Tanzania’s museums and tourism

Tanzania has two state museum systems that operate independently, one on the mainland and one on Zanzibar. Across both systems, state museums present a narrative that supports the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) Party and the presidency of Samia Suluhu Hassan. Hassan, who is from Zanzibar, was a relative unknown when she was added to the ticket as the CCM’s vice presidential candidate in 2015. She then suddenly and surprisingly became president when John Magufuli died, likely of COVID, in 2021. CCM barred the two leading opposition parties in the 2025 election and brutally suppressed protests against Hassan’s reelection. Domestically, Hassan has cast herself as “Mama Samia,” the mother of the Tanzanian people. She has utilized the country’s museums to support this role. For foreign visitors, museums are a key part of the Tanzanian state’s strategy to diversify tourism. State museums are an attempt to control understandings of the Tanzanian past and present with official stories that support CCM’s continued dominance.

The National Museum of Tanzania system includes eleven museums and/or historical sites on the mainland.Footnote ⁷ This number reflects a dramatic expansion of the system as new museums have been established and the state has taken control of sites as part of the national system. The first museums, the National Museum of House and Culture and the Village Museum, were both located in the then capital of Dar es Salaam. The system now stretches across the country, with museums in seven of the country’s twenty-six mainland regions, with a museum planned for an eighth.Footnote ⁸ Most of the branch museums have a more specific purpose than the generalist House of Culture, though what they exhibit does often include a wider swath of history and culture than one might assume from the museum titles. The Zanzibari government operates six or seven museums, though not all of them are operational.Footnote ⁹ Wall and vitrine text is available in Swahili and English, and occasionally even in German.

The historiography on museums as cultural and educational institutions is extensive. Many scholars have delved into the invention of the modern museum in nineteenth-century Europe, its use to educate the masses, and its role in spreading bourgeois culture to the working classes and poor. The historiography focuses on European museums as products of the nineteenth century and on their role as educators of the public. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of organization and display, Tony Bennett’s Birth of the Museum kicked off a discussion of museums as shapers of visitor behavior and the imposition of bourgeois norms on the European masses.Footnote ¹⁰ Much of this scholarship argues that museums were important to the formation of national identities in European nations as leaders attempted to get people who thought primarily in terms of the local to identify on a larger scale. Collections looted or otherwise acquired in African colonies were often central to this process as national leaders tried to get the masses to identify with imperial projects. Analyses of museum displays, of visitation data, and of reception of museum exhibits have shown the successes and failures of identity formation.Footnote ¹¹ Recent scholarship has problematized the continued presence of African objects in European and North American museums.Footnote ¹²

Most African national museums began as colonial museums meant to “order Africa.”Footnote ¹³ In many cases, this meant the building and exhibiting of ethnographic collections that sorted Africans into the neatly defined tribes essential for indirect rule. National museums inherited those collections at independence. While the growing field of museum history has given Africa relatively short shrift in a clear consensus that museums shape the popular image of the nation, Raymond Silverman, George Abungu, and Peter Probst’s edited collection makes it clear that national history museums across the continent have also played a central role in the formation of ideas about the past and national identities.Footnote ¹⁴ As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has written about the genesis of national museums, “As the collections were divided, documented, and placed in new spaces, so the population was to be constituted as citizens of the state, by means of their propulsion through the newly public spaces and their exposure to the newly available symbols of civilization."Footnote ¹⁵ State museums “perform a public role of remembrance in which they are expected to represent a broad social or at least political consensus, producing narratives that form an integral part of national identity politics.”Footnote ¹⁶ Museumgoers are to learn to be better national citizens through the absorption of a story of the nation that makes their own role clear.

This is the story of Tanzanian state museums, as well. On the mainland, the National Museum and House of Culture in Dar es Salaam has been the national museum since independence. It was established by the British in 1934, dedicated to George V. The museum’s initial emphasis was on what its board declared “the two fundamentals of prosperity: Public Health and Agriculture.”Footnote ¹⁷ Early collection building focused on collecting ethnographic objects to show traditional African culture, which the curator believed would disappear with imports of manufactured goods to Tanganyika. The museum’s audience was primarily the European and Indian elite.Footnote ¹⁸ Tourism was already part of museum planning in 1958, when an exhibit on Henry Morton Stanley’s search for David Livingstone, “designed to interest American tourists,” went on display.Footnote ¹⁹

