My Safari to see the earliest human art of East Africa!

Site B1 at the Kolo sites.

June 10, 2014
Tanzania, East Africa

You can know the universe
Without leaving your house.
You can see the ways of heaven
Without looking out of your window.
The further you go
The less you know.

The Tao
(about 500 BC)

Introduction:
Indigenous rock paintings appear in hundreds of rock caverns around the Kondoa region of central Tanzania. As a result of Mary Leakey's 1983 book, "Africa's Vanishing Art: the Rock Paintings of Tanzania", the spectacular rock paintings of the Kondoa area became the subject of international attention

The rock art portrayed hunter-gatherers of the stone age and wild animals in mainly reddish-brown colours in their paintings. Pastoralists added their paintings later. Their portrayals were cattle herds, tools and weapons, spears and shields, in black and grey colours (Bwasiri 2008).

Later, in July 2006, the World Heritage Committee decided that the rock art of Kondoa was truly a World Heritage Site. It had acknowledged its international significance, its beauty and living heritage for the people of the world.

The five objectives of this post are to share with you my visit to the Kolo Rock Art sites in the Kondoa District of central Tanzania; to provide a picture tour to it with my photos; to enhance my visit with expert knowledge, local knowledge about the rock art; the status of biodiversity and wildlife movements in the area; and to introduce an international development project championed by my guide at a village in the semi-arid Kondoa District. The photos show the bush road leading to the site, the natural setting of the Kolo sites along a low mountain ridge at the edge of the savannah, and the ancient rock art galleries. I also reveal the current, threatened status of wildlife movements through a corridor next to the rock art sites of Kolo. What is more, I will do a basic analysis and express an opinion about the current management of the sites.

Moshi, my guide:
As soon as I told Moshi that I was from Canada. He enthusiastically talked about a water project he did with Canadian partners. Moshi had been the champion who had co-ordinated the water project for Cheku Village. It is 22 km south, south-east of Kondoa. More than 3,000 people in the village now have clean drinking water as a result of the partnership. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to visit the project.

During 2007, the student body of an inner-city school of Vancouver, BC, Canada, did an extensive, school-wide, study of water. As a result of this study, the school decided to raise funds to help build a well in Africa. Thus, in 2007, the Queen Victoria Water Project (click here to see detailed information about the water project) started at Queen Victoria School, a small inner-city elementary school on Vancouver’s east side.

Moshi Changai, a kind, generous, out-going, young Moslem man, wanted safe drinking water for his community. Moshi was the Executive Director of a NGO called the Kondoa Irangi Cultural Heritage and Environmental Conservation (KICHECO). It decided to start a water project. As a consequence, Moshi became the major driving force for a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-Victoria School-KICHECO partnership, from 2007-2011.

On June 8'14, I had arrived at Kondoa by bus from Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania. I had met Moshi Changai during my second day at Kondoa. He was an angel (the right kind) who had loaned me his MacBook Pro laptop to regain control of my highjacked Apple email system. Amazingly Apple iPads do not empower its users to regain control of its own email system that has been hi-jacked. So, Moshi handed me his laptop for the evening to get out of this mess. An amazing gesture that I will never forget as we had just met earlier in the day!

Now, Moshi was starting up an ecotourism program at Kondoa. It's called the Kondoa Cultural Tourism Programme. Moshe said to me at the start of the safari, "I will look after you like you are my father!" And he did as my guide!

Travel from Kolo to the rock art sites:
Most visitors follow the Northern Safari Circuit of northern Tanzania. Few travellers take the two-three hour drive from the Circuit to visit this UNESCO World Heritage site. The Kolo Rock Art Site is too far off the beaten track. In fact, during the first 10 days of June'14, only 13 travellers had reported their visit in the visitor's book at the gate to the Kolo site. I was one of the visitors at the start of the dry season.

For me, the simple task of taking to bus to Kolo might not have been possible. I don't speak Swahili. Few people spoke English at Kondoa. Happily, Moshi made it simple.

At the next morning, Moshi and I boarded a bus at Kondoa. We travelled northwards in the "Champion", the name of the Arusha-Kondoa bus, to Kolo, a distance of 26 km along Highway A 104. Travel was very slow as a construction firm from China was hard at work upgrading the A 104. What is more, numerous passenger stops along the way was time consuming as some passengers even brought small farm animals like chickens into the bus. The trip took 90 minutes.

