GOODBYE TO ALISON REDMAYNE, MUNG'ANZAGALA SEMUGONGOLWA

by Martin Walsh

Alison Redmayne, Utengule, Usangu, December 1981

I've mentioned Alison Redmayne a number of times in this blog and will again, I hope. We first met at her house in north Oxford in February 1980 when I was planning doctoral research in Usangu, in south-west Tanzania. She became my ethnographic mentor and a lifelong friend. I last spoke to her in January, when she rang me from the Churchill Hospital in Oxford -- she'd been in and out with various complaints, but nothing that made me think that I wouldn't see or speak to her again. However, she didn't leave the hospital this time, but succumbed to a recurrence of lymphoma, a cancer that she'd beaten off once before. I had no idea until I wrote about her in my last post (Where The Doctor is Ignorant) and today's equivalent of the bush telegraph brought me the sad news.

Alison Hope Redmayne was born on 1 October 1936 and died on 20 February 2013, aged 76. She was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon (13 March), following an informal graveside ceremony attended by family and friends, who shared recollections of her before continuing to do the same in the more congenial surroundings of the Victoria Arms in Old Marston. It was unexpectedly, but appropriately, sunny when we were in the cemetery. The most poignant moment came when we all gathered around and strained to listen to the start of one of her recordings of Hehe mourning ceremonies, played back by her nephew's son Max over a mobile phone with a small tinny speaker attached.

Alison Redmayne, Oxford, August 2000

I couldn't help but reflect that if she'd been buried in one of the villages in Iringa or Mufindi that she knew so well, we'd have found ourselves in the midst of a multitude, the air filled with heartfelt lamentations and rousing songs in praise of Mung'anzagala Gisakamutemi Msengidunda Semugongolwa (her full name as an adopted member of the Hehe royal family), this extraordinary woman who spoke their language like few other Europeans could, who gave the best years of her life to recording their history and ethnography, and who ignored her own physical suffering to devote herself instead to improving their welfare, saving the lives of who knows how many people as she did so. Here's just one testimony, posted on the Mjengwa blog on 15 March:

I met Semgongolwa while I was a student at Lugalo Secondary School back in 1970. Even though I am Hehe, my Kihehe was far worse than hers. I will always remember her anthropological studies she conducted among the Wahehe; she was one of the few people who entered into the field, and never left!
. . . Alex Mwakikoti 

Alison Redmayne, Luhanga, Usangu, December 1981

Although she also worked in northern Nigeria, Alison Redmayne's name will always be most closely associated with the Hehe and neighbouring peoples in Tanzania, and so it should be. I've spent most of my spare time in the past week sorting through our correspondence, records of her visit to Usangu in December 1981, and searching for photographs, tape recordings, and a short video I made of her at home in Oxford in August 2000 (I've posted stills from this in the sidebar to the right -- scroll down to find them). I'll write more anon, but wanted to begin to say goodbye to her with this (grave) post marking her departure from this life and passage into the world of the ancestors whom she talked and wrote so much about.

Bibiliography of selected works by Alison Redmayne

Sound recordings

Alison Redmayne Collection, British Library, London.
For an introduction, link to the collection catalogue, and sample recordings see:
Topp, Janet 2012. Rare Tanzanian music recordings preserved. Music in the British Library Blog, 13 July 2012.

Photographing the Sangu chief Alfeo Merere, Luhanga, December 1981

Unpublished dissertations

Redmayne, Alison 1961. The Concept of Feudalism in African Ethnology. Unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford.

Redmayne, Alison 1964. The Wahehe People of Tanganyika. Unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford.

Published papers, articles, book chapters

Lee, Annabelle [= Alison Redmayne] 1968. African nuns: an anthropologist’s impressions. New Blackfriars 49 (576, May): 401-409. Also in 1968. Exchange. New Blackfriars 49 (579, August): 614-616.

Redmayne, Alison 1968. Mkwawa and the Hehe wars. Journal of African History 9 (3): 409-436.

Redmayne, Alison 1968. The Hehe. In Andrew Roberts (ed.) Tanzania Before 1900: Seven Area Histories. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. 37-58.