After independence, the museum, now called the National Museum, assumed a nation-building mission. As the museum’s first African (interim) curator wrote in 1968, “When we think of nation building, we usually picture the construction of schools, raising the yield of an acre of maize, or putting in a new village water supply. We feel very strongly that our own part in nation building is equally vital and worthy of full support. If we neglect this aspect of the development of Tanzania, it will mean a severe loss for the entire country.”Footnote ²⁰ The party viewed the museum similarly, testified to by its donation of the kitchen table that had served as Nyerere’s desk and a conference table used for early meetings in 1970–71. These “humble” pieces showed the beginning of the party and the country’s “rapid progress.”Footnote ²¹ The National Museum was a priority to “strengthen the spirit of nationalism and African unity and make the Tanzanian feel proud of himself as a true son of Africa.”Footnote ²²

Zanzibar’s Peace Memorial Museum opened as the Zanzibar Museum in 1925 and, like the King George V Museum, catered primarily to the expatriate elite. Architect John Sinclair designed the building to appear “Eastern” and distinct from Zanzibari architecture that British administrators thought looked too African for how they imagined Zanzibari culture. The museum’s exhibits, too, were designed to create distinctions between Zanzibar and the mainland to serve British visions of Zanzibari culture and history. Exactly what this looked like varied over the remainder of British rule.Footnote ²³

The pitfalls of conceptualizing national museums primarily as shapers of national identities among national citizens are rather obvious when one considers that most of the visitors to the majority of Tanzania’s national museums are not citizens, but rather international visitors. Tourists are not developing Tanzanian identities or adopting codes of conduct as they view the exhibits in Tanzania’s national museums. This situation is not unique to Tanzania, either. Other African states report similar statistics for the breakdown of visitors between nationals and non-nationals.Footnote ²⁴ In some cases, foreign funders have provided funding for museums based on their serving as tourist draws to increase tourism revenue.Footnote ²⁵

Tourism was initially incidental to the work of both museums. Tourism has been concentrated in the wildlife sector since the creation of colonial game reserves.Footnote ²⁶ As early as the German period, the government acknowledged wildlife as a tourist revenue source.Footnote ²⁷ Wildlife tourism continued to grow after independence, with the promotion of the Serengeti as the preeminent unspoiled wilderness in need of conservation and the expansion of the northern safari circuit.Footnote ²⁸ The Village Museum was a more explicitly tourist venture when it opened in 1967. Its origins lie in the era of ujamaa and Nyerere’s writings about a precolonial African past of communal village life. It was meant to be a contrast to the dense urban environment of the National Museum.Footnote ²⁹ The museum is organized as a walking path along which are arranged sets of buildings traditional to different ethnic groups around Tanzania, with informational placards located next to each set to provide the visitor with information about the ethnic group and the construction and function of the buildings. The museum was meant in part to increase tourism. The NMT’s 1968–69 annual report noted that the Village Museum “is performing a very useful function in promotion of tourism in Dar es Salaam.”Footnote ³⁰ The Village Museum charged an entrance fee, which meant it was “mainly a tourist resort,” whereas Tanzanians made up the majority of visitors to the House of Culture.Footnote ³¹

State museums have reflected the broader state relationship to tourism and its citizens. The Nyerere government disdained tourism in the period of ujamaa villagization and tourism revenues collapsed. Party control of museums and the concentration on shaping Tanzanian citizens accelerated in the mid-1970s. Where only eight of fifty employees at the National Museum were party members at the start of 1974, the year-end total was forty of fifty. Political education of museum employees began in 1975.Footnote ³² In 1974, the National Museum published a book that declared the museum was “crucially important in a socialist state where rapid change is required, and everything has to be planned. It is a museum that will strengthen the spirit of nationalism and African unity and make the Tanzanian feel proud of himself as a true son of Africa.” It was an institution “representative of modern Tanzania built by Tanzanians themselves.”Footnote ³³ The book presented Tanzanians as living in a country without cities and as people who did not use modern technology, with a focus on colonial oppression and ethnographic collections and demonstrations. Most of the National Museum’s ethnographic collection was donated by Nyerere in 1980, in the wake of the Kagera War with Uganda.Footnote ³⁴ The Zanzibar Museum became the Ideological College and Party Museum.Footnote ³⁵

With market liberalization in the 1980s, CCM began to embrace tourism to bring in needed foreign exchange and grow the nation’s economy.Footnote ³⁶ Tanzania issued its first national tourism policy in 1991.Footnote ³⁷ The government established the Tanzania Tourist Board to oversee tourism in 1992. The revised National Tourism Policy of 1999 included among its objectives to “develop and maintain museums” as part of a goal of turning Tanzania into “an all-rounded/single holiday destination.” Museums, it suggested, should be part of school curricula to encourage human resource development in the cultural heritage sector.Footnote ³⁸

