$Unique_ID{COW03634}
$Pretitle{262}
$Title{Tanzania
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{tanzania
groups
area
early
bantu
iron
peoples
century
political
african}
$Date{1978}
$Log{Wood Carving*0363401.scf
Figure 2.*0363403.scf
}
Country:     Tanzania
Book:        Tanzania, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Wood Carving: Wood carving from a Nyamwezi Chief's throne.]

     The union in 1964 of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to form the United Republic
of Tanzania joined two entities whose connections before the nineteenth
century had been few and whose political, social, and economic systems in the
precolonial and colonial eras were quite different. Moreover there were
overwhelming differences in size between the two islands constituting Zanzibar
and the land mass of Tanganyika. Their populations in the mid-1970s-roughly
15.5 million for the mainland and about 500,000 for Zanzibar-indicate the
proportions at the time of union and earlier.

     Early in the second millennium A.D. Zanzibar was one of a number of
coastal and insular city-states oriented to the Indian Ocean trade, Islamic in
culture, and inhabited by a mixed, largely Afro-Arab population. The mainland
had been peopled over a very long period by a number of groups that were
different linguistically, culturally and, in some respects, physically. By the
second millennium, however, Tanganyika's population was composed chiefly of
groups speaking Bantu languages, using iron implements, and relying on
agriculture (supplemented by hunting, gathering, and fishing) for subsistence.

     The arrival and mixing of groups on the mainland continued through the
nineteenth century. In the course of this process each amalgam evolved its own
social and political institutions. Bantu (and non-Bantu) groups were, however,
generally characterized by relatively small-scale political units. Even when
such units were linguistically and culturally similar a sense of ethnic
identity encompassing all of them emerged very slowly.

     By the late eighteenth century Zanzibar became the seat of an Omani
dynasty, and by the early nineteenth largely Arab-owned clove plantations
dependent on slave labor dominated its domestic economy and that of Pemba. Not
long after, trading links (including the slave trade) between Zanzibar (and
its dependencies) and various groups in the mainland's interior were firmly
established, directly and indirectly affecting the economies and politics of
mainland societies.

     By mid-century European traders had established themselves in Zanzibar,
but the chief official presence was that of the British who were there to stop
the sale of slaves to Europeans. Except for a few explorers the only Europeans
on the mainland before the 1880s were missionaries, Roman Catholic and
Protestant, of diverse origin. Substantial success in converting Africans was
not to occur until the twentieth century, however. An ancillary but important
task, that of bringing Western education to Africans, was also begun and
became a major mission responsibility throughout the colonial period.

     In 1885 Germany authorized the German East Africa Company to administer
what had become a German colony in the division of Africa arranged by the
European powers. The company's ineptitude led to the German government's
assumption of administrative responsibilities in 1890. For the rest of the
nineteenth century and much of the first decade of the twentieth, the German
colonial authorities began the development of the territory at the same time
that they dealt with African recalcitrance, including a major rebellion in
1906. By the time they had instituted unchallenged control only a short
interval remained before the onset of World War I and the loss of the colony
to British troops by 1917. In 1922 the mainland, now called Tanganyika, became
a League of Nations mandated territory administered by Great Britain.

     Meanwhile Great Britain had established a protectorate over Zanzibar
(including Pemba and a coastal strip later ceded to the Germans). In principle
the sultan continued to rule, but the British increasingly dominated
administration and government finance. Despite their subordinate role in
government and their growing dependence on Indian merchants and financiers,
the Arabs, particularly the Omani elite, maintained their social status. That
status was supported by the British who thought of Zanzibar as an Arab state
through the colonial period, although Arabs constituted less than 20 percent
of the population.

     In the interwar period political, social, and economic development in
Tanganyika proceeded slowly. The territory lacked easily exploitable natural
resources, and much of its land was characterized by poor soils, uncertain
rainfall, and tsetse fly, making it unsuitable for cultivation or herding. The
considerable investment required for more rapid social and economic
development was not forthcoming from Great Britain for a variety of reasons,
including the depression of the 1930s.

