A sanctuary built by hand and rooted in the earth

A former university professor finds his true calling by ‘marrying’ the Tanzanian environment

“Everything written by everyone not a poet nonetheless has poetry in it.” 500-yard stone wall in with stone-chiseled letters of poem by Yahya Jongintaba.

Yahya Jongintaba is building an ecovillage totally off grid in Tanzania. His former self, Jon Michael Spencer, held tenure track positions at U.S. universities, published prolifically in scholarly journals, was married to an African American woman (also advancing in her profession), and could look forward to a comfortable later life with substantial retirement income. 

Life was good ... and predictable.  

Jongintaba’s current life is anything but "predictable."  His survival requires adjustments to the vicissitudes of nature, constant physical labor and devising how to make things, and his income is precarious. But there's no going back. 

Born of African American parents in Amherst MA and raised on the Hampton University campus in Virginia, Jongintaba now lives with his Tanzanian partner Sophia Issa Biyila, and 14 year old son Izengo, in Morogoro, about 120 miles from the Dar es Salaam capital. 

The seed of this village was planted during the five years that Jongintaba's paternal grandparents spent in Liberia as missionaries and where his father was born. Jongintaba's father, John Spencer was director of Hampton University's architecture department and continued to be a practicing architect in the Hampton Roads area. Spencer and his wife, Mildred, now in their mid-90s, live in the house that Spencer designed in Hampton. 

Because of the family missionary background and the many connections between Hampton Institute (now University) and Africa, young Jon Michael was no stranger to African wisdom and ways. After earning a PhD in music composition and working 23 years as a professor of music and humanities in the United States, Spencer heard Destiny (as “the Continent”) calling him back to humanity’s East African home. The call was not just to settle there but to cultivate an Eden-like garden village. The garden takes many forms including landscaping that is as striking as it is resourceful.   

Creativity and ingenuity pervade every aspect of Jongintaba family life.  Their handmade creations include shoes made from flexible banana tree trunk strips, ropes made from twisted grasses, home furnishings, paint pigments and paint brushes. They grow food crops, design houses and landscapes, and create drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Yahya and Izengo are creative and scholarly writers. Their holistic lifestyle is reinforced by Yahya's knowledge of naturopathic medicine which he studied in India.   

The art of minimizing waste and reusing resources

Yahya Jongintaba

It is the fertile soil of this land of human origins in East of Africa that called us to live in the heart of untrammeled nature. We dwell in Tanzania, in the region of Morogoro, in the far-outskirts of the city of that same name. In total harmony with our natural surroundings, we live “off the grid.”

In this original land of great fertility, the vast majority of Africans still live off the grid, surviving on nature rather than institutions and industries.  They intimately know the laws of nature on which the laws of physics and industry are built. Like them, the Jongintaba family feels a close proximity with the open-minded ingenuity of our earliest human ancestors. 

And it has become natural for us to stretch reality and imagine what these ancestors might want us to know and remember about original sustainability and survivability in nature. This feeling of gritty contiguity with the original survival struggle does weary us at times, but it also invigorates us with gratitude for being called into such a primal experience within a very troubled, technocratic and increasingly authoritarian contemporary world.

The longer we have worked with the land on which we live, the more our  respect has grown for nature, not least for how much she provides for us and how much we depend on her. We depend on her not only for water, food, medicine, and shelter, but for the feeling of wholeness, health, wellbeing, belonging, and love. Those feelings came to life, when we wrote this statement for our website: 

“The fertile soil … was such that we asked to marry her.  “First let’s make something” the fertile soil said.  “What shall we make?” we asked.  She answered “Love.”  We said “What shall we make with love?”  She answered “Many things but first a house of mud in which together we may live as one.”

Respecting nature makes heftier work for us in many ways. At the simplest level, we are driven to be far more prudent about trimming back nature, which every rain season inundates us in taller and taller grasses and endlessly spreading plants, all genetically wired to survive. 

We cannot anymore just swing the thresher and be gone with the tall grasses but must now slowly and painstakingly sickle handfuls after carefully examining them for other less abundant plants grassed over. These less abundant plants help maintain the biodiversity and, in some instances, feed us and give us medicine.

