A year in Tanzania

Issue 30

Tanzania doesn’t sit still for a moment. As the months race by, the country witnesses some remarkable annual events, from the subtle blossoming of African violets in the Usambara Mountains to the legendary and utterly spectacular charge of migrating wildebeest across the Serengeti. If you’re lucky enough to have more than a couple of weeks to explore, its varied charms can get right under your skin, as Jens Finke, author of the Rough Guides to Tanzania and Zanzibar, explains. Tanzania, East Africa’s largest nation, is an immensely rewarding place to visit, whatever the time of year. Lying in the tropics, just south of the equator, it has no summer or winter as such, but rather two dry and two rainy seasons, with the change from one to the next largely determined by the Indian Ocean monsoon.   The masika (main rains) sweep in on the kusi (south-east monsoon) between March and June, followed by a long dry season, until the mvuli (short rains) break around October or November. The arid kaskazi (north-east monsoon) then brings another dry spell, before the cycle begins anew. Tanzania is blessed with several outstanding attractions: the Serengeti Plains, famed for the largest migration of mammals on earth, an 800km trek to Kenya and back following the annual rains; snow-capped Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, best tackled when it’s dry; the “Spice Islands” of Zanzibar, with their idyllic palm-fringed beaches and the achingly atmospheric capital of Stone Town, coolest in the heart of the long dry season; and Ngorongoro Crater, offering excellent wildlife-watching all year round, with heaps of predators and their prey in surreal surroundings. The country’s wildlife is, for most visitors, its incontestable highlight, and there’s little to match the sweet mixture of awe and excitement that comes with being on safari, whether on foot with a backpack or in the lap of neo-colonial luxury. Over 40 per cent of Tanzania is under some form of natural protection and its wide range of habitats supports an immense wealth of plant and animal species, making it the fourth most biodiverse nation on earth. Add to this some of the world’s oldest rock paintings, a rich cultural heritage, superb hiking, coral reefs for snorkelling and diving, and you have the makings of a trip of a lifetime. For me, what really makes Tanzania special is its people: genuinely friendly and welcoming, despite widespread poverty, and proud of both their tribal heritage and Tanzanian identity. Genuine friendships are easily made, and as a traveller you’ll generally be met with open arms, meals, and as many children to climb on your back as you like. I fell in love with the place within an hour of arriving: alongside the road from the airport to Arusha was a small village amidst rich green plots of maize where women dressed in colourful kanga wraps were dancing to drums in a shimmer of laughter, the low golden sunlight striking the dusty red-brown soil to caress my eyes. I still have no idea what they were celebrating, but the combination of music, colour and movement had me hooked. February to May- The long rains and Kukata Kiuno I left Dar es Salaam right at the end of the dry spell, and headed south. The tarmac disappeared soon after I’d left Dar, and I had my first mud-driving experience in the floodplain of the Rufiji, Tanzania’s largest perennial river. The scattered showers of the long rains were beginning to fall, showers that would soon become metronomic in their precision, drenching the land every afternoon for months on end, rapidly turning southern Tanzania’s roads into muddy quagmires. Most of the safari camps and lodges close down for the season, and tourists are scarce. I was driving inland along the border with Mozambique when the first rains fell for real. At length, the dirt road I was following finally disappeared under a torrent of water, and my Land Rover got stuck in a pothole amidst the swell. Local kids clustered around excitedly, yelling out a mixture of encouragement and insults. Even in these remote parts, world news had filtered through, so in addition to the usual “mzungu!” (white man), the bare-faced “give me money”, the sly “give me my money”, and the cheery “Good morning, teacher!” (kids are taught English in the morning when their minds are at their most radiant), I was greeted with a squeaky little voice saying “Bin Laden, give me money!” The moral: shave more frequently. Incidentally, Afro-Europeans and Afro-Americans need not feel left out: you’re called mzungu mwafrikano. The term mzungu was first reported by nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers, who