Tourism has continued to grow in importance for Tanzania’s economy,Footnote ³⁹ and both international organizations and the government have stressed the importance of diversifying tourist attractions, including museums. The Tanzanian government views tourism as a way to alleviate poverty, balance foreign exchange, and create jobs.Footnote ⁴⁰ Government reports on the Tanzanian tourist industry have called for diversifying tourist attractions as a means of increasing the length of tourists’ stays and increasing their expenditures in the country for at least two decades.Footnote ⁴¹ By 2010, the government’s focus was on historical tourism. The “Tourism Developments” section of the annual report on the tourism sector was entirely history-related: listing the central slave-trade route as a UNESCO world heritage site, plans for collecting information on sites utilized by southern African freedom fights to “promote them as tourist attractions,” the preservation of Kaole ruins and Kilwa Kisiwani, and the restoration of Zanzibar’s Forodhani Park.Footnote ⁴² The Dar es Salaam City Council set about turning Dar into a “renowned tourism” destination, utilizing buildings from the German colonial era.Footnote ⁴³ In 2017, the national tourism report noted that “there is a need of putting more efforts in promoting other forms of tourist attractions so as to complement wildlife tourism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The government has attempted to develop tourism around the slave trade in Bagamoyo and along the central slave trade route.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hassan has requested that the Tanzania Tourism Board (TTB) further examine the possibilities of the slave trade route for tourism. This resulted in a Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation production of The Slave Caravan, a series of documentaries about the slave trade in Tanzania.Footnote ⁴⁶

The usage of museums to strengthen nationalism coincides with an internationalization of heritage practices in Tanzania. The National Museum system is heralding “heritage for sustainable development” and promoting “global alliances” with European and Asian countries.Footnote ⁴⁷ Noel Lwoga, the Director General of the National Museum declared in 2024, “The Ministry will continue to support this important festival and champion its preservation, as it not only honours our heritage but also strengthens cultural diplomacy with other nations.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Some of the growth in international funding and increase in museum visits can be tied to the growth of what John and Jean Comaroff label “Heritage, Inc.,” heritage as an industry. Heritage has been turned into a marketable commodity.Footnote ⁴⁹ States have been marketing timeless pasts in which traditional institutions expected of Africa by international visitors play a central role. Local elites have power that “poses a substantial challenge to the liberal promises of democracy.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Culture has become a commodity to be trademarked and controlled by cultural brokers. “Conceived of as the distinctive property of a particular, unique people, heritage renders political or cultural dissent illegitimate.”Footnote ⁵¹ Daniel Herwitz has identified heritage as “important in the neoliberal game of profiling, branding, and marketing,” while it is at the same time tightly linked to nation-building in postcolonial states.Footnote ⁵² Building precolonial heritage institutions and festivities was an essential element in the development of national identity and claims to origins outside of European invention. Heritage is process and performance.Footnote ⁵³ But the government has embraced tribal identities as a method of nation-building and for tourism purposes since the mid-1990s. The Village Museum has been hosting what it refers to as “tribal cultural festivals” since 1994.Footnote ⁵⁴ The number of museums is rapidly multiplying in Tanzania, incorporating more parts of the country and focusing on individual ethnic groups rather than the national story of the National Museum and House of Culture.