Redmayne, Alison 1969. Blasius Undole’s History of the Ndamba. Anthropos 64 (5/6): 957-959.

Redmayne, Alison 1969. Hehe medicine. By Dr. Weck, Senior Doctor of the Imperial Colonial Troops in Gerrnan East Africa. Introduced, translated and annotated by Alison Redmayne. Tanzania Notes and Records 70: 29-40.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. The war trumpets and other mistakes in the history of the Hehe. Anthropos 65 (1/2): 98-109.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. Chikanga: an African diviner with an international reputation. In Mary Douglas (ed.) Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (ASA Monograph No. 9). London: Tavistock Publications. 103-128.

Redmayne, Alison, with Clement MwaNdulute 1970. Riddles and riddling among the Hehe of Tanzania. Anthropos 65 (5/6): 794-813.

Roberts, D. F., J. Chavez, and Alison Redmayne 1974. Dermatoglyphics of the Hehe (Tanzania). Man (N.S.) 9 (1): 31-43.

Following in the footsteps of Chief Alfeo Merere

Redmayne, Alison 1975. The Hehe. In Family of Man: People of the World and Where They Live (Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, Part 41). London. 1138-1140.

Redmayne, Alison 1980. Note on health services and the indigenous population under the German administration (German East Africa). In E. E. Sabben-Clare, D. J. Bradley and K. Kirkwood (eds.) Health in Tropical Africa During the Colonial Period: Based on the Proceedings of a Symposium Held at New College, Oxford, 20-23 March 1971. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 115-117.

Redmayne, Alison, assisted by Christine Rogers 1983. Research on customary law in German East Africa. Journal of African Law 27 (1): 22-41.

Published report

Booth, David, Flora Lugangira, Patrick Masanja, Abu Mvungi, Rosemarie Mwaipopo, Joaquim Mwami and Alison Redmayne 1993. Social, Economic and Cultural Change in Contemporary Tanzania: A People-oriented Focus. Report to SIDA, commissioned through Development Studies Unit, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.

Her final publication and book review

Redmayne, Alison 2011. Review of Helga Voigt, Letters from Helga 1934-1937: A Teen Bride Writes Home from East Africa (trans. Evelyn Voigt, Renfrew, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 2008), and Werner Voight, 60 Years in East Africa; Life of a Settler 1926 to 1986 (Renfrew, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 1995). In Tanzanian Affairs 100 (September-December 2011): 70-71.

OF FROGS AND FIELD GUIDES

Mitchell's reed frog (© Jonathan R. Walz 2002)

I was inspired to write this note about frogs and field guides after seeing the image of a frog posted online by my good friend Jonathan Walz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Florida. This striking photo was taken in 2002 in Amani Nature Reserve in the East Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, and gives a nice sense of the forested environment that Amani is famous for. Its subject was identified for Jonathan by Kim Howell (another friend, and Professor of Zoology in the University of Dar es Salaam) as an example of Mitchell's reed frog, Hyperolius mitchelli, a species that has also been recorded in Malawi and Mozambique. It might well occur elsewhere in Tanzania, but very little collection or sound recording of frogs has taken place in the country, and our knowledge of the distribution of many species like this is correspondingly sketchy.

Banded rubber frog in one of my notebooks

Despite having lived in environments with a superabundance of cacophanous anurans (most notably amidst the seasonally-flooded wetlands of Usangu and the verdant rice valleys of Pemba island), I don't own a single photo of a toad or frog, and regret now that for many years I didn't have a camera capable of taking one. My notebooks, though, do feature the occasional frog that attracted my attention, like the Banded rubber frog (now Phrynomantis bifasciatus, formerly Phrynomerus) that I stumbled upon one day in 1992 in our garden in Nyali, on the north coast of Mombasa. I identified this with the aid of the only guide that I had at the time, Norman Hedges' Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (1983), which includes fuzzy and poorly reproduced colour photographs of fewer than a tenth of the frogs known to occur in the region. Needless to say, the Banded rubber frog is quite distinctive, with two vermillion (or orange, or red) stripes along its black back, and that's why it had caught my eye in the first place. For the same reason it's well known in the pet trade. What I didn't know when I scooped it up was that this bright colour scheme signals the presence of skin toxins that can be fatal to predators and result in a raft of distressing symptoms when they enter the human bloodstream. You'll be glad to hear that we didn't exchange body fluids.

