Musoma

Musoma is a colonial-era lake port, founded as an administrative station on a peninsula reaching into Lake Victoria. For most of its history it was a modest town serving the fishing and farming communities of the Mara region. Its national importance comes from a village forty kilometres inland.

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born at Butiama on 13 April 1922, the son of a chief of the small Zanaki people. He trained as a teacher — which is why Tanzanians still call him Mwalimu, the teacher — studied at Makerere and at Edinburgh, founded the Tanganyika African National Union, and led Tanganyika to independence in 1961 without a war. He became the first president of the united Tanzania in 1964.

His legacy is argued over, and the argument is part of it. The ujamaa policies of collective villages and state control did not deliver the prosperity they promised, and he said so himself. But he gave a country of more than a hundred ethnic groups a shared national language in Kiswahili and an identity strong enough that Tanzania has avoided the ethnic conflict that tore apart many of its neighbours. He stepped down voluntarily in 1985 — rare in his generation of leaders.

Nyerere died in London on 14 October 1999 and was buried at Butiama. The day is a national holiday.

Mara Region is home to many peoples, including the Kurya, Luo, Zanaki and Jita, and its culture reflects both the lake and the plains. Nyerere's own Zanaki are a small group, a fact he often pointed to as evidence that leadership in Tanzania was not the property of any large ethnic bloc.

The pull of the region for visitors is Butiama. The Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Museum holds his personal possessions, gifts from world leaders and a record of the independence struggle, and nearby are the family homes and his mausoleum. It is modest, dignified and quiet, and it tells the story of modern Tanzania more directly than anywhere else.

From Musoma, the northern Serengeti is within reach by road, entering through the less-used western and northern gates — a way to reach the park without joining the traffic from Arusha.