Part of the explanation for the development of Tanzania’s museums can be found in the contrast between heritage and history in museum spaces. The Village Museum, with its ethnic celebrations, as well as the regional museums’ ethnic festivals, are selling heritage, an unchanged past surviving to the present. The National Museum system promotes the Village Museum as a space for Tanzanians to learn about their heritage. Stories and videos focus on Tanzanian visitors.Footnote ⁵⁵ The centrality of historical tourism to the National Museum is apparent from social and other media. The Tanzania Safari Channel has created content to drive tourism to Tanzania’s museums. Two episodes show Kenyan comedian/actor Eunice Mammito visiting the Village Museum and National Museum and House of Culture.Footnote ⁵⁶ The National Museum was the first location named in a 2020 Tanzania Safari Channel episode promoting tourism in Dar es Salaam.Footnote ⁵⁷ The National Museum now has a tourism officer position. Radio station CityFM posted a video of Tourism Officer Chance Ezekiel making the almost blasphemous claim that Nyerere himself is a “tourism product [bidhaa ya utalii].”Footnote ⁵⁸ TTB promoted the National Museum and House of Culture in a post for World Tourism Day, describing the museum as “a place that preserves our history while inspiring our future.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Cruise ship tourism is another frontier. Over one hundred tourists from a cruise ship docked in Dar es Salaam’s harbor visited the National Museum and House of Culture on January 11, 2026. The museum filmed the visit and promoted it across social media channels. According to the museum’s Instagram account, the visit was proof of the government’s efforts to open new tourism markets and the strengthening of the cultural tourism sector. The National Museum was preparing to meet the expected record numbers of tourists arriving in Tanzania in 2026.Footnote ⁶⁰ The tourists’ time in Tanzania was beginning at “a timeless gateway into Tanzania’s rich heritage stories of our people, our wildlife legacy, and the roots of a nation proudly crowned the World’s Leading Safari Destination and Africa’s Best Destination.”Footnote ⁶¹ The museum also posted a video of the visit, reporting that tourists like to stop along their route and visit cultural sites and museums.Footnote ⁶² For a February visit, the museum invited Tanzanian media to cover the experience of about five hundred tourists from Europe, the United States, and Israel. Director General Noel Biseko Lwoga told the press that the visit was coordinated with the Tanzania Tourism Board and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism to diversify tourism, show tourists Tanzanian history and culture, and take tourists through the museum gift shop. American tourists reported positive experiences learning about Tanzania’s history; one was impressed by the memorial to the Americans who died in the embassy bombing.Footnote ⁶³ Other posts from early 2026 celebrated the arrival of Western tourists at the museum.Footnote ⁶⁴ The arrival of over two hundred cruise ship tourists at Kilwa on Easter Day was celebrated by the Tanzania Tourism Board as the result of the government’s campaigns, such as the Royal Tour documentary.Footnote ⁶⁵

Museum exhibits and statist narratives

Tanzania’s state-operated museums present historical narratives that match those of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi party. This narrative runs as follows: the distant past was locally a time of community and cooperation, where people lived in villages in which people worked together to build and labor for the benefit of all. Colonial predation began under Omani rule, as the Omani sultans enslaved the people of the region and built an economy based on exploitation. It continued under German and British rule on the mainland and British rule in Zanzibar, as Africans first resisted the colonial incursion and then turned their attention to the winning of independence and the formation of political parties.

Located on a site near the botanical garden in the Kivukoni area of Dar es Salaam, the mainland’s National Museum and House of Culture holds a wide-ranging collection of fossils and objects, from animal skeletons to Julius Nyerere’s Rolls-Royce, befitting its broad mandate as the nation’s main museum and cultural center. The museum’s conventionally designed historical exhibits trace Tanzania’s history from the early nineteenth century and the ivory and slave caravan trade through the German and British colonial periods to independence and the formation of the Tanganyika–Zanzibar union. A pamphlet by former director Paul Msemwa notes a lack of success in attracting Tanzanian visitors to the museum because they viewed the museum as an institution for dead culture and foreign tourists. Tanzanians who did visit were unlikely to return because the exhibits did not change, according to Msemwa.Footnote ⁶⁶

Besides the Natural History Museum, mainland museums bolster the official history of Tanzania. The Village Museum supports the idea that Tanzanian life is, at its core, village life. The museum’s location on the outskirts of the nation’s metropolis suggests that even there, a simple village life is the proper one. At the Majimaji Memorial Museum, the focus is on Majimaji, which appears to arise out of a traditional Ngoni society without its own internal politics. The Kawawa Museum is housed in a residence that belonged to Kawawa and focuses on his role in international liberation movements, with visitors able to tour tunnels in which Kawawa met with representatives from the Mozambican and South African resistance movements in the 1970s. Many of the state museums take up the theme of colonial exploitation, though it is most central at the House of Culture. The Omani period comes in for particular scorn. The largest individual display in the interior of the House of Culture is two life-sized mannequins chained together and bearing an elephant tusk. The German period appears in the form of a few official objects – a postal sign, a steamboat wheel, money – and in photos with captions. The subject of the texts is almost always violent repression and resistance. For the British period, the main story is of the formation of TANU and the path toward independence. These displays replaced the museum’s exhibits from the early 1970s that centered on European explorers in Tanzania’s history.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is notable, too, that most of the historical displays have seen little updating for some time. They follow the same timeline as the historical exhibit created in 1975, where the story began with “The Arab Slave Trade Era.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In historical exhibits, women are given only a minor role as part of an undifferentiated exploited population.

