Abstract
AbstractThe essay chronicles the early phases of a digital history project on landscape change in the mountains of eastern Tanzania. In collecting sources for a land and culture narrative, the project aims ultimately to create an archive that is locally produced in Tanzania and maintained by Utah State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives division. The project draws on more than thirty early twentieth-century landscape photographs from the Usambara Mountains in northeastern Tanzania by Walther Dobbertin, a professional photographer living in German East Africa. In the fall of 2015, team members scouted the sites for repeat photographs. The following summer, the project team began repeat photography and expanded the range of local collaborators to develop an oral history collection tied to the region’s landscape history. The essay lays out the problems, pitfalls, and successes of the preliminary collaborative work among academics, university students, archival specialists, and elders’ groups intent on collecting and preserving knowledge.
Highlights
This essay explores the possibilities of situating history through the Usambara Knowledge Project, whose overarching purpose is to document local environmental history of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains
A set of landscapes photographed early in the twentieth century by a professionally trained photographer named Walther Dobbertin serves as a starting point for community discussion and repeat photography
The foundational piece of the UKP archive is a set of German colonial-era (c. 1910) landscape images taken by Walther Dobbertin, a professional photographer based in German East Africa from about 1900
Summary
Public history in Africa has significant potential to illuminate the history of place through community involvement. This essay explores the possibilities of situating history through the Usambara Knowledge Project (hereafter UKP), whose overarching purpose is to document local environmental history of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains. The project’s current goal is to create a digital archive of the oral history and photography. This essay explores the possibilities of situating history through the Usambara Knowledge Project (hereafter UKP), whose overarching purpose is to document local environmental history of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains.. The project’s current goal is to create a digital archive of the oral history and photography. The archive’s openly available digitized material will serve as an essential complement to the paper holdings on East Africa’s highland history in institutional collections. In addition to data collection and dissemination, the UKP encourages community participation in knowledge creation as the archive becomes part of the locality. This paper highlights the process of developing this community-based history project from far-flung bases in Tanzania and the United States, documents the efforts of the UKP team to date. Our preliminary oral history collection from the summer of 2019 suggests a rich store knowledge regarding the ways in which ancestors of the The UKP team’s progress suggests that through close collaboration local knowledge can be preserved and disseminated
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