     The Tanganyika government, in part as a matter of principle, in part to
cope with a shortage of personnel, instituted the system of indirect rule. The
system entailed administration through traditional chiefs or their analogues
on the assumption that as natural rulers they would be the appropriate
channels not only for the maintenance of law and order, but also for gradually
introduced change. The demands made on chiefs by authorities, their increasing
dependence on the regime for approval, and the use of chiefs to introduce
unpopular measures (even more marked after World War II) led to distortion of
the precolonial relations between chiefs and people, and chiefs gradually lost
their legitimacy.

     By the end of World War II, despite the slow pace at which the
educational system had developed, a number of literate Tanganyika Africans,
many of them working at lower levels in the civil service, had appeared on the
political stage organized as the Tanganyika African Association (TAA). Local
political agitation and organization had also begun in some rural areas, often
set off by resentment of rules governing agricultural and herding practices
imposed through and enforced by the Native Authorities (chiefs and their
appointed subordinates). These resentments, coupled with antipathies
accumulated over the years, and the political movements that grew out of them
were to provide a significant basis for mass support for the nationalist party
that emerged in the mid-1950s.

     The TAA began to ask for elected representation at various levels and to
protest the operation of a de facto color bar in most political, economic, and
social relations. Resentment generated by the color bar was focused on
European colonial authorities and settlers; part of it was turned against
Asians, almost ubiquitous in the kinds of commercial enterprise and civil
service positions to which Africans were beginning to aspire and often
considered more remote than Europeans by Africans.

     The colonial government responded to these manifestations of discontent
slowly and attempted to carry out its own, sometimes uncertain, plans for
development, predicated on colonial rule for a long period. The authorities
emphasized growth in the educational system, continuing development in
plantation agriculture and cash cropping by peasant smallholders, and road
construction. They also intended a very gradual introduction of elected
representatives in the Legislative Council and at local levels. Closely
associated with the notion of election was the notion of multiracialism
calling for the representation for both Europeans and Asians equal to that of
Africans who vastly outnumbered them. This point of view, urged by the
governor of Tanganyika from 1949 to 1958, was disliked by the ordinary African
and was to provide a major issue for African nationalists.

     In July 1954 the TAA became the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU)
under the leadership of Julius K. Nyerere. Rejecting multiracialism (and
tribalism) TANU emphasized the African nature of Tanganyika and called for
African majorities at all levels of government. It was the first African
organization to indicate that independence was its ultimate goal, but it set
no timetable for self-rule. Despite the obstacles the colonial authorities put
in its way TANU, sparked by Nyerere's leadership and eloquence, rapidly,
gained membership and support. By 1958 internal and external developments had
opened the way to self-government, achieved in September 1960; independence
quickly followed in December 196l.

     Progress toward independence in Zanzibar, initially slow, gathered steam
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The situation in Zanzibar and Pemba was not
simple, allegiances and antipathies based on race, socioeconomic class, and
religion cutting across one another. In the end the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP)
achieved a popular majority, but a coalition of two minority parties held a
parliamentary majority when independence was granted in December 1963. In
January 1964 a revolution led to the ouster of the Arab-led coalition and the
end of the sultanate. On April 26 Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to form the
United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar (later the United Republic of
Tanzania) (see fig. 1). The reasons for the union were complex and are not
altogether clear. In any case there were no significant implications for the
internal political and economic systems of the mainland or the islands.
Zanzibar maintained its autonomy in virtually all matters. Only in 1977 when
the ASP and TANU formally became one under the name of the Revolutionary Party
(Chama Cha Mapinduzi-CCM) were tentative steps taken toward the integration of
the two territories (see ch. 2).

