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
Ha (Waha)
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Kigoma highlands above Lake Tanganyika, close kin of the Rundi and Rwanda in language and once organised in six kingdoms of their own, whose country has absorbed refugees from Burundi and Congo continuously for sixty years.
Identity
Population: Estimated 1.5 to 2 million, among Tanzania's larger communities
Location: Kigoma Region and western Kagera in north-western Tanzania, between Lake Tanganyika and the Burundi border
Language: Kiha, close to Kirundi and Kinyarwanda
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (JD66, Rwanda-Rundi group)
Traditional governance: Six historic kingdoms — Buha proper, Heru, Muhambwe, Bushingo, Luguru and Bujiji — under mwami rulers; abolished at independence; Tanzanian local government today.
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.
Baha of Heru
The kingdom around Kasulu, the largest of the six.
Baha of Muhambwe
The northern kingdom bordering Burundi.
Baha of Bujiji
The kingdom on the Tanganyika lakeshore near Kigoma.
Batwa of Buha
Forest-origin households historically attached to the kingdoms as potters and hunters.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; barkcloth and hide in the older record; the royal regalia of drums and iron in museum and family keeping.
Food: Beans and maize ugali, cassava, bananas, milk and ghee in cattle-keeping households, dagaa and other fish from Lake Tanganyika, and the banana and sorghum beers of the region.
Ceremonies: Royal drum ceremonies historically; kubandwa possession rites of the Ryangombe cult; funerals with lineage-wide gathering; harvest and cattle observances.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous; bridewealth in cattle; the negotiation is staged and formal in the Rwanda-Rundi manner, conducted through intermediaries.
Initiation rites: No circumcision traditionally; adulthood marked by marriage, cattle and household; the kubandwa initiation was the significant ritual passage for those who entered it.
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
Six Kingdoms and a BorderPolitical history
Buha was not one state but six, each with a mwami and a royal drum, sharing a language and a court culture with the kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda to the north. The Anglo-German-Belgian boundaries of 1890 and 1919 placed them in a different colony from their nearest relatives, and Tanganyikan independence abolished chieftaincy in 1963. Kiha remains close enough to Kirundi that a Burundian refugee and a Kigoma farmer converse without difficulty, which is one reason the region has absorbed refugees as readily as it has.
Sixty Years of ArrivalsContemporary history
Kigoma has received Burundian refugees since 1972, Rwandans in 1994, Congolese from 1996 and Burundians again from 2015. The camps at Nyarugusu, Nduta and Mtendeli have at times held over 300,000 people. Nyarugusu, opened in 1996, has been among the largest camps in the world. The host communities are Ha, and the long-running arguments about firewood, land, water and the closure of camps are theirs.
The Chimpanzees Above the LakeScientific history
Jane Goodall began her study of chimpanzees at Gombe in 1960, on the Tanganyika shore in Ha country, and the work that followed changed what was known about tool use, hunting and social life among wild apes. Ha households have lived alongside the Gombe and Mahale forests throughout, as labour, as neighbours, and as the people whose farms press against a very small park's boundaries.
Proverbs
“The drum belongs to the kingdom, not to the drummer.”
On office and the person holding it.
“A guest who stays a year plants a garden.”
A Ha saying that has acquired a new sense since 1972.
“Cattle cross the border, the border does not cross them.”
On kinship across a colonial line.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Imana as the creator, in the Rwanda-Rundi pattern; Ryangombe as the hero-spirit of the kubandwa cult; the royal drums as sanctified objects rather than instruments.
Beliefs: Kubandwa possession and initiation, historically the central non-royal religious institution; ancestral spirits (abazimu); royal ancestral observance; Catholic and Pentecostal churches now dominant.
Ancestors: Ancestors are named onto children and addressed at family level; royal ancestors were honoured through the drums and at the kingdoms' burial sites.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Imana
The creator, present in names and blessings
Ryangombe
The hero-spirit at the centre of the kubandwa cult
Abazimu
Spirits of the dead, addressed when misfortune runs in a family
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Homesteads dispersed across the highlands among banana and bean plots, with cattle pens; lakeshore fishing villages at Kigoma and Kibirizi.
Building techniques: Pole and mud with grass thatch, now brick and iron sheet; woven granaries; the mwami's enclosure historically built with reed fencing and a drum house.
Village layout: Houses around a swept yard with the cattle pen behind, banana groves marking the holding, and the royal enclosure historically on high ground with its drums.
Artifacts
Royal drums of the Buha kingdoms
Regalia
Sanctified drums embodying the authority of each of the six kingdoms.
Inanga zither
Instrument
Trough zither accompanying sung poetry, shared with Rwanda and Burundi.
Gombe Stream
Natural heritage
Forest on the Tanganyika shore where chimpanzee research began in 1960.
Agaseke basket
Craft
Tightly woven lidded basket of the Rwanda-Rundi world, made in Buha too.
Historical Timeline
1500s–1700s
Six Ha kingdoms form in the western highlands, sharing court culture with Burundi and Rwanda.
1890–1919
German and then British administration; the boundary separates Buha from Burundi.
1960
Jane Goodall begins chimpanzee research at Gombe on the Tanganyika shore.
1963–1972
Chieftaincy is abolished; the first large Burundian refugee influx arrives in Kigoma.
1994–present
Rwandan, Congolese and further Burundian influxes; Nyarugusu becomes one of the world's largest refugee camps.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- UNHCR — Tanzania operation, Kigoma campsUNHCR
- Tanzania National Bureau of StatisticsGovernment of Tanzania
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: HaSIL International