Fipa - History and Cultural Relations

Linguistic evidence suggests that Ufipa has been largely peopled by migrants from what is now northern Zambia and southeastern Zaire. An early center of ironworking and sacral kingship appears to have been established at Milansi, a village in the middle of the Fipa plateau. A subsequent and politically dominant form of kingship gradually developed, and a centralized and hierarchic form of administration was established. It seems that early in this process the new state divided into two entities, called respectively Lyangalile and Nkansi. About 1840 the Fipa plateau was overrun by militarily superior Ngoni invaders from the south, who ruled the country until a succession dispute ended in the withdrawal of the competing factions from Ufipa. Nyamwezi traders from central Tanzania were probably in contact with Ufipa from early in the nineteenth century, and from the 1850s onward there was increasing trade between the Fipa and Zanzibari merchants from the East African coast. The missionary-explorer David Livingstone was the first European known to have visited the Fipa, in 1872. He was followed in 1880 by the Scots explorer Joseph Thomson and the German Paul Reichard. In 1890 Ufipa was incorporated into the colonial state of German East Africa; in 1919, after Germany's defeat in World War I, that state was renamed Tanganyika and administered by Britain as a mandated territory under the League of Nations. In 1961 Tanganyika, including Ufipa, became a sovereign state, and in 1963, after the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the new state adopted the name of Tanzania.