Tanzania
Capital: Dodoma · East Africa & Horn
From Olduvai Gorge's earliest humans to Kilwa's medieval gold trade and Zanzibar's Swahili sultanate — with over 120 ethnic groups united by Swahili.
Ethnic communities
- SukumaLargest group; famed bugobogobo dance societies
- Swahili & ZanzibariIndian Ocean city civilization; taarab music
- MaasaiNorthern plains pastoralists
- ChaggaKilimanjaro banana-grove kingdoms and irrigation
- HadzaOne of the last hunter-gatherer peoples on Earth
More communities of Tanzania
- Nyamwezi · Caravan 'people of the moon' of Tabora
- Haya · Kagera's banana kingdoms and early iron genius
- Makonde · Ebony master-carvers of the southeast plateau
- Hehe · Mkwawa's highland resistance kingdom
- Gogo · Central rift farmers of zeze fiddle fame
- Ha · Kigoma's forest-and-lake communities
- Zaramo · Dar es Salaam's coastal hinterland people
- Pare & Shambaa · Usambara kingdom terraces and rain lore
- Iraqw · Cushitic terrace farmers of Mbulu highlands
- Datoga · Bronze-working pastoralists of the rift
- Sandawe · Click-speaking ancient people of the center
- Nyakyusa · Age-village farmers of the southern highlands
- Zigua & Bondei · Northeastern coast-hinterland farmers
Languages
Major languages: Swahili, Sukuma, Chagga, Maasai, Hadza, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu); Nilo-Saharan; Afro-Asiatic; Khoisan-type (Hadza, Sandawe)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kilwa Sultanate
- • Sultanate of Zanzibar
- • Chagga chiefdoms
- • Karagwe
Heritage sites
- • Stone Town of Zanzibar
- • Kilwa Kisiwani & Songo Mnara ruins
- • Kondoa rock art
- • Olduvai Gorge
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Tanzania
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1926–2000
Bibi Titi Mohamed
Women's mobilisation
Singer who organised tens of thousands of women into TANU, making the independence movement a mass movement rather than an elite one.
- Sportb. 1953
Filbert Bayi
Middle-distance running
Set a 1500m world record from the front at the 1974 Commonwealth Games, a race still cited among the greatest ever run.
- Politics & liberation1922–1999
Julius Nyerere
Independence and ujamaa
Known as Mwalimu, the teacher. Built a unified nation from more than 120 language groups, made Kiswahili a national language, and stepped down voluntarily in 1985. His ujamaa villagisation programme remains widely debated.
- Music & the arts1909–1962
Shaaban Robert
Swahili literature
Called the father of Swahili literature, he wrote poetry and prose that established Kiswahili as a language of modern literary ambition.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bena
Highland farmers of the Njombe plateau whose nineteenth-century state under Mkwawa's neighbours was reshaped by Ngoni invasion, whose men were conscripted into the Maji Maji war and its suppression, and whose cool uplands now grow much of Tanzania's timber and tea.
Open deep profile →Chagga
The banana-grove people of Kilimanjaro whose ancient irrigation channels, coffee cooperatives and terraced kihamba gardens turned Africa's highest mountain into one of its most prosperous and densely settled landscapes.
Open deep profile →Comorians of Zanzibar
The islanders from the south — Comorian families who settled Zanzibar as scholars, clerks and traders under the sultanate, held a position between Arab and mainlander, and were caught badly by the revolution that abolished both.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Fipa
Farmers and ironworkers of the plateau between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, whose mound-and-compost cultivation system fed a dense population without fallow, and whose tall induction furnaces produced steel that European metallurgists studied in astonishment in the 1970s.
Open deep profile →Gogo (Wagogo)
The cattle-and-millet people of Tanzania's dry central plateau — masters of survival on the caravan road to the coast, whose msunyunho ritual, ng'oma dance-competitions and celebrated polyphonic singing made Ugogo a crossroads of sound and endurance.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Hadza (Hadzabe)
One of the world's last hunter-gatherer peoples — click-speaking foragers of Lake Eyasi whose language has no established relatives, whose honey-guiding partnership with a wild bird is famous, and whose land is the front line of indigenous rights in Tanzania.
Open deep profile →Haya
The banana-grove kingdoms of Lake Victoria's western shore — Bahaya iron-masters who smelted carbon steel two millennia ago, whose Kagera courts kept epic praise-poetry, and whose coffee-and-banana kibanja gardens are among Africa's oldest continuous farms.
