Tanzania's recent history

Long before Europeans were interested in what we now call Tanzania, there were well developed societies and kingdoms practising agriculture and stock rearing. Arabs were powerful along the coast and in the islands and there were established trade routes into the interior carrying ivory to the coast. French and Portuguese became involved in the slave trade in the 1770s. German missionaries and British explorers arrived in the 19th Century.

In the Imperial land-grab of the late 19th Century, the country became German East Africa. Germans developed the sisal industry, exploited the hard wood in the forests and built railways. During the First World War, there was fierce fighting in East Africa. After the war the League of Nations made Tanganyika a mandated territory, to be looked after by Britain, but not a British colony. The good aspect of this, in terms of later independence, was that Tanganyika did not have a large white settler population. The bad aspect was that Britain invested much less than in the colonies. Indeed when independence came in 1961, there was only a handful of African graduates and a poor infrastructure.

The architect of Tanzanian independence was Julius Nyerere (1922-1999), known to Tanzanians as ‘Mwalimu’ (Teacher). He welded together opposition groups and enabled a peaceful transfer of power. Through Kiswahili as the national language and enlightened social policies, he united the country. His economic policies, although initially successful, led to stagnation. The economy also suffered after the invasion of Tanzania by Idi Amin and the Tanzanian riposte, with no Western support, to remove his tyrannical regime. The economy was ‘baled out’ by the IMF in 1986 and under Nyerere’s successors who introduced a multi-party democracy, it has been liberalised and now has a positive growth rate. Because Tanzania has a deserved reputation as a peaceful and harmonious state, with increasingly better governance, its prospects are good.