The People’s Palace is the most important state institution exhibiting Zanzibari history, particularly since the closure of the House of Wonders due to its partial collapse.Footnote ⁶⁹ The building had been the city palace of the sultans of Zanzibar until they were deposed in 1963. The revolutionary government took control of the building and eventually turned it into a museum about the sultans and their family during the sultanate. Viewers see the rooms decorated largely as they were in the early 1960s, with some brief explanatory placards. In the People’s Palace Museum, the focus is on Zanzibari sultans, primarily from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth. Visitors can see rooms decorated as they were during the sultanate, though these are mostly public-facing rooms other than a bathroom with an early flush toilet. British actions receive relatively little attention in the People’s Palace, where the focus remains on the actions of Zanzibar’s sultans rather than the European colonial power. There is very little information about women’s roles in Zanzibar’s politics. The message that visitors are meant to take away is of exploitation by a foreign ruling class.

The Princess Salme Museum is the newest of the museums in Zanzibar. It is not controlled by the state, but the interests of the museum converge with those of CCM. Said el-Gheithy, who worked in international public health efforts before returning to Zanzibar, opened the museum in the 2010s. Princess Salme is Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salama bint Said, the sister of Sultans Majid and Barghash. During a political contretemps in Zanzibar, the princess married a German merchant and left Zanzibar. The Princess Salme Museum concentrates entirely on the Salme/Ruete story, telling the narrative of her life, its context, and the lives of her descendants across three rooms. The museum holds collections of a few objects evocative of the period of Salme/Ruete’s life and others provided by her descendants. The image it creates is of a woman misunderstood and mistreated in her time who was a tireless advocate for the common people, especially in the realms of healthcare and literacy.

None of the museums exhibits much of anything about Tanzania since 1970. The Princess Salme Museum presents an ambivalent picture of the Zanzibar sultanate. It was a place where Salme could pursue her public health projects and develop an identity and profile of her own, but it was also a place that turned her into a victim of palace intrigues and drove her to find a way out. Women’s stories are nearly absent from the National Museum’s exhibits.

Recent developments in Tanzanian tourism and museums

Since Samia Suluhu Hassan assumed the presidency, tourism has become even more central to Tanzania’s economic planning, and museums play an important role in plans for diversifying the tourist economy. The Tanzanian state has clearly placed a greater emphasis on the national museums in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Visitor numbers in 2019 were only slightly higher than those in 1968–69.Footnote ⁷⁰ There was a dramatic acceleration of museum visits in 2022. That year, the Village Museum welcomed over one million visitors, an increase from 16,889 in 2019, the last pre-COVID year.Footnote ⁷¹ Overall, Tanzania saw a 48 percent increase in international tourist arrivals between 2019 and 2024, the most in Africa.Footnote ⁷² Numbers continued to rise in early 2025, and tourism overtook gold as Tanzania’s leading generator of foreign exchange.Footnote ⁷³

A 2021 World Bank report declared that tourism plays a “pivotal role in achieving inclusive and resilient growth in Tanzania,” noting that it was the second-largest component in the country’s GDP and earned over a quarter of its foreign exchange.Footnote ⁷⁴ Tourism is central to Tanzania’s main economic planning document, Development Vision 2050. The National Planning Commission expects tourism to be a leading employer and plans for Tanzania to be Africa’s top tourist destination by the middle of the century. This necessitates an expansion of the tourism sector beyond wildlife and beach to include other activities, among them cultural heritage, cruise ship tourism, and Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions (MICE) tourism, in all of which museums play a role.Footnote ⁷⁵

