A FALLEN TREE IN STONE TOWN

by Jonathan Walz 

Forodhani Gardens, Zanzibar (photo: Martin Walsh)

I

On July 9, 2020, a large tree fell in the Vuga area of Stone Town, Zanzibar.* Its collapse was sudden and loud. People quickly gathered. The tree’s meaning to different people emerged in the subsequent three days as the tree was discussed, disassembled, hauled-off, reflected-on, and mourned. Clarity about the tree’s meaning and social role emerged from its death.

II

Unique trees are essential to societies in eastern Africa and throughout the world. From mainland Africa to Seychelles, the baobab, coco de mer, fig, and mango play roles in story-telling and ritual practice, not to mention their contributions to sustenance and medicine. Common English names for other trees with distinct uses and cultural significance – all found in contemporary Zanzibar – include, but are not limited to, the bodhi, breadfruit, camphor, cassia, cinnamon, clove, coconut, date, ebony, euphorbia (succulent), false ashoka, ficus, frangipani, Indian almond, kapok, mahogany, mangrove, neem, peepal, saman, tamarind, and teak.

Trees serve a multitude of purposes. Particular species provide shade or windbreaks. Trees can be ornamental. Large or old trees serve as shrines, house ancestors, or, for some societies, they can represent the center of the symbolic universe (i.e. an axis mundi). Trees can obscure visibility and sound, facilitating secrecy. The wood of some species can be used to make objects: posts, flooring, utensils, beehives, weapons, watercraft, musical instruments, and carvings. Many trees produce edible fruits, seeds, roots, leaves, saps, or gums or are consumed as timber for construction projects or for firewood, charcoal, or animal fodder. Extracts from trees can be employed as latexes, oils, dyes, hunting poisons, or incense. The cosmetic cabinets of Swahili women contain an assortment of tree products revered for their affordances.

Trees in Stone Town (photo: Jonathan Walz)

Large trees are visible and prominent, with high crowns that mark places of importance on the countryside or in cities. In Stone Town, multi-story architecture often obstructs viewsheds. There are no natural features other than trees to distinguish places from a distance, especially when viewed from the perspective of a pedestrian in the alleyways. In parts of Tanzania, forests serve as sacred groves or identify ancient settlements (see the scholarship of Elgidius Ichumbaki (2015), who suggests reconsidering the meaning of “archaeological site” using trees). Trees have meanings that stretch beyond their immediate times and locations; they can live on in place names, for example throughout Zanzibar (Myers 2016). 

III

The tree that fell in Vuga had a social life. It was planted by Khamis Salum in 2000. The Ficus benjamina - Weeping or Java Fig - has an origin in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This species is a large evergreen tree, 10-20 meters in height with drooping foliage. Hardy and fast-growing, it has a strong root system and bears orange to red berries (Dharani 2002).

The Weeping Fig functioned as a shade tree for nearby offices. Taxi drivers wedged everyday items in the openings in its trunk and among its lower branches. It was an attractive destination for urban animals, including a pair of Broad-billed Rollers, a colony of Yellow-headed Dwarf Geckos, and a Great Plated Lizard that lived in a stone wall at the base of its trunk. When it fruited, the tree attracted Greater Galagos and two species of fruit bat.

All of this ended when the tree fell. When it collapsed across a dirt road it landed without injury to people or property. Community members in the area gathered, taking photos in awe.

(photo: Jonathan Walz)

IV

After the tree’s collapse, three entities were contacted because each has purview over the trees of Stone Town, a World Heritage Site: the Stone Town Conservation and Development Authority, Urban Municipal Council, and Department of Forests and Non-Renewable Natural Resources. Discussions with the authorities documented the details of the tree and offered guidelines for the removal of its remains. Photographs were taken by authorities and its species confirmed. Then, clearance began. A representative from the Urban Municipal Council arrived on-site to observe a hired worker with a permitted chainsaw disassemble the tree. At 12 meters in height and almost a meter thick at breast height, the removal process of the tree spanned two days. This species produces soft wood useful as firewood (not charcoal), so its trunk and branches were carried away by community members. 

V

During subsequent days, two individuals independently visited the site of the tree fall and performed rites. The individuals were older men who discretely left items at its stump and spoke inaudible words. They stayed in the vicinity briefly. The Weeping Fig was a shrine to a spirit. The two visitors each left an offering (sadaka), including a small white cloth. This interpretation also explains the appearance of eggs and vials of rosewater at the base of the tree in previous years. The rite maintains harmony for an individual or community by preventing evil or pollution as a result of the demise of the mzimu, the Swahili name for a spirit dwelling.