flattered themselves to think that it meant wondrous, clever or extraordinary. The appearance of the first Europeans in Tanzania may indeed have been wondrous, but probably more in the sense of being strange rather than marvellous. The original meaning of the word is perhaps more appropriate. Stemming from zungua, it means to go round, to turn, to wander, to travel, or just to be tiresome. You choose. Just count yourself lucky that the Maasai word for Europeans didn’t stick: they called trouser-wearing folk iloridaa enjekat – those who confine their farts. The Maasai are the best known of Tanzania’s tribes, one of several semi-nomadic cattle-herding peoples who inhabit the region around the safari parks in the north. There are, however, at least 127 other tribes in Tanzania, perhaps not as visually striking as the red-robed, spear-carrying Maasai warriors, but with equally rich traditions, histories, customs, beliefs and music. For many years, only backpackers or those with months on their hands had the privilege of really getting to know people. But Tanzania’s award-winning Cultural Tourism Programme, set up in 1995, has broken new ground in enabling tourists, even those with limited time or money, to experience for themselves local life in an unhurried, intimate, and inevitably fascinating way.   Covering twenty locations, visitors have the chance to stay with local communities for anything from a few hours to a few days, meeting elders, healers, farmers, potters and other artisans, and visiting sights of local importance like ritual forests, the graves of chiefs, viewpoints, waterfalls, and crystal-clear streams. The locals benefit financially, with profits going towards small-scale projects such as community schools, dispensaries, irrigation systems, reforestation and erosion control. It’s a fantastic idea, and one that gave me one of my most memorable Tanzanian experiences. Lushoto, capital of the western Usambara Mountains, is home to one of the most successful of the programmes, giving visitors a chance to clamber through mountainous rainforests in search of Colobus and blue monkeys. The highlight of my own visit, apart from meeting the monkeys and sampling some of Tanzania’s 184 varieties of bananas, was the uncommon privilege of being an honorary female for a night, as the guest of Hyasintha, my guide, and her family. To subscribe or order this issue click here. I was invited to join a kibwebwe – an all-night, women-only celebration for the birth of a mother’s first child. Fuelled by a large pot of cloudy sugar cane wine, its signature dance move, the kukata kiuno, involves the rhythmical and circular swaying and shuddering of the nether regions. Understandably, such displays are usually kept from the gaze of men, except those of fleeting feminine status. Accompanied by the insistent and alluring throbbing of drum beats, the bawdy lyrics both entertained and educated the new mother about her obligations and responsibilities. Inevitably, my presence was the source of much hilarity, especially among the more elderly – and decidedly more drunken – mothers and grandmothers, who took great joy in shaking their backsides towards the enjoyably embarrassed mzungu before collapsing in hysterics. The main drummer was a thin woman in her late twenties, who had a fat baby boy strapped to her back in the usual fashion, using a brightly coloured piece of kanga cloth that matched the piece she wore wrapped around her body. As she drummed out a pulsating, hypnotic rhythm, rocking sometimes quite violently to and fro, her baby’s head rocked too, striking its mother’s sweat-beaded back in time with the music. Not once did the baby wake up. May to June-The rains subside: mosquitoes, flies and the slave route The long rains gradually come to an end towards the end of May or in June, having transformed the country into a gaudy green tapestry. Many roads are reduced to barely passable muddy ditches, with puddles that breed malarial mosquitoes and a host of other unwelcome bugs. Tanzanian mosquitoes seem to have evolved a preference for flying against dark or patterned backgrounds, like bedroom cupboards and curtains – thus foiling all attempts at swatting them. Charles Darwin would have been impressed. Bugs and more bugs. At this time of year, the broad-leafed deciduous miombo woodland of Tanzania’s central plateau has finally been washed clean of its dust and monotone hues. It’s a visual delight, but it’s infested by sleeping sickness-carrying tsetse fly. The nineteenth-century slave and ivory trade routes used to be blocked for a good part of the year as a result. Up and down the coast