Mtwara

The older town is Mikindani, on its sheltered bay just west of the modern town. It was a Swahili trading port whose nineteenth-century business was ivory, gum copal and enslaved people for the plantations of the Indian Ocean. In April 1866, after failing to enter the Ruvuma estuary, David Livingstone landed at Mikindani Bay and set off inland on the expedition from which he never returned.

Under German rule, around 1895, the colonial administration built a fortified administrative boma above the town. It fell into ruin, and since 1997 it has been restored and run by a development charity as a vocational training centre.

Mtwara itself is a mid-twentieth-century invention. In 1946 the British government launched the Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a vast plan to mechanise peanut farming for Britain's post-war food supply. To serve its southern farms it built a deep-water port at Mtwara from nothing, and a railway inland. The scheme failed and was abandoned in 1951; the railway, which never had anything to carry, was dismantled. The port stayed, and in 1952 the administration of the south moved here from Lindi.

Inland rises the Makonde plateau, home of the Makonde, a matrilineal people who live on both sides of the border with Mozambique. They are famous for wood carving, much of it in African blackwood, or mpingo. Two styles are best known: ujamaa, towers of interlocked figures representing a family or community, and shetani, distorted spirit figures drawn from Makonde belief. At Newala, on the plateau's edge, the viewpoint called Shimo la Mungu — God's Hollow — looks out over the Ruvuma valley into Mozambique.

South of the town, the coast from Mnazi Bay to the Ruvuma estuary is protected as the Mnazi Bay–Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park, established in 2000. It covers about 650 km² of mangroves, coral reef, seagrass and beach, where green and hawksbill turtles nest and humpback whales pass. Around 30,000 people live inside it, fishing as they always have.

The Ruvuma itself was bridged only in 2010, when the Unity Bridge opened at Mtambaswala — 720 metres long, and the first road link across the river between the two countries. Mtwara is, in every sense, the end of the Tanzanian coast.