Moshi spoke to the driver of the Champion at Kolo.

Then Moshi took me south-east wards into the Kome Forest Reserve on a motor cycle from Kolo. The 9 km trip along a bush road was a rough one! I thought the road would be rough. That is why I carried a small and light photography kit. This was the only way I could travel on the back seat of a small motorcycle.

A few short sections of the road were too steep for the motorcycle. So, I got off of it and walked past the section. Then I got back onto it again to proceed to the trailhead leading to the sites.

We visited sites B1, B2, and B3. Our visit took three hours from the trailhead, to view the sites, then return to the trailhead. It was an easy walk with a few steep sections in the trail. The temperature was warm (20-25 C).

Usually for trips like this one, I take my pocket GPS to mark my visit locations. However, to protect the rock art sites, I chose not to disclose the precise site locations for this safari.

The Kolo rock art sites:
Some 150 to 450 rock art sites (Wikipedia) have been found at the Kondoa Irangi Rock Art District of north-central Tanzania. The best rock paintings in Africa are in this district. The rock art was thought to be painted 40,000 years ago up to approximately 300 years ago.

Two photos in my album show you views of the landscape near the sites. My imagination transported me back in time as I gazed in wonder at the same vistas seen by the artists themselves.

The Age of the Rock Art:
The age of the paintings, however, done over many centuries are subject to some disagreement among scholars. The Leakeys, for example, believed they were ancient. UNESCO found that the work and surveys about the rock paintings were scattered in many countries. UNESCO downplays their age saying they are at least two millennia in age. So, they are hard to synthesize. My guide said they were 30,000 years old.

What age are similar paintings elsewhere? The age of paintings near Gibraltar and Seville, Spain, are 40,800 years old. A recent publication by Nature found that rock art at South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was as old as 40,000 years.

Our ancient ancestors began their migration out of Africa 75,000 years ago according to the National Geographic Geno 2.0 project. Bwasiri synthesized the dates of the paintings according to various researchers over the years. He found that Inskeep, a researcher in published a report in (1962) that "suggested a period of 29,000 years before present (BP) based on ochre recovered from Kisese II." Another expert believes the oldest paintings are 40,000 years of age. Given the oral history of indigenous people of northwestern BC, Canada goes back to the last age, I support local knowledge about it and use the 30,000 year age for the rock paintings of our ancient, ancestral Adam and Eve.

World Heritage does not spend money for co-management and governance of the Kolo sites:
In 2000, the United Nation Development Program had started a new initiative called the Community Management of Protected Areas Conservation (Click here to see information about COMPACT) Programme. World Heritage set the stage for new approaches that engage indigenous and local communities in World Heritage.

Since 2000, the COMPACT programme has been working with communities next to eight World Heritage Sites around the world. However, the pilot locations do not include the Kolo Rock Art sites. Thus, the UNDP does not invest any funding to engage the local and indigenous community in co-management or governance of the rock art sites.

Later, a United Nations agency, the World Heritage Committee, decided in 2006 that the Rock Art sites should be a World Heritage Site. A commendable move on their part, however, the Committee and the Government of Tanzania should have obtained the free, prior, and informed consent of the indigenous people and the local community about use and management of the Rock Art sites.

Conflicts about the use of the Rock Art sites:
According to the researcher Bwasiri, the Department of Antiquities has put a stop to traditional rituals at the site saying clan members from three nearby villages are damaging the paintings. Bwasiri goes on to say "the present management system and legislation fails to recognize traditional practitioners (traditional healers, diviners and rainmakers) as having any rights to use the site for sacrifices to their ancestors."

As a result, there is now conflict between authorities, the indigenous people, and the local community who hold the grottos in high regard for their spiritual importance and practice similar to the current importance of certain grottos at the great pilgrimage location of Lourdes, France.

During my visit to the sites, I saw the remnants of large, metal barriers that had been dismantled. Originally they were erected at the grottos to keep visitors and local people at a distance. Thus, it reveals the tension between collective ownership of our planet, the national jurisdiction of Tanzania and its lack of support for the local community and indigenous governance and ownership of its resources and heritage.

