Tanzania

History

• Pre-History

  Tanzania is home to some of the oldest hominid settlements unearthed by archaeologists. Prehistoric stone tools and fossils have been found in and around Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, an area often referred to as “The Cradle of Mankind”. Acheulian stone tools were discovered there in 1931 by Louis Leakey, after he had correctly identified the rocks brought back by Hans Reck to Germany from his 1913 Olduvai expedition as stone tools. The same year, Louis Leakey found older, more primitive stone tools in Olduvai Gorge. These were the first examples of the oldest human technology ever discovered in Africa, and were subsequently known throughout the world as Oldowan after Olduvai Gorge.

  The first hominid skull in Olduvai Gorge was discovered by Mary Leakey in 1959, and named Zinj or Nutcracker Man, the first example of Paranthropus boisei, and is thought to be over 1.8 million years old. Other finds including Homo habilis fossils were subsequently made. Paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, uncovered fossil evidence that humanlike creatures inhabited the area at least as early as 3.7 million years ago. Excavations of Stone Age sites have revealed that the hunter-gatherers of the late Stone Age, known as Bushmen, were gradually displaced by successive waves of Cushitic, Bantu, and Nilotic peoples.

  From oral history, archaeology, linguistic analysis and anthropology, a certain amount can be deduced about the early history of Tanzania. The Olduvai Gorge has become known as the cradle of mankind and the era of Australopithecine man probably lasted several million years. The bones of two types of hominids from the Australopithecine era found there have provided evidence of human evolution. These are Zinjanthropus, the ‘Nutcracker Man’ and Homo habilis, the ‘Handy Man’. They lived together about 2 million years ago and until recently it was thought that Homo habilis, capable of using tools, evolved into Homo erectus, and then into modern man – Homo sapiens.

  But this is now under some debate as in 2001, in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya, a Homo erectus complete skull (1.4 million years old) was found within walking distance of an upper jaw of a Homo habilis (1.5 million years old). This proved that they must have lived in the region at the same time, and one theory now is that they have evolved from another, older common ancestor; a missing link that has not yet been found. By about 500,000 years ago Homo erectus was on the scene (somewhere between the Australopithecine and Homo sapiens eras). The brain was larger and the hands more nimble and therefore better at making tools. The development of tool-making is clearly seen at Olduvai Gorge. The different layers of rock contain tools of different ages, which show the development from crude tools to more efficient and sharper implements. Another collection of such tools can be found at Isimila near Iringa.

  The Middle Stone Age saw the further development of hunter-gatherers who used tools, and were advanced in human ingenuity and craftsmanship and the use of fire. Progress accelerated in the Late Stone Age, which began about 100,000 years ago, and there are a number of sites from this era in Tanzania, particularly well known because they are the locations of rock painting. The virtual disappearance of these people was a result of the migration and expansion of other people who were more numerous and more advanced. The most significant factor about these migrating people was that instead of being hunter-gatherers they were food producers – either by agriculture or by keeping livestock. They spoke the language of the Cushitic group (legendary biblical descendants of the Cush in Ethiopia, Somalia and north Sudan) and came from the north from around 1000 BC onwards. They did not have iron-working skills and this meant that the efficiency of their agriculture was limited.

• Early Iron Age and the Bantu

  Sometime in the first half of the first millennium A.D. small groups of iron-using people, acquainted with agriculture, entered Tanzania and other parts of eastern and central Africa. Two groups migrated into the area. These were both Negroid but were of different linguistic groups – the Bantu from the west and the Nilo-Hamite pastoralists from the north. A process of ethnic assimilation followed and the Cushitic intermarried with the newcomers and adopted their languages. The Bantu possessed important iron-processing skills, which greatly improved agricultural efficiency and this enabled population growth. There was not one single migration but a series of waves of various groups, expanding and contracting, assimilating and adapting.