This sickling takes time but it is far less work than defending the land. When we hear villagers cutting down trees in the forest just beyond our property and we go out and see the plant debris left behind as waste but which can serve useful purposes. We put up signs saying “Please do not cut the trees.”  We preach to the tree cutters about what Nature intended from “the beginning. ”We offer tutorials on how, with less effort, to make biomass briquettes for cooking fuel.  And we bring in local leaders to see the damage and to give us help in conserving the land. We have even offered to “rent” the forestland as a nature reserve that would preserve it for the generations of villagers who one day might need the land as an only remaining source of food and medicine.

Without question, our feelings of love and respect for nature make heftier work for us, but the burden is offset by one most wonderful thing about living off the grid amid natural forestland: being led to creating art with the land in the form of landscaping. At first glance it seemed to us that our landscaping would be an imposition on the art of nature, but we have come to see it as an ongoing interaction and negotiation with nature, in which each part of our shared nature-body does its best to help the other part. As far as we can see now, our landscaping has brought about ecological diversity that was not here prior to our coming. Some of the animal life diversity comes and goes during migrations and some plant forms persist.

Seasonal or occasional visitors to our manmade pond are egrets, storks, hamerkops, and flocks of guinea fowl. Nice to see also are the bees that regularly visit our living area for shallow water we put in dishes landscaped with stones so the bees do not drown. Some of the bees come from the beehives we keep solely for biodiversity’s sake, since we do not harvest any of the bee’s honey.

It is with minds steeped in the art of sustainable living that we look at our forest environment and our homestead within it.  We do not look with “thinking” about what to do with the land. Rather we listen for clues. The clues seem to originate not in the thoughts but in the land we contemplatively observe. What next are we do to?

And so what about … ?

Feeling that the reader would be curious about eco specs not discussed in the essay, we posed the following questions to Jongintaba. 

Who designed and built your house?

Houses, plural. I designed our current house with suggestions and approval from my wife. In this way all of our houses and buildings were built --- we have lived in three thus far and may soon live in a fourth. When we decided to renovate the first house, for example, we moved into a second.  We also have a “house” for storage, dehydrating, shading plants (a net-house). Plus, we have a stone-walled underground space that does not have a roof yet and which may become a multi-purpose building.

So you designed the houses and the workers built them?  If so, do so are they skilled contractors"?

Yes, I designed the houses, not on paper but on the ground, sometimes literally taking a stick and drawing the lines in the dirt.  I considered the space available and the purpose of the building, and it was more intuitive than scientific. The workers we hire are villagers who know how to work hard in order to survive.  In some cases the know how to build, or they learn here how to build.  We show them what we want. Our best builder, a local villager who has been with us about five years, learned to build here. 

What is the "cob" building material?  Is it like corn cobs? 

Cob is a mixture of clay soil, sand, straw (we used rice straw from local rice farms), made muddy and sticky with water.

Where do the stones come from?

Some of the stones we picked up or dug up from our land, doing no more than digging four or so feet under the ground for a large stone we have seen on the surface.  Most of the stones we pay a local broker to bring to us by truck from around the local area.

What is the source of drinking water?

We harvest rainwater from our rooftops which pipe it into large water tanks spread throughout our land.  We have many stone water tanks, secured with internal plastering (about 100,000 liters), and some tanks (about 45,000 liters).  We then filter the water through a bio (sand) filter we make ourselves.  We have several of these filters in 200-liter polyethylene barrels.

How does your partner,  Sophia Issa Biyila, figure in the operations of the homestead?

Sophia is our family botanist, identifying the wildplants on our property for their medicinal and edible value through contact with and help from a professional botanist we pay at Dar es Salaam University.  She goes out on our land every morning, knowing how to watch out for snakes, and picks our wild and cultivated vegetables for each of our day's two meals.  She is therefore our nutritionist and pharmacist, and she alone prepares our meals, as no one else could be trusted.  She also manages our gardening and farming work among our employed workers.  Izengo is second to her in all these endeavors, as he has learned them directly from her.  She is also the gifted tailor who sewed the suits I wear on our YouTube videos.  She taught our son to machine sew as well.  Like our son, Sophia paints beautifully, when she takes the time to do it, and she, along with our son, makes the organic paint pigments we use for the art illustrating our books.

