Tanganyika Territory

Tanganyika was the mainland territory of modern Tanzania under British administration from 1916 to 1961, and German rule before that. Germany had taken it in the 1880s and governed it as German East Africa with exceptional harshness. The Maji Maji rebellion of 1905-07, in which fighters believed a water medicine would turn bullets to liquid, was suppressed by a deliberate famine campaign that killed perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand people. The First World War was fought across the territory for four years by von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was never defeated and surrendered only after the armistice, at a cost in African porters that dwarfed the military casualties. Britain took the territory as a League of Nations mandate in 1922 and a United Nations trusteeship after 1946, which meant its administration was formally accountable and subject to visiting missions. That status mattered: it gave nationalists an international forum and made settler self-government impossible, unlike Kenya next door. Julius Nyerere built TANU into a national movement in the 1950s and used the UN hearings deliberately. Independence came on 9 December 1961 without violence. Zanzibar became independent separately in 1963, had a revolution in 1964 that killed thousands of its Arab population, and united with Tanganyika three months later. The combined name Tanzania was coined from the two. German rule lasted barely thirty years and left the railways and the Swahili administrative language. Von Lettow-Vorbeck's campaign tied down some three hundred thousand Allied troops with a force never above fifteen thousand. Nyerere translated Shakespeare into Swahili. Tanzania moved its capital to Dodoma in 1974, a decision still not fully carried out.

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