Tanzania historical timeline

Origins

Olduvai Gorge and the footprints at Laetoli — three and a half million years old, made by hominins walking upright across fresh volcanic ash — put Tanzania at the centre of the human story. Bantu-speaking farmers arrived over the following millennia. On the coast and on Zanzibar, Swahili city-states traded with Arabia, Persia, India and China from the eighth century, and Kilwa Kisiwani was rich enough that Ibn Battuta called it one of the most beautiful cities he had seen.

Turning points

Oman ruled Zanzibar from the nineteenth century and made it the centre of the East African slave and clove trades. Germany took the mainland as German East Africa, and the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905 was suppressed with a famine that killed enormous numbers. Britain administered the territory after the First World War. Tanganyika became independent in 1961 under Julius Nyerere, Zanzibar in 1963 with a revolution the following year, and the two united in 1964 as Tanzania. Nyerere’s ujamaa policy collectivised rural life, failed economically and succeeded in something else: it built a national identity across more than a hundred ethnic groups, and Tanzania has never had the ethnic conflict of several neighbours. Multiparty politics returned in 1992, and Samia Suluhu Hassan became the country’s first woman president in 2021.

Influential people

Julius Nyerere, known as Mwalimu, the teacher — who gave up power voluntarily in 1985, which was rare in Africa at the time, and whose insistence on Swahili as the national language is the reason the country coheres. Abeid Karume of Zanzibar. Tippu Tip, the Zanzibari trader whose caravans reached the Congo. And the Leakey family, whose excavations at Olduvai rewrote human prehistory.

Cultural evolution

Swahili is the national language and genuinely the first language of public life, which distinguishes Tanzania from most of the continent. Zanzibar’s Stone Town is a UNESCO site and an Afro-Arab-Indian fusion in stone. The Maasai of the north and the Hadza around Lake Eyasi — one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples on earth, speaking a click language — are at opposite ends of a very wide cultural range. And taarab, sung poetry with orchestras, is Zanzibar’s own form.

Present-day significance

Tanzania holds Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater and a third of its land under some form of protection, and tourism is correspondingly central. Gold and, increasingly, gas are the other pillars. The population is young and growing quickly, and the tension between conservation areas and the pastoralists who used them is among the hardest domestic questions.