     From self-rule in 1960 to the mid-1960s, Tanganyika was a de facto
one-party state, but TANU was given a subsidiary role as Nyerere and his
colleagues sought to function in terms of the parliamentary system given by
the independence constitution prepared by the British. They also relied
heavily on British civil servants and assumed that development necessarily
required a great deal of foreign aid, British and other. These assumptions
gradually gave way in the face of internal discontents and conflicts with the
Western powers. The internal pressures, present from the beginning, arose
from Nyerere's reluctance to Africanize the civil service too swiftly lest
expertise and efficiency be diminished and from his unwillingness to cater to
what he considered African racialism. Nevertheless some adjustments were
carried out.

     Nyerere also struggled with the concept of democracy: in his view the
Western notion implied a win-lose system in which different interest groups
sought to maximize their power and influence at the expense of others. An
African system implied the consensus of a moral community in which the welfare
of all was considered. To approximate the latter, amendments to the
constitution formally instituted a one-party state. It is doubtful that most
of his colleagues shared Nyerere's philosophical orientation, but they had no
difficulty in accepting the change: a one-party system confirmed their
oligarchic experience and their certainty that as leaders of the independence
movement they had a right to rule.

     Nyerere, however, was not fully satisfied. He saw signs of an incipient
class division in the country, not only between well-off party and government
leaders on the one hand and peasants on the other, but also between urban and
rural Tanzanians and among the peasantry where the structure of rewards for
enterprising farmers was leading to significant economic differentiation in
the rural areas. A basic tenet in Nyerere's philosophy was equality, and after
tentative writings on socialism in the early 1960s he explicitly urged the
institution of a socialist economy and society in the Arusha Declaration of
1967 and other official expressions. Like his conception of democracy,
Nyerere's idea of socialism was based on his perception of traditional African
communities.

     The growing wealth of party and government leaders was dealt with by
instituting a leadership code; the code required that they give up most of
their sources of wealth other than their salaries, a step that led to some
disgruntlement but was in part, at least, effective. Above all, Nyerere's
conception of socialism was founded on his view of the nature of the
traditional African rural community, and it was oriented to the axiom that the
great bulk of the mainland's population would remain agricultural.

     This set of ideas and assumptions accounts for the salience of the idea
of ujamaa in the years after the Arusha Declaration. Ujamaa, inadequately
translated as familyhood, refers to a pattern of equality, cooperation,
interdependence, and sharing presumably characteristic not only of the family
but also of traditional rural communities, even if they are not composed of
kin. Given Tanzania's essentially rural character, ujamaa was to be made
concrete in ujamaa villages. But if a mode of village social and economic
organization was to go hand in hand with economic development and the
provision of social services to which all Tanzanians were entitled, the
dispersed communities characteristic of much of Tanzania would have to give
way to nucleated ones-a process that came to be called villagization.

     After a slow start and a good deal of coercion, villagization proceeded
rapidly in the mid-1970s; ujamaa as a set of attitudes and social arrangements
took hold much more slowly, a fact recognized by Nyerere and others (see ch.
2; ch. 3; ch. 4). The idea was not abandoned, however; it was assumed that the
process would take longer and that it could not be coerced.

     A second salient point in the Arusha Declaration was the notion of
self-reliance (kujitegemea). Both leaders and followers had come increasingly
to assume that economic development depended on huge quantities of aid from
foreign sources, untenable and unfortunate in Nyerere's view. He did not
reject such aid (and it was, in fact, still very important in the late 1970s),
but he considered the attitude an obstacle to hard work by Tanzanians. One of
TANU's early slogans was "Freedom and Work" (Uhuru na Kazi); the latter
intended to disabuse Tanzanians of the idea that independence alone would
bring the millennium. His insistence on self-reliance was consistent with the
earlier notion.

     These attempts to institute socialism involved a degree of coercion.
Further, it has been assumed that a consensus existed and that opposition to
that postulated consensus could stem only from a selfish perspective or from
external sources, and suppression has followed (see ch. 2; ch. 5).
Nevertheless public and private criticism of specific programs and, indeed, of
instances of coercion does occur, and the government takes account of it, even
if after the fact.

