First published: 11/05/23.

Anonymous

Kondoa

Kondoa (Inscribed)

Kondoa by Wojciech Fedoruk

Kondoa Rock-Art Sites WHS. A series of ancient paintings on rock shelter walls in central Tanzania nine kilometres east of the main highway (T5) from Dodoma to Babati.

The landscape is large piled granite boulders on the western rim of the Maasai steppe and form rock shelters facing away from prevailing winds. These rock shelters often have flat surfaces due to rifting, and these surfaces are where the paintings are found, protected from weathering.
These paintings are still part of a living tradition of creation and use by both Sandawe in their simbó healing ceremonies, and by Maasai people in ritual feasting. About 1970, Sandawe men were still making rock paintings. The reasons were magical (depicting the animal that the painter intended to kill), casual, and sacrificial (on specific clan-spirit hills and depicting rain-making and healing ceremonies).
The paintings depict elongated people, animals, and hunting scenes. Older paintings are generally red hunter-gatherers superimposed by Bantu white cattle.
Individual sites include Kisese II Rockshelter: paintings, beads, lithics, pottery, and other artifacts. Used for the burial of seven Holocene individuals. Evidence of occupation on the floors dated to more than 40,000 years ago.
One of the paintings depicts a human figure holding a stick and an elephant. Nash commented on the peaceful posture of the human, doubting that the drawing was intended to depict a hunting scene. Other paintings portray giraffes, a possible rhinoceros fragment, a humanoid figure composed of concentric circles in the head and continuous lines from the top of the head to the rest of the body, and some other figures whose intended depictions were unclear.

This may be the most unusual access for an WHS. Google Maps puts you in the middle of a field several kilometres from the site. If you look on Google Maps, the sites are marked in blue in the correct location. Drive through the city of Kolo to the middle of town looking for the office on the east side of the road. Go in, pay and then there is a long involved registration process first in a book and then on a phone. The guide came along in my car. It is 8.5 km from the office and a high clearance vehicle with AWD is probably necessary to navigate the last 3.5 km. Turn east on the road just north of the office and drive for 5 km on a good dirt road. Then turn south on a rough rocky, single track road. A guard lets you through the gate and registers you again. The road crosses the dry Kolo river (that could prevent any access in flood) and then crosses some steep rocky areas 3.5 km to a parking area. 

Climb a steep cement/rock path to the first site (an animal, 3 yellow stick figures carrying fruit, and two red hunters with "inverted baskets" on their heads), return a ways on a level area and climb up again to the second site in a large rock overhang (stick giraffe, more hunters with "baskets"). The explanation for the "baskets" is that they are a headdress mimicking an ostrich. Then descend to the left to the third site (dancing or romantic site with 2 pairs of couples embracing). Note that my description of the art bears little resemblance to the write-up I obtained from Worldheritagesite.org. 
If one does not have a car that could drive there, the guide said you could rent one for 100,000 Tsh. Another option was to walk the 8.5 km which the guide was all too willing to do (ridiculous). Compared to other rock art sites (south Algeria in the Sahara), these were of mediocre quality. 27,000 Tsh
At the site were 3 older Canadian women, two of them amazingly from the same city I am from. They were very impressed and weren't too interested in anything I had to say. 

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