With a population of over 60 million, the United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa, within the African Great Lakes region. Tanzania borders Uganda to the north, Kenya to the northeast, as well as Comoro Islands and the Indian Ocean to the east. To its south are Mozambique and Malawi, Zambia to the southwest, with Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. There are over a hundred distinct ethnic groups and tribes in Tanzania, some of which are the Sukuma, the Nyamwezi, the Chagga, among others. And of course, there are many languages spoken in Tanzania, however, there's no language spoken natively by a majority of the population. The country maintains Swahili and English as its lingua francas, Swahili being the official national language. The Tanzanian population is dominated by Christians, however, it has some Muslim and Animist minorities. Like a number of other African settlements, the Europeans took over Tanzania, but not without dealing with much resistance.
Prior to this European disruption, Tanzania was regarded as home to some of the oldest human settlements, going by archaeological evidence.
The fossils found in this ancient land are over two million years old. The Bantu-speaking peoples, who dominate today's Tanzanian population migrated to the area over 2000 years ago. They engaged primarily in ironwork at the time. They were initially under the German rule from 1880 to 1919 when the British took over. Led by anti-colonial activist, politician, and political theorist Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian people eventually gained their independence from Britain on the 9th of December, 1961. The Republic of Tanzania was eventually formed by the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964.