Tabora

Before there was a railway there was a road — or rather a trail, walked by caravans of porters carrying ivory, and enslaved people, from the great lakes to the coast. Coastal traders were settling in Unyanyembe, the Nyamwezi country here, by the 1830s, and in the 1850s Swahili and Omani merchants founded Kazeh, near the present town. It became the most important trading station of the interior: the point where the route from Bagamoyo divided for Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and for the kingdoms around Lake Victoria.

It was not an easy place to hold. Mirambo, the Nyamwezi ruler who built the largest state in nineteenth-century East Africa from his base at Urambo to the west, fought the Tabora traders for control of the caravan trade, and in August 1871 his forces burned a quarter of the town. He never took it.

The same year brought Henry Morton Stanley, who waited here before marching west to find Livingstone at Ujiji. In February 1872 the two men came back together to the trader's house, or tembe, at Kwihara outside the town. Stanley left for the coast in March; Livingstone stayed on for five months waiting for the porters and supplies Stanley had promised to send, and left in August on the journey from which he did not return. The house is now a museum.

The Germans took the region in the 1890s, and the Central Line railway arrived in 1912. In the First World War, with the coast under British naval blockade, a temporary German mint here struck the 1916 fifteen-rupee gold coin — the only emergency coinage ever made in gold — from metal mined at Sekenke, in present-day Singida Region. Belgian colonial forces took the town on 19 September 1916 after ten days of fighting.

Tabora is the homeland of the Nyamwezi, one of Tanzania's larger peoples. In the nineteenth century Nyamwezi men were the professional porters and traders of the caravan routes, walking to the coast and back as a matter of career, and the routes they worked carried Swahili deep into the interior.

The town's later reputation was built on education. Tabora Boys' Secondary School, founded in 1922 as a government school, counts Julius Nyerere among its pupils; he entered in 1937. After university he returned to teach at St Mary's School in Tabora from 1946 to 1949.

Tabora was also where the independence movement made one of its hardest decisions. In 1958 Nyerere persuaded a divided conference of TANU here to take part in elections that the British had designed to reserve seats by race — a compromise that led, within three years, to independence. Between the Kwihara tembe, the German-era buildings and the schools, few towns in the interior hold so much of the country's story.