Tanzania: Independence Day/Republic Day

By British Expat, 8 December 2010

Tanzania celebrates two key moments in the country’s history on 9 December: the granting of autonomy from the United Kingdom as a Commonwealth Realm in 1961 and the adoption of a republican constitution, with Julius Nyerere as the first President, in 1962.

However, those dates didn’t affect the whole of present-day Tanzania directly; only the territory of Tanganyika (a German colony from 1886 to 1918, then a British-administered territory under a mandate from the League of Nations and subsequently the United Nations). It wasn’t until 1964 that the island of Zanzibar (a British protectorate since 1890) joined Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania.