Morogoro

The Uluguru Mountains have been farmed by the Luguru for centuries, their steep slopes terraced and irrigated and their land held through the female line, and the plain below was crossed by caravan routes between the coast and the interior. In the middle of the 1800s a Zigula leader, Kisabengo, founded a fortified settlement called Simbamwene where the town now stands, and the Germans, who conquered the country in the 1890s, made it an administrative centre, building a boma, laying out a grid of streets and pushing the central railway from Dar es Salaam through the town.

Colonial agriculture shaped what followed. Sisal estates spread across the plains around Morogoro in the German and British periods, worked by migrant labour, and the town became a processing and transport centre for the fibre, as well as for cotton, oilseeds and later fruit and vegetables. By the middle of the twentieth century the largest sisal estates in East Africa lay in the drier plains that encircle the Uluguru Mountains.

After independence the sisal industry collapsed as synthetic fibres took over, and Morogoro turned back to food crops and institutions. The agricultural faculty at the edge of town became Sokoine University of Agriculture in 1984, named after the prime minister Edward Sokoine, who died in a road accident that year. The highway and, more recently, the standard-gauge railway have kept Morogoro on the country's main artery, and it has grown into one of the larger cities of southern Tanzania.

Morogoro's identity is bound to the mountains at its back. The Luguru have lived on the Uluguru slopes for generations, farming smallholdings on gradients that look impossible, and their matrilineal system, in which land and clan membership pass through the mother, is unusual in Tanzania and still governs much of rural life above the city. Their villages, footpaths and terraces are visible from the streets below.

The city itself is mixed. Sisal estates, the railway and the highway brought people from across the country, and Swahili is the common language of a population that includes Luguru, Pogoro, Ngindo, Sukuma and coastal families. Islam and Christianity are both long established, and the calendar runs through Ramadan and Eid as well as Christmas and Easter, with mosques and churches within a few streets of one another in the centre.

Students give Morogoro much of its character: Sokoine University of Agriculture and several other colleges fill parts of the city with young people, cheap restaurants, bars and music, and agricultural research shapes local conversation about seeds, prices and rainfall. Football is followed closely, market day is the social event of the week for many in the surrounding villages, and visitors are expected to greet before anything else.

The municipality counted about 316,000 people at the 2012 census and was projected to pass 390,000 by 2020, making Morogoro one of the larger urban centres in the southern half of the country. Work comes from trade and transport along the highway, from government offices and the universities, from food processing and small industry, and from the farms that ring the city.

Agriculture remains the foundation. The Uluguru slopes produce fruit and vegetables in remarkable quantity, and the plains grow maize, rice, sugar, sesame and sunflower, with the Kilombero valley to the south-west among the country's main rice and sugar areas. Lorries carrying produce to Dar es Salaam and returning with goods for the interior are a constant presence, and the railway adds freight of its own.

Life follows the market and the road. Traders come down from the mountain at dawn, the centre is busiest before the heat of the middle of the day, and evenings are spent at the grills and bars along the main streets. Current issues are the pressure of a growing population on mountain farmland and forest, soil erosion and landslides on the steep slopes, water supply, and the accident rate on the highway that runs through the city.

Morogoro is known across Tanzania for its produce, and that shows on the plate. The market is piled with bananas and plantains in many varieties, avocados, mangoes, pineapples, oranges, tomatoes, aubergines, spinach and pumpkin leaves carried down from the mountain gardens, and vegetables feature more strongly here than in drier parts of the country.

The everyday meal is ugali with beans, greens and a stew of beef, goat or fish, or rice with a coconut-flavoured sauce reflecting the closeness of the coast. Makande, boiled maize and beans cooked together, is a common working lunch, and mchicha, amaranth greens cooked with groundnut or coconut, is the standard vegetable. Plantains are boiled, roasted and cooked into stews in the Luguru kitchen.

Grilled meat is the evening sociable food — nyama choma with kachumbari salad — and the street food follows the national pattern of chapati, mandazi, samosas, grilled cassava and roasted maize, with chai brewed with milk and plenty of sugar. Sugarcane juice and fresh fruit juices are sold everywhere given the supply of fruit.

The highway trade has added its own food culture: stalls and cafés along the road feed drivers and bus passengers at all hours, and travellers passing through often buy fruit here to take on to Dar es Salaam or the highlands.