Tanzania

From the footprints of Laetoli and the gold of Kilwa to Nyerere's union and a modern East African republic.

Tanzania holds some of the oldest evidence of humankind on earth: at Laetoli, near Olduvai Gorge in the north, lie 3.6-million-year-old hominin footprints, while the gorge itself yielded the fossils and stone tools that made the Leakey family famous and the region a cradle of humanity. Over later millennia Bantu-speaking farmers settled the interior, and along the Indian Ocean shore a literate, Muslim Swahili civilisation arose, its greatest city — Kilwa Kisiwani — growing rich on the medieval gold trade. The Portuguese disrupted the coast after Vasco da Gama's voyage of 1498, and from the 1830s the Omani Arab sultanate of Zanzibar dominated it, building a clove-plantation economy on a brutal slave and ivory trade. Germany seized the mainland as German East Africa from the 1880s, crushing the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905–07 with a scorched-earth campaign that brought catastrophic famine; after the First World War Britain held mainland Tanganyika as a League of Nations mandate. Tanganyika won independence under Julius Nyerere and TANU on 9 December 1961, and after the Zanzibar Revolution of January 1964 the two states united on 26 April 1964 to form Tanzania, which Nyerere then steered toward Ujamaa socialism through the 1967 Arusha Declaration.