The Uruguru Hills

Where to start? Well, we finished up in a daladala, with me squashed in next to a gorgeous family of mum, baby and little boy. Earlier, we had come down the mountain at breakneck speed, on tyres which had their inners showing, with Jack, the driver, becoming more erratic as his embarrassment grew and the three of us shouting at him to stop. Amos really did not know what to do.

Amos, of the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania, had been our guide and guru for the past three days. There is not much he doesn’t know about the trees in the forest, the fruit and berries on the hills and the Uruguru people. There is not much he does know about the workings of a car or what might constitute reckless behaviour on the part of a taxi driver.

We arrived in the small mountain town of Kilone soon after ten o’clock in the morning. The town resembles a pioneering town from the wild west a hundred years ago. Deep ruts in the red brown road matter little, as the only traffic is from young boys racing their pikipikis. The shops are wooden shacks selling everything from oil to biscuits, phone cards to bicycle spares but we can’t find a tin of coffee for love nor money.

Our first walk of the trip took us to the small settlement nestled under a mobile telephone mast – the home of Kingaro, the chief of the Uruguru tribe, the fourteenth such chief, whose ancestry can be traced back three hundred years with great accuracy, thanks to the oral tradition of histories being recounted to visitors. Sadly, he was not at home. He was away staying with one of his numerous other wives. We did, however, meet his mother and his father-in-law, the latter, having been granted permission from his son-in-law, proceeded to tell us the story of the Uruguru people. The Uruguru people speak their own language and although times are changing , retain the tradition of women in the community being the landowners and decision makers.

The hills are alive with people. Tucked away, seemingly behind every small banana plantation is a small mud hut and a family growing what they can. Bananas are the most obvious, but there are pineapples, cassaver, jack fruit, field after field of rice, black pepper, cloves, passion fruit -  even coffee. At every field, or every twist of the hillside, another shamba, and more fruit to harvest.

As we traipsed, sweating up the hill, we would rest for a while whilst young men passed us going down the mountain carrying pineapples or bananas. Intricate baskets of pineapples and whole branches of bananas strapped together are hoisted onto men’s shoulders. They run down the hill, presumably because to walk or to dally would hurt too much. We calculate that these burdens of fruit typically weigh between 50 and 70kg.

Taking photographs is often problematic. Many people are suspicious and supersticious. They often simply refuse. I have started tricking people into having their photograph taken by, first of all, inviting them to take mine. The magic of the digital camera, for young and old, brings gasps of wonder and usually great belly laughs of hilarity. A group of young men was flattered into submission as I admired their Herculean strength. They laughed as I tried in vain to lift the basket.

A man in a distant field waved to us, called “Habari?” and had his daughter run two hundred yards up the steep hill to present us with five bananas. The poverty of subsistence farming is dotted across the hills – a small fire here, women working in iron-age fashion on a steep hillside over there, babies sitting in dirt in the shade of a great mango tree while their mother scrapes the land with an ancient hoe. Dash any thoughts of pastoral idyll, this is grinding, unforgiving, relentless hard work.

Once having made the climb in soaring temperatures, the magnificent beauty of the place unfolds. We climbed one small scale of the dinosaur’s back to look down over Neolithic settlements. In the distance a jagged skyline of forest, buttressed by steep slopes of banana plants, encircles us, but lets us peer over into the great Morogoro plain in the shimmering distance.

As we picked our way down through great Jurassic ferns, avoided treading on gardenia and orchids, we heard monkeys yelping and laughing in the trees above us – trees that had grown there since the earliest man hunted and gathered.

The Kingaro’s father-in-law spoke of times when Nyerere had visited, when Arabs had come for slaves and when the British had shown them how to terrace the hillside. I asked what was good and bad about the British. They had helped with tree planting, they had stopped robbery, they had curbed unjust beatings and they had respected the role of the Kingaro. What was bad?, I asked....and my camera gave up. Honestly. But in truth, he had nothing bad to say about the British. I was left thinking that like many old men he thought fondly of happier times when he was young and fit.

And so to that reckless taxi driver and a wacky races style descent on a rutted road. We broke down in a hillbilly village where men sat on upturned boxes playing draughts with bottle tops. For a moment the scene had tension, but I accepted the offer of a game, lost easily and laughed, and all was well. The huge man with the welding gear whipped out his torch and fixed the radiator. Jack and Amos looked on helpless. As we set off down the hill, young boys were still shouting after us to mend the pancha in the front tyre, but Jack was determined to get us home. We were determined to get home alive and eventually persuaded him to stop so we could jump on the daladala that had pulled up ahead. I squeezed in beside my new family, gave the thumbs up to my young boy and we headed for Morogoro and a cold beer.