The history of Tanzania

Tanzania joins two histories: that of the mainland, where some of the oldest traces of humanity have been found and where farming and herding peoples built chiefdoms and kingdoms over thousands of years, and that of the coast and the islands, where the Swahili city-states traded across the Indian Ocean for a thousand years. Kilwa was for three centuries the greatest of those cities, before Portuguese and then Omani power took over the coast, and in the 19th century Zanzibar became the capital of an Omani sultanate and the hub of the East African slave trade. Germany conquered the mainland in the 1880s and crushed the Maji Maji uprising with a deliberate famine, and Britain ruled it as Tanganyika after the First World War. Under Julius Nyerere, Tanganyika became independent in 1961 and joined Zanzibar in 1964, and the same party has governed the united republic ever since.

The volcanic ash beds of northern Tanzania hold one of the longest records of human evolution anywhere. At Laetoli, a trail of footprints left in wet ash about 3.6 million years ago shows that early hominins, probably Australopithecus afarensis, already walked upright. At Olduvai Gorge, where Louis and Mary Leakey worked from the 1930s, simple stone choppers gave their name to the Oldowan, the oldest known stone-tool tradition, and finds there included the skull of Paranthropus boisei and remains of Homo habilis, both around 1.8 million years old. Later layers trace the development of hand axes and, eventually, of modern human behaviour in sites such as Mumba Cave.

For most of the last ten thousand years the land was home to hunter-gatherers, whose descendants include the Hadza and the Sandawe, two peoples whose click languages are unlike any of their neighbours'. Their rock paintings at Kondoa, in the centre of the country, are among the richest in Africa. From around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, herders with cattle, sheep and goats moved in from the north, some probably speaking Cushitic languages and others Nilotic ones.

About 2,000 years ago Bantu-speaking farmers, part of the long Bantu expansion across central and southern Africa, began to settle the region, bringing iron-working and new crops. Over the following centuries they absorbed many of the earlier inhabitants, and most Tanzanians today speak Bantu languages. Nilotic pastoralists, including the ancestors of the Maasai, continued to arrive from the north until the 18th century. At Engaruka, below the Rift Valley escarpment, farmers built an elaborate system of stone terraces and irrigation channels between the 15th and 18th centuries.

The interior never formed a single state. West of Lake Victoria, small kingdoms such as Karagwe and Buhaya were ruled by dynasties linked to those of Rwanda, Burundi and the kingdoms of Uganda. Elsewhere, among peoples such as the Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Chagga and Hehe, power was held by many separate chiefs. In the 19th century the long-distance caravan trade changed this world. Nyamwezi porters carried ivory to the coast, and ambitious leaders built larger states: Mirambo, a Nyamwezi ruler, created a powerful military state around Urambo in the 1870s, and the Hehe under Munyigumba and his son Mkwawa dominated the southern highlands. In the south, Ngoni warriors who had fled the wars of the Zulu Kingdom far to the south arrived in the 1840s and founded raiding states of their own.

The coast had its own history, facing the sea. A Greek merchant's guide of the first century CE, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes a market town called Rhapta somewhere on this shore, and Roman-era coins have been found along it. From the later first millennium, Bantu-speaking fishing and farming communities on the coast and islands grew into trading towns. Their language, Swahili, is a Bantu language that absorbed many Arabic words, and their culture, now known as Swahili culture, was African in origin, though it was long misrepresented by Europeans as the creation of Arab colonists. Islam was present on the coast by the eighth or ninth century, and the towns built mosques and houses of coral stone.

The monsoon winds made the trade possible: ships sailed from Arabia, Persia and India on the north-east monsoon and returned when the winds reversed. African gold, ivory, timber and enslaved people went out; cloth, glass beads, Chinese porcelain and other goods came in. The richest of all the towns, from about 1200 to 1500, was Kilwa Kisiwani, on an island off the southern coast. According to the Kilwa Chronicle it was founded by Ali ibn al-Hassan, a prince said to have come from Shiraz in Persia, and later rulers gained control of Sofala, in what is now Mozambique, the port through which gold came from the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. Kilwa minted its own copper coins, one of which has turned up as far away as northern Australia.

