Year 7 Kondoa Safari
13th October 2019
Students and teachers departed at 09:00 on the 6th October 2019. We were bound for Kolo Information Centre, which is situated in central Tanzania and located approximately 250 km from Arusha. We were off to go and see and the Kondoa Rock Art.
We stayed at Amarula Campsite in Mnenia Village near Kolo.
This trip forms part of the Dragon Award for the Year 7’s. This involved them putting up their own tents, cooking and cleaning up after themselves.
The Year 7’s were in wonderful spirits and tackled their jobs with enthusiasm and varying ranges of competence!
Monday was spent visiting the rock art, which is many thousands of years old and has been classified as a World Heritage Site. The scenes depict hunter- gatherer paintings. The paintings portray stylized people, an anthropomorphic figure (half human half animal) and also animals such as gazelle, elephants and giraffe. They were painted with porcupine quills using a mixture of ochre rock and fig tree sap. They were painted by the San people who were similar to the Hadzabe. Mary Leakey was one of the first researchers to study these paintings in 1935.
In the afternoon, the students took a walk to the river with their clipboards, taking paper and coal to sketch their own art in a similar form.
Following this, they took white chalk and practised some rock art!
Tuesday morning involved packing up and cleaning camp before travelling back to Arusha. It was a very worthwhile trip and the students appeared to relish in the experiences. As did the teachers!
