Later Iron Age
Significant changes in the distribution of the Bantu-speaking peoples began to occur when peoples of non-Bantu origin moved down from the north bringing cattle and cereals, permitting a more intensive exploitation of areas hitherto more or less unoccupied. In a number of cases, particularly in the interlacustrine area, new political forms gradually emerged in the course of contact between disparate peoples.
The northerners who moved into Tanzania from, roughly, the early centuries of the second millennium to the eighteenth century AD were, in linguistic and cultural terms, of three kinds: Central Sudanic, Nilotic, and Paranilotic. In most cases whatever their cultural contributions to the Bantu already present, they were linguistically, culturally and, often, biologically absorbed by them.
It has been hypothesized that the first of these peoples to arrive were speakers of Central Sudanic languages, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries located chiefly in the northeastern Zaire and southwestern Sudan but thought to have been a significant population in northern Uganda many centuries ago. Themselves Iron Age people but, unlike Bantu then living in East Africa, grain cultivators and cattle herders, they seem to have affected the ecological adaptations of the interlacustrine Bantu and to have contributed some terms to the local languages (e.g., the currently used word for cow).
There is no firm evidence that Bantu contact with this first set of northerners (who probably infiltrated the interlacustrine area slowly and in small groups) led to significant changes in social and political organization, but it is likely that there were some. In any case whatever their contributions to interlacustrine society and culture, the Central Sudanic speakers came eventually to speak Bantu languages; there are no remnant groups in the area.
Again on the basis of fragmentary evidence it has been suggested that groups speaking Paranilotic languages (referred to as Southern Paranilotes) reached that part of Tanzania just east of Lake Victoria sometime in the first half of the second millennium A.D., having come ultimately from an area in what is now southeastern Sudan and westernmost Ethiopia.
One set of peoples, now known collectively as the Kalenjin, came no farther south than the Kenyan Rift and the highlands immediately to the west of it, but another (linguistically and socially different) group of Southern Paranilotes, the Tatog (sometimes known as Dadog) reached central Tanzania south of lakes Manyara and Eyasi. The historian Roland Oliver (in the Cambridge History of Africa) has offered the hypothesis that these Tatog, remnants of which some are still to be found scattered in the area (Bantuized as Tatoga), brought cattle and cereal farming to central Tanzania.
On less substantial evidence it has been suggested that people referred to as Eastern Paranilotes arrived, via the eastern side of the Rift Valley, in the environs of Mount Kilimanjaro and the nearby plains and hills where, presumably, they interacted with early Iron Age Bantu already present, although it is not likely that the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro were heavily occupied by the Bantu-speaking Chaga until somewhat later. A remnant of these early Eastern Paranilotes are the Ongamo living on the northeastern slopes of Kilimanjaro.
The last and most important incursion of Eastern Paranilotes occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the arrival of the Masai, a pastoral people. Elsewhere in mainland Tanzania during the first half of the second millennium Bantu-speaking peoples were gradually and, on the whole, sparsely settling the interior. Some areas in central Tanzania probably were not settled then and remained unsettled into the twentieth century, either because of inadequate and uncertain rainfall (which precluded cultivation) or tsetse fly (which precluded herding).
Oliver points out that this central region, although as large as the interlacustrine area (comprising parts of several modern states) has had in modern times only a fifth of the interlacustrine population, and that ratio probably prevailed in the earlier period. For the purposes of this discussion the region's northern and western borders are the interlacustrine area and Lake Tanganyika, and its southern limits the mountainous area stretching from a point just north of Lake Nyasa west to Lake Tanganyika and northeast to the Iringa Highlands. In the east they are set by the western boundary of the eastern Rift Valley; that western boundary then (and now) marked off the Bantu peoples in the central region from the Paranilotic and Southern Cushitic peoples to the east.
The central Tanzanian region apparently drew small groups from the more densely settled Bantu-speaking areas to the west and the east (in the latter case Bantu speakers would have had to move through the eastern Rift peopled by Southern Cushitic and Paranilotic groups). Only in the area immediately south of Lake Victoria and a few other places was relatively dense settlement possible. In this early period political organization was small scale, each entity consisting of a few, usually dispersed, communities. Larger scale systems, just beginning in the interlacustrine area and among the Pare in the northeast, did not emerge until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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