Trees have specific meanings and uses to different stakeholders. This event should inspire conversations about the roles of trees, their socio-nature, urban environmental histories, and the symbolic and spiritual character of cities (Myers 2016: 83). Trees are physical and metaphysical anchors. Western perspectives on trees delimit and can erase other cultural meanings and uses of trees. While the built environment of Stone Town may be “of elsewhere” (Meier 2016), trees and green spaces in Zanzibar still yield deep significances that draw heavily from the African and Indian Ocean cultural intersections in Zanzibar. For instance, the words jini and shetani have Arabic roots, but pepo and mzimu have Bantu roots. These terminologies are variously used to indicate spirits or spirit dwellings among the Swahili. The cultural significance of these terms and the context of use are obscured when trees or green spaces and districts on the island are framed simply as areas of public enjoyment (or “parks”), which embraces a Western concept of nature and green spaces for urban Africa.

(photo: Jonathan Walz)

VI

The words, performances, and objects associated with special trees are essential for comprehension of their significance as heritage. The material approach to the fallen Weeping fig and its consumption (as firewood, and so forth) is understandable in a comparatively impoverished setting that has been culturally degraded by tourism. Yet, the performance of rites shows that even under these less than ideal circumstances, or, better yet, because of the circumstances, meaning persists. Using a case from Transkei, Throop (2003) articulates that from on-the-ground treatments of trees there is the potential to distil the surrounding power relations. In Zanzibar, this postulate applies to trees as central places of social practice that respond to colonial experience, the intersection of town-and countryside, and environmental change. Contradictions exist in the “heritagization” of Stone Town (Sheriff 2019). One everyday tension is the disproportionate emphasis placed by conservators on architecture (already questioned for its “authenticity”) as compared against, for example, intangible practices that surround trees that endure at prominent points or in place names in Stone Town.

*Note that the tree that is the subject of this post is not shown for ethical reasons. All of the images included here are of other trees in Zanzibar.

References

Dharani, N. 2002. Field Guide to the Common Trees and Shrubs of East Africa. Cape Town: Struik Publishers.

Ichumbaki, E. 2015. Monumental Ruins, Baobab Trees and Spirituality: Perceptions on Values and Uses of Built Heritage along the East African Coast. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Meier, P. 2016. Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Myers, G. 2016. Urban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics. Chicago: Policy Press.

Rival, L (ed.) 1998. The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism. London: Routledge.

Sheriff, A. 2019. Contradictions in the heritagization of Zanzibar ‘Stone Town’. In B. Schnepel and T. Sen (eds.) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World. Leiden: Brill. 221-245.

Throop, J. 2003. The python and the crying tree: interpreting tales of environmental and colonial power in Transkei. International Journal of African Historical Studies 36 (3): 511-532.

FATHER PHIL: GEOLOGIST, BOTANIST, PRIEST

I first met Father Phil when he came to give Midnight Mass in Utengule-Usangu in 1980. He arrived in the village on his pikipiki (motorbike) in the late afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I immediately went off to find him. Some months earlier I’d been told to look out for this geologist-turned-botanist and White Father, and this was my first chance to meet him. It was also the first time another white man had visited Utengule since I’d been there. To my pleasant surprise I found myself greeting an Englishman, a gaunt northerner (a “tallish, thin, frail-looking man, with circular spectacles”) whose voice and humour reminded me of home. We spent about three hours lost in lively discussion before the local Catechist and the Village Secretary both came to tell him that the congregation was waiting, and that Mass should begin. But it was far too early to start (about two and half hours before midnight), and Padre Philip tried to resist their pleas. Finally he gave in, threatening not to come to give “Midnight” Mass again.

I’ll never forget sitting at the back of Utengule’s small brick-built Roman Catholic church hearing him welcome the congregation in Swahili with a thick northern accent. I struggled through the rest of the service – the first Mass I’d ever been to – trying to conceal a broad grin. It was a wet and windy night and he berated the villagers for not turning out in greater numbers – most of those present were women and children. But afterwards he joined them singing and dancing in the mud outside the church, before we slipped off for yet another cup of tea in the small bare room that was reserved for visiting priests. We resumed our earlier conversation by the flickering light of a small kerosene lamp, until eventually he asked the Christmas revellers to stop (they’d been singing and dancing for about an hour), and retired for the night. I went back to my mud hut and after midnight began writing a letter that included details of our meeting, which I described as “my Christmas present”.

Father Phil gave me a potted account of his life, including his academic and religious conversions. If he could find time he’d arrange for me to come and stay in the White Fathers’ mission at Irambo (in Imbwila to the south-west of Usangu), and then we could spend longer talking about the natural and cultural history of the Southern Highlands. Alas this never came to pass. We didn’t meet again in Utengule until the following June, when I came across him preaching in one of the village drinking clubs. No wonder that the villagers -- many of whom weren’t Christians -- thought that he was something of a character (churchgoers themselves would sometimes gleefully mimic the characteristic way in which he gesticulated with his hands and arms while giving Mass). We spent more time together that day, and among other things he went through the plant names in my shoebox file of Sangu vocabulary, suggesting scientific identifications that I can still read in pencil on the paper slips. The next day, 28 June, was a Sunday, and he gave Mass in the morning and then sped off towards Igurusi and the Tanzam Highway in the afternoon.

