EXHIBITS
The Usambara Project: Landscapes of Continuity and Change in the West Usambara Mountains, c. 1910: Bumbuli
Bumbuli Panorama
The images portray Bumbuli kaya and the Lutheran mission in a long-settled part of the southern Usambaras. In the Mbegha dynastic origin story, Bumbuli figures prominently as the Usambara Mountain community that first hosted him after his expulsion from the Nguru Mountains to the south. As at Gare and Mlalo, the Bumbuli Kaya sits at the head of a productive agricultural valley. The German Lutheran Missionaries founded a station there in the late 1890s, building a church, a school, and eventually a hospital just northeast of the kaya.
Bumbuli Panorama, Left hand image
Dobbertin’s sweeping image looks out overthe Bumbuli Lutheran Mission station at about 1200 meters elevation in the south-eastern quadrant of the West Usambara Mountains. Dobbertin’s mountain vantage point lets him capture several large banana agroforestsbetween 1100 and 1200 meters asl. to the south and on higher hillsides to the east. A fire burns in the basin to the south. The mission compound, built on sloping and above the kaya, has a large and lush garden.The mission gardener has also planted hundreds of Eucalyptiand Grevillea trees around the church’s properties and along the roadside. An enlargement of the upper left-handside of the image shows a substantial compound with cattle trails leading up tothe ridges above this settlement. Given their tendency to settle on the periphery of the banana zone, the settlement may be an Mbugu cattle compound. Higher up, cloud-covered rainforest on the upper mountain slopes opposite the mission.
Bumbuli Panorama, Right Hand Image
On this side of the panorama the roadside lines of Eucalyptus and the rectangular lines of the mission buildings with metallic roofing contrast with the Kaya’s round houses with thatch roofing. Like Mlalo, the Bumbuli Kaya lies along a hillside. In general, the landscape is open, farmed in patches with substantial areas of interspersed fallow of thicket and secondary forest as just to the southeast of the Kaya. The presence of colonial buildings right up the kaya’s boundary suggests that the Lutherans wanted to influence activities in the kaya itself.
As with its partner image, the photograph shows a heavily used pathway running toward the mountain forests in the background. The pathway suggests the movement of livestock through the mountain forests, which by 1913 would have been legally prohibited by the German forestry service.
Who is the man standing on the cliff in the photograph’s right side? Photographer’s assistant? Is he shirtless because of the difficult hike up the mountain behind the Lutheran Mission?
