Nyamwezi

The Nyamwezi, the people of the moon or of the west in Swahili, are a Bantu people of the western plateau of central Tanzania, their homeland of Unyamwezi around Tabora. Kindred groups also answer to the name Wanyamwezi, though they never formed a single state.

They reached the plateau in the 1500s and lived as fishermen and shifting farmers in more than a hundred small chiefdoms; the Galahansa tradition confirms their presence there by the late 1600s. By 1800 their caravans carried Katanga copper, wax, salt, ivory and slaves from the interior to the coast.

Arab and Indian merchants reached Unyamwezi by 1825, exchanging cloth and guns for ivory. Around the same time the first kingdoms, above all Unyanyembe with its trading town of Tabora, rose above the old chiefdoms as caravan wealth reshaped the plateau.