SOURCE OF THE NAME ''TANGANYIKA''

Source of the Name ''Tanganyika''

With Kelly Askew Magomeni Mapipa Dar es Salaam

"Tanganyika officially received its name during the subsequent British colonial period. The British Colonial Office apparently had fun pondering possibilities:

Smutsland [in honor of General Smuts who led British forces to final victory in East Africa] was dismissed as inelegant, Eburnea [from the Latin for ivory] and Azania as pedantic. New Maryland, Windsorland, and Victoria were vetoed by the Colonial Secretary's insistence on "a native name prominently associated with the territory." He considered Kilimanjaro and Tabora before settling on "The Tanganyika Protectorate" as proposed by his deputy undersecretary. (Ilife 1979, 247)

"But from where did the undersecretary get "Tanganyika"? One Tanga elder dates it to the German period and explained that from a German administrative perspective, they ruled Tanga and the nyika (lit., "bush" or "hinterland") beyond. Another explanation positions Tanga as the point of entry into the territory and hence translates Tanganyika as "the land beyond Tanga" (Martin 1991, 80, n. 7). An alternative etymological possibility, however, could relate it to the verb kutanga, meaning "to go to and fro, go from side to side, dawdle, loiter, stroll about, wander" (Johnson 1989, 452), thus lending itself to a colonial description of the territory as "to wander in the bush."

From Kelly M. Askew PERFORMING the NATION: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2002.