Mara

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born at Butiama, a Zanaki village inland from Musoma, in 1922 — the son of a chief, educated at Tabora and Makerere and then at Edinburgh, and the man who led Tanganyika to independence in 1961 and united it with Zanzibar in 1964. He resigned the presidency in 1985, died in 1999, and is buried at Butiama, where a national museum tells the story.

The region's older history is one of small, independent societies — Zanaki, Kuria, Ikoma, Jita, Luo and others — farming, herding and fishing on the lake shore and the plains behind it, with no large centralised state of the kind found around Lake Victoria's western shore.

The border with Kenya runs across the top of the region, and the relationship across it is old: the Luo and the Kuria live on both sides, the markets are shared, and a great deal of everyday movement ignores the line entirely.

The Mara River rises in Kenya, runs through the northern Serengeti and empties into Lake Victoria in this region. Between about July and October, as the migration moves north and back, hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra cross it — plunging down cut banks into crocodile water in the scenes that most people picture when they think of the Serengeti.

Behind the park, the region is agricultural and, in places, strongly traditional. The Kuria of Tarime keep cattle and a strong age-set culture; the Zanaki around Butiama, the Jita and Luo along the lake, and the Ikoma on the park's edge each have their own languages and customs.

Musoma itself is a relaxed lake town on a peninsula, with rocks, sunsets and a fish market, and it makes a much cheaper base for the northern Serengeti than Arusha does.