I had less success in identifying other frogs. The 'one that got away' was a delicate yellow tree frog that I saw one evening in the foliage next to our outdoor table at the Jambo Inn in Kilimani in Zanzibar town. It was bright and glossy yellow all over its smooth and tiny body, and I noted it as a curiosity before continuing with the meal. This was in July 1996: much later I asked Kim Howell what it might have been and he merely shrugged. Perhaps this was the juvenile or colour morph of an otherwise well-known tree or reed frog, but I still haven't been able to identify it. Lack of a good field guide also scuppered my sundry efforts to make sense of indigenous knowledge about frogs. When living on Pemba in 1994-96 I recorded bits and pieces of information about the island's amphibians, and in 1997 drafted a short article about the local classification of frogs and toads. But I gave up on this when I realised that my preliminary attempt to map Pemban names onto scientific taxonomy was deeply flawed, and based on little more than unsubstantiated guesswork. I had Pakenham's (1983) checklist of the island's amphibians (which he knew was incomplete), but no illustrated field guide with which to compare local descriptions.

Things began to look up at the turn of the millennium, when I was based in Iringa and became aware of the work of Alan Channing (Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology in the University of the Western Cape) and colleagues. Indeed my sole (and admittedly feeble) claim to frog fame is to have been consulted over the specific name of the newly discovered Red sand frog, Tomopterna luganga, first collected by another of my friends, David Moyer, from Kigwembimbi, 14 km east of Iringa town (Channing et al. 2004). This is in the heart of Uhehe, and the name that I was asked to check, luganga, is one of the Hehe words for 'sand'. I bought a copy of Alan Channing's Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa (2001), and at last had a field guide that provided better guidance than Hedges' slim section on frogs. Channing and Howell's Amphibians of East Africa (2006) came out after I'd left East Africa, and I still haven't got my hands on it, though I do have the boiled-down version that was published in the same year in the Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (Spawls et al. 2006).

When he was working on the main guide, Kim Howell sent me a list of local names of frogs that he and his colleagues had collected, together with older records by the herpetologist Arthur Loveridge. While many dictionaries and vocabularies only give a single word for frogs, it is evident that finer discriminations are made in a number of East African languages. Ethnotaxonomies of frogs have been even less studied than the frogs themselves, and it is not impossible that complex systems of knowledge like those of the Kalam (Karam) of highland Papua New Guinea (Bulmer and Tyler 1968) are waiting to be described. At least we now have better guides to work with, together with an increasing number of images online, and if I ever identify that tiny yellow frog, or figure out those Pemban classifications, I'll write another frog blog.

Acknowledgements
As should be clear, I couldn't have written this post without the friendship of Jonathan Walz, Kim Howell and David Moyer. I'm especially grateful to Jonathan, who generously provided a copy of his photograph of Mitchell's reed frog and gave me permission to edit and reproduce it.

References

Bulmer, R. N. H. and M. J. Tyler 1968. Karam classification of frogs. Journal of the Polynesian Society 77 (4): 333-385.

Channing, Alan 2001. Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Channing, Alan and Kim M. Howell 2006. Amphibians of East Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Channing, Alan, David C. Moyer and Abeda Dawood 2004. A new sand frog from central Tanzania (Anura: Ranidae: Tomopterna). African Journal of Herpetology 53 (1): 21-28.

Hedges, Norman G. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.

Pakenham, R. H. W. 1983. The reptiles and amphibians of Zanzibar and Pemba islands (with a note on the freshwater fishes). Journal of the East Africa Natural History Society and National Museum 177: 1-40.

Spawls, Stephen, Kim M. Howell and Robert C. Drewes 2006. Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. London: A&C Black.

