Tanzania – from the Swahili coast to the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar
The land of Tanzania holds some of the oldest traces of humankind: at Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, researchers have found fossils and footprints of early human ancestors. Over thousands of years, many peoples settled the region, including Bantu-speaking farmers who spread iron-working, as well as pastoralists such as the Maasai.
From the first millennium AD, trading towns grew up along the coast, where African, Arab and Persian influences merged into the Swahili culture. Kilwa became one of the richest ports of the Indian Ocean. In the 16th century the Portuguese took control of parts of the coast until they were driven out by the Sultanate of Oman, which later moved its capital to Zanzibar. Zanzibar became a centre of the clove trade and of the East African slave trade, which brought great suffering to the interior.
In the 1880s Germany established the colony of German East Africa on the mainland, while Zanzibar became a British protectorate. Resistance was brutally suppressed, above all in the Maji Maji uprising of 1905–1907, which cost a very large number of lives. After the First World War, Britain administered the mainland as Tanganyika. Under Julius Nyerere, Tanganyika became independent in 1961; Zanzibar followed in 1963, and after a revolution there in 1964 the two united to form Tanzania. Nyerere's policy of Ujamaa and the promotion of Swahili as a national language strongly shaped the young nation.
Today Tanzania is shaped by its many peoples living peacefully together, Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti and the Swahili culture of its coast.
Do you have a story, a memory or an old photo from Tanzania? Share it with the community in the Local History section!