StapleTanzania
Ugali
Maize meal cooked stiff and turned out as a mound, eaten with fish, beans or greens across the whole country. The measure of a cook is whether it holds together cleanly.
Serves 6 · 25 minutes
Datooga (Barabaig)
Nilotic cattle herders of the Rift country around Mount Hanang and Lake Eyasi, whose brass and iron work supplies their Hadza neighbours, whose women wear scarified faces and beaded hide dresses, and who lost their best grazing to a Canadian-funded wheat scheme.
Identity
Population: Estimated 100,000 to 150,000
Location: The Hanang, Mbulu, Singida and Lake Eyasi country of northern Tanzania
Language: Datooga, with the Barabaig and other dialect clusters
Language family: Nilo-Saharan → Southern Nilotic → Datooga
Traditional governance: Clan and neighbourhood councils, with a distinctive women's council that can try and fine men for offences against women; Tanzanian local government alongside.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (4)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Barabaig
The largest and best-documented section, of the Hanang plains.
Gisamjanga
A section closely associated with the Barabaig.
Bajuta
A southern section toward Singida.
Rotigenga and Buradiga
Further named sections with their own territories.
Culture
Clothing: Women in beaded and brass-ornamented hide dresses with distinctive facial scarification around the eyes; men in cloth wraps with a staff and knife; ochre used in ceremony.
Food: Milk, blood and meat from the herds, maize and millet purchased or grown, honey traded from the Hadza, and the honey beer used at funerals and settlements.
Ceremonies: Bung'eda funerary mounds for senior men, built over months; girls' and boys' passages; the women's council hearings; cattle blessings and rain rites.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous; bridewealth in cattle; polygyny common; the women's council can sanction a husband and its rulings are enforced by collective action.
Initiation rites: Boys enter age-based responsibility through herding; the killing of a dangerous animal or an enemy historically conferred a distinctive status marked in ornament and song.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Tanzania, at national rather than community level — 12 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
StapleTanzania
Makande
also Maize and bean stew
Maize and beans simmered slowly with coconut milk, the Chagga and Pare version of the East African staple. Richer and looser than Kenyan githeri.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes, plus soaking
National dishTanzania
Nyama Choma na Kachumbari
Goat grilled slowly over charcoal, chopped and eaten with a tomato and onion salad. Ordered by weight at a nyama choma joint and shared standing around the board.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
National dishTanzania
Mchemsho
also Boiled one-pot
Everything boiled together in one pot — plantain, potato, cassava, carrot, beans and meat — in a light broth. Northern Tanzania's household dinner, and what a Tanzanian cooks when feeding a crowd.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Chipsi Mayai
A chip omelette cooked flat in a pan and cut in wedges, sold from every street griddle in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Cheap, filling and universally eaten.
Serves 2 · 25 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Mishkaki
also Marinated beef skewers
Beef marinated in papaya, ginger and spice, threaded on sticks and grilled over charcoal on every Tanzanian street corner after dark. The papaya is what makes it tender.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Festival & feastTanzania
Pilau
Spiced rice with beef or goat, made for weddings, Eid and Christmas. The onions must be fried genuinely dark, which is where the colour comes from rather than from any powder.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Festival & feastTanzania
Mkate wa Sinia
also Vitumbua tray bread, Rice tray cake
A soft, faintly sweet rice and coconut cake steamed or baked in a tray, cut into diamonds and served at coastal weddings and at the end of Ramadan.
Serves 10 · 1 hour, plus 6 hours soaking and rising
Regional specialityTanzania
Mchuzi wa Samaki
Fish curry in coconut milk with tamarind, from the Swahili coast. The tamarind is what separates the coastal version from anything cooked inland.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Regional specialityTanzania
Ndizi na Nyama
also Machalari, Green banana and beef stew
Green cooking bananas stewed with beef until they take on the meat's flavour and thicken the pot. The Chagga dish of Kilimanjaro, and one of Tanzania's most beloved.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
Drink & sweetTanzania
Kahawa na Tangawizi
Black coffee boiled with ginger and sold from brass pots carried through the streets of Zanzibar and Dar, poured into tiny cups and drunk in one.
