The Background Story of a Place where Culture and History Merge

The exhibit shows images from four distinct areas in the West Usambara Mountains: Gare, Kwai, Bumbuli, and Mlalo. Each of the images tells a story of a historical moment deeply rooted in the past but also indicative of change. Photographs from 2016 accompany some of the originals. The recent images show a far less open landscape covered in trees, often exotic species rather than local forest trees.

By the time Dobbertin took these photographs, farmers had been using the Usambara environment for more than two millennia. As in other East African highlands, the Usambara highland farming system focused on banana and plantain horticulture mixed with local trees and ground crops. The cultivation complex appears in several of Dobbertin’s images. Farmers continually experimented with new and established crops. They used iron tools and built supporting irrigation infrastructure to enhance productivity.

By the beginning of the 1700s, several different ethnolinguistic groups lived in and around the mountains the most numerous of whom spoke Kishambaa while others spoke related languages like Kipare, Kikamba, and Kibonde, for example. A herding community, the Va’maa, lived above the banana zone, where they grazed their stock in the high pastures visible in the Dobbertin images. They spoke a Cushitic language with origins far to the north in present-day Ethiopia. The mountains provided the farmers and herders with exploitable ecosystems ranging from high mountain pastures (above 1500 meters asl) to productive farming zones at around 1200 and 1400 meters asl. Gare, Mlalo, and Bumbuli, shown below, all fall in the within that elevation zone. Using land along the elevation gradient gave farmers several cropping options and some protection against periodic food shortages. Their expertise drew on local knowledge and while the plant repertoire included crops and animals from across the continent and the Indian Ocean littoral. In this way, Usambara landscapes were cosmopolitan.

At Kimweri’s passing in 1862, a succession war broke out between two of his sons, engulfing the region in violence. The decades-long war ultimately favored Semboja, the son who capitalized on the regional wealth generated by the coast-based caravan trade in guns, slaves, and ivory. In the mountains, decades relative security ended. Many left the mountains as slaves bound for the coast. Others hid out, their mobility restricted by fear. In addition to warfare, a period of epidemic disease confronted humans and livestock. The violence and disease, coupled with drought and famine in the 1890s, depopulated once densely settled neighbourhoods.

The landscapes exhibited here represent a moment in time in the 1910s just before the outbreak of World War I and after twenty years of German colonialism. The mission stations and farms shown here date to the 1890s and so their imprint was less than a generation old, a new landscape layer on a long-established place. Dobbertin’s African landscapes are nonetheless revelatory. We hope our viewers will read the images for historical continuity and change.