history of Tanzania

Early exploration

Most of the known history of Tanganyika before the 19th century concerns the coastal area, although the interior has a number of important prehistoric sites. The most significant of these is the Olduvai Gorge, situated in the northwestern corner of Tanzania near the Ngorongoro crater. In 1959, following years of excavations in the gorge with her husband, Louis Leakey, Mary Leakey discovered the near-perfect skull of the “Eastern Man” (Zinjanthropus boisei; now regarded as Paranthropus boisei, a type of australopith), who inhabited the area between 2.3 and 1.2 million years ago. Available evidence from other archaeological sites and historical records attests to the existence of numerous major waves of in-migration onto the Tanzanian littoral over the millennia. The earliest of these likely included traders from such locales as Greece, Rome, Phoenicia, Arabia, Persia, and India, possibly beginning as early as the 5th century bce and continuing into the next millennium.

The trading contacts between Arabia and the East African coast resulted in the establishment of numerous Asian and Arab trade settlements along the coast and in the interior of what is now the Tanzania mainland. The coastal trading centres were mainly Arab-controlled, and relations between the Arabs and their African neighbours appear to have been fairly friendly. After the arrival of the Portuguese in the late 15th century, the position of the Arabs was gradually undermined, but the Portuguese made little attempt to penetrate into the interior. They lost their foothold north of the Ruvuma River early in the 18th century as a result of an alliance between the coastal Arabs and the ruler of Muscat on the Arabian Peninsula. This alliance remained extremely tenuous, however, until French interest in the slave trade from the Tanganyikan coastal town of Kilwa revived the trade in 1776. This attention by the French aroused the sultan of Muscat’s interest in the economic possibilities of the East African coast, and a new Omani governor was appointed at Kilwa. For some time most of the enslaved people came from the Kilwa hinterland, and until the 19th century any contact between the coast and the interior was due mainly to African caravans from the interior.

In their constant search for people to enslave, Arab traders began to penetrate farther into the interior, particularly in the southeast toward Lake Nyasa. Farther north two merchants from India followed tribal trade routes to reach the country of the Nyamwezi about 1825. Along this route the availability of ivory appears to have been as great an attraction as people to enslave, and Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān himself, after the transfer of his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, gave every encouragement to the Arabs to pursue these trading possibilities. From the Nyamwezi country the Arabs pressed on to Lake Tanganyika in the early 1840s. Tabora (or Kazé, as it was then called) and Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, became important trading centres, and a number of Arabs made their homes there. They did not annex these territories but occasionally ejected hostile chieftains. Mirambo, an African chief who built for himself a temporary empire to the west of Tabora in the 1860s and ’70s, effectively blocked the Arab trade routes when they refused to pay him tribute. His empire was purely a personal one, however, and collapsed on his death in 1884.

The first Europeans to show an interest in Tanganyika in the 19th century were missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, who in the late 1840s reached Kilimanjaro. It was a fellow missionary, Jakob Erhardt, whose famous “slug” map (showing, on Arab information, a vast shapeless inland lake) helped stimulate the interest of the British explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. They traveled from Bagamoyo to Lake Tanganyika in 1857–58, and Speke also saw Lake Victoria. This expedition was followed by Speke’s second journey in 1860, in the company of J.A. Grant, to justify the former’s claim that the Nile River rose in Lake Victoria. These primarily geographic explorations were followed by the activities of David Livingstone, who in 1866 set out on his last journey for Lake Nyasa. Livingstone’s object was to expose the horrors of the slave trade and, by opening up legitimate trade with the interior, to destroy the slave trade at its roots. Livingstone’s journey led to the later expeditions of H.M. Stanley and V.L. Cameron. Spurred on by Livingstone’s work and example, a number of missionary societies began to take an interest in East Africa after 1860.

German East Africa

It was left to Germany, with its newly awakened interest in colonial expansion, to open up the country to European influences. The first agent of German imperialism was Carl Peters, who, with Count Joachim von Pfeil and Karl Juhlke, evaded the sultan of Zanzibar late in 1884 to land on the mainland and made a number of “contracts” in the Usambara area by which several chiefs were said to have surrendered their territory to him. Peters’s activities were confirmed by Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Empire. By the Anglo-German Agreement of 1886, the sultan of Zanzibar’s vaguely substantiated claims to dominion on the mainland were limited to a 10-mile- (16-km-) wide coastal strip, and Britain and Germany divided the hinterland between them as spheres of influence, the region to the south becoming known as German East Africa. Following the example of the British to the north, the Germans obtained a lease on the coastal strip from the sultan in 1888, but their tactlessness and fear of commercial competition led to a Muslim uprising in August 1888. The rebellion was put down only after the intervention of the imperial German government and with the assistance of the British navy.