CHILD'S PLAY IN USANGU AND UHEHE

In the good old days of descriptive ethnography children's games and pastimes were treated as a serious matter. The now-defunct handbook Notes and Queries on Anthropology declared games of all kinds to be "worthy of special study", and advised fieldworkers to join in and learn to play them, as well as recording them as fully as possible (1929: 321; 1951: 334). When I began fieldwork in Usangu in 1980, Alison Redmayne encouraged me to collect children's riddles for the linguistic and cultural information they contained, much as she and other Oxford-trained anthropologists of her generation had done. But after a tentative start I switched my attention to the verbal 'games' that adults played, making no more than occasional notes on children's pastimes whenever I came across them. Sometimes they were difficult to ignore, like the boys who playfully parodied the ethnographer-as-photographer with their own clay models of my camera.

I discovered Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) in the mid-1990s and haven't tired of dipping into their work ever since, not least because it brings forth memories of my own childhood in the north-west of England. In 1998 I went through my Sangu dictionary and fieldnotes from Usangu plucking out the snippets that I'd written about children's toys, games and other pastimes. Here are some lightly edited extracts from my compilation:

Counting songs
In 1981 I recorded one childhood counting song from two adult Sangu, a man and a woman, who sang it in unison:
1. mbwe
2. yangaya
3. yapusi
4. yalima
5. tumbwe-tumbwe
6. manguluma
7. kinengu
8. nengulya
9. kilosa
10. chumilya
These apparently nonsensical 'numbers' bear no obvious relation to the Sangu cardinals in everyday use, nor other known Sangu counting systems (a cominatorial verbal sequence in use in the late 19th century and a finger counting system which is still employed). The tenth term, chumilya, appears to be a playful variant of Swahili kumi, 'ten', or one of its Northeast Coast Bantu cognates (/ch/ is not an inherited Sangu phoneme, nor is it usually retained in loanwords except in some proper names). The ninth term is possibly derived from the place name Kilosa, located in Usagara on one of the old caravan routes to the coast, though why it should be so derived is obscure (/ki/ also has a very restricted distribution in Sangu, and is probably indicative of a loan in this case: this also applies to the term for seven, kinengu). The other terms in the list share the regular phonological characteristics of Sangu, and playful etymologies might be suggested for some of them, though this would be no more than guesswork.

Jacks
The Sangu version of jacks (imdodo) that I witnessed on numerous occasions in Utengule in 1980-81 was played with twelve small stones as the jacks and a small round fruit of the ilihuluhulu (Capparis tomentosa) shrub as the ball. The game is played as follows. A small hollow is made in the earth and the stones are placed inside it. The fruit is then thrown up in the air and before it is caught a single stone must be scooped up in the other hand. If more than one stone is scooped up then the extra stone(s) must be returned to the hollow on the next throw. When all twelve stone have been removed one by one in this way, they are returned to the hollow and the same procedure is repeated, this time the stones being removed in twos. Next time they are removed in threes, then fours, and so on, until all twelve stones have to be scooped up in one go. If the player errs at any point (for example by failing to catch the fruit) then it is the turn of another player (or the same player if she is playing alone) to start from the beginning again. This game is most commonly played by girls. A twelve-stone game was also observed and photographed by Kubik in 1976 in the vicinity of Mahango-Mswiswi (1978: 103). This is a version of the game called 'fivestones' by Opie and Opie (1997: 56-72).

Where's the cow?
The following guessing game is one of the most common Sangu children's games, and I watched it being played in both Utengule and Luhanga in 1981. The game is played by two opponents (often accompanied and assisted by other children) who face one another and take turns to guess in which hand the other is concealing a small stone. The stone is referred to as ing'ombe, a cow, and each turn begins with the following exchange:

Player concealing the cow: hilili, hilili (the name of the game)
Player trying to guess where it is: ing'ombe, ing'ombe, 'cow, cow'
First player again: ing'ombe yili kwi?, 'where's the cow?'

If a player guesses correctly, then he or she is entitled to advance his or her counter (also a stone) towards a goal drawn on the ground. This goal takes the form of a circle or small hollow in the middle of a pitch of typically five or six concentric circles (sometimes not completed at the sides, so that the pitch comprises two bands of lines on either side of the goal). The game starts with the two counters at the outer edge of the pitch, being moved progressively towards the centre (across individual lines) at each successful guess. The winner is the player or team whose stone counter reaches the central goal first. When I first recorded this game being played, in Luhanga, children whose turn it was to conceal the 'cow' frequently attempted to cheat by dropping the stone behind their back, so that it was in neither hand. The game is called hilili, presumably after its opening formula, the etymology of which is opaque. The same term is also used in an extended sense by many Sangu speakers to refer to puzzles and riddles in general. Hilili can perhaps be thought of as the quintessential Sangu children's game, not only because of the wider use of its name, but also because it is cast in a bovine idiom.