     A comparison of Tanzania with other African states of roughly similar
size and population suggests that it faces some problems that others do not
and is free of some that trouble others. As a consequence in part of its
history as one of the three East African territories governed by the British
it had only a rudimentary industrial base at independence, the bulk of
industrial investment having gone to Kenya. Except for diamonds, expected to
run out in the not distant future, it lacked mineral resources. Some of its
land was very good, but much of it was not, and the good land often supported
excessively dense populations. There has been some progress in economic
development, but Tanzania reached independence as a very poor country, and it
has, in many respects, remained so (see ch. 4).

     Like most African states Tanzania is ethnically heterogeneous; as many as
120 ethnic groups have been identified. Nevertheless ethnic relations have not
become a political issue, in part because no single group is large enough to
have become dominant (the largest constitutes no more than 13 percent of the
population) in part because, except in a few cases, ethnic identification is
not deeply rooted (see The Peopling of Tanzania, this ch; ch. 3). Moreover
Nyerere himself and most other leaders are adamantly opposed to what is
usually called tribalism. This does not mean that ethnic awareness does not
affect local social and political relations, or that differences in culture
and in the economic situations of ethnic groups have not affected perceptions
and actions; it does mean that conflict in ethnic terms is not nationally
salient. Tanzania has also been fortunate in that a combination of historic
factors and TANU's insistence have given it a lingua franca, Swahili, that has
become very widely known and provides an opportunity for most Tanzanians to
become literature without learning a completely alien language.

     If divisiveness on ethnic grounds is not a critical issue in Tanzania, it
is not clear that efforts to minimize economic differences between urban and
rural populations and in the rural areas will not lead to other difficulties.
For example, some of the economic differences in rural Tanzania are based on
the differences between the natural environments in which specific communities
(ethnic groups or large segments of them) have the luck to be located. Whether
such differences can be leveled without generating a sense of unfairness is
doubtful. Perhaps more important is the problematic nature of Nyerere's
assumptions and vision. In the circumstances there is no articulated
opposition to that vision, but there are indications that many Tanzanians do
not share his emphasis on economic equality. Moreover Nyerere's assumption
that his goals are rooted in traditional values may well be misplaced (see ch.
3). Nyerere's popularity is not at issue, and his sense of the direction in
which Tanzania should move remained the formal basis of public policy in the
late 1970s, but whether his goals are really those of ordinary Tanzanians is
another matter.

The Peopling of Tanzania

     With other countries in eastern Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia), Tanzania may
have seen the emergence of the earliest ancestors of mankind, but no
connection can be traced between those ancient hominids or, for that matter,
the earliest known Homo sapiens in the area and any element in the modern
population. Some of the ancestors of the present inhabitants may have been in
the area more than 10,000 years ago; others came as late as the nineteenth
century. But the antecedents of the great bulk of the population arrived over
a period of many centuries beginning some time in the first half of the first
millennium A.D. and continuing into the eighteenth century.

     The process was gradual: small groups of people moved in stages from a
point of departure, arrived in the area, and adapted to local conditions. If a
desirable niche was occupied leapfrogging might take place, or the earlier
inhabitants would be absorbed or driven out. Often a group's first area of
settlement was not its last. The community as a whole or some segment of it
might find itself uncomfortable for ecological or sociopolitical reasons with
its then current situation and move on.

The Mainland Before the Iron Age

     The earliest inhabitants of mainland Tanzania to which some of its
peoples may be tentatively linked were hunters and gatherers some of whose
shelters, stone tools and weapons, skeletal materials, and rock drawings have
survived. These people were certainly in the area 3,000 to 5,000 years ago,
and it is likely that they were present much earlier. It has been suggested,
on the basis of a variety of evidence, that they were a part of a once
relatively widespread peoples, sometimes called Khoisan speaking, most of them
localized for many centuries in southern and southwestern Africa where
Europeans came to call them Bushmen and Hottentots. The Sandawe and Hadzapi in
northcentral Tanzania are thought to be remnants of these early inhabitants
(see ch. 3).

