Kondoa

North of Dodoma, the Masai escarpment runs along the western edge of the Great Rift Valley. Its eastern slopes are broken by rift faults into overhanging slabs of rock, and for at least two thousand years people have painted on them. UNESCO estimates there are between 150 and 450 decorated shelters, caves and cliff faces. Nobody knows the exact number, because some areas have never been surveyed.

The paintings come in layers. The oldest are fine-line figures in dark reddish-brown: elongated people with elaborate headdresses, carrying bows, alongside elephant, giraffe, eland, rhino and antelope. They are attributed to the hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Sandawe, one of the first peoples of Kondoa. Later come paintings by herding peoples, and the white paintings of farming communities, which often show cattle. UNESCO lists the sites because that sequence records the change from hunting and gathering to farming and herding.

No painting has been scientifically dated. Estimates for the oldest range from about three thousand years to ten thousand or more, and the weathering makes the earliest dates impossible to prove for now. The ground beneath the shelters is older still. At the Kisese II rock shelter, excavated by the Leakeys from 1935, ostrich-eggshell beads have been dated to more than 40,000 years ago.

Missionaries first reported the paintings to Europeans in 1908. Mary and Louis Leakey studied them through the 1930s and 1950s and documented more than 1,600 painted images at 186 sites north of Kondoa. Many of the paintings they recorded in the early 1950s have since faded badly or disappeared.

Kondoa town has a later history too. In the First World War, South African troops under Jacob van Deventer took the town in April 1916, and Lettow-Vorbeck's German force attacked them there from 7 to 10 May 1916, one of the larger actions of the East African campaign.

What sets Kondoa apart from most rock-art sites is that it is not only in the past. UNESCO lists it partly for this: some shelters are still used by local communities for rainmaking, divination, healing and initiation. The places where hunter-gatherers once painted, perhaps to influence the weather, are used by farming villages today for their own rain ceremonies.

The most powerful of them, according to oral tradition, is Mongomi wa Kolo, the main shelter at Kolo. A hollow under a huge boulder a few metres to its south is still used by diviners, healers and rainmakers. Researchers have linked some of the paintings to the Sandawe practice of simbó, in which dancers are believed to take on the power of an animal, often the lion.

Living use and conservation do not always sit easily together. In some rain ceremonies animal fat and beer are thrown over the paintings. UNESCO notes this as a possible recent version of older practices, and a problem the site's managers have to balance against the communities' rights to their own sacred places.

The district is home to the Rangi (Warangi), who speak a Bantu language, Kirangi, and are mostly Muslim, together with the Sandawe, Alagwa and Datooga. The Sandawe tradition of painting did not end in the distant past. About 1970 a researcher recorded Sandawe men still making rock paintings, and UNESCO cites a recent painting by a Sandawe-speaking man as evidence of a tradition that may run back thousands of years.