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Recognizing the administrative inability of the German East Africa Company, which had theretofore ruled the country, the German government in 1891 declared a protectorate over its sphere of influence and over the coastal strip, where the company had bought out the sultan’s rights. Germany was eager to exploit the resources of its new dependency, but lack of communications at first restricted development to the coastal area. The German agronomist Richard Hindorff’s introduction of sisal from Florida in 1892 marked the beginning of the territory’s most valuable industry, which was encouraged by the development of a railway from the new capital of Dar es Salaam to Lake Tanganyika. In 1896 work began on the construction of a railway running northeastward from Tanga to Moshi, which it reached in 1912. This successfully encouraged the pioneer coffee-growing activities on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Wild rubber tapped by Africans, together with plantation-grown rubber, contributed to the economic development of the colony. The government also supplied good-quality cottonseed free to African growers and sold it cheaply to European planters. The administration tried to rectify the lack of clerks and minor craftsmen by encouraging the development of schools, an activity in which various missionary societies were already engaged.

The enforcement of German overlordship was strongly resisted, but control was established by the beginning of the 20th century. Almost at once came a reaction to German methods of administration, the outbreak of the Maji Maji uprising in 1905. Although there was little organization behind it, the uprising spread over a considerable portion of southeastern Tanganyika and was not finally suppressed until 1907. It led to a reappraisal of German policy in East Africa. The imperial government had attempted to protect African land rights in 1895 but had failed in its objective in the Kilimanjaro area. Similarly, liberal labour legislation had not been properly implemented. The German government set up a separate Colonial Department in 1907, and more money was invested in East Africa. A more liberal form of administration rapidly replaced the previous semimilitary system.

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World War I (1914–18) put an end to all German experiments. Blockaded by the British navy, the country could neither export produce nor get help from Germany. The British advance into German territory continued steadily from 1916 until the whole country was eventually occupied. The effects of the war upon Germany’s achievements in East Africa were disastrous; the administration and economy were completely disrupted. In these circumstances the Africans reverted to their old social systems and their old form of subsistence farming. Under the Treaty of Versailles (signed June 1919; enacted January 1920), Britain received a League of Nations mandate to administer the territory except for Ruanda-Urundi, which came under Belgian administration, and the Kionga triangle, which went to Portugal.

Tanganyika Territory

Horace Byatt, administrator of the captured territory and, from 1920 to 1924, first British governor and commander in chief of Tanganyika Territory (as it was then renamed), enforced a period of recuperation before new development plans were set in motion. A Land Ordinance (1923) ensured that African land rights were secure. Donald Cameron, governor from 1925 to 1931, infused a new vigour into the country. He reorganized the system of native administration by the Native Authority Ordinance (1926) and the Native Courts Ordinance (1929). His object was to build up local government on the basis of traditional authorities, an aim that he pursued with doctrinaire enthusiasm and success. He attempted to silence the criticisms by Europeans that had been leveled against his predecessor by urging the creation of a Legislative Council in 1926 with a reasonable number of nonofficial members, both European and Asian. In his campaign to develop the country’s economy, Cameron won a victory over opposition from Kenya by gaining the British government’s approval for an extension of the Central Railway Line from Tabora to Mwanza (1928). His attitude toward European settlers was determined by their potential contribution to the country’s economy. He therefore was surprised by the British government’s reluctance to permit settlement in Tanganyika. The economic depression after 1929 resulted in the curtailment of many of Cameron’s development proposals. In the 1930s, there were persistent fears that Tanganyika might be handed back to Germany in response to demands by Adolf Hitler—then chancellor of Germany—for overseas possessions.

At the outbreak of World War II (1939–45), Tanganyika’s main task was to make itself as independent as possible of imported goods. Inevitably the retrenchment evident in the 1930s became still more severe, and, while prices for primary products soared, the value of money depreciated proportionately. Tanganyika’s main objective after the war was to ensure that its program for economic recovery and development went ahead. The continuing demand for primary produce strengthened the country’s financial position. The chief item in the development program was a plan to devote 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of land to the production of peanuts (the Groundnuts Scheme). The plan, which was to be financed by the British government, was to cost £25 million, and, in addition, a further £4.5 million would be required for the construction of a railway in southern Tanganyika. It failed because of the lack of adequate preliminary investigations and was subsequently carried out on a greatly reduced scale.