Open deep profile →Hehe
The southern highlanders who beat a German army — whose chief Mkwawa forged a nation from scattered chiefdoms, destroyed a colonial column at Lugalo, and whose skull's return from Germany became a landmark of restitution.
Open deep profile →Indians of Zanzibar
The financiers of the clove and ivory economy — Gujarati, Kutchi and Bohra merchant families who bankrolled the Omani sultanate, built the stone town's finest houses, and largely left within a decade of the 1964 revolution.
Open deep profile →Iraqw
A Cushitic island in a Bantu sea — the terraced-farming people of Mbulu whose sunken tembe houses hide in the hillside, whose Cushitic language links them to the Horn a thousand kilometres away, and whose masay purification rites bind the community.
Open deep profile →Kaguru
Matrilineal farmers of the Itumba mountains in Kilosa, whose ritual life and moral reasoning were recorded across four decades by an anthropologist who kept returning, producing one of the fullest portraits of a single African community in the literature.
Open deep profile →Kuria
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Kenya-Tanzania border above the Mara, organised in clans and age-sets whose ritual cycles run across an international boundary, and known across East Africa both for the cattle raiding that has shaped their modern history and for the campaigns run from within the community against girls' cutting.
Open deep profile →Luguru
Matrilineal mountain farmers of the Uluguru range above Morogoro, whose refusal of a colonial terracing scheme in 1955 helped launch Tanganyikan nationalism, and whose forests supply most of Dar es Salaam's water.
Open deep profile →Luo (Joluo)
The lake nation of Nyanza — river-lake Nilotes who walked the Nile's length over five centuries, masters of fishing and oratory, whose nyatiti poetry, benga guitar and intellectual tradition (from Argwings Kodhek to Obama's father) mark East African public life.
Open deep profile →Maasai
Semi-nomadic Nilotic pastoralists of the Kenya–Tanzania borderlands, whose age-set society, cattle-centered economy and striking red shúkà have made them among the most recognized peoples in Africa.
Open deep profile →Mainlanders of Zanzibar
The descendants of the enslaved and of the plantation workers — Yao, Nyasa, Makonde and Manyema brought to Zanzibar for the clove estates, whose labour built the island's wealth and whose numbers decided the 1964 revolution.
Open deep profile →Makonde
The plateau people of the Ruvuma — matrilineal farmers whose mapiko masquerades dance the ancestors at dusk, whose ebony 'tree of life' carving founded a modern art movement, and whose highlands sheltered Mozambique's liberation war.
Open deep profile →Makua (Emakhuwa)
Mozambique's largest nation — the matrilineal millions of the northern plateaus whose white-masked muali initiations, Mount Namuli origin songs and centuries of Indian Ocean trade wove the deep interior to the Swahili coast.
Open deep profile →Mambwe
Ridge-mound cultivators of the plateau between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, whose grass-mound farming built fertility out of poor soil, and whose country the First World War's last campaign crossed on its way to the final surrender.
Open deep profile →Mijikenda
The 'Nine Homesteads' of the Kenyan coast — Giriama, Digo, Duruma and kin — whose sacred kaya forests hold the ancestral villages and vigango memorial posts, and whose long entanglement with Swahili towns wove coast and hinterland together.
Open deep profile →Ngindo
Beekeepers and shifting cultivators of the Selous wilderness, matrilineal, dispersed by design across the largest protected area in Africa, and the community whose killing of a German officer in 1905 is where the Maji Maji war is usually said to have begun.
Open deep profile →Ngoni
The northern branch of the Zulu diaspora — regiments that marched two thousand kilometres out of the Mfecane, absorbed the peoples they conquered, and planted Nguni kingship, praise poetry and the ingoma dance across four countries.
Open deep profile →Nyakyusa (Ngonde)
The banana-and-cattle people of the fertile northern Lake Malawi rift — famed for their unique age-villages where age-mates built and lived together, their sacred chiefs and 'breath of men' philosophy, and the volcanic gardens of the Rungwe highlands.
Open deep profile →Nyamwezi
The 'people of the moon' — Tanzania's great caravan nation whose porters carried the ivory trade from Lake Tanganyika to the sea, whose chief Mirambo built an empire in a decade, and whose bugobogobo dance societies still contest the harvest.
