Iringa

Start much earlier than the colonial period. At Isimila, about twenty kilometres south-west of the town, a dry gully has cut down through sediments and exposed a Stone Age site where hand axes and cleavers were excavated in quantity, dated to roughly 70,000 years ago. The gully has also eroded into a forest of sandstone pillars, which is why people photograph it. The tools are why it matters.

The history the town is built on, though, is the Hehe and their chief Mkwawa. In 1891 a German column under Emil von Zelewski marched into Hehe country expecting the usual outcome. At Lugalo, the Hehe ambushed it and destroyed it, killing von Zelewski and most of his force — one of the most complete defeats inflicted on a European army in the colonial conquest of the continent.

The Germans spent seven years answering it. They stormed Mkwawa's fortress at Kalenga, and built a garrison town — Neu Iringa — to hold the district. Mkwawa took to the bush and fought a guerrilla campaign until 1898, when, cornered, he shot himself rather than be captured. German soldiers cut off his head and sent the skull to Germany.

What happened next is remarkable. The return of the skull was written into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 — Article 246, an article of a world peace treaty devoted to the head of a Tanzanian chief. It still took decades. Governor Sir Edward Twining traced it to a museum in Bremen, and on 19 June 1954 presented it to Mkwawa's grandson, Chief Adam Sapi, at Kalenga in front of more than thirty thousand Hehe. It is still there, in the Mkwawa Memorial Museum.

The Hehe identity here is strong and explicitly historical — Mkwawa is not a museum figure but a living reference point, and the chieftaincy retained real standing well into the independence period. Chief Adam Sapi Mkwawa, who received his grandfather's skull in 1954, went on to be the first Speaker of Tanzania's National Assembly.

The town itself sits on a rocky spur with a colonial-era grid below it, and it is walkable, cool and unusually pleasant. The German and Asian commercial buildings along the main streets are largely intact, and the market is one of the better ones in the country for produce, given what grows here. There is a long-standing Greek and Indian trading presence in the older streets.

The climate is the thing visitors remark on. Above 1,550 metres, Iringa is cold at night for much of the year, and the surrounding country — rocky outcrops, miombo woodland, pine plantations — looks nothing like the savanna people arrive expecting. Kalenga, ten kilometres out, holds the museum and Mkwawa's grave, and the walk around the old fortress site is the most historically dense hour in the southern highlands.