Zanzibar has especially embraced historical tourism. Without the megafauna of the mainland, tourism growth in Zanzibar has been primarily in beach activities. The Zanzibar Commission for Tourism’s policy calls for a greater focus on historical attractions to bring in visitors. Zanzibar Stone Town anchors “a strong historic – cultural product.” Diversification of tourist attractions, including museums, is an emphasis “to achieve a balanced growth of the tourism industry.” The policy declares that “[t]he culture and historic attributes of Zanzibar, especially Stone Town, will dominate the marketing message, more so than traditional sun and sand beach tourism.” This means “[i]mproving museum displays that interpreting [sic] Zanzibar heritage and way of life.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A 2025 prospectus for investors in Zanzibar’s tourism industry stresses the opportunity for growth in heritage tourism and highlights efforts “leveraging [Zanzibar’s] historical allure” for growth.Footnote ⁷⁷ The government of Zanzibar has signed an agreement with Infinity Developments, a UAE property developer, to restore and modernize historic sites, which it has announced as “a new phase in Zanzibar’s cultural and economic development by positioning heritage conservation as a pillar of sustainable tourism.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Hassan has strenuously promoted tourism since becoming president. Posters in tourist centers like Arusha promoting Hassan as the mother of the nation highlight the hordes of tourists as bringing local benefit. Hassan’s public appearances on her visit to the United States in 2022 promoted Tanzania as a tourist destination, with a focus on the country’s natural parks and safari opportunities.Footnote ⁷⁹ The National Museum was chosen as the site of remarks by US Vice President Kamala Harris on a visit to Tanzania in March 2023. Harris spoke about the significance of a stage “shared by two powerful women” and Tanzania’s friendship with the USA, symbolized by the memorial to victims of the 1998 US embassy bombing. She stressed that Tanzanian politics had entered a new era with Magufuli gone.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hassan has starred in “documentaries” about Tanzania meant to promote the country as a tourist destination in the United States, China, and India. In The Royal Tour, which aired on PBS in the United States, Hassan met veteran travel journalist Peter Greenberg at her official residence before they traveled to Zanzibar, a Tanzanite mine, Ngorongoro Crater, and the Serengeti. The documentary portrays Hassan as a reformer. Greenberg references her predecessor John Magufuli’s nickname of the “bulldozer” and mentioned his anti-vaccine stance before archival footage of Hassan receiving the COVID vaccine. Hassan tells Greenberg that she has a softer touch and that women must lead differently.Footnote ⁸¹ The Chinese equivalent, titled Amazing Tanzania, is quite similar to The Royal Tour, though it spends more time on the architecture of Zanzibar and notes the People’s Palace Museum. Both feature Hassan as the primary guide to Tanzania’s tourist sites, highlighting her position as the country’s first woman president. Notably, Hassan drives the safari vehicle for the American documentary, but sits in the back with host Jin Dong in the Chinese documentary.Footnote ⁸² Tantalizing Tanzania, starring Shakti Mohan, debuted in Mumbai on December 14, 2024.Footnote ⁸³

This international role shored up Hassan’s claims to be a reformer, particularly on women’s issues. An increasingly autocratic CCM regime has pushed a view of Hassan as a reformer and democrat internationally, winning over much of the Western media. Reports from Western outlets on Hassan during her first year-plus in office were almost unanimously glowing. She was welcomed as a reformer who would turn Tanzania away from Magufuli’s populism and the country’s crackdown on alternative political parties and independent media outlets.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Dan Paget and Aikande Clement Kwayu detail, Hassan needs to be a “performer” rather than a reformer, using small reforms to hide her government’s growing use of repressive measures to remain in power, including arresting the leader of the largest opposition party before the 2025 presidential election.Footnote ⁸⁵ Museums and museum exhibits that highlight a carefully curated story of women in Tanzanian history support Hassan’s performance on the world stage.

The tourism focus and women’s history in Tanzanian museums

Men who fought against the Germans and organized politically against the British are depicted and named in Tanzania’s national museums, whereas women are not. In the Village Museum, visitors read in some cases about a gendered division of labor in different ethnic groups, but individuals are not identified in a museum meant to illustrate Nyerere’s African socialism. The 1999 tourist policy included a segment that women were central to tourism, but in a supporting role. Among their duties was to “create awareness of the importance of tourism” as mothers and teachers.Footnote ⁸⁶ The exception to this general rule is the Emily Ruete exhibit in the People’s Palace and the whole Princess Salme Museum. Emily/Salme was a Zanzibari princess and grew up in the palace when it was the seat of the Zanzibari monarchy. She married a German man and moved to Germany in 1867. She published an autobiography, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess in Zanzibar, which received much acclaim in Germany, especially in nationalist circles.Footnote ⁸⁷ An entire room in the palace is devoted to telling Ruete’s story and displaying objects from her life. Museumgoers are treated to significant texts describing Ruete’s life and a recreation of a room in which she spent significant time in the 1880s. The exhibit includes several photos of Ruete at different stages of her life, from her time in Zanzibar to old age in Germany. Adding to the gendered aspects of this exhibit is the fact that it is the primary exhibit about the private spaces of the palace, rendering women’s roles as domestic ones. Through the Zanzibari museums, Ruete becomes the woman of Zanzibar’s, and by extension, Tanzania’s history. Her story of oppression under Omani rule and escape to Europe, where she longed to return to her former home but never could, becomes the story of millions of women. Gendering Zanzibari rule by highlighting Ruete puts those tropes at the forefront in discussions of precolonial Zanzibar. Museum visitors are confronted with a story of oriental despotism reminiscent of anti-Arab campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, but updated for a Western audience of today, focused on women’s oppression.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Ruete story fits neatly with the resurgence of Western organization around the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men since the beginning of the Global War on Terror.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Ruete story has been packaged for visitors ready to receive another story on this theme. That audience is then primed to receive a more expansive story of Zanzibar’s oppression of women. Ruete’s memoir has also been reissued multiple times in both German and English, and has served as the basis for multiple twenty-first century German historical novels – Nicole Vosseler’s Sterne über Sansibar, Lukas Hartmann’s Abschied von Sansibar, and Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues. Footnote ⁹⁰ This has the effect of sanitizing the history of German colonialism in Africa for Germans today, as holding up Ruete as an exemplary figure and colonialist Germans as humanitarians more than exploiters. In Hamburg, activist letters to the Hamburger Abendblatt led the city to rename a square after Ruete.Footnote ⁹¹

