ABSTRACT
T he Arusha are sedentary agriculturists living on the south-western slopes and peripheral lowlands of Mt. Meru, an extinct volcano 14,979 feet altitude, in northern Tanganyika. In 1957 nearly two-thirds of the population of 63,000 lived on the mountain slopes, the traditional lands of the tribe, where rainfall is good and reliable and volcanic soils are fertile. There, at an average density of more than one thousand people per square mile (Gulliver, 1960), their economy is based on bananas, maize, finger millet and legumes with, increasingly, coffee and onions as cash crops. Beginning in the second quarter of the last century with a small group of immigrant settlers, the Arusha accommodated a rapidly expanding population by a continuous expansion of settlement upwards on the mountain slopes, cutting away at the edge of the forest.
