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Tanzania has a long history of human habitation stretching back to our most distant ancestors. The so-called ‘bantu migrations’, occurring between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, brought agriculture and pastoral knowledge to the area as competing groups spread over the country in search of fertile soil and plentiful grazing for their herds.

European missionaries and explorers mapped the interior of the country by following well-worn caravan routes, including Burton and Speke who Traditional ways of life remained largely intact until the arrival of German colonizers in the late 19th century.

On the Swahili Coast, Indian Ocean trade began as early as 400BCE between Greece and Azania, as the area was commonly known. Around the 4th century AD, coastal towns and trading settlements attracted bantu-speaking peoples from the African hinterland. They settled around mercantile areas and often facilitated trading with the Arabs and Persians, who bartered for slaves, gold, ivory, and spices, sailing north with the monsoon wind.

Between the 13th and 15th centuries, the settlements of Kilwa Kisiwani and the Zanzibar Archipelago reached their peak, with a highly cosmopolitan population of Indian, Arab and African merchants trading in luxury goods that reached as far as China. The completion of Portuguese domination in 1525 meant that trade, for a short time, was lessened, but rival Omani routes and regained complete control of the islands, even going so far as to make Zanzibar the capital of Oman in the 1840’s.

In the late 19th Zanzibar Archipelago, in contrast to German suppressed the slave trade and brought the rebellions in German East Africa, most notably the Maji Maji rebellion from 1905 to 1907, slowly weakened the colonizer’s grip on the nation and at the end of the First World War Germany ceded Tanganyika to English administration. Under the leadership of Julius Nyerere of TANU, popularly referred to as Mwalimu or ‘teacher’ Tanganyika achieved full independence in 1962. Meanwhile, a violent revolution in Zanzibar ousted the Omani sultancy and established a oneparty state under the Afro-Shirazi party in 1963. A year later, the United Republic of Tanzania was formed, unifying the Tanganyika mainland with the semi-autonomous islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago, and merging TANU and the ASP to form CCM, Chama cha Mapinduzi, the Party of the Revolution which rules Tanzania to the present day.

Mysterious ruins of complex irrigation systems span the area around Engaruka, the remnants of a highly developed but unknown society that inhabited the area at least 500 years ago – and then vanished without a trace.

important remnants of Swahili civilization on the East African coast. The area became the centre point of Swahili civilization in the 13th century, when it controlled the gold trade with Sofala, a distant settlement in Mozambique. After a brief decline under the rule of the Portuguese, Kilwa once again became a centre of Swahili trade in the 18th century, when slaves were shipped from its port to the islands of Comoros, Mauritius and Reunion.

The port town of Lindi, in southeastern Tanzania, Nyasa during the heyday of the Zanzibari sultans. In 1909, a team of German paleontologists unearthed the remains of several dinosaur bones in Tendaguru, including the spicies Brachiosaurus brancai, the largest discovered dinosaur in the world.

Another central port in the Swahili coast’s network of Indian Ocean trade, in the 15th century Mikindani’s reach extended as far as the African hinterlands of the Congo and Zambia. The area became a centre of German colonial administration in the 1880s and was a chief exporter of sisal, coconuts, and slaves.