Singida

The landscape around Singida is made of granite — whole hills of rounded boulders and inselbergs rising out of the dry plain. Those rocks have sheltered people for a very long time. Archaeological survey at Siuyu, in Singida Region, has recorded Later Stone Age rock shelters and rock paintings of animals, people and geometric figures, evidence of early human life contemporary with the far better-known rock-art landscape of Kondoa, to the east.

The modern history is shorter and stranger. Gold was found at Sekenke, in the north of the region, in 1907, and in 1909 it became the first gold mine in Tanganyika. It was the largest single producer of gold in the territory before the Second World War, and during the First World War, with exports cut off by blockade, Sekenke gold was carried to Tabora and struck into the famous 1916 fifteen-rupee coin to pay German troops. The mine closed in 1959.

Under British rule a branch railway was built north from Manyoni on the Central Line to Singida and Kinyangiri in 1931, and closed again in 1948. Singida stayed a regional centre on the road rather than the rail, and it is the paved trunk road — the route from Dodoma west towards Rwanda — that connects it today.

The region's largest people are the Nyaturu, or Turu, who call themselves Arimi — a name that means farmers. Their neighbours include the Iramba, the Isanzu, and the pastoral Datooga, whose herds move across the drier plains. Traditionally the Nyaturu were governed by councils of elders rather than chiefs, and the region remains overwhelmingly rural.

What surprises visitors is water. Right beside the town lie two shallow saline lakes, Singidani and Kindai, which fill and shrink with the seasons. Singidani is recognised as an Important Bird Area: pelicans are common, and when the water level suits them, thousands of lesser flamingos arrive. Some dry seasons it disappears almost completely.

South-east of the town, around Manyoni and Itigi, grows the Itigi thicket — a dense, almost impenetrable scrub of multi-stemmed shrubs found in very few places on earth, with a high share of plant species found nowhere else. It is under pressure from clearing for farms, and ecologists regard it as one of the country's most sensitive vegetation types.