Times in Tanzania: Charcoal

A very typical charcoal stove.

Another common design for roadside and informal food vendors.

This roving salesman has a tiny bit of charcoal in the bottom of his portable oven with roasted banana and meat. It also appears that he has homemade hotsauce taboot

Being from America, I most closely associate charcoal with grilling out in the summertime. Using charcoal only occurred a few times a year and unlike charcoal in the developing world, it was packaged in a way that made the little pieces of charcoal completely uniform. In Tanzania the charcoal is varied with the ray structure of the wood preserved.

Tanzania still has vast areas of land that are unpopulated. Whenever people expand and land is cleared, charcoal is ultimately a nice little byproduct of clearing the land. Making charcoal is relatively easy and makes sense if you have a bunch of fallen trees from clearing areas of land for framing. You basically stack up a bunch of wood in a teepee like structure, cover the outside with mud or earthern materials (leaving the top and sides open for oxygen flow), light the wood on fire, and then when the fire is burning you plug up the holes and leave it to burn for a day or two depending on the size of your charcoal dome. The science behind this is that heating wood to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen allows it to partially combust and remove water and impurities. This leaves behind an almost pure piece of carbon.

Why charcoal? It burns hotter than wood without smoke and with less flame. It provides a more steady temperature and requires less maintenance than a wood fire. But the really critical factor is that due to the ever expanding human population, charcoal is being made and sold at a very low price. Much cheaper in fact than natural gas and in a low-income country like Tanzania, every shilling counts.

As a nature lover it is always a little painful to see clearing of land and creation of charcoal. The first sign can often be found before reaching the cleared area. Motorcycles stacked with gigantic sacks of charcoal act as middlemen transporting the charcoal from frontiers to the nearest villages and cities. Next is the smell, charcoal mounds have a tell-tale smell, usually amplified by the fact that several mounds are typically found in short proximity of each other. Eventually one will see denuded landscapes with active land clearing at various stages and usually a bag or two of charcoal on the side of the road indicating that there is charcoal for sale.

Charcoal can get a bad reputation and blamed for environmental degradation but based on what I've seen, at least in Tanzania I do not believe it to be a primary driver of environmental desegregation. Many times it's a secondary byproduct of clearing land for agriculture or other uses. The photos below are from an area that was being cleared for a tree plantation.