If I was to rewrite these notes I'd say more about the actual games I watched and the contexts in which they were played. There's a nice account by Marius Fortie (1938: 302-303) of a series of contests and games which he observed being played in the west of Usangu in September 1934, having provided the prize money himself. That's one way of getting people to play games, although it wasn't Fortie's intention to record them in any great detail.  Studying children's games isn't child's play, and I'm not aware of any attempt in East Africa to undertake the kind of research that the Opies did in England, Scotland and Wales, though there are scattered sources from which a compilation might be begun, including the now largely forgotten literature on string figures. In November-December 2002 my Hehe-speaking research assistant, Justin John Kitinye, filled six school exercise books (436 pp.) with descriptions of the games that he knew and had played as a child. I've barely begun to translate these and reflect on their significance, but am very much looking forward to it.

References

Fortie, Marius 1938. Black and Beautiful: A Life in Safari Land. London: Robert Hale.

Kubik, Gerhard 1978. Recording utamaduni in Tanzania - a field report from Iringa and Mbeya regions, Oct 10 - Dec 14, 1976. Review of Ethnology 5 (11-14): 81-107.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie  1969. Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1985. The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1997. Children's Games with Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. Riddles and riddling among the Hehe of Tanzania. Anthropos 65: 719-813.

The Royal Anthropological Institute 1929. Notes and Queries on Anthropology (5th edition). London: The Royal Anthropological Institute.

The Royal Anthropological Institute 1951. Notes and Queries on Anthropology (6th edition). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

Walsh, Martin 1985. Shisango Dictionary. Unpublished ms. (computer printout), Cambridge, June 1985.

Walsh, Martin 1998. Children's toys, games and other pastimes in Usangu. Unpublished ms. (draft).

THE CURSE OF AN OLD WOMAN'S BUTTOCKS

One of the blog posts I enjoyed last week was my colleague Duncan Green's review of Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World, a popular book by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson about popular protests that in some cases have had far-reaching impacts. This reminded me of an incident that took place in the Tanzanian town of Iringa in early 2003, when an elderly woman bared her buttocks at men sent by the municipal council to destroy the maize she was growing on her urban plot. Deliberate exposure of the nether regions in this way is widely understood in East Africa as an act of excommunication (hence its Swahili description, kumwaga radhi, literally 'pouring away blessing', 'spilling forgiveness') and the equivalent of a grave curse, especially when undertaken by a parent or elder. I learned this some years earlier when a group of British squaddies in Nanyuki made the front-page headlines for collectively sticking their bare bums out of the windows of the bus they were travelling in. What to them was playful mooning was treated by the Kenyan media as an affront to the nation that demanded a high-level apology. (If I ever find the newspaper cutting I'll post it here. For those who want to reflect further on the humorous side of this cultural misunderstanding, then I suggest starting with Carry On Up the Khyber.)

The Iringa incident happened in February 2003, a month or so before I was due to depart after living there for almost six years. It was soon the talk of the town, and in early March I asked my local research assistant, Justin John Kitinye, to gather what stories he could about this act of resistance and the crackdown on urban maize-growing that had led to it. By the end of March he'd filled two 40-page exercise books with people's accounts of the crackdown and in particular the indignation that they felt about it. I left Iringa before I could follow up on the council's side of events, including the institutional and legal background to its actions, though I can now guess at the general outline of what happened. In 1997 Iringa joined Tanzania's implementation of the Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP), a joint UN-HABITAT/UNEP facility established in the early 1990s to build capacities in urban environmental planning and management (Nnkya 2005). Danida funding of the Sustainable Iringa Project (SIP) began in 2000 and supported a wide range of activities to improve the urban environment (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Iringa Municipal Council 2004). Although government policy and the SCP projects promoted home gardens and horticultural production in urban areas, this encouragement didn't extend to all forms of urban agriculture in every zone. The cultivation of maize and other tall crops in built-up areas has been perceived as an environmental hazard since British colonial times, and legislated against accordingly (Foeken et al. 2004: 3, 26). The crackdown on maize growing in Iringa in 2003 evidently began as the over-zealous revival of an old by-law, unmitigated by the more relaxed attitude that prevailed in other towns with SCP Projects. And this revival may have been inspired by memories of the colonial period, when such by-laws were strictly enforced and believed to have resulted in the virtual eradication of malaria from the town, as anthropologist Alison Redmayne has reminded me.

