Mirambo

Mirambo was born around 1840, named Mbula Mtelya or Mytela Kasanda, in Unyamwezi, the land of the Nyamwezi in what is now central Tanzania. The Nyamwezi were long-distance traders, famous as porters and ivory merchants across East Africa. Most accounts say he came from a ruling family, and he took the name Mirambo, which means corpses in Kinyamwezi, around 1860.

In that decade he created a new Nyamwezi state, Urambo, uniting many hitherto separate Nyamwezi clans into a powerful kingdom. His military system was built around the ruga-ruga, mobile armies of young men, many of them boys separated from their families and raised as soldiers, a system he is said to have learned from the Ngoni of the south, and he equipped them with firearms.

Mirambo's power rested on control of trade. Tabora, the home of Arab and Swahili merchants, was the key hub for the caravan routes between the coast and the interior, and from 1871 to 1884 he was at war with the Arab-backed rulers of Unyanyembe, who objected to the transit fees he charged. In 1873 his forces blockaded the ivory trade from Tabora, driving up the price of ivory worldwide, and by 1875 he had signed a treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Between 1876 and 1880 he gained control of the main routes north to Buganda and west to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and by 1880, according to one source, the Arabs asked for peace and agreed to pay tribute. His trade, like that of his enemies, included ivory and slaves. European missionaries who regarded him as the builder of a stable state in the interior persuaded the British consul in Zanzibar to switch support to him. The explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who first dismissed him as a bandit, later called him the African Bonaparte.

Mirambo died on 2 December 1884, the year his army suffered a defeat in Burundi, and his kingdom soon broke up into small chiefdoms. Tanzanians remember him as a national hero, and a war song, Iron Breaks the Head, honours his memory.