from Dar es Salaam are a number of former slave-trading towns – among them Bagamoyo, Kilwa, Mikindani, Tanga and Pangani – all attractive in sleepily decrepit and abandoned kinds of ways. Pangani is my favourite, both for its beach and for the muezzin of its main mosque, whose unusually blunt early morning exhortations include a litany of colourful curses, invariably finishing with the classic “If you sleep now, your bed will be your coffin and your sheets your shroud!” Slavery had been present in East Africa since ancient times – it was mentioned by Greek and Egyptian writers – but only reached its terrible zenith in the nineteenth century, when Omani Arabs assumed control of the trade routes. At its height, 60,000 people were transported annually from the steamy Great Lakes region to the coast, to be shipped to the then Omani capital of Stone Town in Zanzibar. Each of the Stone Town slave market’s tiny, dingy cells used to house up to 75 slaves. Today, a bleak memorial sculpture stands on the site. The market, Africa’s last, was closed in 1873 by a reluctant Sultan Barghash under pressure from the British, but domestic slavery did not completely disappear from Zanzibar until 1917. My own journey along the slave routes was by train. For the most part, the railway between Dar es Salaam and Kigoma follows the exact same path as the most infamous of the trade roads. The mango trees scattered along the 1200km track are said to have sprouted from seeds discarded by slaves – but the beautiful scenery offered no other reminder of the horrors of the past. June to July -The long, cool dry season begins: chimps, steamers and harvest dances The slave routes and the explorers that shared them used to converge on the perennially hot and humid town of Ujiji, tucked into the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika a few kilometres from the railway’s end at Kigoma town. There isn’t much to see in Ujiji other than a plaque marking the alleged spot where Stanley stumbled upon Livingstone and uttered those famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” but there’s more to the lake – the world’s longest freshwater body, the second-deepest, and one of the oldest – than its sordid history, especially if you’re the kind of person (like me) who listens in rapture to frogs calling out from a pond. On the eastern shore are the national parks of Gombe Stream and Mahale Mountains, both home to chimpanzees, the study of which over the last forty years has greatly expanded our understanding of them – and of us. The weeks after the rains have subsided are a good time to join a tracking expedition. Chimps, it turns out, are even more human than I had thought: murder, infanticide, cannibalism, and even outright warfare have been witnessed and minutely recorded. The highlight of a visit to Tanzania’s western regions is a trip by steamer. On Lake Nyasa, I rode first-class with a coffin whose occupant was being returned to his birthplace. It’s a glorious and inspiring route. As the jagged Livingstone Mountains turned blue in the evening mist, we cruised over the lake’s calm, unbroken waters into the night. Thanks to the dereliction of each and every pier and jetty along the way, the skipper’s docking technique was unorthodox. Taming the engines, he simply rammed the ship’s prow into the beach and dropped a ladder. Following such a manoeuvre at the village of Lupindi, we were met by dozens of women and children up to their necks in water, selling fried fish and cassava. They passed this up to the passengers in water jugs strapped to long bamboo poles, into which payment would be placed. Meanwhile young boys in dugouts paddled skilfully to the stern of the boat to sell more food, and ducks swam around and mated, the whole scene illuminated by two strong spotlights from the ship that also brought into vision the spinning columns of insects that would make the night unbearable. To subscribe or order this issue click here On another occasion I witnessed a riotous and hugely enjoyable dance competition at the Sukuma village of Bujora. Bujora lies 15km east of Mwanza, the Sukuma town on the shores of Nyanza (Lake Victoria), Tanzania’s largest lake. The competition was one of a series held in June and July after the harvest, between rival wigashe (dance societies). Their nineteenth-century founders, Ngika and Gumha, were healers who could not agree which of them had the most powerful dawa (medicine). A dance contest was organised to decide the issue, and the format, which remains unchanged, is for the competing societies to perform concurrently, with the crowd being free to move between the two. The better the