Townspeople interviewed by Kitinye placed the blame for the crackdown squarely on the Municipal Director. It was believed that he had decided to take drastic action without reference to his peers, who anticipated a more measured campaign in which education would take precedence over enforcement, which wouldn't be contemplated until the next growing season. It was also alleged that regular council staff had refused to do the destructive work that he had ordered; instead he was compelled to employ local youths - layabouts and bhang-smokers - at a daily rate of Tshs. 2,500 each. Indeed their depredations took place in the very parts of town in which many government staff lived: parts of Kihesa, Kleruu, Gangilonga (where I lived) and Ilala. The victims of this exercise were incensed that it had begun without warning: there was no announcement that the by-law against metre-tall crops would be enforced. They were especially angry that growing crops had been destroyed and their livelihoods threatened as a result; it would have been more acceptable if they had been fined and warned not to grow corn again the following season. But their plots of green maize were slashed without notice in the name of protecting them against the malaria-carrying mosquitoes and robbers that they might harbour. Not surprisingly the crackdown produced widespread fear and dismay, as well as individual acts of resistance, often in the form of verbal threats of physical or spiritual retribution against the maize-slashers. And the most notorious protest, of course, was that of the old woman who lifted up her clothes and displayed her buttocks to the youths who were cutting down her plants.

According to Kitinye the full meaning of her action wasn't immediately understood by the young men sent to do the council's dirty work - why was this old woman showing them her butt? - and they carried on slashing. What they didn't know - or chose to ignore - was that in local Hehe culture this was a curse that could result in them going mad, blind, deaf, dumb, or physically handicapped in some other way. And so after this incident people watched and waited to see what would happen to the cursed perpetrators in the days ahead. Sure enough, the curse began to take effect. One youth was heard talking to himself out loud as though he was still giving orders while cutting maize and mocking the victims of the exercise. One man involved in the operation was said to have got up in the middle of the night and slashed his own child with a machete while imagining that he was cutting maize: his wife snatched the child off him and rushed it to the hospital, where it was treated in time. Another man started frenziedly chewing maize leaves like a cow. Yet another was suddenly stricken by stomach pains and began to defecate maize plants... Such were the tales circulating in March 2003, along with the more prosaic news that the Iringa Urban MP, Monica Mbega, had hurried back from parliament and met with victims of the exercise and local leaders to discuss the gross injustice that had occurred. As a result the regional administration halted the operation against  maize growers. This was a small victory for the protest, but it didn't end the council's use of its by-law against tall crops, and reports from Iringa in February this year (e.g. on Francis Godwin's blog) indicate that urban cultivators continue to be harassed for what is supposed to be their own good.

References

Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Iringa Municipal Council 2004. Project Document: Sustainable Iringa Project - Phase 2: January 2005 - December 2006. Dar es Salaam and Iringa: Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Iringa Municipal Council.

Foeken, Dick, Michael Sofer, and Malongo Mlozi 2004. Urban Agriculture in Tanzania: Issues of Sustainability (African Studies Centre Research Report 75). Leiden: African Studies Centre. 

Nnkya, Tumsifu Jonas 2005.  The Sustainable Cities Programme in Tanzania 1992-2003: From a City Demonstration Project to a National Programme for Environmentally Sustainable Urban Development. Nairobi: UN-HABITAT and UNEP.

