Do Not Take this Road to El-Karama by Chris Harvie

Author:Chris Harvie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Do Not Take This Road to El-Karama
ISBN: 9781415202425
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2011-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

The next day with Aggrey was an eye-opener. For all his outward seriousness he was utterly delightful. Guides anywhere can be hit-and-miss. Aggrey was a huge hit in his yellow cagoule and with his infectious ke-ke-ke-ke laugh. We all hit it off immediately and set off exploring. He took us up to the Magamba rainforest and showed us elephant shrews, poisonous plants, narcotics, spiky tomatoes and colobus monkeys. Watching these beautiful rare primates leaping from tree to tree and grooming one another, Aggrey told us that they eat for one third of their waking lives and stress about their appearance for the remaining two thirds. He found us Ross’s touraco and we followed their bright red wings through the trees. He showed us busy lizzies and African violets growing wild. He told us about the hyena which turned into a tree stump, he told us how Kimweri had been known as the Lion King (Simba Mwene), he told us how well the Germans were respected and how the older people still emulate them by dressing smartly like Lutherans.

The German influence is indeed still strong in these parts and slightly disconcerting. We felt that, despite the strong element of fear they had instilled in their native underlings, there had obviously been a fair amount of intermingling as well, although there is not a notable mixed-race population in Tanzania. Maybe the strict German ways (like the Afrikaner ways in South Africa) were easier to work with than the rather wishy-washy British approach with its frequent blurring and changing of the rules.

The German way could still be felt up here in the Usambaras. Juma had told us that before the Great War there had been several thousand German settlers in the mountains and Aggrey now showed us State House, where the Kaiser had been based on his few visits to German East Africa. Sadly, the Emperor only managed to stay in this Alpine schloss for one or two short visits before the perfidious British, for totally irrelevant European reasons, hoofed him out of his colony and then foolishly established their capital on the sultry coast instead. The Kaiser had employed a German housekeeper, as one might expect. Mrs Müller came out to German East Africa around the turn of the last century and her descendents were among very few white people who’d remained up here permanently.

Our morning with Aggrey ended with a climb to the top of Kigulu Hakwewa Peak, which he said meant ‘not for short legs’. We looked down from the 2 350 m summit, through the clouds, at the spreading town of Lushoto below us and then visited the system of trenches and bunkers built by the Germans to enable them to hide from the British. A system of tunnels, which is now home only to bats, snakes and ghosts, once housed three hundred German settlers and their possessions in over a hundred chambers. The bunkers had a supply of fresh water and meat was obtained from the surrounding forests.

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