Open deep profile →Nyaturu (Rimi)
Cattle keepers and sorghum farmers of the Singida plateau, builders of the flat-roofed tembe homestead that once defined central Tanzania's architecture, and the people whose district gave Tanzania both its groundnut boom and its most notorious witch-killing statistics.
Open deep profile →Nyiha and Lambya
The iron-smelting people of the northern highlands — farmers of the Songwe river country whose furnaces supplied hoes across three modern countries, and whose highland is now Malawi's coffee and Tanzania's maize frontier.
Open deep profile →Ogiek
The honey-hunters of the Mau — forest-dwelling beekeepers whose clans own named tracts of highland woodland by inherited right, and whose landmark African Court victory in 2017 affirmed indigenous land rights across the continent.
Open deep profile →Pare (Asu)
Iron smelters and irrigators of the Pare mountains between Kilimanjaro and the coast, whose furnaces supplied the region's hoes and spears, whose rain shrines held skulls of chiefs, and who took to mission schooling early enough to shape Tanganyikan politics out of all proportion to their numbers.
Open deep profile →Rangi (Langi)
Farmers and traders of Kondoa in central Tanzania, Muslim in a largely Christian interior, custodians of the Kondoa rock art — thousands of years of painting on shelter walls, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006 and older than any state on the continent's east.
Open deep profile →Shambaa (Sambaa)
Farmers of the Usambara mountains whose nineteenth-century kingdom under Kimweri ye Nyumbai reached the coast, whose forests hold some of the densest endemism in Africa, and whose historian gave African studies one of its classic accounts of how a state is remembered.
Open deep profile →Shirazi
A claim of descent rather than a tribe — the Swahili coast's tradition of Persian founding ancestors from Shiraz, used for a thousand years to assert antiquity and rank, and made in the twentieth century into a political identity that carried Zanzibar into revolution.
Open deep profile →Sukuma
Tanzania's largest nation — the farmer-herders south of Lake Victoria whose competing dance societies, snake-charming and porcupine troupes, healing guilds and cotton fields built a culture of spectacular public performance.
Open deep profile →Swahili
The Indian Ocean's African civilization — a chain of stone towns from Lamu to Kilwa where Bantu Africa met Arabia, Persia and India across two millennia of monsoon trade, giving the continent its most widely spoken language and a literary tradition centuries deep.
Open deep profile →The 1972 Burundians
Hutu Burundians who fled the killings of 1972 into Tanzania, were settled in three great camps in the western forests, farmed there for four decades, and became the longest-standing refugee population in Africa before Tanzania offered them citizenship and then hesitated.
Open deep profile →Wahadimu
Unguja's oldest farming population — the people whose mwinyi mkuu ruled the island before the Omanis came, who lost the fertile west to clove plantations and kept the coral rag east, and who still work the seaweed and the fishing grounds of the south coast.
Open deep profile →Wamakunduchi
The people of Zanzibar's southern tip, who open the Shirazi new year each July with a ritual stick fight and the burning of a hut, in a festival of Persian origin that has been held on this coast for a thousand years.
Open deep profile →Wapemba
The people of the green island — Pemba's farmers and clove growers, who supply most of Zanzibar's cloves, whose reputation for sorcery draws clients from across East Africa, and whose politics have been the archipelago's most contested for thirty years.
Open deep profile →Watumbatu
The island within the island — sailors and fishermen of Tumbatu off Unguja's north-west, famed as the finest boat handlers on the coast, holders of their own dialect and of a reputation for religious strictness and social distance.
Open deep profile →Yao (Wayao)
The long-distance traders of the Lake Malawi–Ruvuma country — matrilineal caravan-merchants who linked the interior to the Swahili coast, embraced Islam early, and carry the masked Midimu and initiation traditions across three nations.
Open deep profile →Zanzibari Arabs
The Omani and Hadrami families of Stone Town — who moved a sultanate from Muscat to Zanzibar, built the clove economy on slavery, gave the island its carved doors and its taarab, and were killed or driven out in their thousands in 1964.
Open deep profile →Zaramo
Matrilineal coastal farmers whose land became Dar es Salaam, absorbed into the city they were surrounded by, keepers of the mwali girls' seclusion tradition and of the sculptural style that gave Tanzania its best-known figure carvings.
Open deep profile →Zigua (Zigula)
Farmers of the Pangani hinterland whose nineteenth-century warlords armed themselves through the caravan trade, and whose people were taken as slaves to the Somali river valleys in such numbers that a Zigua-speaking community survives on the Jubba to this day.
Open deep profile →