The Tongwe Trust
The Tongwe people of West Tanzania inhabit one of the most beautiful and remote places on the planet. Their homeland ranges from thickly-forested Mahale Mountains, where chimpanzees and elephants roam, to the crystalline waters of Lake Tanganyika. They make their living by subsistence farming, fishing and trading, often across the lake with neighbouring Congo.
To the traveller passing through their villages, the Tongwe lifestyle might seem idyllic, but, as in many parts of Africa, the hard realities of poor education, abysmal health services and back-breaking manual labour are just beneath the surface.
The Tongwe economy, such as it is, operates largely outside the mainstream of cash and credit. There are no roads, cars, telephones, power or mains water. The few dispensaries and schools are hopelessly under-equipped and poorly staffed.
Yet there is also a strong sense of cultural identity and self-reliance; they speak their own language, Ki-Tongwe, as well as Swahili; also they keep alive a strong system of traditional beliefs expressed through vivid folklore and knowledge of herbal medicine. Almost every one of them is an accomplished drummer, dancer, mimic or humourist, and they have an extraordinary reservoir of knowledge of the plants and trees around them, and their uses as herbal remedies.
The roughly 30,000 Tongwe people have a remarkable affinity with the land on which they live: although they have co-existed with populations of eastern long-haired chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains for centuries, perhaps even thousands of years, they have never hunted them for bush meat as in other parts of Africa. Instead, they have respected the chimpanzee as an ancestor who decided to return to the forest rather than venture onto an unknown evolutionary path.
This sort of empathy with the natural world could be seen as naivety by many, but it makes the Tongwe fascinating, and their continuing stewardship of the forest is critically important in establishing best practices in sustainable eco-friendly rural conservancy and development schemes.
The Tongwe Trust was established in 1989 as a grassroots partnership between a group of Tongwe people, headed by local Hamisi Sadi and a westerner called Roland Purcell, who had come to the area to establish a safari camp in the Mahale National Park. From the start, the trust was built entirely in the image of its own people - and, to this day, Purcell remains the only non-Tongwe with any management involvement.
The trust's mission was simple - to improve the livelihoods of the Tongwe people - but its methods have evolved in the most innovative ways. The trust has learned that in order to get at the root problems of poverty, the root causes have to be addressed, such as: land ownership
and title, health and education, corruption and good governance. Such issues are not necessarily being addressed by central or district government - at least not in places as remote as Tongwe-land.
As they become integrated into our increasingly uncertain and troubled world, The Tongwe are learning to take their future into their own hands. With this new-found sense of self-determination, the Trust's aim is to make the Tongwe people truly self-reliant.
To date the Tongwe Trust has been involved in investment in nursery schooling, healthcare, health education and vaccination programmes, micro-finance schemes, the improvement of agricultural techniques and irrigation, sustainable timber use, training guides and trackers for eco-tourism schemes, compiling records of herbal knowledge, conserving wildlife and preserving the oral cultural traditions of the Tongwe. It has done all this on a tiny budget, much of achieved by unpaid volunteer work from the Tongwe themselves, who can see the importance of fighting to preserve their culture in a way that is as compatible as possible with social justice and the ways of the modern world.
The work of the trust will not be completed overnight; the Tongwe people know that they will have to adapt to change as it happens, and that generations hence will still be working to maintain and advance the cause of their people. But it is a measure of how foresighted and culturally aware the Tongwe people are that they should be so involved and so self-reliant.
Potential donors can specify exactly which area of any project they would like their funding to be used for, whether it is for a pair of ranger's boots, or for a foot-driven water pump for one of the women's groups. One-hundred percent of any donation reaches the target, a remarkable claim.
For more information you can visit The Tongwe Trust website
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