The National Museums on the mainland have taken notice, too. An article in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism’s promotional magazine, Amazing Tanzania, about Songea’s Maji Maji National Memorial and Museum tells readers to travel to Songea to learn about the three Ruvuma region women who fought in World War II but “are hardly mentioned in history or war narratives,” telling readers “sometimes one needs to travel to Songea for the details.”Footnote ⁹² In April 2024, the system announced plans for a new museum dedicated to Mwami Tereza Ntare II, the country’s first woman paramount chief.Footnote ⁹³ Ntare became chief of Kasulu in 1958 and participated in the struggle for independence over the following years, and served in the Tanzanian parliament until 1980. An announcement of the new museum cited Ntare’s “contributions to women’s leadership, development, and societal welfare. It also served as a platform for dialogue on documenting women’s achievements and integrating their stories – Herstories – into the national historical narrative." The museum is meant to “honour the women who contributed to Tanzania’s liberation,” but Ntare was just one of many women who shaped Tanzania’s path to independence.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ntare is identified more with regional and ethnic politics than with the national politics of the TANU women written about by Susan Geiger. The choice of Ntare is indicative of the CCM’s current politics and how the museums fit into its plans.Footnote ⁹⁵ Tereza Ntare represents a set of traditional African values set against the foreign influences that colonizers brought to Tanzania. Ntare exemplifies CCM’s current nation-of-tribes politics that deflects political discourse away from discussions of parties and policies.

That the Ruete exhibits are meant for international audiences raises bigger questions about the meaning and role of public history. Is something public history if it is for an international public of tourists (meaning relative affluence), or does it have to be for a local museum-going public? Is the role of public history necessarily the edification of the public? Is a museum a public history institution if its role is more to present history to an international tourist and donor audience, fulfilling a public diplomacy role? There is a growing divide between the museums’ citizenship function and their role as tourist attractions. To understand Tanzanian museums, we need to analyze them as both public history institutions and as diplomatic displays meant for different audiences.

Building and enforcing CCM’s power is the goal of Tanzania’s state museums. President Hassan utilized an event at the Majimaji Memorial and Museum in September 2024 to declare, “We are seeing signs of moral decay and behaviours that contradict Tanzanian identity … It starts at home. I urge every Tanzanian to reflect on their family values.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The museums and their exhibits shore up autocracy as tradition in Tanzania. The messiness of the nation’s postindependence political history is gone. What is left is a heritage removed from its time and context and a celebration of a few figures who fit CCM’s political claims. Much of the system’s expansion outside of Dar es Salaam has consisted of taking control of local remembrances and museums and turning them to CCM’s ends. This was the case with the Majimaji Memorial and Museum in Songea. Then-president Jakaya Kikwete led a state takeover of the museum in 2011 and presided over that year’s commemorations. The museum has since become a site for international visits and there now stands a monument from the German government next to the mass grave monument that was erected in the regional museum era.

Ruete’s story, combined with Hassan’s statements about traditional values, posits women as subordinates, even as Hassan herself acts as the national head of state. Ruete’s escape from her oppression was to flee to Germany and sever ties with her African past. The museum exhibit thus makes available the idea that such flight was the solution to the oppression of women. The alternative is a constrained role within a Tanzanian society characterized by conservative values and the exclusion of elements the government deems foreign. The Ruete story also sets up Hassan as a break from the past, a thoroughly modern Muslim woman president who is challenging the historical oppression of her citizens.

