Tanzania

Tanzania was the name given in 1964 to a new nation carved from an area between Mt. Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria, Africa's highest mountain and largest lake. The name represented a union of two separate postcolonial entities: Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Given the large number of ethnic groups, estimated at 130, and with no particular ethnic group having a dominant position in the country's history, political leaders at independence built on the pluralistic tradition to establish a stable nation of civility and peaceful order. Governing parties in the island-state and the mainland soon agreed to form a union by integrating the two political groupings into one single party and adopting the name Tanzania. The basis was laid for a one-party state and the governing ideology of ...