Welcome to Harambe! Once you enter this amazingly detailed land, you can't help but feel like you have traveled across the ocean to a land filled with mystery and history. Today, we will be exploring something with both of those things. Just like all lands found throughout Walt Disney World, Africa is extremely detailed and the Imagineers have left clues behind for us to discover to piece the story of the town of Harambe together. Today, we will be focusing on this object:

This bench, found near the Harambe theater, offers weary guests a place to sit down and relax fo afew minutes. What those guests don't realize, however, is that they are sitting on one of the most important details in the history of Harambe.

When Disney decided to focus an entire land around the continent of Harambe they needed to come up with a few guidelines first. The most important one was trying to figure out which language would represent the area. With hundreds of languages spoken throughout the continent they decided one of the most spoken languages that also helped fit into the theming of the land would be Swahili. This gets us back to our bench where we see that Uhuru 1961 has been written upon it. What does this mean exactly?

Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom. Therefore, this bench is allowing guests to discover that the city of Harambe obtained their freedom in the year 1961!