Lushoto

The western Usambaras were settled long before any European saw them. The Shambaa built terraced farms on the wet, fertile slopes and by the eighteenth century had formed a powerful kingdom centred on Vugha, in the mountains near present-day Lushoto, whose rulers controlled trade between the coast and the interior. The kingdom fell into civil war in the nineteenth century as caravan routes, firearms and the slave trade reached the mountains, and it was weakened well before German troops arrived.

Germany took the mountains with the rest of German East Africa in the 1880s and found the highland climate unlike anything on the coast: cool, temperate and free of much of the disease that killed Europeans at sea level. A station was established in the valley and named Wilhelmstal, and it became a hill station where officials came to recover, with a residence, a church, plantations and experimental gardens; the railway built from Tanga to Moshi passed close below at Mombo. Sisal, coffee, quinine and European vegetables were tried on the slopes.

After the First World War the British took over, kept the forestry and farming stations and renamed the place Lushoto. The town became the administrative centre of its district and, after independence, the market centre for a densely farmed and heavily populated mountain region. Its later history has been shaped by that density: forest cleared for fields, soil washed off the steep slopes, and from the late twentieth century a series of conservation and reforestation programmes in the catchment forests above the town.

Lushoto is the heart of Shambaa country, and Kishambaa is heard everywhere alongside Kiswahili. Shambaa identity is bound up with land: with the terraces, the irrigation furrows and the inheritance of small plots, and with a long memory of the kingdom at Vugha and its chiefs. Clan and family ties run through village life, and elders are consulted over land and marriage matters in ways that outsiders rarely see.

Christianity and Islam sit side by side. Lutheran and Catholic missions have been in these mountains since the German period and run schools, hospitals and farms that remain central to the district, while the town itself has a long-established Muslim community of traders. Sunday services and Friday prayers both empty the streets, and church choirs are a serious local pursuit.

Manners follow the general Tanzanian pattern but are noticeably formal here. Greetings are long, elders are greeted first and addressed as shikamoo, and hurrying is impolite. Much of the visitor economy runs through a cultural tourism programme set up with the villages, under which guides from the area lead walks between farms and ridge settlements and part of the fee goes to community projects — an arrangement that makes walking here a social as much as a scenic activity, with introductions, conversations and cups of tea along the way.

About 30,000 people live in Lushoto town, in a district of several hundred thousand spread across some of the most densely settled countryside in Tanzania. Almost every usable slope is farmed. Maize, beans, potatoes, cabbages, carrots and tomatoes grow on terraces, with plums, pears, peaches and tree tomatoes around the houses, and lorries carry the produce down to Tanga, Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Forestry, mission institutions, schools, the district administration and a modest flow of visitors make up the rest of the local economy.

The town is the district's service centre — market, bus stand, bank, hospital, schools and offices — and fills and empties with the buses. Days start early and cold, with mist in the valley and people walking to fields and school, and the market is busiest in the morning. By dusk the minibuses have stopped and the town is quiet.

The pressures here are those of a crowded mountain district: farm plots subdivided until they can barely support a family, young people leaving for Tanga, Arusha and Dar es Salaam, soil erosion and landslides after heavy rain, water shortages in the dry months, and the long argument between clearing more ground and protecting the forests that hold the catchment together.

Highland food here is plainer and less spiced than the coastal cooking below the escarpment, built on what the terraces produce. Ugali, the stiff maize porridge, is eaten with beans, with greens such as mchicha, and with a stew of meat or beans, and rice and boiled bananas are the other staples. Shambaa cooking makes much of maize and beans together, and kisamvu, pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly, is a common relish.

The mountains grow what the plains cannot. Potatoes, carrots, cabbages, leeks and tomatoes from these slopes supply markets as far away as Dar es Salaam, and the temperate fruit introduced in the colonial period — plums, pears, peaches and apples, along with avocados and tree tomatoes — is sold from baskets on the roadside in season. Cheese, bread and jam made at the mission farms near the escarpment are a local speciality unusual in Tanzania.

Meals are simple and cheap in the eating houses around the market: rice or ugali with stew, chipsi mayai, chips cooked into an omelette, chapati, and mishkaki skewers grilled over charcoal in the evening. Breakfast is chai, black or with milk and heavily sweetened, with mandazi or chapati, and in this climate hot tea is drunk through the day. Fresh juice, sugarcane and soda are the usual cold drinks, with local lager in the bars.