Constitutionally, the most important immediate postwar development was the British government’s decision to place Tanganyika under United Nations trusteeship (1947). Under the terms of the trusteeship agreement, Britain was called upon to develop the political life of the territory, which, however, only gradually began to take shape in the 1950s. In 1953 Julius Nyerere was elected president of the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), an organization made up mainly of African civil servants, which had been formed in Dar es Salaam in 1929. In early 1954 Nyerere and his associates transformed the TAA from a social organization to a political one, and later the same year the TAA became the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), with the stated aims of self-government and independence.

The first two African members had been nominated to the Legislative Council in December 1945. This number was subsequently increased to four, with three Asian nonofficial members and four Europeans. An official majority was retained. In an important advance in 1955, the three groups were given parity of representation on the unofficial side of the council with 10 nominated members each, and for a time it seemed as if this basis would persist. The first elections to the unofficial side of the council (in 1958 and 1959), however, enabled TANU to show its strength, for even among the European and Asian candidates, only those supported by TANU were elected.

Independent Tanganyika

A constitutional committee in 1959 unanimously recommended that after the elections in 1960 a large majority of the members of both sides of the council be Africans and that elected members form the basis of the government. In the 1960 Legislative Council elections, TANU and its allies were again overwhelmingly victorious, and when Tanganyika became independent on December 9, 1961, Nyerere became its first prime minister. The next month, however, he resigned from this position in order to devote his time to writing and to synthesizing his views of government and of African unity; he was succeeded by Rashidi Kawawa. One of Nyerere’s more important works was a paper called “Ujamaa—the Basis for African Socialism,” which later served as the philosophical basis for the Arusha Declaration of 1967.

On December 9, 1962, Tanganyika adopted a republican constitution, and Nyerere became executive president of the country. The next month, he announced that in the interest of national unity and economic development, TANU had decided that Tanganyika would now be a one-party state. Nyerere’s administration was challenged in 1964; an army mutiny was suppressed in January only after the president reluctantly sought the assistance of British marines.

Although TANU was the only legal party, voters in each constituency were often offered a choice between more than one TANU candidate in parliamentary elections. That this arrangement amounted to something more than lip service to the idea of democracy was demonstrated in 1965 and in subsequent elections when, although Nyerere was reelected again and again as the sole candidate for president, a considerable number of legislators, including cabinet ministers, lost their seats.

Portuguese and Omani domination

Though the first references to Zanzibar occur only after the rise of Islam, there appears to be little doubt that its close connection with southern Arabia and the countries bordering the Persian Gulf began before the Common Era. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Arab geographer Yāqūt recorded that the people of Langujah (namely, Unguja, the Swahili name for Zanzibar) had taken refuge from their enemies on the nearby island of Tumbatu, the inhabitants of which were Muslim.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama visited Malindi, and in 1503 Zanzibar Island was attacked and made tributary by the Portuguese. It appears to have remained in that condition for about a quarter of a century. Thereafter the relations between the rulers of Zanzibar and the Portuguese seem to have been those of allies, the people of Zanzibar more than once cooperating with the Portuguese in attacks upon Mombasa. In 1571 the “king” of Zanzibar, in gratitude for Portuguese assistance in expelling certain African invaders, donated the island to his allies, but the donation was never implemented. A Portuguese trading factory and an Augustinian mission were established on the site of the modern city of Zanzibar, and a few Portuguese appear also to have settled as farmers in different parts of the island. The first English ship to visit Zanzibar (1591–92) was the Edward Bonaventure, captained by James Lancaster.

When the Arabs captured Mombasa in 1698, all these settlements were abandoned, and (except for a brief Portuguese reoccupation in 1728) Zanzibar and Pemba came under the domination of the Arab rulers of Oman. For more than a century those rulers left the government of Zanzibar to local hakims (governors). The first sultan to take up residence in Zanzibar was Sayyid Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān, who after several short visits settled there soon after 1830 and subsequently greatly extended his influence along the East African coast. On Saʿīd’s death in 1856, his son Majīd succeeded to his African dominions, while another son, Thuwayn, succeeded to Oman.

