About the park

The history of Mahale

Name: Mahale Mountains National Park
Address: Tanzania

Every park in this network has a story about people, borders and power. Mahale has that story too, but it also has one no other park here can claim: since 1968, a single community of wild chimpanzees has been watched, named and followed without a break, and what came out of that record changed what scientists mean when they say a non-human animal has culture.

If you only want the answer

The Batongwe and Holoholo lived in these mountains for generations, fishing Lake Tanganyika's shore and farming its footslopes, before Kyoto University primatologists began surveying the lakeshore for chimpanzees around 1961 and set up a research camp at Kasoje in October 1965. The M-group chimpanzees have been studied continuously since 1968, one of the two longest wild-chimpanzee studies on Earth, and the work produced the first solid evidence that chimpanzee communities carry their own local cultures and that they self-medicate with specific plants. In 1979 the site became a formal research centre and the Batongwe and Holoholo still living inside its boundary were moved out; the park was gazetted in 1985. Tourism arrived later still, through camps such as Greystoke Mahale, on a park that to this day has never built a road.

Tongwe country first

Long before any scientist reached Lake Tanganyika's eastern shore, the Batongwe, commonly written Tongwe, and the Holoholo lived in and around these mountains. They fished the lake from dugout canoes, farmed the narrow footslopes between the water and the forest, hunted and gathered inland, and moved along paths that still shape the routes trekkers and rangers use today. Kasoje, the flat ground at the western foot of the range where the chimpanzee study still runs, was a Tongwe village and fishing landing before it was a research station; the name survived the change of use, and everyone who works there, Tanzanian and foreign, still calls it Kasoje.

This was not empty wilderness waiting to be discovered. It was inhabited country with its own land use, its own names for the peaks and rivers, and its own long relationship with the animals that would later make the mountains famous. That relationship gets one sentence in most guidebooks and a great deal more in the record, and it belongs at the start of this story rather than at the end.

Science arrives, on Itani's trail

Japanese primatology moved into Africa in the late 1950s under Junichiro Itani, a student of Kinji Imanishi and one of the founders of Kyoto University's school of primate studies. Itani's teams began surveying the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika for wild chimpanzees around 1961, working first around Kabogo to the north before turning south. By 1963 they had reached Kasoje, and in October 1965 the Kyoto University Africa Primatological Expedition set up what was meant to be a single field season at the site. It became a sixty-year commitment.

The method was simple and, by modern standards, blunt: researchers planted sugar cane near camp to draw chimpanzee groups close enough to observe and eventually to habituate. The first community drawn in this way, known as K-group, was provisioned from 1966; it did not survive, and by 1982 it had died out. A second community, the Mimikire clan, or M-group, was habituated from 1968 and has been followed without a break ever since. Toshisada Nishida, who defended his doctoral dissertation on the Mahale fieldwork at Kyoto University in 1968, led the project for decades, stepped back from his Kyoto professorship in 2004, and stayed connected to the site until his death in 2011.

What sixty years of watching produced

A study this long does not just accumulate sightings; it changes what a species can be said to have. In 1999 a team that included Nishida and Jane Goodall pooled decades of field notes from Mahale, Gombe and five other long-term sites and published 'Cultures in Chimpanzees' in the journal Nature. The comparison showed dozens of behaviours, from grooming styles to ways of cracking nuts and courting, that varied consistently between communities in ways genetics and habitat could not explain. It was one of the first times mainstream science took seriously the idea that a non-human animal could carry something close to culture in the anthropological sense, and Mahale's decades of records were part of the evidence that made the case hold up.

The same long record turned up something stranger and more specific: chimpanzees medicating themselves. Kyoto researchers documented Mahale's chimpanzees deliberately chewing the bitter pith of a plant, Vernonia amygdalina, that local people also use against intestinal parasites, in a pattern that looked like self-treatment rather than ordinary feeding. The finding, formalized in the research record in 1987, helped found zoopharmacognosy, the study of animals using plants medicinally, as a field of its own.

Not everything the record shows is flattering. The first documented case of one chimpanzee community killing a member of another was logged at Mahale in 1974, and infanticide within the group followed in 1977. Because the study never stopped, individual chimpanzees, among them long-ruling alpha males like Ntologi and Kalunde, have documented biographies spanning decades rather than seasons; when a guide points out an animal on a trek today, they are often pointing at a name with a multi-generational file behind it, not a stranger.

The research centre, the resettlement and the park

As the science matured, the Tanzanian government and Kyoto University formalized the site as the Mahale Mountains Wildlife Research Centre in 1979. The same process cleared the mountains of the people still living inside what would become the park boundary: the Batongwe and Holoholo resident there were moved out. The sources describe the removal in blunt terms, forced eviction rather than negotiated resettlement, but none we found gives a reliable count of how many households were affected; unlike some other parks in this network, Mahale does not have a documented eviction number, and that gap should be stated plainly rather than papered over with a guess.

The park itself was gazetted six years later, in 1985, under Government Notice No. 262. The order of events is worth noting: the research station came first, the park came after, built in large part around protecting the ground the study already depended on. Very few African parks were shaped this directly by an ongoing science project rather than the other way around.

Greystoke's era and a policy with no roads

Tourism reached Mahale much later than research did, and on a small scale it has stayed that way. Greystoke Mahale, built on the beach by the operator Nomad Tanzania partly from timber salvaged from a wrecked dhow, opened as one of the park's first permanent camps; sources are not consistent on the exact year, so we are not going to invent precision the record does not have. What is well documented is that it and the handful of camps that followed operate on a strip of lakeshore a few kilometres long, sharing the park with a research station rather than displacing it.

No road has ever been built inside Mahale. Guests and researchers alike arrive by light aircraft to the single airstrip or by boat along the lake, and everything after that moves on foot or by dhow. That is not an oversight; it is the same isolation that let a chimpanzee study run for sixty years without the disturbance a road network brings, and it is why Mahale, alone among Tanzania's major parks, charges no vehicle fee at all. There is nothing to drive.

What you see of this history today

The M-group is the clearest living link to 1968. The chimpanzees a visitor treks to see today are descendants, in several cases direct descendants, of the community Nishida's team first drew in with sugar cane, and guides trained through decades of continuous observation can identify individuals on sight and describe their place in a family tree that predates most of the tourists who come to see them.

The human history is quieter but still on the map. Kasoje still carries its Tongwe name, and the research station still sits where the village once did. Ask a guide and most can point out other place names along the trekking routes that predate the park, even where the people who gave them those names no longer live inside the boundary.

The arrival itself is the last piece of the story that has not changed. There is still no road in, only a plane to the airstrip and then a boat along the shore, the same approach researchers made in October 1965. Mahale is one of the few parks anywhere where reaching it at all still requires travelling the way the first people to study it did.