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Unyamwezi or Unyamwezi states and kingdoms ( Falme za Unyamwezi in Swahili language) is a historical region and former Pre-colonial states in what is now modern central Tanzania, around the modern city of Tabora in Tabora Region to the south of Lake Victoria and east of Lake Tanganyika. It lay on the trade route from the coast to Lake Tanganyika and to the kingdoms to the west of Lake Victoria. The region home to the Nyamwezi people people became an empire under Mirambo in the 1860s. The various peoples of the region were known as long-distance traders, providing porters for caravans and arranging caravans in their own right. At first the main trade was in ivory, but later in the 19th century enslaving became more important part of the economy.
However, most of the area was first inhabited around 300 years ago, in the 18th century. But the majority of the region was first populated in the 18th century, some 300 years ago. Oral traditions state that the Kimba are the ancestors of the first Nyamwezi dynasties, while other dynasties claim to have originated in Kenya, Sagara, Uganda, and Tanganyika.
Several of the ruling Nyamwezi dynasties moved to different parts of Unyamwezi and established their own small kingdoms and chiefdoms. More importantly, there were Matrilineality and patrilineal successions in some of the ruling families. The 19th century saw the first arrival of Indian and Arab traders in the area, and by the mid-1840s, Tabora had grown to be a significant trading hub. Coastal traders settled in Unyamwezi, some with hundreds of well-armed Arabs.
By 1857, Burton and Speke became the first Europeans to pass through the area. By the mid-19th century, a number of the Unyamwezi exports were enslaved people and ivory, and they imported clothes and weapons. Ivory was not widely used by the Nyamwezi, but at some point they became aware that there was an overseas market for the product, and began to carry ivory along the route from Tabora down to the Indian Ocean coast opposite Zanzibar. There are records of Sultan Sayyid Said of Zanzibar negotiating with envoys from Unyamwezi in 1839 for safe passage for caravans to the interior.
The Nyamwezi did not sell their own people as slaves, since they needed manpower for the ivory trade, but after the 1850s the slave trade began to become important. Slaves brought from the Congo Basin or the Great Lakes region would be held at Tabora, then sent down to the coast in small groups for onward shipment.
The first Europeans to reach the region were Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, who had been sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the British government to investigate the great Lake Uniamési said by German missionaries to lie in the region and determine if it was the source of the Nile. Burton and Speke reached Zanzibar on 20 December 1857, visited Johannes Rebmann (who had reported the lake) at his Kisuludini mission station, and paid a visit to Fuga, capital of the Usambare kingdom. They left for the interior on 26 June 1858. After travelling through mountainous country they reached the inner plateau of Uniamesi. At the Arab trading post of Kazeh (now Tabora) they recorded an elevation of .
At Kazeh Burton and Speke found a mixed population of Nyamwezi, Tutsi and Arabs engaged in cattle farming and cultivation of foods such as rice, cassava, pawpaw and citrus. Burton called Unyamwezi the garden of inter-tropical Africa.
Henry Morton Stanley visited the region in 1871, where he found that the Zanzibar Arabs were predominant in the country. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "later the natives rose and, under Mirambo—who had been a common porter and rose to be a conquering chief, earning for himself the title of the Black Bonaparte—a Negro kingdom was formed. Since 1890 the country has been under German control and the power of the native chiefs greatly curtailed."
In the small kingdoms of Unyamwezi, slavery in the 19th century wreaked havoc on neighboring tribes like the Konongo and Kimbu. The tenacious kingdoms survived by collecting toll from Swahili caravans. The settler Arabs, with their slave trade, were able to subjugate many small Naywmwezi kingdoms with the aid of their weapons, most notably the powerful Kingdom of Unyanyembe. In the 1860s, Mirambo gained power and seized the chiefdoms of Busagiri and Ukyankulu. With the backing of numerous other chiefdoms, King Mirambo led a war against the Arabs in 1871, which ended in a truce in 1875.
After his death in 1884, King Mirambo's empire ended up breaking up into small, independent chiefdoms. After the defeat of the Isike of Unyanyembwe, the Germans conquered Unaymwezi by 1893. The Germans made an exception for the Nyamwezi and ruled them indirectly, in contrast to other areas of the country they had conquered. This affected the chiefdoms' power dynamics and caused matrilineal rule to decline.
The British took over after the Germans lost the First World War. The Nyamwezi kept their indirect rule policy but with a more administrative focus on tax collection, and chiefdoms were reduced. Adding the Nyamwezi Federal Council and Sukumaland Federation. By the end of British rule, commoners could be elected into positions of native power, further eroding the sovereignty of the monarchy. By 1962 all native monarchies were abolished by the new Tanganyikan government.
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