Wild chimpanzees on the shore of Lake Tanganyika — Africa's most remote and most rewarding primate encounter, where the forest meets the world's deepest freshwater lake
Mahale Mountains National Park (1,613 sq km of the Mahale Peninsula on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania — accessible only by light aircraft from Kigoma, or by the weekly Lake Tanganyika ferry, a minimum 7-hour journey) protects the largest habituated wild chimpanzee population in Tanzania: the M-group community of approximately 60 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) has been studied continuously by Kyoto University researchers since 1965, making this one of the longest-running primate field studies in the world and the chimpanzees accustomed to human presence…
The Mahale Peninsula's pre-colonial history is the history of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika: the Tongwe people (the Bantu-speaking people of the Mahale area, the original inhabitants of the peninsula) were cattle and fishing people who inhabited the peninsula before the arrival of Arab-Swahili traders from Ujiji in the 19th century. David Livingstone passed through Ujiji (across the lake on the Congo/Tanzania border) in 1869, and Henry Morton Stanley found him there in 1871 with the famous greeting 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' The Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida arrived at Ma…