  These people probably spoke Bantu languages, a set of tongues spoken in historical times by most Africans living south of the equator and by substantial numbers north of it. There is considerable agreement that the ultimate point of origin of their ancestors (the pre-Bantu) lies in western Africa (probably southern Nigeria and Cameroun). The location of later centers of dispersal remains in dispute, but there is no doubt that those entering Tanzania came initially from a westerly direction whatever their point of entry into the territory.

  All but one of the authenticated and dated early Iron Age sites in Tanzania have been found in the north. Those west of Lake Victoria are apparently part of a series of related finds in the interlacustrine area: southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire; a similar site has been discovered on the other side of the lake at Urewe in Kenya. Another set of sites has been excavated in the foothills of the Pare and Usambara mountains in the northeast and in the Digo Hills between Tanga in Tanzania and Mombasa in Kenya.

  The only dated early Iron Age site farther south is that at the Uvinza brine springs not far from the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. The pottery there, however, resembles that found in Zambia rather than that turned up in the interlacustrine area to the north. Early Iron Age sites have not yet been discovered in southern Tanzania, but it may be assumed that Iron Age Bantu-speaking cultivators reached some part ‘of the area as they clearly did in northeastern-most Zambia immediately south of the Tanzanian border.

  The early Iron Age Bantu, limited by the kinds of crops (mainly vegetables) available to them and apparently lacking cattle, settled chiefly in the moister, more easily worked areas. Those in the interlacustrine area stressed fishing rather than hunting as a supplementary source of food. All relied to some extent on gathering. It is unlikely that there was much contact or conflict between the Iron Age cultivators and the hunting and gathering groups on the one hand or the pastoralists on the other given what must have been a generally sparse population and the fact that each of these groups had adapted to somewhat different ecological conditions.

  The most recent of the Nilotic migrations was by the Masai. By about the year 1800 they had reached the area around Dodoma where their advance was stopped by the Gogo and the Hehe . Their reputation as a warrior tribe meant that the north part of Tanzania was largely avoided by slave traders and caravan routes. As a result of these migrations north and central Tanzania has great ethnic diversity.

• The middle Ages

  Arabs from the Persian Gulf area were engaged in trade along the Indian Ocean coast by the 9th century ad and by the 12th century had established trading posts on the mainland and the offshore islands. Intermarriage between the Arabs and coastal Bantu-speaking peoples resulted in the creation of the Swahili people and language. (Swahili literally means “of the coast.”)

  The first contacts of European nations with the East African coast were incidental to their quest for spices. In 1498, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and thereafter the Portuguese established trading and supply posts on the East African coast for their ships on the way to India. Eventually, the Portuguese lost control of the sea routes, and in 1698, the Ya’aruba imam of the Ibahdi Arabs of Oman, Sa’if bin Sultan, expelled the Portuguese from every position that they held north of Mozambique. The Ibahdis of Oman long remained in at least nominal control of East Africa, and there was a lucrative trade in slaves and ivory.

  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 slaves 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.

  Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan (the ruler of Oman during 1806–56), above all others, must be regarded as the founder of modern Zanzibar. Sa’id first visited Zanzibar in 1828, and in 1840, he made the island his capital. A believer in free trade, he encouraged foreign merchants, including Indians, broke up Arab monopolies, and made commercial treaties with the United States and the United Kingdom. Zanzibar is indebted to him most for his establishment of the clove tree. By the time he died in 1856, he had established a large, loosely held empire that included Oman, Zanzibar, and the East African coast inland to the Great Lakes and the Congo. Zanzibar produced three-quarters of the world’s clove supply on plantations worked by slaves from the mainland. British pressure forced the closing of the slave trade in 1876, although slavery itself was not abolished until 1897.

  The rise of Zanzibar as a commercial center was largely due to its trading links to the interior. Many of the caravan routes that stretched across East Africa were pioneered by African mainland societies. For example, the Yao living around Lake Malawi supplied the southern Tanzania trading town of Kilwa with slaves and ivory. African societies that gained control over the trade routes enhanced their power and wealth. In northeast Tanzania, a powerful trading and military state emerged in the 1860s in Urambo. Its leader, Mirambo was an excellent military and commercial strategist. He challenged the position of coastal traders in the area as well as the leading states that were closely aligned to Zanzibar.