Although I always wanted to, I didn’t get chance to talk to him again. For some months he was on leave in England, and other priests came to Utengule in his stead. I was back in Cambridge when I heard, more than two years later, that he had died. Mutual friends in Kidugala, Sarah and Christoph Jaeschke, wrote telling me that he’d been killed in an accident in Mbeya on 7 December 1982. Apparently he was overtaking a bus on his pikipiki and didn’t see an oncoming car. Christoph and he had talked about hiking together from Kidugala over the Kipengere Mountains and down to Usangu in the vicinity of Chimala, but like my own dream of spending more time in his good company, this wasn’t to be. I wrote a belated letter of condolences to his brother in Lancaster, and asked if he knew the whereabouts of the detailed notebooks that Father Phil had kept of his hikes and collecting in the Southern Highlands (when he’d shown me one of these I’d implored him to make sure that they ended up one day in a library or archive). In return John Leedal sent me a copy of the booklet – Welcome to Mbeya – that his brother had extensively rewritten and that had been completed and printed by friends after his death.

I’ve treasured this for many years, tracing the footsteps of Father Phil whenever I dip into it. It’s a wonderfully succint guide to the landscape that he loved, more substantial than the article on ‘Places to Visit in Mbeya Region’ that he published in Tanzania Notes and Records in 1981. There’s more of the same in the introductory chapter on ‘Highways and Byways of the Southern Highlands’ in the book on The Mountain Flowers of Southern Tanzania (1982) that he co-authored with fellow botanist Phillip Cribb, in this case woven together with references to the plant collecting trips of Mary Richards (cf. Condry 1998). And more recently Welcome to Mbeya has itself been expanded and updated by Liz de Leyser as A Guide to the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, with a dedication to Father Phil. Some of the information from these different texts has since been picked up by the standard tourist guides to Tanzania, and so his knowledge of the region continues to be passed on. His experience of its plants is, of course, preserved in the collections that he made and the botanical designations of the species that are named after him, and ultimately in the protected areas that now cover parts of this landscape (Kitulo National Park and Mpanga/Kipengere Game Reserve).

As for Father Phil’s notebooks, I wrote last week to Phil Cribb, asking if he knew of their whereabouts. There are, he said, assorted notes, maps and sketches in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. I don’t know whether these include the detailed notes that I saw in Utengule nearly three decades ago. I hope so, because that kind of knowledge is irreplaceable.

-------------
Geoffrey Philip Leedal was born in 1927 in Shipley, Yorkshire, and studied at the University of Leeds, where he wrote a Ph.D. on the geology of the NW Highlands of Scotland. He subsequently went on geological surveys and expeditions in East Africa, and all of his early publications are in this field. He joined the White Father’s Missionary Society in 1953, and was ordained a priest in 1961 and appointed to Mbeya. He wrote a number of (now hard-to-obtain) booklets on the natural history of the area, and collected more than 7,000 botanical specimens for the herbaria in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kew. For these and other details of his life and work readers are referred to the obituary written by Phillip Cribb in the Kew Bulletin (1984).

Afterword, 27 July 2010

Phil Cribb writes:

When Phil Leedal joined Chris Grey-Wilson and myself in the Southern Highlands in 1976 he expounded his plant hunting philosophy. "You will never find new species by walking along tracks in the forest, always walk at right angles to established paths". At that moment he abruptly turned right into the forest and fell down a small cliff. Believe it or not we found a new species of Impatiens, subsequently named Impatiens leedalii, where he landed! He had four orchids named after him: Angraecopsis leedalii, Margelliantha leedalii, Stolzia leedalii and Ypsilopus leedalii, but he discovered many more novelties over the years and became an important source of herbarium material for Kew's work on the Flora of Tropical East Africa.

He adds that another plant named after Father Phil was Aloe leedalii S. Carter.  Phil Cribb has also kindly sent me this photo of his friend and colleague, taken on Mount Rungwe in 1976.

References

Condry, William 1998. Wildflower Safari: The Life of Mary Richards. Llandysul, Ceredigion: Gomer Press.

Cribb, Phillip 1984. Rev. G. Philip Leedal W.F. (1927-1982). Kew Bulletin 39 (1): 156.

Cribb, P. J. and G. P. Leedal 1982. The Mountain Flowers of Southern Tanzania: A Field Guide to the Common Flowers. Rotterdam: A.A.Balkema.

Leedal, P. H. [sic] 1981. Places to Visit in Mbeya Region. Tanzania Notes and Records 86-87: 77-81.

Leedal, G. P. (and others) 1983. Welcome to Mbeya. (No publication details).

de Leyser, Liz (Undated) [2002]. A Guide to the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. (No publication details).