Early Tribes and Pre-States
It is difficult to identify in these early settlers the specific ancestors of modern ethnic groups: there is no archaeology and oral history going back to this period; moreover there are indications that a good deal of movement and mixture went on in this and later times, and only some of the ancestors of modern peoples could have been present in the area at that time. The ethnic entities that developed out of usually heterogeneous peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (for example, the Sukuma, Cogo, Turu, Iramba, Hehe, and Fipa) had not yet emerged.
Chieftainship and slightly larger scale polities may have begun to develop as early as the fourteenth century AD in the ecologically and economically mixed highlands south and southeast of the central region. There the partly pastoral Bantu speakers of the drier northeastern sections of these highlands came eventually to mix with the more intensive cultivators of the south and southwest leading to a process of state formation that took several centuries to effect.
In any case the states were small. Again movement and mixture preclude the establishment of a clear connection between a fourteenth or fifteenth century group and modern ethnic groups in the same area. In some cases it is quite clear that a degree of ethnic self-consciousness embracing a number of independent communities did not emerge until the late nineteenth century or later.
East of the Rift Valley and north of the lower reaches of the Pangani River lies a series of highland areas (Mount Kilimanjaro and the Pare and Usambara mountains) with minor exceptions inhabited in historical times and earlier by Bantu-speaking peoples. In the Pare Mountains early Iron Age sites, presumably associated with Bantu speakers, have been excavated.
Although early Southern Cushitic and Eastern Paranilotic peoples may well have preceded the Bantu, by the end of the first half of the second millennium the bulk of the population consisted of Bantu peoples who continued to move into the area for centuries. Oral history and traditions of origin suggest diverse geographic origins for these people. Kilimanjaro in particular seems to have been a refuge for a variety of largely Bantu-speaking groups, although some Chaga descent groups (see Glossary) claim origin among the Paranilotic Masai.
In the coastal hinterland north of the Pangani, also the locus of early Iron Age sites, other Bantu-speaking groups (in part the ancestors of the set of ethnic groups sometimes collectively called the Nyika) were certainly present by the end of the first half of the second millennium and may indeed be linked to those early sites. Among the people in the area, however, was at least one pastoral group, the Segeju, perhaps Paranilotic in origin but Bantuized in historical times.
Most of these northeastern Bantu groups, whether in the highlands or the coastal hinterland, were in one degree or another influenced by the pre-Masai Paranilotics, the Masai, or the Southern Cushitic speakers. The most marked indication of that influence is the presence among them of a system of age-sets.
The northeastern Bantu consisted of relatively small communities until the late eighteenth and early ninetenth centuries with one exception, that of the northern Pare who seem to have been organized into a hierarchical political system in the sixteenth century (that polity was called Ugweno). The pattern began when a clan of blacksmiths became to a limited extent the focus not only of a market for iron but for the settling of disputes and the holding of initiation rites.
Another clan, the Suyia, then established political overlordship by what oral history depicts as a coup d'etat: the new rulers organized a hierarchy of councils, sent members of the ruling clan to rule over various districts, and made clan initiation rites into national ones.
South of the Pangani River the coastal hinterland, most of it low and hot, stretches into the interior for roughly 150 to 300 kilometers (100 to 200 miles). Except for the area south of the coastal town of Lindi to the Ruvuma River and stretching west to the town of Masasi, this southeastern quadrant of Tanzania is relatively sparsely peopled, a situation that may be attributed largely to its climate but may have been caused in part by the depredations of slave raiders in the nineteenth century.
Most of the groups in this area are and have been organized in small communities and have lacked a ruling group concerned to support its status by the keeping of detailed genealogies and the development of oral history. Moreover there has been very little archaeological research in the area, and no sites dated to the sixteenth century or earlier have been found. The Arab and mixed Afro-Arab settlers on the coast and offshore islands make no reference to these groups although they must have traded with them.
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