     By the beginning of the first millennium B.C. parts of the Rift Valley of
Kenya and northern Tanzania were occupied by a cattle-herding people using
stone tools (and bowls) and resembling the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the
Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia). On the basis of linguistic and other
considerations scholars consider southern Ethiopia the point of origin of
peoples speaking Cushitic languages, and it is argued that some of them began
to move south through the Rift Valley before the first millennium B.C. There
is no evidence that they migrated south of central Tanzania, and it is likely
that they lived interspersed with the hunters and gatherers who had preceded
them in the area. One site, that at Engaruka between lakes Natron and Manyara
in northcentral Tanzania, suggests that some of the Southern Cushitic speakers
turned to iron and agriculture roughly in mid-first millennium A.D., but most
remained pastoralists. What seem to be remnants of these early Southern
Cushitic peoples are still found in northcentral Tanzania: the Iraqw, one of
the larger ethnic groups, are among them (see ch. 3).

The Early Iron Age and the Coming of the Bantu

     Sometime in the first half of the first millennium A.D. small groups of
iron-using people, acquainted with agriculture, entered Tanzania and other
parts of eastern and central Africa. These people probably spoke Bantu
languages, a set of tongues spoken in historical times by most Africans living
south of the equator and by substantial numbers north of it. There is
considerable agreement that the ultimate point of origin of their ancestors
(the pre-Bantu) lies in western Africa (probably southern Nigeria and
Cameroun). The location of later centers of dispersal remains in dispute, but
there is no doubt that those entering Tanzania came initially from a westerly
direction whatever their point of entry into the territory.

     All but one of the authenticated and dated early Iron Age sites in
Tanzania have been found in the north. Those west of Lake Victoria are
apparently part of a series of related finds in the interlacustrine area:
southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire; a similar site has been
discovered on the other side of the lake at Urewe in Kenya.

     Another set of sites has been excavated in the foothills of the Pare and
Usambara mountains in the northeast and in the Digo Hills between Tanga in
Tanzania and Mombasa in Kenya. The only dated early Iron Age site farther
south is that at the Uvinza brine springs not far from the eastern shores of
Lake Tanganyika. The pottery there, however, resembles that found in Zambia
rather than that turned up in the interlacustrine area to the north. Early
Iron Age sites have not yet been discovered in southern Tanzania, but it may
be assumed that Iron Age Bantu-speaking cultivators reached some part of the
area as they clearly did in northeastern-most Zambia immediately south of the
Tanzanian border.

     The early Iron Age Bantu, limited by the kinds of crops (mainly
vegetables) available to them and apparently lacking cattle, settled chiefly
in the moister, more easily worked areas. Those in the interlacustrine area
stressed fishing rather than hunting as a supplementary source of food. All
relied to some extent on gathering. It is unlikely that there was much contact
or conflict between the Iron Age cultivators and the hunting and gathering
groups on the one hand or the pastoralists on the other given what must have
been a generally sparse population and the fact that each of these groups had
adapted to somewhat different ecological conditions.

The Later Iron Age

     Significant changes in the distribution of the Bantu-speaking peoples
began to occur when peoples of non-Bantu origin moved down from the north
bringing cattle and cereals, permitting a more intensive exploitation of areas
hitherto more or less unoccupied. In a number of cases, particularly in the
interlacustrine area, new political forms gradually emerged in the course of
contact between disparate peoples (see Social and Political Differentiation to
the Late Eighteenth Century, this ch.)

[See Figure 2.: Early Iron Age Sites and Non-Bantu Intrusions Source: Adapted
from Figure 17, "The Later Iron Age Intrusion," in Roland Oliver "The East
African Intrusion," in Roland Oliver (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa,
Vol. 3, from c. 1050 to c. 1600, Cambridge University Press, 1977.]

     The northerners who moved into Tanzania from, roughly, the early
centuries of the second millennium to the eighteenth century A.D. were, in
linguistic and cultural terms, of three kinds: Central Sudanic, Nilotic, and
Paranilotic (see fig. 2). In many cases whatever their cultural contributions
to the Bantu already present, they were linguistically, culturally and often,
biologically absorbed by them.