What is the source of the power for your lights and electronic equipment?

Solar power.

What crops do you grow?  And what do you buy from local farmers?

We grow a lot of fruit trees like mango, banana, and papaya, a lot of edible and medicinal trees like moringa and neem, and some nut trees like cashew.  We grow cassava, sweet potato, pumpkin, turmeric, ginger, Chinese cabbage, tomatoes, sesame and seeds.  We have grown rice but now buy it from local farmers at market.  We supplement our homegrown diet with market-bought fruit.  We do not need to, and do not, buy any food from grocery stores.

How do you make biomass briquettes for cooking and what kind of cooking appliance is used?

Biomass briquettes are made of charcoal from our trimmed tree woods, clay soil, and chopped grasses, all soaked to make it sticky to hold together when pounded into the round mold we had a welder create with a hand pounder to press the briquettes together.  We also had a special small round stove made to hold the round briquettes.

Do you forage in the forest?  If so, what?

We eat a great deal of foraged vegetables, including cissus rotundifolia and malabar spinach (basella alba). Our foraged fruits include tamarind, ximenia, and wild gooseberry. Our foraged herbs include holy basil and African basil.

Do you have any refrigeration?

No.  We do not need or want refrigeration.

So dried foods are a key element in your diet?

Yes, we eat dried foods that we store dried for use in the dry season when fresh gardened and wild vegetables are less abundant. We have a solar house and net house for drying. Also we have bed-sized netted shelves with legs on which we dry foods. Now and then we dry bananas from our farm. slice and dry under the sun.  Delicious.

We dry moringa leaf, which later we crush into a powdered herb. Same with many other herbs, like turmeric, papaya seed, avocado seed which we eat daily are part of our diet.

How does toilet composting work?

We make bins of grass and clay that fit into 20-liter buckets, on which we place a toilet seat.  Once used, we cover with finely-chopped grass and soil.  When the bucket is filled, it is carried to a stone-enclosed compose structure, into which the bin is cleanly dumped.  The bucket is easily washed, since it is touched by no waste, and into a new bin is place, before the bucket is returned to the house.  We keep two of these ready buckets in the house, one for use while the other is being emptied.  The waste in the stone structure will compost into fertilizer safely with a year.  We use this fertilizer for our trees when it is needed.  

Food compost we use to fertilize food plants

I developed our technique for making compost bins to have a more sanitary way of using them and an easier way of emptying them. It takes one of our workers about five hours to make ten grass bins that fit into a 20-liter bucket, on which a toilet seat is set.  The steps are:  Cutting and gathering the long grass (55 minutes). Preparing the grass by removing short pieces, cutting off the stickers, and cutting the grass to bucket size (1½ hours). Preparing clay by mixing and stirring it with water (15 minutes). And making the bins in the 20-liter bottom-removed bucket (20 minutes each or 2½ hours). These toilet bins can also double as biodegradable planter pots.

Can you tell us about the medicines?

We know a lot about the medicinal plants on our land, thanks to the assistance of a botanist at Dar es Salaam University, coupled with our own research after the botanist helps us identify plants we send him with photographs.  Our most important medicine is neem, which grows naturally around here.  We have planted a lot of neem trees.  We drink neem tea when we feel intuitively that we need to shore up the immune system.  Once a week we eat neem leaves as part of our cooked-vegetables mix (it is bitter-tasting and not to be taken too regularly for damage it can do to the kidneys).  We use the abundant moringa tree leaf and pods as vegetables everyday, but moringa is also highly medicinal.  Guava tree leaf is highly medicinal, and we use it also.  We make our own activated charcoal, and use it as needed.

And the bee hives? Why don't you eat the honey?

We found that the old-fashioned device we have for harvesting bee honey ends up killing a lot of bees, so we decided to leave the honey to the bees. Otherwise we would harvest some honey. 

What about the surrounding environment (mountain, forest, desert? Temps? etc.)

We live at the foot of the Uluguru Mountains in the Morogoro region, which is the so-called breadbasket of the country.  It is very green land with hills and valleys.  The weather is divided into dry and rainy seasons, with a large and small rain season between two dry seasons.  The temperature ranges between 17 and 31 degrees celsius (63 – 87 degrees fahrenheit).