If the UNDP had funded governance and co-management of the sites right from the start or declaration if its World Heritage status, it would be a better experience for everyone. Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) would have made this story a far more positive and ethical one while utilizing a higher quality rights-based governance and management approach. The United Nations should require its agencies to follow its own declaration about Indigenous People.

The Kome Forest Reserve:
ProtectedPlanet.net, the new UN and ENGO website for the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), provides the most comprehensive global database on terrestrial and marine protected areas. Visitors to the website can search for points of interest and access biodiversity data. Through my visual comparisons of the map of the Kome Forest Reserve and a Goggle Map with the B1 location, I found that the Kolo Rock Art Sites were within the protected area.

The database reveals that 179 wildlife species have ranges that overlap with the protected area boundaries of the Kome Forest Reserve. Later after my return to Canada, much to my surprise, I learned that the range of leopards and lions overlap with the Kolo Rock Art sites. However, during my visit to the rock art sites, except for birds and a baboon call nearby Site B1, we never saw any animals at all.

Elephant migration corridor disappeared:
Five days after my visit to the Kolo sites, I had one of the great experiences of my life. Near the centre of the Serengeti, the Great Migration of wildebeest and zebras had passed through my safari location. Then three days after seeing the Rock Art of Kolo, I had the great privilege of witnessing elephant herds at Tarangiri National Park within 120 km of the Kolo Rock Art sites. So, I wondered about their ability to migrate in the region.

Moshi told me about animal migrations between the Tarangire River area and the Swaga Swaga Game Reserve. This wildlife corridor was next to the Kolo Rock Art sites. What is more, I travelled through the corridor so I now have impressions of the landscape, human population density and villages in it. For example, I stood in a small cornfield close to the rock art sites to take the photo of Tarangire National Park. Elephants can trample through cornfields. Although small subsistence farms in the area do not have fences, they would be barriers to wildlife. What is more, I travelled the A 104 to Kolo and the forest road into the Kome Forest Reserve that both dissect the migration corridor. For countless years, wildlife migrated through the area. However, the corridor was not in use now.

Elephant herd near the Tarangire River

My curiosity led me to look more closely at the current situation after my return home to Canada. The Tanzania management plan for elephants indicate all herds in northern Tanzania are at risk because their movement corridors are in poor condition. Five of them had been at risk of disappearing by 2012 according to the elephant management plan for Tanzania.

Eleven villages are in the 100 km Tarangire-SwagaSwaga corridor. Kolo was in the wildlife migration corridor too. Wikipedia indicates that the present population of Kolo is over 8,000. As a result, the corridor's life was expected to end by 2012, according to the "Tanzania Elephant Management Plan 2010-2015."

I added the blue oval to show the corridor location discussed in this post.

The disappearance of the Kolo corridor will have significant implications. It will cut off smaller elephant populations of northern Tanzania from southern Tanzania. Many other wildlife species would be affected too. Thus, the amazing elephant herds at Tarangire National Park and all protected areas in Tanzania will decline in both population and health due to their genetic isolation.

Concluding thoughts:
For some reason, rock painting sites attract me. They stir something deep in me. During my world travel I always make special efforts to see such sites. I have travelled in my own country to see them too. Ultimately, I believe my ancestors guide me to them.

As my world travel experiences grow larger and wider, my ability to think in new ways grows larger. I am able to pose more questions about my experiences. Thus, the mystical wisdom of the Tao begins to make more sense to me now. The more I learn during my travels the less I know. The further I go the less I know.

Further reading:
The Management of Indigenous Living Heritage in Archaeological World Heritage Sites: A Case Study of Mongomi wa Kolo Rock Painting Site, Central Tanzania (2008).

Emmanuel James Bwasiri

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master Arts (Rock Art Studies).

Picture album:

All photos were taken by me. Please enjoy the rock art, a magnificent contribution to the human story!

Collapsed bridge on the main highway between Kondoa and Kolo.

Dry river bed.

Road leading to the Kolo sites.

Kolo Rock Art sites are along this ridge.

Rock art site.

View from one of the most famous rock art sites.

Rock art can be seen at the left, centre of the photo.

Looking northwards at a former wildlife corridor and the Savannah of Tarangire National Park.