Dar es Salaam: From Sultan's Port to Tanzania's Commercial Capital

Dar es Salaam’s skyline along the Indian Ocean coast, glass towers rising behind a natural harbor busy with cargo ships and dhows, sits on ground that was a small fishing settlement called Mzizima as recently as the 1860s. Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar founded the town in 1862, choosing the sheltered harbor as the site for a new mainland port and giving it the Arabic name that translates to “abode of peace” or “haven of peace.” For its first few decades it remained modest, overshadowed by older Swahili coast trading towns, until Germany’s colonial ambitions on the mainland changed its trajectory.

In 1887 the German East Africa Company established a station at Dar es Salaam, and when Germany converted its commercial foothold into the formal colony of German East Africa, the town became the colonial capital in 1891, a position it held until the First World War. British and imperial forces, including the Royal Navy, targeted the German-held port early in the war, and Dar es Salaam fell to British occupation in 1916. Britain subsequently administered the territory as Tanganyika under a League of Nations mandate and later a United Nations trusteeship, keeping Dar es Salaam as the territorial capital from 1916 through independence in 1961.

Tanganyika’s first president, Julius Nyerere, kept the capital in Dar es Salaam after independence, and it remained the seat of government when Tanganyika united with Zanzibar in 1964 to form Tanzania. The city grew rapidly through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s into the country’s largest urban center and busiest port, the point through which the bulk of Tanzania’s trade, and a significant share of landlocked neighbors’ trade as well, passed to and from the sea.

In 1973 Nyerere’s government announced plans to relocate the national capital inland to Dodoma, a more centrally located city, partly to reduce the coastal capital’s dominance and better connect the government to the country’s interior. The transfer began in 1974 but proceeded far more slowly than the original ten-year timeline envisioned, hampered by cost and logistics. Tanzania’s National Assembly did not actually begin meeting in Dodoma until 1996, and it took until 2023, with the inauguration of new presidential offices there, for the shift to be considered largely complete, a full fifty years after it was first announced. Throughout that half-century transition, Dar es Salaam continued to function as the country’s practical center of government, hosting most ministries, foreign embassies, and the judiciary long after Dodoma was designated the official capital on paper.

Today Dar es Salaam is unambiguously Tanzania’s commercial and financial capital even though it has ceded formal capital status, a metropolis of several million people whose skyline, once dominated by colonial-era warehouses and low government buildings, now includes towers like the PSPF Tower and the Tanzania Ports Authority headquarters, among the tallest buildings in East Africa. The port remains the backbone of the city’s economy and one of the busiest on the continent’s eastern seaboard, a direct continuation of the role the Sultan of Zanzibar had in mind when he founded the town more than a century and a half ago.