Dodoma

Long before the capital, there were the paintings. The Kondoa Rock-Art Sites, north of the city on the eastern slopes of the Masai escarpment, hold more than a hundred and fifty painted shelters showing people, animals and hunting scenes, made over a span of centuries by hunter-gatherer and later pastoralist communities. Some of the shelters are still used by local people for rituals today. UNESCO inscribed them as a World Heritage Site in 2006.

Dodoma town itself grew in the German period as a station on the Central Railway, a dry and modest plateau town serving the surrounding farmland. It would have stayed modest, except for a political decision.

In 1973 the government of Julius Nyerere decided to move the capital from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma. The reasoning was deliberate: Dodoma sits close to the geographical centre of the country, and moving government inland was meant to spread development away from the coast and signal a national rather than colonial orientation. For a long time the move existed mostly on paper. Parliament met here, but ministries stayed in Dar es Salaam.

That changed from 2016, when the government began relocating ministries in earnest, and Dodoma has grown rapidly since — new government districts, roads, a university and an airport being expanded. It is still a young capital, and it feels like one: wide, spread out, and in the middle of being built.

The Gogo are the principal people of the Dodoma plateau — pastoralists and farmers adapted to a hard, dry country, known across Tanzania for a distinctive and complex musical tradition built around voice and the ilimba, a thumb piano. Gogo music has been recorded and studied far beyond the region.

The city itself has a newer, more mixed culture, shaped by civil servants arriving from every part of the country. It has a large Anglican cathedral and a strong church presence, reflecting the missions that worked in central Tanzania, alongside mosques and a growing university population.

For visitors, Dodoma is chiefly a base. The Kondoa rock art is the reason to come, about three hours north by road, and it deserves to be far better known than it is — to stand under a rock shelter in quiet hills looking at paintings made by people who lived here many centuries ago, often with nobody else there, is one of the most affecting heritage experiences in the country.