Around 1300 a new dynasty, the Mahdali, took power, and in the following decades built the Great Mosque's domed extension and Husuni Kubwa, a vast palace on a cliff above the sea. When Ibn Battuta visited in 1331 he described Kilwa as one of the most beautifully built cities in the world. At its height in the 15th century the sultan claimed overlordship over much of the coast, including Zanzibar, Pemba and Mafia, though in practice the towns were largely self-governing.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama sailed up this coast on the first European voyage to India, and in 1502 he returned with a war fleet and forced Kilwa to pay tribute. In 1505 Francisco de Almeida stormed the town, installed a puppet ruler and built a fort. The Portuguese Empire tried to control the Indian Ocean trade by force, and the Swahili towns declined under its tolls and raids. Kilwa never recovered its old wealth.

The Portuguese were challenged by Oman, whose imams had expelled them from Muscat in 1650. Omani fleets attacked the coast, and in 1698, after a long siege, they took Fort Jesus at Mombasa, ending Portuguese power north of the Ruvuma River. For over a century Omani rule over the coastal towns was loose, but under Said bin Sultan it became an empire. Said moved his court to Zanzibar and from 1840 made the island his main residence. He encouraged Arab settlers to plant cloves on Zanzibar and Pemba, worked by enslaved Africans, and by the later 19th century the islands produced most of the world's supply. He also welcomed Indian merchants, who financed the caravan trade, and the United States, Britain and France opened consulates in the town.

The wealth of 19th-century Zanzibar was built on ivory and on slavery. Caravans led by Swahili and Arab traders pushed inland along routes through Tabora to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and beyond into what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the most famous being that of Tippu Tip. They bought or seized captives, who were marched to the coast, many dying on the way. Tens of thousands of people a year passed through the Zanzibar market in its peak decades, some to work the clove plantations of the islands, others shipped to Arabia, Persia and beyond. This Indian Ocean trade was older than the Atlantic slave trade and lasted longer.

After Said's death in 1856 his realm was split, and his son Majid became the first independent sultan of Zanzibar. Britain, which had abolished the slave trade in its own empire, pressed the sultans with a series of treaties, and in 1873, under the threat of a naval blockade, Sultan Barghash closed the slave market; the Anglican cathedral of Zanzibar was built on its site. The trade continued illegally for years, and slavery itself on the islands was only abolished in 1897. The explorers who made the interior known in Europe all started from Zanzibar: Burton and Speke reached Lake Tanganyika in 1858, and in 1871 Henry Morton Stanley found David Livingstone, the missionary and campaigner against the slave trade, at Ujiji.

In 1884 the German adventurer Carl Peters travelled inland and had local chiefs sign "treaties" handing over their land, and in 1885 Otto von Bismarck granted his company imperial protection. In the Scramble for Africa that followed, Britain and Germany divided the mainland, leaving the sultan only a narrow coastal strip, which Germany then bought; in 1890 the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty made Zanzibar a British protectorate. In 1896 Britain fought the 38-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, the shortest war on record, to install its preferred sultan.

The German Empire took over the colony directly after a coastal revolt led by Abushiri bin Salim in 1888 to 1889 was crushed. The Hehe under Mkwawa wiped out a German column in 1891 and resisted for years until Mkwawa, cornered, shot himself in 1898; the Germans cut off his head and sent his skull to Germany. German rule was harsh, with hut taxes, forced labour and the whip. In 1902 the governor, Gustav Adolf von Götzen, ordered villages in the south to grow cotton for export on communal plots, for almost no pay.

In July 1905 the Matumbi people near the Rufiji River rose against the scheme, and the revolt spread across the south. A spirit medium, Kinjikitile Ngwale, had given followers a sacred water, maji, said to turn German bullets to water, which bound together peoples who had never acted together before. Kinjikitile was hanged early in the war. German troops with machine guns broke the rebel attacks, and then, to end the war, deliberately destroyed villages, crops and food stores across the south. The fighting lasted until 1907, and the famine that followed killed far more people than the battles: estimates of the dead range from about 75,000 to 300,000. Several historians describe the campaign as genocidal. Afterwards a new governor softened some policies, and the colony built railways, schools and plantations of sisal and coffee.

