Arusha

Arusha is young by the standards of the coast. There was no Swahili port here, no sultan, no stone town — the country belonged to the Arusha and Meru farmers on Mount Meru's fertile southern slopes and to Maasai herders on the plains below, and the two traded rather than merged. The German colonial army arrived in 1896, and by 1900 had built a fort — a boma — and garrisoned it. That is the founding date of the town in any modern sense: a military post placed to control a junction.

The British took over in 1916, during the First World War, and the town's fortunes turned on infrastructure. When the railway was extended from Moshi to Arusha in 1928–29, the settlement stopped being an administrative outpost and became a commercial one, gathering the coffee and the produce of the mountain and sending it east to the coast. Even so it stayed small: the 1952 census counted fewer than eight thousand people in total.

Its significance is more political than commercial. In February 1967, at a meeting here, Julius Nyerere set out the Arusha Declaration — the statement of ujamaa, African socialism and self-reliance that defined Tanzania's first decades: nationalisation, villagisation, and an explicit rejection of the idea that development could be bought from abroad. Whatever one concludes about its economic results, it gave the country a political character distinct from its neighbours, and it was declared in this city.

That reputation as neutral ground stuck. The Arusha Accords for Rwanda were signed here on 4 August 1993. The Arusha peace agreement for Burundi followed on 28 August 2000. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sat here from 1994 to 2015. Today the city hosts the headquarters of the East African Community and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. Arusha received formal city status in 2012.

There is a geographical joke that the town likes: it sits roughly midway between Cairo and Cape Town. It is not quite true, but it captures something about how the place sees itself.

The city takes its name from the Arusha people, agriculturalists of the mountain's southern slopes who speak a Maa dialect and are historically close to the Maasai — a relationship of shared language and long exchange rather than of identity. Above and around them are the Meru, Bantu-speaking farmers of the higher slopes, with their own history and their own chiefdoms. On the plains, the Maasai, whose presence is what most visitors notice first and understand least.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Maasai culture is the most photographed thing in northern Tanzania and the most frequently misrepresented. What is sold as a 'cultural visit' is often theatre arranged for tour vehicles, priced per camera. Communities that run their own cultural tourism programmes on their own terms exist and are worth seeking out; the difference is who set the price and who keeps it.

The everyday culture of Arusha itself is urban, mixed and commercial. Kiswahili is the working language, English is common in the tourism and institutional trades, and the market is the honest centre of the city — produce down from the mountain, cloth, hardware, and the constant negotiation that is the actual sound of the place.

Because it is a crossroads, Arusha eats well and eats broadly: Indian food from a long-established South Asian community, Ethiopian restaurants, and the Tanzanian staples of nyama choma, ugali and chipsi mayai. It is not a beautiful city. It is an unusually alive one.