• The Arrival of European

  The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama explored the East African coast in 1498 on his voyage to India. By 1506, the Portuguese claimed control over the entire coast. This control was nominal, however, because the Portuguese did not colonize the area or explore the interior. Assisted by Omani Arabs, the indigenous coastal dwellers succeeded in driving the Portuguese from the area north of the Ruvuma River by the early 18th century. Claiming the coastal strip, Omani Sultan Seyyid Said (l804-56) moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1841. European exploration of the interior began in the mid-19th century. Two German missionaries reached Mt. Kilimanjaro in the 1840s.

  In the 19th century 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 colonial interests were first advanced in 1884. Karl Peters, who formed the Society for German Colonization, concluded a series of treaties by which tribal chiefs in the interior accepted German “protection.” Prince Otto is von Bismarck’s government backed Peters in the subsequent establishment of the German East Africa Company.

  In 1886 and 1890, Anglo-German agreements were negotiated that delineated the British and German spheres of influence in the interior of East Africa and along the coastal strip previously claimed by the Omani sultan of Zanzibar. The two treaties between Germany and Great Britain were signed: the first partitioned the territories on the mainland hitherto controlled by the sultan of Zanzibar; the second officially recognized Anglo-German spheres of influence, excluded Germany from the Upper Nile, and established a British protectorate over Zanzibar and Pemba. Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) became recognized as German East Africa in 1891. As they occupied the interior, the German-led troops put down African opposition and uprisings. Intense military opposition to the European imperialism was led by Mirambo of the Nyamwezi in northwest Tanzania, by Mkwawa of the Hehe in southern highlands and by Meli of the Chagga around Kilimanjaro.

• Colonial German

  German rule was established quickly over Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam, and Kilwa. The caravans of Tom von Prince, Wilhelm Langheld, Emin Pasha, and Charles Stokes were sent to dominate “the Street of Caravans.”[citation needed] The Abushiri Revolt of 1888 was put down with British help the following year. In 1890, London and Berlin concluded the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, which returned Heligoland to Germany and decided the border between GEA and the East Africa Protectorate controlled by Britain, although the exact boundaries remained unsurveyed until 1910.

  Between 1891 and 1894, the Hehe people, led by Chief Mkwawa, resisted German expansion. They were defeated because rival tribes supported the Germans. After years of guerrilla warfare, Mkwawa himself was cornered and committed suicide in 1898. The Maji Maji Rebellion occurred in 1905 and was put down by Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen. Scandal soon followed, however, with allegations of corruption and brutality. In 1907, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow appointed Bernhard Dernburg to reform the colonial administration.

  German colonial administrators relied heavily on native chiefs to keep order and collect taxes. By 1 January 1914, aside from local police, the military garrisons of the Schutztruppen (protective troops) at Dar es Salaam, Moshi, Iringa, and Mahenge numbered 110 German officers (including 42 medical officers), 126 non-commissioned officers, and 2,472 Askari (native enlisted men). Like other colonial powers, the Germans expanded their empire in the Africa Great Lakes region, ostensibly to fight slavery and the slave trade. Unlike other imperial powers, however, they never formally abolished either, preferring instead to curtail the production of new “recruits” and regulate the existing slaving business

  The Supreme Council of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference awarded all of German East Africa (GEA) to Britain on 7 May 1919, over the strenuous objections of Belgium. The British colonial secretary, Alfred Milner, and Belgium’s minister plenipotentiary to the conference, Pierre Orts, then negotiated the Anglo-Belgian agreement of 30 May 1919, where Britain ceded the north-western GEA provinces of Ruanda and Urundi to Belgium. The conference’s Commission on Mandates ratified this agreement on 16 July 1919. The Supreme Council accepted the agreement on 7 August 1919.