What advantages do you think you’ve given your son by raising him this way?  Home schooling, traditional ways of life. Any disadvantages?

The advantages are that he suffers from no illnesses, he loves nature and learns its science naturally, he is free of the kinds of negative influences and struggles that affect youths in town, and that has learned not only the conventional academic subjects from homeschooling but such trades as building with earth and gardening.  The negatives may be that he is isolated from any neighborhoods with lots of children to play with, but this is offset by the fact that now and then we have visitors with children.

You call your beautiful homestead a “village” indicating a plurality beyond the Jongintaba family of three and the workers who occasionally live in the guest house. Is this indicated intent actual?

Yes, we want and are expecting people to come live here as hopefully a permanent part of our village. There are people who have already expressed this interest, understanding that we are an “intentional community,” our general agreement being that we live in harmony with nature.

This discussion continues in final section of this article.

Bird sculpture chiseled by Jongintaba’s son, Izengo

Building layout and construction

View of house under construction. Fallen canopy on the right.

An earthy asthetic of living totally on, and with, the land

Foundation and lower cob layers of house in which the Jongintaba family now live.

Early view of completed cob house, the second cob house, where the family now lives.

Laundry soap made of soda apple fruit

All from their land: paintbrushes made of wood from our wild bamboo trees; brushes made of fibers from our sisal plants, pigments made of plants, clays, stones; pigments in sandpapered coconut shells.

Izengo Jongitaba playing string instrument. The family also makes drums.

Cut grass for making toilet compost bins.

Completed toilet compost bins.

Lectern made from tree.

First house: cob with stone facade and self-designed windows and doors welded by a local welder; stone roof replaced metal root, metal beams replaced termite-eaten wood; self-designed door and window bars welded by a local welder.

The Jongintabas’ current house going up. Worker saws cob to make walls straight.

Jongintaba Village food forest: this partial view shows banana trees among sisal and green agave plants, The Jongintaba family also planted mango, papaya, lemon, and guava trees here.

Current kitchen house. The family cooks with biomass briquette fuel.

Self-designed pond after the rain

First landscape design for front yard: plant and stone sculptures abound. Partial views of stone cisterns on left and right. Laundry poles in front of solar light pole. The Morogoro ground is the reddest clay thanks to abundant iron oxide. The terrain requires that plots for growing food crops be enriched with potassium and calcium from composts.

Old kitchen house.

Jongintaba’s partner, Sophia Issa Biyila harvesting vegetables.

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Two views of the stately house that was Jongitaba’s childhood home attest to the strength of his commitment to reinvent his life. He aspired not to prestige but to authenticity: to be fully integrated with the natural environment. The renovated building is now the Hampton University Alumni House.

Unfinished underground building.

Storage facility: initially cob then bricked over

Incomplete building now used for drying plants.

Current Jongintaba home. The family planted moringa trees shown in this view. Known as the "miracle tree," moringa is a nutrient-rich plant with numerous health benefits.

Cob walls of first house constructed by Yahya’s partner Sophia Issa Biyilla and local women when Yahya was back in the U.S. Yahya renovated and redesigned the house (shown in the top photo).

Above ground view of the underground building. The top of the building’s walls can be seen in background of this view. The pitched roof will have ventilated skylights.

Self-designed door forged by a local welder.

Banana tree trunk fiber shoes.

“Root art,” dug-up roots of downed African blackwood trees, sandpapered, and glossed with linseed oil, mounted on stone base. “We didn’t chop down the trees!,” says Yahya.

Izengo and unfinished wall mural that he helped to paint.

Children’s blocks

Fallen canopy made from stiff mountain grasses on wooden pole inserted into a compost base. It was made by a local worker and fell when the pole was eaten by termites.

Hand-crafted household and yard items

Izengo Jongintaba, Womb and World

Illustration by Jongintaba’s partner, Sophia Issa Biyila.

Illustrations from the “Found Poems” series by Izengo Jongintaba. Izengo is a very imaginative child of nature.

Izengo Jongintaba, Tree Family

Izengo Jongintaba painting with handmade pigments.

Izengo Jongintaba

Tribe of Benjamin