As a result of an award made in 1860 by Lord Canning, governor-general of India, the former African dominions of Saʿīd were declared to be independent of Oman. Majīd died in 1870 and was succeeded by his brother Barghash. Toward the end of the latter’s reign, his claims to dominion on the mainland were restricted by Britain, France, and Germany to a 10-mile- (16-km-) wide coastal strip, the administration of which was subsequently shared by Germany and Britain. Barghash died in 1888. Both he and Majīd had acted largely under the influence of John Kirk, who was British consular representative at Zanzibar from 1866 to 1887. It was by Kirk’s efforts that Barghash consented in 1873 to a treaty for the suppression of the slave trade.

Zanzibar as a British protectorate

In 1890 what was left of the sultanate was proclaimed a British protectorate, and in 1891 a constitutional government was instituted under British auspices, with Lloyd Mathews as first minister. On August 25, 1896, on the death of the ruling sultan, Ḥamad ibn Thuwayn, the royal palace at Zanzibar was seized by Khālid ibn Barghash, who proclaimed himself sultan. The British government disapproved, and, as he refused to step down, British warships bombarded the palace on August 27, 1896. The British were victorious in the battle, known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted less than an hour and is considered to be the shortest war in recorded history. During the fighting, Khālid escaped and took refuge at the German consulate, whence he was conveyed to German East Africa. After the battle, Ḥamud ibn Moḥammed, favoured by the British, was installed as sultan. In 1897 the legal status of slavery was finally abolished. In 1913 the control of the protectorate passed from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office, when the posts of consul general and first minister were merged into that of British resident. At the same time, a Protectorate Council was constituted as an advisory body. In 1926 the advisory council was replaced by nominated executive and legislative councils.

Khalīfa ibn Harūb became sultan in 1911. He was the leading Muslim prince in East Africa, and his moderating influence did much to steady Muslim opinion in that part of Africa at times of political crisis, especially during the two World Wars. He died on October 9, 1960, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Abdullah ibn Khalīfa.

In November 1960 the British Parliament approved a new constitution for Zanzibar. The first elections to the Legislative Council then established were held in January 1961 and ended in a deadlock. Further elections, held in June, were marked by serious rioting and heavy casualties. Ten seats were won by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), representing mainly the African population; 10 by the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), representing mainly the Zanzibari Arabs; and 3 by the Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP), an offshoot of the ZNP. The ZNP and the ZPPP combined to form a government with Mohammed Shamte Hamadi as chief minister.

Because of failure to agree on franchise qualifications, the number of elected seats in the legislature, and the timing of the elections, a constitutional conference held in London in 1962 was unable to fix a date for the introduction of internal self-government or independence. An independent commission, however, subsequently delimited new constituencies and recommended an increase in the numbers of the Legislative Council, which the council accepted, also agreeing to the introduction of universal adult suffrage. Internal self-government was established in June 1963, and elections held the following month resulted in a victory for the ZNP-ZPPP coalition, which won 18 seats, the ASP winning the remaining 13. Final arrangements for independence were made at a conference in London in September. In October it was agreed that the Kenya coastal strip—a territory that extended 10 miles (16 km) inland along the Kenya coast from the Tanganyika frontier to Kipini and that had long been administered by Kenya although nominally under the sovereignty of Zanzibar—would become an integral part of Kenya on that country’s attainment of independence.

Independent Zanzibar

On December 10, 1963, Zanzibar achieved independence as a member of the Commonwealth. In January 1964 the Zanzibar government was overthrown by an internal revolution, Sayyid Jamshid ibn Abdullah (who had succeeded to the sultanate in July 1963 on his father’s death) was deposed, and a republic was proclaimed.

Although the revolution was carried out by only about 600 armed men under the leadership of the communist-trained “field marshal” John Okello, it won considerable support from the African population. Thousands of Arabs were massacred in riots, and thousands more fled the island. Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume, leader of the ASP, was installed as president of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. Sheikh Abdulla Kassim Hanga was appointed prime minister, and Abdul Raḥman Mohammed (“Babu”), leader of the new left-wing Umma (The Masses) Party (formed by defectors from the ZNP), became minister for defense and external affairs. Pending the establishment of a new constitution, the cabinet and all government departments were placed under the control of a Revolutionary Council of 30 members, which was also vested with temporary legislative powers. Zanzibar was proclaimed a one-party state. Measures taken by the new government included the nationalization of all land, with further powers to confiscate any immovable property without compensation except in cases of undue hardship.