A Historical View of Tanzania

I have to admit, the quest for pre-1950s written text about landscape in Tanzania was extremely difficult, there is very little material written about Tanzania before 1959 and even less available. Some of the material I did find online and in the library was often about East Africa in general and did not have the vivid descriptions that I was looking for. After frantic searching I came across the book Imagining Serengeti by Jan Bender Shetler which talks about the changing historical memory before and after the 19th century of the Serengeti, a national park in the Northeast of Tanzania. The most interesting chapter of the book was "Ecological Landscapes" which pointed out that ecologists today often describe the Serengeti as being without humans whereas stories from as early as 300 CE show that humans were in fact living in the Serengeti region. Strong evidence of human presence is visible in the types of vegetation that thrive in parts of the Serengeti. Acacia trees that thrive on regular fires (natural ones only occur in the dry season) are evidence that humans that create those fires must be in the vicinity. This is especially true in the north and western parts of the park. 

               Serengeti National Park                           

 
             

















 Modern Day Population map of the area

Using Africa map I was able to map out an ethnographic survey that was conducted in 1924. I layered the map onto google earth map of the same area and even then you can clearly see that though few, there were people that were living there because of the evidence of languages being spoken there. Why would ecologists try and portray the are as uninhabited? What implications do humans bring to this sort of environment?

1924 Ethnographic Map

Africa Map - Tanzania

I began using Africamap by zooming into the map so that Tanzania was in the center of the page and as large as possible while still fitting on the page. When I began to add layers to my map that is when I started to run into some problems. The layers were showing up on the map but I had no idea what they meant because for the life of me I could not find any key to the maps when I was viewing them. After a few minutes I figured out that if I went back to the list of map layers and clicked legend next to the map, the key would appear on that page. To see the legend on the map just hit the view tab at the top of the page and the key should appear on that page, you can then change the parameters of the key and move it so that it is not right where you need to look. This may have been straight-forward for everyone else it was something I hadn’t really played around with when I had checked out Africamap before so it was useful to discover that.

In keeping with what we talked about in the last class, I applied map layers to Tanzania that would give and indication of the landscape in that region. One of the maps I applied to Tanzania was the 2006 Population by Cell map. It showed that in most of Tanzania there where 26-50 people or less per 30” cell, the exceptions being North-west Tanzania, near Lake Victoria and on the East in the city of Dar es Salaam. This tells me that these areas are economic centers. Trade has historically been brought through water channels and it makes sense that these two areas would have the largest population densities. The vast spaces in the heart of the country that had the lowest population densities also coincided with the areas that were either protected or had little or no water sources near them. One thing that I was unable to get Africamap to do was put the names of lakes on the map. When I tried to find them through google maps I wasn’t able to either. Does anyone know how to do this?