Dar es Salaam

The harbour was a fishing village called Mzizima until the 1860s, when Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar began building a town and a palace on the creek and named it Dar es Salaam, usually translated as "haven of peace". The project stalled after his death in 1870, and the place shrank back towards a village.

Germany revived it. The German East Africa Company established itself here in the 1880s, and in 1891 the colonial administration moved its capital from Bagamoyo to Dar es Salaam, whose sheltered deep-water harbour suited steamships where Bagamoyo's open roadstead did not. The Germans laid out a waterfront of offices, churches and a hospital, and began the Central Line railway inland, which reached Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika in 1914. British forces took the town in 1916, and under the Tanganyika mandate it remained the capital and the main port, growing with migrants from the interior into segregated quarters — the European seafront, the Indian commercial streets and the African neighbourhood of Kariakoo, named after the wartime Carrier Corps.

Dar es Salaam was the centre of the independence campaign led by Julius Nyerere and TANU, and it became the capital of independent Tanganyika in 1961 and of Tanzania in 1964. In 1974 the government announced that the capital would move to Dodoma, a transfer only completed decades later; ministries and parliament have gone, but business, banking and the port have not. Since the 1980s the city has grown very fast, spreading far inland and along the coast, with a bridge to Kigamboni, rapid-transit bus lanes and a new railway among the results.

The city is the cultural engine of Tanzania. Bongo Flava, the hip-hop and R&B style whose name comes from "bongo", a nickname for Dar es Salaam itself, grew up in its neighbourhoods in the 1990s and is now heard across East Africa, and the faster, rougher singeli sound emerged later from the city's poorer districts. Taarab orchestras, with their Arab and Indian influences, remain part of weddings and celebrations on the coast.

Tingatinga painting began here in the 1960s, when Edward Saidi Tingatinga sold bright enamel animal pictures on hardboard; his followers still work at the cooperative named after him, and Makonde carvers from the south sell blackwood sculpture at the craft markets. Football divides the city between Simba and Young Africans, whose derby fills the national stadium and empties the streets.

Dar es Salaam is a mixed city: Muslim and Christian in roughly equal measure, with old Indian, Arab and Comorian communities alongside people from every region of the mainland. Swahili is the common language, and the coastal courtesies hold — long greetings, respect for elders, modest dress in the older neighbourhoods, and the phrase pole pole, "slowly slowly", offered as both apology and advice. The call to prayer, church bells and loudspeakers from shopfronts all run together in the same streets.

The Dar es Salaam region counted about 5.4 million people at the 2022 census, and the built-up area keeps spreading; it is among the fastest-growing cities in Africa. The port is the economic foundation, handling cargo for Tanzania and for landlocked Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Congo, and around it sit banks, insurers, media, wholesale trade and light industry.

Most people live far from the centre, in districts such as Temeke, Kinondoni, Ubungo and Kigamboni, and commute inwards. The day begins before dawn with queues for dala-dalas and rapid-transit buses, and ends in evening traffic that can take hours; motorcycle and three-wheeler taxis squeeze through the jams. Much of the working population trades or works informally, and Kariakoo's wholesale streets set prices far beyond the city.

Current issues are those of very fast growth: unplanned settlements on low ground that flood in the long rains, pressure on water and electricity, long commutes, and the cost of housing near the centre. The aftermath of the unrest that followed the October 2025 election, when protests in the city were met with curfews, an internet shutdown and deadly force whose toll remains disputed, is still felt in public life.

Coastal cooking dominates: rice and fish in coconut milk, pilau and biryani for celebrations, octopus and prawns in coconut curry, and cassava and plantains alongside the ugali eaten inland. Street food is the everyday pleasure — chipsi mayai, chips fried into an omelette; mishkaki, marinated beef skewers over charcoal; nyama choma, grilled goat or beef shared from a board with kachumbari, the chopped tomato-and-onion relish; and grilled maize sold from braziers at the roadside.

Mornings start with chai, spiced and sweet, and mandazi, lightly sweet fried dough, or vitumbua, small coconut rice cakes. Kivukoni's fish market sells the night's catch at auction and grills part of it on the spot. Kariakoo's streets are full of cheap cooked food, and Upanga's Indian restaurants, a legacy of a community settled here for generations, are known across the country for vegetarian food, biryani and sweets.

Drinks run from fresh coconut water drunk from the nut and sugarcane juice pressed at the roadside to tamarind and baobab-seed drinks, strong sweet tea and cold local lager in the evening. On the peninsula, cafés and seafood restaurants serve a more international version of the same coastal ingredients.