Serves 6 small cups · 20 minutes
Drink & sweetTanzania
Togwa
also Fermented maize drink
Lightly fermented maize and millet drink, sour and faintly fizzy, drunk cold through the day. Non-alcoholic, probiotic, and given to children and the sick.
Serves Makes 2 litres · 30 minutes, plus 24 hours fermenting
Stories & Oral Literature
The Wheat Scheme at HanangLand history
From 1970 the Tanzanian government, with Canadian aid, developed large mechanised wheat farms on the Basotu plains at the foot of Mount Hanang — some 100,000 acres of the Barabaig's best dry-season grazing and their burial grounds. The community resisted through the courts for two decades and won a series of Tanzanian judgments recognising customary rights, though recovery of the land was partial. The case is cited across Africa as an example of development displacing pastoralists on the argument that their land was unused.
The Women's CouncilLegal institution
Datooga women hold a council with the power to hear complaints against men — of assault, of neglect of a wife, of insult to a woman — and to impose fines in cattle. A man who refuses can be subjected to a collective sanction in which women of the neighbourhood act together. The institution has been documented since the mid-twentieth century and is one of the better-attested formal women's judicial bodies in East Africa.
The Smiths and the HadzaEconomic relationship
Datooga smiths work brass and iron, and the arrowheads the Hadza hunt with are largely Datooga-made, traded for honey and meat. The relationship is old and asymmetrical: Datooga herds have pushed into Hadza foraging land around Lake Eyasi, and competition for water and bush is now sharp. The arrowhead trade continues through the friction, which is a fair summary of how the two communities have coexisted.
Proverbs
“A grave that grows is a man remembered.”
On the bung'eda mounds, built up over months.
“The women's fine is paid in cattle and in silence.”
On the authority of the women's council.
“Grass that is ploughed does not come back the same.”
A Barabaig saying from the wheat scheme years.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Aseeta, the sun, as the high god, addressed at dawn; ancestral spirits attached to burial mounds; particular hills, above all Hanang, holding prohibitions.
Beliefs: Dawn prayer and blessing; the bung'eda funerary complex, in which a senior man's grave is built into a mound over an extended ritual period; ancestral offerings; Christian and Muslim influence limited compared with neighbouring communities.
Ancestors: A senior man's bung'eda mound is built and added to over nine months or more, with ceremonies at each stage; the mounds mark the landscape and the claim to it.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Aseeta
The sun, the high god, addressed at dawn
Ancestral spirits
Resident at the funerary mounds and addressed there
Mount Hanang
The community's defining peak, treated with prohibition
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Homesteads of low, flat-roofed houses within thorn enclosures around the cattle, sited on the plains near seasonal water.
Building techniques: Pole frames with mud and dung over flat or low-pitched roofs; thorn enclosures; brass and iron smithing; hide dressing and beadwork.
Village layout: Cattle at the centre of a thorn enclosure with houses around it, calf pens separate, and the burial mounds standing out on the surrounding plain.
Artifacts
Bung'eda funerary mound
Funerary
Earth mound built over a senior man's grave through an extended ritual sequence.
Beaded hide dress
Adornment
Women's leather dress worked with beads and brass, a signature of the community.
Datooga arrowheads
Metalwork
Iron points forged by Datooga smiths and traded to Hadza hunters.
Mount Hanang
Natural heritage
The volcano at the centre of Barabaig territory and cosmology.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1700
Southern Nilotic herders occupy the Rift country of northern Tanzania.
1800s
Maasai expansion pushes Datooga sections south and west into their present range.
1970–1990
The Hanang wheat scheme takes some 100,000 acres of dry-season grazing and burial land.
1981–1990s
Barabaig litigation secures Tanzanian judgments recognising customary rights.
2000s–present
Pressure on Lake Eyasi grazing intensifies; the arrowhead trade with the Hadza continues.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Tanzania National Bureau of StatisticsGovernment of Tanzania
Premium & scholarly sources