Mto wa Mbu

Mto wa Mbu is a young settlement by the standards of the country around it. The flat ground at the foot of the Rift Valley wall was fever country, its streams and swamps giving the place the Swahili name that means river of mosquitoes, and it was used for grazing rather than permanent homes. Maasai herders moved cattle across the plain, and the Iraqw farmed the highlands above.

Settlement came with water control and with the road. Furrows were dug to carry the springs and streams that emerge at the base of the escarpment out across the plain, turning swamp and dry bush into irrigated plots, and migration brought farmers to take them up. Families arrived from many parts of the country, and the village became known for the number of languages spoken in it, with Swahili the language everyone shares.

The road was the second maker of the place. The game reserve at the village's edge became Lake Manyara National Park in 1960, and the highway from Arusha towards Ngorongoro and the Serengeti runs through the middle of the settlement, so that almost every vehicle on the northern safari circuit passes its shops. Craft stalls, guesthouses, campsites and guiding work grew up around that traffic. The village today lives on two things at once — the water from the escarpment that feeds its farms, and the road that carries visitors past its door.

The village is known in Tanzania for its mixture. Migration from many regions has put people of very different backgrounds on neighbouring plots, and the number of languages heard here is often given as a point of local pride, with Swahili serving as the common tongue in the market, the school and the street. Maasai from the surrounding rangelands come in to trade and to sell beadwork, and the Iraqw and Datooga of the highlands above are part of the same weekly economy.

That mixture shows in how the place works. Farming practice borrowed from several parts of the country sits side by side in the irrigated plots — bananas grown as they are on the Kilimanjaro slopes, rice as in the lake regions, maize and vegetables everywhere — and cooking traditions have travelled with the families who brought them. Craft workshops turn out carvings and paintings for the safari trade, much of it made by artisans who themselves came from elsewhere.

Manners are those of northern Tanzania generally: greetings before business, respect for elders, modest dress and a patient pace. The craft market involves steady, good-humoured bargaining, and guided walks through the farms are a long-established way for households to earn from the traffic without leaving the land. Churches and mosques both serve the village, reflecting the range of places its people came from.

Some 11,400 people lived in the Mto wa Mbu ward at the 2012 census, a number that has grown quickly with the irrigation and the road. Most households farm: bananas of many varieties, rice in the paddies, maize, beans, tomatoes and other vegetables, with milk and meat from cattle and goats. Water rights in the furrows are managed collectively and matter more here than almost anything else.

The second income is the safari circuit. Guides for farm and village walks, drivers, cooks, campsite and lodge staff, craft traders and stallholders all depend on the vehicles coming down the escarpment, and the collapse of travel in 2020 was felt sharply. Small shops, workshops, bars and guesthouses line the main road, and buses and minibuses call through the day on their way between Arusha and Karatu.

The day starts early, with produce moving to the roadside by bicycle and handcart before the heat, and slows in the middle of the afternoon. Current issues are the pressure of a growing population on irrigated land and on the water itself, crop raiding and danger from elephants and buffalo moving between the park and the farms, malaria in this low, wet ground, and the thin and uneven spread of tourist money through the village.

Bananas define the local table. Dozens of varieties grow in the groves behind the village, some for eating ripe, some for roasting over charcoal at the roadside, and green cooking bananas for stews — mtori, the thick stew of mashed green bananas and meat eaten across the Kilimanjaro region, is familiar here, as is plain ndizi nyama, bananas simmered with beef. Banana beer, fermented at home, is the everyday drink of many households.

Rice from the village's own paddies is the other staple, cooked plain or as pilau spiced with cumin, cardamom and cinnamon for celebrations. Ugali, the stiff maize porridge, is eaten with beans, greens such as mchicha, and stews of fish or meat. Chapati and mandazi, the lightly sweet fried dough, are sold in the mornings, and chai heavy with sugar accompanies almost everything.

Nyama choma — goat or beef roasted over charcoal, chopped on a board and served with kachumbari, a relish of tomato, onion and chilli — is the sociable meal at the grills along the road. The market sells the produce of the irrigated plots at its plainest: tomatoes, onions, greens, mangoes and papaya in season, and groundnuts and dried fish brought in by bus from further away.