Tanzania
is located in Eastern Africa between longitude 290 and
410 East. - Latitude 10 and 120
South.
Tanzania
has frontiers to the following countries: North : Kenya
and Uganda. West: Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic
of Congo.
South:
Zambia, Malawi and
Mozambique.
East:
Indian Ocean
Most of
the known history of Tanganyika before 1964 concerns the
coastal area, although the interior has a number of
important prehistoric sites, including the Olduvai Gorge.
Trading contacts between Arabia and the East African
coast existed by the 1st century AD, and there are
indications of connections with India. The coastal
trading centres were mainly Arab settlements, and
relations between the Arabs and their African neighbours
appear to have been friendly. From the Nyamwezi country
the Arabs pressed on to Lake Tanganyika in the early
1840s. Tabora (or Kazé, as it was then called) and
Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, became important trading
centres, and a number of Arabs made their homes
there
The first
Europeans to show an interest in Tanganyika in the 19th
century were missionaries of the Church Missionary
Society, Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, who in
the late 1840s reached Kilimanjaro. It was a fellow
missionary, Jakob Erhardt, whose famous "slug" map
(showing, on Arab information, a vast, shapeless, inland
lake) helped stimulate the interest of the British
explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. They
traveled from Bagamoyo to Lake Tanganyika in 1857-58, and
Speke also saw Lake Victoria. This expedition was
followed by Speke's second journey, in 1860, in the
company of J.A. Grant, to justify the former's claim that
the Nile rose in Lake Victoria. These primarily
geographic explorations were followed by the activities
of David Livingstone, who in 1866 set out on his last
journey for Lake Nyasa. Livingstone's object was to
expose the horrors of the slave trade and, by opening up
legitimate trade with the interior, to destroy the slave
trade at its roots. Livingstone's journey led to the
later expeditions of H.M. Stanley and V.L. Cameron.
Spurred on by Livingstone's work and example, a number of
missionary societies began to take an interest in East
Africa after 1860.