In the First World War German East Africa became a long battlefield. The German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck defeated a British landing at Tanga in November 1914 and then fought a guerrilla campaign against British, South African, Indian and Belgian forces, retreating into Mozambique and northern Rhodesia and surrendering only after the armistice in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were conscripted as porters, and tens of thousands of them died, mainly of disease and hunger, alongside civilians caught in the requisitions and famine.

After the war the colony was split. Ruanda-Urundi went to Belgium, and the rest became Tanganyika, a League of Nations mandate under Britain from 1920, which became part of the wider British Empire in all but name. Governor Donald Cameron, from 1925, introduced indirect rule through chiefs, and in some places created chiefs where none had existed. The Tanganyika African Association, founded in 1929 by African civil servants, became the seed of the nationalist movement. Around 100,000 Tanganyikans served in the Second World War with the King's African Rifles in Ethiopia, Madagascar and Burma. After 1946 the territory became a United Nations trust territory, and the costly failure of the groundnut scheme, a British plan to grow peanuts on vast mechanised farms, became a byword for colonial mismanagement.

In 1954 Julius Nyerere, a teacher from the small Zanaki people who had studied at Edinburgh, turned the African Association into the Tanganyika African National Union, TANU. Its campaign for independence was disciplined and non-violent, and it used the United Nations trusteeship system to press its case. TANU won the elections of 1958 to 1960, and Tanganyika became independent on 9 December 1961, part of the wave of decolonisation in Africa, and a republic a year later, with Nyerere as president.

Zanzibar became independent in December 1963 as a monarchy dominated by its Arab minority. On 12 January 1964 an uprising overthrew the sultan; in the violence led by John Okello, thousands of Arabs and South Asians were killed. Abeid Karume of the Afro-Shirazi Party took power, and on 26 April 1964 Zanzibar united with Tanganyika. The new state took the name Tanzania in October. Zanzibar kept its own president and government, an arrangement that has been a source of tension ever since.

Nyerere, known as Mwalimu, the teacher, set out his vision in the Arusha Declaration of 1967: a form of African socialism called Ujamaa, "familyhood", based on self-reliance and village co-operation. Banks and major firms were nationalised, and from 1973 millions of rural people were moved, often by force, into planned Ujamaa villages. Swahili was promoted as the national language, and Tanzania avoided the ethnic politics that tore apart many neighbours. Education and literacy spread rapidly. But the economy, battered by falling crop prices, the oil shocks and the collapse of the collective farms, stagnated, and by the late 1970s shortages and corruption were severe. The country was a one-party state from 1965, and in 1977 TANU merged with Zanzibar's ruling party to form Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Revolutionary Party.

Abroad, Tanzania was a leading member of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War and a base for liberation movements fighting white minority rule in southern Africa. China built the TAZARA railway to link Zambia to the port of Dar es Salaam. When Idi Amin's army invaded the Kagera region in late 1978, Tanzania counter-attacked with Ugandan exiles and captured Kampala in April 1979, driving Amin from power.

Nyerere stepped down in 1985, an unusual act for an African leader of his era, and his successor Ali Hassan Mwinyi began economic liberalisation. Multiparty politics returned in 1992, though Chama Cha Mapinduzi has won every election since, making it the longest-ruling party in Africa. Elections in Zanzibar were repeatedly disputed, and in January 2001 police shot dead dozens of opposition protesters there. In 1998 al-Qaeda bombed the United States embassy in Dar es Salaam, on the same day as the attack in Nairobi. The economy grew steadily under Benjamin Mkapa and Jakaya Kikwete, and the capital was gradually moved to Dodoma.

John Magufuli, elected in 2015, pursued infrastructure projects and an anti-corruption drive but also cracked down on the press and the opposition, and played down the Covid-19 pandemic. He died in March 2021, and his vice-president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, became the country's first female president. She at first eased restrictions, but before the election of October 2025 the main opposition party, Chadema, was barred and its leader, Tundu Lissu, was charged with treason. Samia was declared the winner with about 98 percent of the vote. Protests on election day and after were met with live fire and an internet shutdown; the opposition claimed that more than a thousand people were killed, and African Union and Southern African Development Community observers said the vote did not meet their standards.