dawa, the bigger the crowd. Given that crowd size is the key to success, each passing year sees new and innovative dance routines, tricks and costumes. All possess the most outrageous gymnastic prowess. Some dancers use articulated wooden puppets as props, others use stilts or fire breathing, and the Ngika society can be relied upon to pull out their enduring crowd stopper, the bugobugobo snake dance, a hugely theatrical affair starring live pythons. July to October-The heart of the dry season:migration and mountaineering As the dry season wears on the ground becomes dry and brittle, the air fills with dust, and Tanzania’s wildlife converges on a diminishing collection of water pools in otherwise dry river beds. In the Serengeti-Ngorongoro ecosystem, vast herds begin to leave for Kenya’s Maasai Mara in anticipation of the short rainy season. The Serengeti needs little introduction: its well-documented annual migration of over a million wildebeest, zebra and antelope, together with their natural predators, provides one of the world’s most awesome wildlife spectacles. In the Serengeti, every season brings its rewards: in February and March, the plains are dotted with wildebeest and their newborn, and from April to June, before the migration commences, animal concentrations are at their highest, with predators never far away. But nothing can match watching the perilous river crossings en route to Kenya: June for Serengeti’s Grumeti River, and July and August for the Mara River crossing into the Maasai Mara. Both can be the scene of true carnage as the panicked herds struggle across the raging flows in a writhing mass of bodies, and the weak and injured are picked off by crocodiles and lions. Adjacent to the Serengeti is Ngorongoro Crater, an enormous volcanic caldera providing a year-round haven for wildlife in a glorious setting. It’s the only place in Tanzania where you’re pretty much guaranteed to see rhino in their natural habitat, and some might say you also stand a good chance of spotting a good number of tourists in their natural habitat, too. This is the land of designer safari outfits, designer safaris, and designer safari lodges. The long dry season is prime time for the energetic, ideal for attempting an ascent of Kilimanjaro, the “roof of Africa”. This ice-capped dormant volcano has exerted an irresistible fascination since it was “discovered” by Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century. Rising almost 5km from the surrounding plains to a peak of 5891m, Kilimanjaro – a national park and World Heritage Site – is Africa’s highest mountain and one of the world’s largest volcanoes, covering some 3885km2. It is also exceptionally beautiful, both from afar and close up. The Chagga people have a wonderful tale about the origin of Kilimanjaro’s main peaks, Kibo and Mawenzi, who, they say, were sisters. Kibo, the broad snow-capped one, was the wiser of the two, and was careful to store away food for times of hardship. Her sister, Mawenzi, however, had no such cares for the future, and fell into the habit of asking Kibo for help whenever times were bad. Eventually, Kibo became angry with her sister’s begging, and hit her on the head with a spoon. Hence Mawenzi’s ragged and broken appearance. Further east, Kilimanjaro’s foothills give way to the much older granite formations of the Pare and Usambara Mountains, repository of some of the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests, especially at Amani Nature Reserve near the coast, one of fourteen global hotspots for species diversity, and deservedly dubbed the “Galapagos of Africa”. Any hike in the area is immensely rewarding, both for the forest itself, and its unusual denizens, including the African violet (Usambara’s most famous endemic) and a lurid orange land crab that likes to hide under fallen leaves. November to December-The short rains: feasts and celebrations Peak tourist time begins at the end of the short rains, when the landscape is briefly covered in fresh vegetation. Wildlife viewing is at its best a few weeks later, when the grass begins to wither: less vegetation for animals to hide in. With little effort, even the laziest of visitors can easily catch sight of the emblematic Big Five: elephant, lion, leopard, rhino and buffalo. Particularly good at this time of year is Tarangire National Park, which in addition to “traditional” game drives, offers the chance of night game drives in open-topped vehicles, or even walks, the animals lit up by spotlights. Though you probably won’t see many predators, the sight of dozens of eyes peering back at you from the night is an eerily bewitching experience, and