EXHIBITS
The Usambara Project: Landscapes of Continuity and Change in the West Usambara Mountains, c. 1910: Kwai Farm
Introduction
Kwai is only a few miles from Gare, but at 1600 meters asl, the valley at Kwai sat above the warmer and wetter Usambara agroforestry farming zone below 1400 meters asl. Over the centuries before the German colonial confiscation of the valley in 1896, Kwai served as a reliable grazing area for herds of cattle and small stock kept by Mbugu pastoralists. Kwai held important meaning as a battle zone during the cattle epidemics of the 1890s. According to stories told at Kwai, that was the time when Maasai warriors from the plains below entered the mountains intent on stealing livestock. The valley’s entrance from below is quite narrow, almost hidden, and therefore defensible. Mbugu blood had been spilled there and so it became a place of reverence.
When word of Kwai’s agricultural potential spread to the German government, the colonial land commission seized over a thousand hectares, which encompassed most of the valley and the gently sloping land on either side visible in the images.
Emil Eick, himself the owner-manager of a large estate in eastern Germany, served as Kwai’s manager from 1896-1902. He supervised the set-up of tree nurseries, and the planting of the gardens above the residence still apparent in the 1910s. In 1902, the German East African government declared failure at the experimental farm and Eick left in 1903. The government then leased to Ludwig Illich, then a farm manager at Ubiri (near Lushoto). Illich ran the cattle operation that Dobbertin captured more than a hundred years ago. When the British government assumed ownership ofthe colony after World War I, the colonial office of the Custodian for Enemy Property leased the estate to a retired navy cook named Woodcock, who suffered from paranoia and anxiety. His murder in 1953, spurred the new lease holders to open the valley to local land use. Soon after, people completely dismantled the estate’s buildings, using the materials in community construction projects. Farmers thus erased any physical vestige of the colonial past.