Kondoa Rock-Art Sites

Spread across the hills above the small town of Kondoa, and reached from the village of Kolo, more than a hundred and fifty natural rock shelters carry paintings on their walls and overhangs. The images range from elegant red outline figures of people and animals — giraffe, eland, elephant, hunters with bows — to later, cruder white paintings of geometric shapes and stylised figures associated with agricultural communities.

Dating rock art is difficult and the sequence here is still debated. The older red paintings are generally thought to be at least two thousand years old, with considerably earlier dates proposed by some researchers, while the white paintings are much more recent. What is not in doubt is the continuity: some shelters have been used and repainted over very long spans of time, and a number of them still hold ritual meaning for local communities today.

Visiting takes effort. You register at the Department of Antiquities office in Kolo, take a local guide, drive a rough track into the hills and then walk up to each shelter. Three of the best-known sites — usually referred to as Kolo B1, B2 and B3 — can be seen in a morning. It is hot, dusty and steep in places, and there is nothing polished about the experience, but standing in a shelter in front of a two-thousand-year-old giraffe, with baobabs and the escarpment falling away below, is not something you forget.