Mount Hanang

An extinct volcano above Katesh

Mount Hanang rises out of the plains south of Babati, above the town of Katesh in Manyara Region. It is an extinct volcano and, at 3,420 metres, Tanzania’s fourth-highest mountain.

Both of those figures come from the Tanzania Forest Services Agency, which administers the mountain as the Mount Hanang Nature Forest Reserve — an area of 5,871 hectares — and promotes it under the strapline “acclimatisation site to higher altitudes”. The elevation is worth pinning down, because 3,417 metres circulates widely and appears in no Tanzanian government source. TFS says 3,420.

The ranking needs the same care. TFS calls Hanang the fourth-highest mountain in Tanzania, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority separately describes Mount Loolmalasin, at about 3,700 metres, as the third tallest in the country after Kilimanjaro and Meru. Put the two statements together and the order is Kilimanjaro, Meru, Loolmalasin, Hanang — which is consistent, and which explains why “third highest” appears on so many pages about Hanang. It is fourth.

Climbing it, and what nobody publishes

Hanang is a steep, little-used climb on a mountain that sees a tiny fraction of Kilimanjaro’s traffic, and TFS lists trekking and mountain climbing among the reserve’s activities alongside nature viewing and photography, with the Rift Valley and caves seen on the ascent.

What TFS does not publish is a duration, a route or a guide requirement. The one-day and two-day versions both circulate, and no Tanzanian authority states which is standard or whether both are permitted. That gap is worth knowing before planning: a climb of this height from a low base is a serious day’s exertion in anyone’s terms, and the details need to come from whoever is organising it rather than from a published schedule. The mountain trekking guide covers what a Tanzanian trek generally involves and where the altitude thresholds sit; day hiking covers the walks that start and finish at a road on the same day.

There is a second, more telling gap. Hanang District Council publishes a page on its own website titled Mount Hanang. It has been published and updated, and it contains no content at all in either English or Swahili. The district’s flagship attraction has a blank page on the district’s own site. That is a fair signal of how lightly visited the mountain is, and how much of what is written about it comes from somewhere other than an authority.

What is on the mountain

TFS names a specific and unusual list of attractions for the reserve. There is closed forest on the upper slopes, and historical caves. There are Barabaig and Iraqw sacred areas, which are visited with permission rather than wandered into. There are the Himiti waterfalls, and a view out to the Gendabi salt lake.

There is also an endemic mammal. Fukomys hanangensis, the Hanang mole-rat, is found on this mountain and nowhere else, which is the kind of fact that makes a small forest reserve matter more than its size suggests. Chameleons and birds fill out the list, and the forest itself is the habitat that holds them — see forest walks, bird watching, waterfall hiking and cave exploration.

TFS also lists traditional dances, sacred-site visits and local brew tasting among the reserve’s activities, which is unusual for a forest agency and reflects that this mountain is inseparable from the people who live under it. See traditional music and dance and village tours.

Barabaig country, and the history under it

The plains around Hanang are Barabaig grazing country — the Barabaig being a Datoga group — and their recent history is better documented than almost anything else about this area.

The Basotu plains below the mountain were the site of the Tanzania Canada Wheat Programme, a large state wheat scheme established with Canadian support to raise national wheat production on semi-arid land receiving around 600 millimetres of rain a year. The research literature on what followed is unambiguous. The Barabaig had run a seasonal grazing rotation across eight distinct forage regimes, including movement up and down the Rift wall, and the scheme took in land the Barabaig call muhejega, excluding them from the forage species they collectively call nyega nyatka. One favoured grass, megojiga — milk grass — has been completely eradicated. On employment, the published finding is stark: the wheat farms employ 250 people, fewer than ten of them Barabaig, and the water, health and education facilities provided have not greatly benefited a population largely excluded from access to them.

There is a second piece of documented history that bears directly on visiting. The most flagrant case of deceit recorded in a peer-reviewed study of Tanzanian cultural tourism concerned the Babati and Hanang programme: the entrepreneur running it was not local, and the “local guide” presented to visitors of Barabaig communities near Mount Hanang was a Chagga man from the Kilimanjaro region playing the part. It came to light only because a group of visitors spoke fluent Swahili, noticed the guide could not speak the local language, and insisted on hearing from Barabaig people directly — at which point much of what they had been told turned out to be invented. They complained to the Tanzania Tourist Board.

That was years ago and says nothing about any particular arrangement today. It is on this page because it is the specific, documented reason to ask a straightforward question before a cultural visit here: who is the guide, where are they from, and do they speak the language of the people being visited? The Datoga cultural visits guide develops the point.

Getting there and staying

TFS gives the approach distances as about 800 kilometres from Dar es Salaam via Dodoma and Manyara, about 270 kilometres from Kilimanjaro International Airport via Arusha, and about 159 kilometres from Singida. The reserve owns camping facilities, and there are hotels in Katesh and in Babati.

Hanang sits well off the northern circuit, which is the main reason it is quiet, and reaching it means the sort of road day the guide to overland travel in Tanzania describes rather than a scheduled flight. The logical pairing is Lake Babati an hour or so north, on the road that runs down from Tarangire towards Dodoma — a route very few itineraries take, and one of the few ways to see this part of the country at all.

Seasonally the mountain follows the two-season pattern of the northern highlands rather than the single wet season of the south, and the drier months give the most reliable footing on the ascent — The guide to Tanzania’s seasons sets out both regimes.

Common questions about Mount Hanang