that prolonged droughts often resulted in famine, leading to political destabilization and warfare between rival chiefdoms. Famines were so common that they were often named in reference to the impacts they had. In the mid-1930s, for example, a severe drought afflicted much of Kilimanjaro. In Machame, it came to be known as njaa ya mowishi, or “the famine in which people had to eat raw whatever they came across.”15 Those who settled the mountain thus came to realize that though Kilimanjaro was a place of relative water abundance, this abundance was by no means absolute. The often-unpredictable nature of rainfall is reflected in adages and fables, the most notable being kipfilepfile kirundu kechiwa mvuo kilawe. Translated as “a little rainy cloud that never became rain,” it reminds people that they should not trust that rain is inevitable, and that they should be prepared for conditions of scarcity.16
Kilimanjaro is a landscape defined by juxtaposition. It is an area of high altitude surrounded by flat grassland, an island of water abundance in a sea of aridity. The waters of the mountain generate a rich, green expanse of vegetation absent from the brown grasslands. The altitude moderates temperatures, creating an area of relative coolness in stark contrast to the intense heat of the steppe. The mountain even sets itself apart in terms of safety; its sharp slopes and cool temperatures discourage dangerous foes such as lions, leopards, tsetse flies, and mosquitoes. The hospitable conditions of the mountain have long been attractive to human communities. Given the presence of water in a region that is largely arid, it is likely that hunter-gatherer and pastoral communities had visited the mountain’s foothills for thousands of years. Around five hundred to six hundred years ago, the ancestors of the mountain’s current peoples began to settle the agroforest belt. Drawing on the resources of the mountain, they developed a highly sophisticated agrarian society.
THE PEOPLES OF KILIMANJARO
The agrarian peoples that have come to be known as the Chagga are of Bantu descent, closely related to other Northeast Bantu peoples such as the Taita and Meru, and more distantly to the Swahili.17 Throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, outsiders considered the peoples of the mountain to be a singular group who shared a common origin and spoke similar dialects of the same language. In the past thirty years, however, historical linguists such as Derek Nurse, Gérard Philippson, and J. Christoph Winter have shown that the dialects of Chagga language are distinct enough to be considered individual languages.18 The linguistic evidence paints a more complex picture of Chagga origins than had been assumed, giving the possibility of multiple migrations over a period of more than two hundred years. These migrants settled on the ridges of the agroforest belt on the southern and eastern slopes. Within each ridge, people spoke the same language, but across the mountain, dozens of different “Chagga languages” came into being. Together they formed a dialect continuum in which people on neighboring ridges could understand their immediate neighbors, but not those living further away. The linguistic diversity of the mountain is exemplified by the numerous terms for water. In 1955, J. E. Goldthorpe noted more than five “Chagga” terms for water—moha, murra, mudha, mringa, and mota—as one passed from west to east, likely a smaller number than had existed in previous centuries.19 This shows how the rivers that carved the mountain’s valleys over millennia have influenced the linguistic landscape as well.
These migrants settled the highlands of the agroforest belt because of its moderate temperatures, its fertile soils, the security provided by the rugged landscape, and the prevalence of water. By the sixteenth century, a consistent pattern of agriculture had emerged, focusing on small homesteads known as vihamba (sing. kihamba). These were 2–4 hectares in size and contained dwellings, granaries, burial plots, stalls for livestock, and gardens for cultivating crops.20 Kihamba gardens featured mixed cultivation of food crops and fodder grasses under the shade of canopy trees (fig. 1.1). For families that practiced polygamy—indicating high status in the clan—each wife possessed a separate dwelling in the kihamba and her own areas of cultivation. Families grew a wide range of crops, bananas being the most prominent. Well suited to the humid conditions of the agroforest belt, high in calories, and low in labor need, they emerged as the dominant food on the mountain. Bananas were so central to local diet that people came to identify themselves as wandu wa mbdeny, “people of the banana groves.”21 As many as twenty-one different species were grown, with varieties for cooking, brewing, and eating raw.22 They also provided shade for the other crops of the vihamba. By the nineteenth century, common staples intercropped with bananas included yams, cassava, beans, taro, sugar cane, sweet potatoes, maize, pumpkins, and papaya.23 Most homesteads also featured dracaena (masale), a spiritually significant shrub used to mark boundaries and notable locations. Across the mountain, people considered vihamba to be the permanent property of the families that resided on them. Fathers provided elder sons with a homestead at the time of marriage, each containing at least a piece of the original estate. The youngest son inherited the remainder of the original homestead, including the original buildings and the most centrally located gardens. Yet women performed the bulk of the labor in these gardens; men assisted by clearing land and irrigating.24
Some families also developed secondary fields known as shamba in the foothills at the edge of the agroforest zone. On these plots, they cultivated grains such as maize and eleusine (Eleusine coracana, or finger millet). The practice of cultivation in the foothills differed markedly from cultivation in the vihamba in that crops were usually grown in monoculture. The most important shamba crop was eleusine, used primarily for producing an alcoholic brew called mbege. In times of drought, it could also be used as a famine food. For eleusine, planting took place just after the kisiye, and the crop grew to maturity during the dry period with irrigation. The cultivation of this crop during the dry season as opposed to the rainy season has been explained as a defense against vagrant animals. Dundas notes a story in his writings that attributes the practice to the misfortune of a farmer named Salia. One day Salia tried to scare off elephants that were ravaging his eleusine.25 Because of the rains, his gunpowder was damp, and he was unable to load his weapon to shoot at them. As he tried to dry his powder, he caused an explosion that killed himself and thirty-nine other people. Learning a lesson from this misfortune, people then refused to plant eleusine in the rainy season, instead planting it after the rains so that it would ripen in the dry period. Despite the prevalence of this story, it is more likely that the practice started because eleusine ripens better with the direct sunlight of the dry period. It may also reflect that eleusine was a prestige crop. Because men performed the bulk of labor related to the crop, the practice helped distribute labor more evenly over the course of the year.
FIGURE 1.1. A kihamba (Matthew V. Bender)
Social development centered on the vihamba and agricultural life. According to Moore, mountainside society initially consisted of “many small, fairly autonomous settlements, most composed of several localized patrilineages [kishari, pl. vishari], a few consisting of one very large patrilineage.”26 These were led by the most senior men. Settlements tended to be located at the highest points of the ridges where land was flattest. Over time, neighboring communities developed greater connections with one another. Moore notes, for example, that the practice of developing age-sets (rika) cut across the settlements.27 On Kilimanjaro, age-sets were corporate social groups that served as units for organizing corvée labor and warfare.28 Each initiation class formed a division, or ilumbo, within the age-set. These units provided an important means of organizing much of the cooperative work of the mountain. It is important to note that water management remained outside the age-set system, and age-sets were never mobilized for irrigation projects. Given the topography of the mountain, the increasing cooperation among neighboring groups made sense as a means of facilitating access to resources. Settlements closer to the forest had prime access to timber and water, while those closer to the plains had better access to goods procured from beyond the mountain, notably iron ore and pottery. Mifongo, originating
