Ruvuma

The Ngoni reached this highland in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the end of a migration north from what is now South Africa, and built military states over the peoples already here. When the Maji Maji war broke out against German rule in 1905, Ngoni fighters joined it in thousands.

The reprisals were severe. On 27 February 1906 the Germans hanged the captured leaders at Songea — around 67 men, according to the memorial — among them Songea Lwafu Mbano, whose name the regional capital carries. The war ended in 1907 after a scorched-earth campaign and the famine it caused; estimates of the dead across the colony run from 75,000 to 300,000. The Maji Maji War Memorial Museum in Songea is the national museum of that war, and in November 2023 the German president came there to ask the descendants for forgiveness.

The missions arrived just before the war and stayed: Benedictines from St Ottilien founded Peramiho in 1898, and the region remains strongly Catholic, with the abbey's hospital and schools among its most important institutions.

The region's peoples include the Ngoni, the Matengo of the western highlands, the Yao, the Nyasa along the lake, and the Ndendeule and Ngindo to the north. Songea's public culture — drummed dances such as mganda, a strong church calendar, and the annual commemoration of the 1906 hangings — comes out of that mixture.

West of Mbinga the land falls to Lake Nyasa. Mbamba Bay, in Nyasa District, is the region's port: a small town with a sand beach, clear water and a handful of guesthouses, connected by lake ferry up the Tanzanian shore. It is one of the least-visited beautiful places in the country.

North of Songea, the wild country of Nyerere National Park — the largest national park in Tanzania — reaches down into Namtumbo District, and the Selous ecosystem's southern boundary runs through the region.