  On 12 July 1919, the Commission on Mandates agreed that the small Kionga Triangle south of the Rovuma River would be given to Portugal, with it eventually becoming part of independent Mozambique. The commission reasoned that Germany had virtually forced Portugal to cede the triangle in 1894. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 July 1919, although the treaty did not take effect until 10 January 1920. On that date, the GEA was transferred officially to Britain, Belgium, and Portugal. Also on that date, “Tanganyika” became the name of the British territory. During World War II, about 100,000 people from Tanganyika joined the Allied forces and were among the 375,000 Africans who fought with those forces. Tanganyikans fought in units of the King’s African Rifles during the East African Campaign in Somalia and Abyssinia against the Italians, in Madagascar against the Vichy French during the Madagascar Campaign, and in Burma against the Japanese during the Burma Campaign. Tanganyika was an important source of food during this war, and its export income increased greatly compared to the pre-war years of the Great Depression Wartime demand, however, caused increased commodity prices and massive inflation within the colony.

• The Maji-Maji Rebellion

  After the Scramble for Africa among the major European powers in the 1880s, Germany had reinforced its hold on several formal African colonies. These were German East Africa (now Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and part of Mozambique), German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Cameroon, and Togoland. The Germans had a relatively weak hold on German East Africa. However, they did maintain a system of forts throughout the interior of the territory and were able to exert some control over it. Since their hold on the colony was weak, they resorted to using violently repressive tactics to control the population.

  Germany began levying head taxes in 1898, and relied heavily on forced labor to build roads and accomplish various other tasks. In 1902, Carl Peters ordered villages to grow cotton as a cash crop. Each village was charged with producing a quota of cotton. The headmen of the village were left in charge of overseeing the production, which set them against the rest of the population.

  The German policies were not only unpopular, as they had serious effects on the lives of the natives. The social fabric of society was being changed rapidly. The social roles of men and women were being changed to face the needs of the communities. Since men were forced away from their homes to work, women were forced to assume some of the traditional male roles. Also, the fact that men were away strained the resources of the village and the people’s ability to deal with their environment and remain self-sufficient. There was thus a lot of animosity against the government at this period. In 1905, a drought threatened the region. All that, as well as opposition to the government’s agricultural and labor policies, led to open rebellion against the Germans in July.

  The insurgents turned to magic to drive out the German colonizers and used it as a unifying force in the rebellion. A spirit medium named Kinjikitile Ngwale claimed to be possessed by a snake spirit called Hongo. Ngwale began calling himself Bokero and developed a belief that the people of German East Africa had been called upon to eliminate the Germans. German anthropologists recorded that he gave his followers war medicine that would turn German bullets into water. This “war medicine” was in fact water (maji in Kiswahili) mixed with castor oil and millet seeds. Empowered with this new liquid, Bokero’s followers began what would become known as the Maji Maji Rebellion.

  German troops, armed with machine guns, departed from Mahenge to the Ngoni camp, which they attacked on 21 October. The Ngoni soldiers retreated, throwing away their bottles of war medicine and crying, “The maji is a lie!”[citation needed] Upon the outbreak of the fighting, Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, governor of German East Africa, had requested reinforcements from the German government. Kaiser Wilhelm immediately ordered two cruisers with their Marine complements to the troubled colony. Reinforcements also arrived from as far away as New Guinea. When 1,000 regular soldiers from Germany arrived in October, Götzen felt he could go on the offensive and restore order in the south.

  Three brigade army moved into the rebellious South and started destroying villages, crops, and other food sources used by the rebels. They made effective use of their firepower to break up rebel attacks. A successful ambush of a German column crossing the Rufiji River by the Bena kept the rebellion alive in the southwest, but the Germans were not to be denied for long. By April 1906, the southwest had been pacified. However, elsewhere the fighting was bitter. The southeast campaign degenerated into a guerrilla war that brought with it a devastating famine. The war, which lasted from 1905 to 1907, resulted in 250,000–300,000 total dead. The end of the war was followed by a period of famine, known as the Great Hunger (njaa), caused in large part by the scorched-earth policy advocated by Gustav Adolf von Götzen.

