Songea

The Ngoni came from far to the south. Their ancestors were among the peoples scattered by the wars that accompanied the rise of the Zulu kingdom in the early nineteenth century, and over decades of migration some of them crossed the Zambezi and moved north. By the middle of the century Ngoni groups had settled in this highland, where they built powerful military states and raided widely.

In 1905 the Maji Maji war broke out against German rule, beginning in the Matumbi hills of the south-east and spreading across the colony. Its followers believed that a sacred water — maji — would turn German bullets to water. The Ngoni joined the rising with thousands of fighters. The war ended in 1907, and the German scorched-earth campaign that crushed it caused a famine; estimates of the dead run from 75,000 to 300,000.

On 27 February 1906 the Germans hanged the captured leaders of the resistance here — around 67 of them, according to the memorial — among them the Ngoni leader Songea Lwafu Mbano, whose name the town carries. Songea is buried behind the Maji Maji memorial museum, beside a mass grave of those executed with him.

The missions had arrived shortly before. Benedictine monks from St Ottilien founded Peramiho in 1898; its founder, Bishop Cassian Spiss, was killed in 1905 as the war spread. Much later, during Mozambique's war of independence, the border area around Songea was a restricted zone and suffered occasional Portuguese air attacks.

Songea is where Tanzania remembers the Maji Maji war. The Maji Maji War Memorial Museum, run by the National Museum of Tanzania, holds photographs of the men hanged in 1906 and the objects of the resistance, and 27 February, the day of the executions, is remembered in the town every year.

In November 2023 the President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, came to the museum, met descendants of Songea Mbano, and asked for forgiveness. "I am ashamed about what German colonial soldiers did to your forefather and his fellow warriors," he said, and he told his hosts that Germany was ready to work with Tanzania on returning cultural property and human remains taken in the colonial period.

The region is home to the Ngoni, the Matengo, the Yao, the Nyasa and several other peoples, and is strongly Catholic — Songea is the seat of an archdiocese, and Peramiho remains a working abbey with a hospital and schools. Dances such as mganda are still drummed and danced in the town.