (via the nitrogen-fixing nodules on its roots). Vast forests once stretched across the savannah but now the tree is threatened with extinction and the African Blackwood Conservation Project (ABCP) has been established as a direct-action, grass-roots conservation initiative.
Makonde carving and Tingatinga Art Tribe Talk: Makonde: the Makonde live in southern Tanzania but their carvings are found throughout East Africa. They are fiercely imaginative and look as if they were inspired by William Blake in cahoots with an opium-smoking Wonderland character disappearing into a new Philip Pullman world! The "Tree of Life" or "Ujamma" is a Makonde term and describes a sculpture carved directly from an ebony trunk. The outer bark is left intact to highlight the work which displays how a typical African village survives by working with nature and by each man supporting his neighbour. The animals, men, women, children, huts and trees are carved with great detail and the work is exceptional, not least because ebony is exceedingly dense and hard to carve. Certain trees exhibit a variance in colour which is caused by the level of moisture during the tree’s life. Reddish-tinged wood comes from drier areas: jet black from the coastal areas. Sculptures vary in height and I have seen them 3 m high. Tingatinga: Edward Tingatinga comes from the same area of southern Tanzania and created a unique and now much-copied style of painting in the 1960’s. Tragically he was shot by police … by mistake! The artistic community founded a co-operative society in Dar es Salaam in his memory and the naïve, imaginative and highly colourful style now thrives in East Africa. Original Edward Tingtingas are worth a fortune nowadays!
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Part 1: Project Background.