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Tanganyika
The East African republic that joined Zanzibar in 1964 to create Tanzania
Tanganyika was an independent country for less than two and a half years, but its choices shaped one of Africa's most stable states. Under Julius Nyerere, a former schoolteacher who led it peacefully to independence from Britain in 1961, it built a national identity around a shared language, Swahili, across more than 120 ethnic groups. In April 1964 it joined the islands of Zanzibar in a union that took the name Tanzania that October. Tanganyika vanished from the map, yet it survives in the name Tanzania itself, a blend of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, in Lake Tanganyika, the long rift lake that gave it its name, and in one of the few lasting mergers of independent African states.
Tanganyika covered about 945,000 square kilometers of the East African mainland, an area larger than Nigeria. Its borders were drawn by lakes: Lake Victoria to the north, the deep rift of Lake Tanganyika to the west, and Lake Nyasa, also called Lake Malawi, to the southwest. Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak at 5,895 meters, rose near the Kenyan border, and the plains of the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater lay to its west. Much of the interior was a dry plateau of grassland and miombo woodland, with the Indian Ocean coast and the port of Dar es Salaam to the east. All of it is now mainland Tanzania, which together with the Zanzibar archipelago forms the United Republic of Tanzania, whose official capital has since moved to Dodoma.
Germany claimed the territory in the 1880s as part of German East Africa and lost it in World War I. Britain then ruled it as a League of Nations mandate and, after 1946, a United Nations trust territory. Nyerere's Tanganyika African National Union, founded in 1954, won elections and negotiated independence on December 9, 1961, and the country became a republic a year later. In January 1964 a revolution overthrew the sultan of neighboring Zanzibar, and that April the two governments agreed to Articles of Union, creating the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar on April 26, 1964. It was renamed the United Republic of Tanzania in October. Zanzibar keeps its own president and parliament, while the union government also handles mainland affairs, a structure still debated in Tanzanian politics.