     It has been hypothesized that the first of these peoples to arrive were
speakers of Central Sudanic languages, in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries located chiefly in the northeastern Zaire and southwestern Sudan but
thought to have been a significant population in northern Uganda many
centuries ago. Themselves Iron Age people but, unlike Bantu then living in
East Africa, grain cultivators and cattle herders, they seem to have affected
the ecological adaptations of the interlacustrine Bantu and to have
contributed some terms to the local languages (e.g., the currently used word
for cow). There is no firm evidence that Bantu contact with this first set of
northerners (who probably infiltrated the interlacustrine area slowly and in
small groups) led to significant changes in social and political organization,
but it is likely that there were some. In any case whatever their
contributions to interlacustrine society and culture, the Central Sudanic
speakers came eventually to speak Bantu languages; there are no remnant groups
in the area.

     Again on the basis of fragmentary evidence it has been suggested that
groups speaking Paranilotic languages (referred to as Southern Paranilotes)
reached that part of Tanzania just east of Lake Victoria sometime in the first
half of the second millennium A.D., having come ultimately from an area in
what is now southeastern Sudan and westernmost Ethiopia. One set of peoples,
now known collectively as the Kalenjin, came no farther south than the Kenyan
Rift and the highlands immediately to the west of it, but another
(linguistically and socially different) group of Southern Paranilotes, the
Tatog (sometimes known as Dadog) reached central Tanzania south of lakes
Manyara and Eyasi. The historian Roland Oliver (in the Cambridge History of
Africa) has offered the hypothesis that these Tatog, remnants of which some
are still to be found scattered in the area (Bantuized as Tatoga), brought
cattle and cereal farming to central Tanzania.

     On less substantial evidence it has been suggested that people referred
to as Eastern Paranilotes arrived, via the eastern side of the Rift Valley, in
the environs of Mount Kilimanjaro and the nearby plains and hills where,
presumably, they interacted with early Iron Age Bantu already present,
although it is not likely that the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro were heavily
occupied by the Bantu-speaking Chaga until somewhat later. A remnant of these
early Eastern Paranilotes are the Ongamo living on the northeastern slopes of
Kilimanjaro. The last and most important incursion of Eastern Paranilotes
occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the arrival of the
Masai, a pastoral people (see The Eastern Rift and the Northeastern
Highlands, this ch.).

     Elsewhere in mainland Tanzania during the first half of the second
millennium Bantu-speaking peoples were gradually and, on the whole, sparsely
settling the interior. Some areas in central Tanzania probably were not
settled then and remained unsettled into the twentieth century, either because
of inadequate and uncertain rainfall (which precluded cultivation) or tsetse
fly (which precluded herding). Oliver points out that this central region,
although as large as the interlacustrine area (comprising parts of several
modern states) has had in modern times only a fifth of the interlacustrine
population, and that ratio probably prevailed in the earlier period. For the
purposes of this discussion the region's northern and western borders are the
interlacustrine area and Lake Tanganyika, and its southern limits the
mountainous area stretching from a point just north of Lake Nyasa west to Lake
Tanganyika and northeast to the Iringa Highlands. In the east they are set by
the western boundary of the eastern Rift Valley; that western boundary then
(and now) marked off the Bantu peoples in the central region from the
Paranilotic and Southern Cushitic peoples to the east.

     The central Tanzanian region apparently drew small groups from the more
densely settled Bantu-speaking areas to the west and the east (in the latter
case Bantu speakers would have had to move through the eastern Rift peopled by
Southern Cushitic and Paranilotic groups). Only in the area immediately south
of Lake Victoria and a few other places was relatively dense settlement
possible. In this early period political organization was small scale, each
entity consisting of a few, usually dispersed, communities. Larger scale
systems, just beginning in the interlacustrine area and among the Pare in the
northeast, did not emerge until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

     It is difficult to identify in these early settlers the specific
ancestors of modern ethnic groups: there is no archaeology and oral history
going back to this period; moreover there are indications that a good deal of
movement and mixture went on in this and later times, and only some of the
ancestors of modern peoples could have been present in the area at that time.
The ethnic entities that developed out of usually heterogeneous peoples in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (for example, the Sukuma, Gogo, Turu,
Iramba, Hehe, and Fipa) had not yet emerged.