RED VELVET FROM HEAVEN

“About October the dark clouds begin to gather in the east, lingering about the crests of the ridges before breaking in spectacular thunderstorms. While it is still raining the hot sun comes out, the earth steams and rainbows appear over the lakes and dams. At this moment, the people say, “The hyaena is giving birth to twins.” Overnight scarlet lilies appear like balls of fire among the sprouting millet; shrubs along the cattle-paths break into leaf and in a few days are covered with pink scented flowers; bees hum everywhere; and a red velvet mite which crawls over the damp earth is welcomed as “the child of the rain” (mwambua) - a favourite personal name for anyone born at this time. Along the edge of the cattle-paths grass begins to appear. By late December, in a normal year, the rain may be so heavy that much of the country becomes impassable.” (Jellicoe 1978: 6-7)

Marguerite Jellicoe’s evocative description of the start of the annual rains in Singida includes a rare reference to the cultural significance of red velvet mites in Tanzania. I first came across these brightly coloured arachnids (family Trombidiidae) in 1981, at the start of my second wet season in the village of Utengule in Usangu (in what is now Mbarali District). I was away when the rains began on 2nd December, but when I returned to the village two days later these small crimson creatures were everywhere on the newly dampened earth. Sangu-speakers called them inkhadupa, their generic name for ticks and mites, and told me that they were thought to fall down from the sky along with the rain. In this respect they were similar to ground pangolins (Manis temminckii), another creature believed to fall from the heavens, from whence they were sent by the ancestors, amanguluvi.

At the time I had no idea what kind of tick or mite these might be. I later found a reference to them in adventurer Marius Fortie's book Black and Beautiful (1938). When he was in Dodoma in December 1933, Fortie was told by an American naturalist that the "velvety red bugs" crawling on wet sand after heavy rainfall were a kind of tick (1938: 251). In May 1995 I wrote to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi asking if they could help identify the creature that both Fortie and I had seen. In the absence of a specimen they couldn't. I therefore referred to it as a "small red tick" in the paper that I wrote about 'The Ritual Sacrifice of Pangolins among the Sangu of South-west Tanzania' (1995/96: 165).

The growth of the internet has since made searching for this kind of information much easier than it once was, and when I eventually revisited this question it didn't take me long to find out that these 'ticks' were in fact red velvet mites - a perfect description of their external appearance. According to Joanna Makol, an authority on the Trombidiidae and their relatives, the red velvet mites that appear in large numbers after heavy rain are most likely members of the genus Dinothrombium (Oudemans, 1910), only two species of which have been recorded in Tanzania, D. tinctorium (Linnaeus, 1767) and D. zarniki (Krausse, 1916). But definite identification of the heavenly mites that make such a dramatic seasonal appearance in Usangu and elsewhere in the Eastern Rift must await the collection and description of more specimens.

Whatever species are involved, it's clear that red velvet mites are known throughout the region. A post on the Tanzania Odyssey blog in February 2009 describes their sudden appearance in Ruaha National Park, when "in some areas the whole ground can take on an almost red sheen and to walk without standing on one is almost impossible." But their emergence at the start of the rains isn't everywhere ascribed to heavenly intervention. Writing in 2002, my Hehe-speaking research assistant in Iringa, John Justin Kitinye, described pink-coloured ngudupa or ngudupasa mwihala (lit. 'bush mites', as distinct from ngudupasa mnyumba or kaye, 'house ticks') quite accurately as creatures which could dig down and hide in sand for months on end during the long dry season. No mention of them falling from heaven here, but wondrous animals nonetheless.

Acknowledgements
I couldn't have written this note without the information provided by the late Ngwila Simuhongole and other villagers in Utengule, as well as by John Justin Kitinye in Iringa. I'm also grateful to Richard Bagine and David Moyer for answering my queries, and especially to Joanna Makol for her email correspondence in February 2008 and for sending me extracts from her paper in Annales Zoologici (2007).

References

Fortie, Marius 1938. Black and Beautiful: A Life in Safari Land. London: Robert Hale.

Jellicoe, Marguerite 1978. The Long Path: A Case Study of Social Change in Wahi, Singida District, Tanzania. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.

Makol, Joanna 2007. Generic Level Review and Phylogeny of Trombidiidae and Podothrombiidae (Acari: Actinotrichida: Trombidioidea) of the World. Annales Zoologici 57 (1): 1-194.

Walsh, Martin 1995/96. The Ritual Sacrifice of Pangolins among the Sangu of South-west Tanzania. Bulletin of the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research 37/38: 155-170.