comical, too, in the case of Cape hares, with eyes that seem to bounce up and down as they flee. Back on the coast in Dar es Salaam, it’s worth braving the attentions of the city’s hustlers, money-changers, dope dealers and safari touts – all busy plying their trade in the cloying January swelter – if only to make the most of East Africa’s most exuberant club scene. Dar’s competing dance bands light up the night with bold, brassy rhythms, sounds to stir the heaviest of legs. Call me old-fashioned, but my favourite is the venerable OTTU Jazz Band, formed just after Independence in 1964. You pay your fee and enter a dark, packed open-air courtyard, the band illuminated by garish spotlights on one side. OTTU’s twanga pepeta style appeals to all tribes and all ages. I still see old-timers happily doing their very East African interpretation of the Twist, whilst younger souls prefer the raunchier pelvic thrusts and gyrating hips that have been de rigueur in Congolese music videos for getting on for a decade. Anything goes. This is the hottest time of year, perfect for exploring the coast’s fringing reefs, where you have an outside chance of hearing blue whales as they migrate northwards.   The highlights for divers and snorkellers alike are Mafia Island, off the south coast, and Zanzibar’s Pemba Island, close to Kenya, which offers vertiginous drop-offs, largely unspoiled reefs and a stupendous variety of life. Misali Island, off Pemba, is a personal favourite. Here, snorkellers and divers will hear a subtle and exultant symphony: the rhythmical tapping of fish pecking at corals, the creaking of the corals themselves yielding to the current, and the pop and crackle of collapsing air bubbles. There’s another excellent reason to visit Pemba at the start of the year: bull-fighting. Adopted from the Portuguese, who had sojourned for less than a century in the islands before being kicked out by the Omanis, the fights are traditionally held from December to February, and like their Portuguese counterparts do not result in the death of the animals. In fact, the hapless bullfighters are armed only with a white cloth. There’s nothing particularly formal about the event: the bullrings and stands are haphazardly erected, and the proceedings often take unpredictable twists, such as an understandably panicked matador shinning up the nearest tree, much to the delight of the assembled crowd. The fights themselves feature up to six specially trained bulls. Initially tethered, the bulls are provoked by jostling crowds and tandaa pipe music until sufficiently enraged, after which they are untethered, the crowd scatters and the matador takes over. His skill lies in pulling off fleeting displays of macho bravado in between avoiding the bull’s charges. Strangely, it’s the pre-fight preparations that harbour the event’s real significance: the evening before, villagers hold a dance called umund and visit graves to receive help from their ancestors and ask for the arrival of the rains. Closed by nature, Zanzibar’s Islamic society only reveals itself through glimpses – a door left ajar, a fleeting face at a balcony window, an enigmatic smile. The best windows onto Zanzibar behind the facade are provided by a couple of year-round, nocturnal attractions. The oddly-named Jaws Corner, in the heart of Stone Town’s labyrinth, is the best of the town’s barazas. Here stone benches and elderly gentlemen selling wicked cups of Turkish coffee form a focus for communal life.  Jaws Corner got its name from the film, perhaps the first to have been shown on the square’s battered TV, casting a cold blue flickering light over the scene. Looking away from a kung-fu film with Chinese subtitles, my real joy is in observing people’s faces, eyes gazing transfixed at the screen, laughing when the baddies get their due, anxious when the hero’s luck is down. Meanwhile, the evening streetfood market at the waterfront Forodhani Gardens in Stone Town is reason itself to visit Zanzibar. It combines a magical twilight atmosphere with a variety and quality of food that would put many a 5-star hotel to shame – yet it’s also one of the cheapest places to eat in the islands. The eclectic cuisine is an easy blend of African and Oriental, and the choice is regal, ranging from seafood caught that morning and cooked with local spices, to goat meat served with superb homemade chilli sauce (pilipili hoho), washed down with gently spiced zamzam tea, Turkish coffee, coconut milk or tamarind juice. It’s a delicious reflection of the welcoming blend of tribes and cultures, religions and beliefs that is Tanzania. 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