     Chieftainship and slightly larger scale polities may have begun to
develop as early as the fourteenth century A.D. in the ecologically and
economically mixed highlands south and southeast of the central region. There
the partly pastoral Bantu speakers of the drier northeastern sections of
these highlands came eventually to mix with the more intensive cultivators of
the south and southwest leading to a process of state formation that took
several centuries to effect. In any case the states were small. Again
movement and mixture preclude the establishment of a clear connection between
a fourteenth or fifteenth century group and modern ethnic groups in the same
area. In some cases it is quite clear that a degree of ethnic
self-consciousness embracing a number of independent communities did not
emerge until the late nineteenth century or later.

     East of the Rift Valley and north of the lower reaches of the Pangani
River lies a series of highland areas (Mount Kilimanjaro and the Pare and
Usambara mountains) with minor exceptions inhabited in historical times and
earlier by Bantu-speaking peoples. In the Pare Mountains early Iron Age sites,
presumably associated with Bantu speakers, have been excavated. Although early
Southern Cushitic and Eastern Paranilotic peoples may well have preceded the
Bantu, by the end of the first half of the second millennium the bulk of the
population consisted of Bantu peoples who continued to move into the area for
centuries. Oral history and traditions of origin suggest diverse geographic
origins for these people. Kilimanjaro in particular seems to have been a
refuge for a variety of largely Bantu-speaking groups, although some Chaga
descent groups (see Glossary) claim origin among the Paranilotic Masai.

     In the coastal hinterland north of the Pangani, also the locus of early
Iron Age sites, other Bantu-speaking groups (in part the ancestors of the set
of ethnic groups sometimes collectively called the Nyika) were certainly
present by the end of the first half of the second millennium and may indeed
be linked to those early sites. Among the people in the area, however, was at
least one pastoral group, the Segeju, perhaps Paranilotic in origin but
Bantuized in historical times.

     Most of these northeastern Bantu groups, whether in the highlands or the
coastal hinterland, were in one degree or another influenced by the pre-Masai
Paranilotics, the Masai, or the Southern Cushitic speakers. The most marked
indication of that influence is the presence among them of a system of
age-sets (see Glossary).

     The northeastern Bantu consisted of relatively small communities until
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with one exception, that of
the northern Pare who seem to have been organized into a hierarchical
political system in the sixteenth century (that polity was called Ugweno). The
pattern began when a clan of blacksmiths became to a limited extent the focus
not only of a market for iron but for the settling of disputes and the
holding of initiation rites. Another clan, the Suyia, then established
political overlordship by what oral history depicts as a coup d'etat; the new
rulers organized a hierarchy of councils, sent members of the ruling clan to
rule over various districts, and made clan (see Glossary) initiation rites
into national ones.

     South of the Pangani River the coastal hinterland, most of it low and
hot, stretches into the interior for roughly 150 to 300 kilometers (100 to 200
miles). Except for the area south of the coastal town of Lindi to the Ruvuma
River and stretching west to the town of Masasi, this southeastern quadrant of
Tanzania is relatively sparsely peopled, a situation that may be attributed
largely to its climate but may have been caused in part by the depredations of
slave raiders in the nineteenth century (see Raiders and Traders: The
Nineteenth Century, this ch.). Most of the groups in this area are and have
been organized in small communities and have lacked a ruling group concerned
to support its status by the keeping of detailed genealogies and the
development of oral history. Moreover there has been very little
archaeological research in the area, and no sites dated to the sixteenth
century or earlier have been found. The Arab and mixed Afro-Arab settlers on
the coast and offshore islands make no reference to these groups although
they must have traded with them.