• The British Mandate: 1919-1962

  After the end of the war the treaty of Versailles, in 1919, grants Britain a League of Nations mandate to govern the former German East Africa – which now acquires a new name, Tanganyika. British policy from the 1920s onwards is to encourage indigenous African administration along traditional lines, through local councils and courts. Sir 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. Sir 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).

  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, 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.

  During the 1950s a likely future leader of Tanganyika emerges in the person of Julius Nyerere. Son of a chief, a convert to Roman Catholicism while studying at Makerere college in Uganda, then an undergraduate for three years in Edinburgh university, Nyerere returns to Tanganyika in 1953. He immediately founds a political party, TANU or the Tanganyika African National Union (evolving it from an earlier and defunct Tanganyika African Association). 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. From the start its members feature prominently in elections to the legislative assembly. When independence follows, in 1961, Nyerere becomes the new nation’s prime minister. In 1962 Tanganyika adopts a republican constitution and Nyerere is elected president.

• Independent Tanzania

  In 1947, Tanganyika became a United Nations trust territory under British control. It’s geography, topography, climate, geopolitics, patterns of settlement and history made Tanganyika the most significant of all UN Trust Territories.But two-thirds of the population lived in one-tenth of the territory because of water shortages, soil erosion, unreliable rainfall, tsetse fly infestations, and poor communications and transportation infrastructures.

  In 1957, only 15 towns had over 5,000 inhabitants, with the capital Dar es Salaam having the nation’s highest population of 128,742. Tanganyika was a multi-racial territory, which made it unique in the trusteeship world. Its total non-African population in 1957 was 123,310 divided as follows: 95,636 Asians and Arabs (subdivided as 65,461 Indians, 6,299 Pakistanis, 4,776 Goans, and 19,100 Arabs), 3,114 Somalis, and 3,782 “coloured” and “other” individuals. The white population, which included the Europeans (British, Italians, Greeks, and Germans) and white South Africans, totalled 20,598 individuals. Tanganyika’s ethnic and economic make-up posed problems for the British. Their policy was geared to ensuring the continuance of the European presence as necessary to support the country’s economy. But the British also had to remain responsive to the political demands of the Africans.

  Many Africans were government servants, business employees, labourers, and producers of important cash crops during this period. But the vast majority were subsistence farmers who produced barely enough to survive. The standards of housing, clothing, and other social conditions were “equally quite poor.” The Asians and Arabs were the middle class and tended to be wholesale and retail traders. The white population were missionaries, professional and government servants, and owners and managers of farms, plantations, mines, and other businesses. White farmerss were of primary importance as producers of exportable agricultural crops.

  Britain, through its colonial officer David Gordon Hines, encouraged the development of farming co-operatives to help convert subsistence farmers to cash husbandry. The subsistence farmers sold their produce to Indian traders at poor prices. By the early 1950s, there were over 400 co-operatives nationally. Co-operatives formed “unions” for their areas and developed cotton gineries, coffee factories, and tobacco dryers. A major success for Tanzania was the Moshi coffee auctions that attracted international buyers after the annual Nairobi auctions.

  The UN and the Africans who used the UN to achieve their purposes were very influential in driving Tanganyika towards independence. The Africans attended public gatherings in Tanganyika with UN representatives. There were peasants, urban workers, government employees, and local chiefs and nobles who personally approached the UN about local matters needing immediate action. And finally, there were Africans at the core of the political process who had the power to mould the future. Their goal was political advancement for Africans, with many supporting the nationalist movement, which had its roots in the African Association (AA). It was formed in 1929 as a social organization for African government servants in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. The AA was renamed the Tanganyika African Association (TAA) in 1948 and ceased being concerned with events in Zanzibar.

  Beginning in 1954, African nationalism centered on the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), which was a political organization formed by Julius Nyerere in that year as the successor to the TAA. The TANU won the Legislative Council elections in 1958, 1959, and 1960, with Nyerere becoming chief minister after the 1960 election. Internal self-government started on 1 May 1961 followed by independence on 9 December 1961.