What is the significance of the fact that there is only one exhibit devoted to women’s history in the most-visited history museum in each of the two parts of Tanzania, and that the one exhibit that does exist is focused on the oppression of women rather than their role as historical actors in their own right? The way the museum presents Ruete’s story is reflective of wider trends noted by several scholars of the role of international organizations in certifying the legitimacy of African states. As scholars like Issa Shivji and Gregory Mann have noted, many African governments can be more responsive to the whims of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide important economic and other aid than to their own populations.Footnote ⁹⁷ This means producing national narratives of progress that fit the desires of those international organizations. In the Ruete exhibit, we can observe the ways in which this need to satisfy international audiences has crept into museums and national histories. In the decades before and after independence, national histories served an essential role in building national unity by providing a common story around which people could unite. As many scholars have noted, those national narratives have fractured since the 1980s as critics have demonstrated their simplification of the complexities of past experience. With Ruete, we can see the repackaging of a national narrative for Zanzibar meant for international audiences rather than domestic ones. The Ruete exhibit is not meant to unite Zanzibaris, but rather to garner foreign support from an audience primed to see Hassan as a warrior for women.

Recent developments and conclusion

CCM’s brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters following the October 2025 general election has sullied Hassan’s image as a reformer. Even the regime’s official report admits to the killing of over five hundred protestors, with the political opposition claiming far higher numbers.Footnote ⁹⁸ The museum tourism initiatives, however, continue unabated. The University of Dar es Salaam opened a museum in the summer of 2025.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hassan announced plans for a new museum about Tanzania’s role in the liberation of Southern Africa at the funeral of former National Assembly speaker Job Ndugai in August 2025.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hassan celebrated the tourism sector in her speech opening the newly elected parliament in November 2025 and spoke of future growth. She said she expected eight million tourists to visit a year by 2030. Hassan stressed the need to diversify and link tourist attractions for tourists to spend more time in the country.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Museum social media accounts shared this part of the speech, so there is clearly a perception that tourism diversification initiatives apply to them. The TTB has rolled out a new campaign, Tourism beyond Safaris, meant to bring in other types of tourist revenue. It debuted at the 2026 ITB Berlin, a leading tourism trade show. Museum representatives guided a group of approximately fifty conference delegates to the joint National Museum-State Museums of Berlin exhibit Histories of Tanzania in the Humboldt Forum in the center of Berlin, with the goal of drumming up interest in visiting Tanzania for historical and cultural tourism.Footnote ¹⁰² Museum Tourism Officer Chance Ezekiel trained the country’s Miss World contestants so that they can talk about tourism and the museum’s role in fostering it.Footnote ¹⁰³

Museums reflect the political goals of their curators and bosses. Scholars have made this clear in the case of nineteenth-century European and American museums, with their goal of spreading national identity to the masses. Others have examined the growth of the heritage industry in Africa (among other places) as a tool for sustainable development, with its goal of attracting international tourists. In the Tanzanian case, these threads weave together. The National Museum system, as it expands across the country, is supposed to further Tanzanians’ identification with the conservative values that CCM wants to be at the heart of Tanzanian national identity. At the same time, museums play a key role in furthering the regime’s performance of reform and shoring up the belief that President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s regime is a triumph for all Tanzanian women.

Especially important in the Tanzanian museum landscape is the museums’ depictions of Tanzanian women’s history. The story of Emily Ruete and the nearly absent depiction of women who were involved in nontraditional politics in the road to independence or the postindependence Tanzanian state establish Hassan as a liberator and her vision for women’s rights and role in society as the official state narrative. There is no space for complexity or contingency in this story of the past, only oppression by outside forces and CCM’s restoration of proper Tanzanian culture and traditions.

Taken together, Tanzania’s museum landscapes call out for an approach that more clearly integrates traditional museum studies with analyses of the heritage industry. Changing museum audiences and the growth of the museum sector as an element in sustainable development plans mean that museums are playing a mixed role in shaping society and culture. Museums have become a piece of the international presentation of the state, while their role in educating local people to be better citizens continues to evolve. The Tanzanian case may hold lessons for what is to come as the United States government insists museums “should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Museums without contested narratives serve only the powerful. Public history is a piece of the global struggle against authoritarianism in the twenty-first century.