The African Blackwood Conservation Project was founded in 1996 by Sebastian Chuwa (now deceased), a botanist from the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania, and James Harris, a woodturning artist from the USA. They were brought together by a television program produced by the BBC in 1992 entitled “Mpingo-The Tree that Makes Music.” This documentary was the first to focus on Dalbergia melanoxylon, calling to the attention of the world community the significant threats to its future survival due to overexploitation and lack of adequate conservation measures to insure its conservation. The film highlighted Sebastian’s efforts to call public attention to the plight of the species in northern Tanzania, where it is commercially extinct, and documents his first nursery efforts to raise seedlings and replant the species in areas where it had once thrived. Showing Sebastian at the work of watering some of his first mpingo seedlings, he commented, “My 200 seedlings are obviously not enough to make much difference compared with what is being lost. But next year I hope to have 20,000 seedlings to plant. It is vital for me to act now rather than wait until the future when things have reached a crisis.” This paradigm has been behind the work of the ABCP ever since.

After seeing the program in the US, James contacted Sebastian by postal mail and suggested they coordinate a targeted program for the species based on replanting in its native range along with public education to raise awareness about its precarious conservation status. In 1996, the ABCP began operations by establishing a nursery called the Moshi Mpingo Plot in Mijongweni, south of Moshi, where Sebastian lived in rural Moshi near Sungu village. Since its founding the nursery has successfully produced not only thousands of mpingo seedlings each year, but other indigenous tree species as well, some that are important commercially and others that are used domestically. They have been replanted in locations that are protected from predators, like acreages surrounding schools, churches, private farms and public institutions. This website documents those efforts.