The natives collect rubber from the wild forest vines, but rubber balls sent in by Europeans and natives alike are cut through the middle to detect the presence of a core of leaves or other foreign substance.
Cotton and coffee are articles also jointly produced by planters and natives.
As elsewhere in tropical Africa, cotton grew wild and is now extensively cultivated—the value exported in 1912 being £105,000.
The coffee produced by the natives is either collected from the trees which grow wild or by cultivating the indigenous plants. The wild coffee has a small misshapen bean, but is excellently flavoured, the quality of the bean improving with each year of keeping. The value of coffee exported amounts to about £100,000 per annum.
On the highlands oats, barley, and wheat are grown successfully; and other articles of export are hides and skins, coming chiefly from the district round Lake Victoria and from the provinces of Ruanda and Urundi, which abound with millions of head of cattle and other live stock.
The slopes of the highlands are covered with short sweet grass, and are well watered with perennial streams, which might easily be diverted into channels to irrigate the land below.
Though sheep do well in parts, the grass in the main grows too coarse for any small stock, and requires feeding down.
The cattle are still nearly all in the hands of the natives, but the Germans turned the hides to profit, £200,000 worth having been exported in 1912.
The exportation of cattle is prohibited, but traders from Rhodesia have made their way up into German East Africa, where they traded cattle from the natives at prices averaging about 40s., and managed to return with large herds of the quaint "hump-backed" beasts, known as "Madagascar cattle," to southern Rhodesia, where they found a ready market at an average price of about £7, 10s.