Dar es Salaam
Sultan's 1862 vanity project nearly died with him — German colonizers revived the harbor, and now 89% of Tanzania's tax revenue flows through Africa's second-fastest growing city (projected 13.4M by 2035).
A sultan's vanity project that nearly died at birth is now Africa's second-fastest growing city — proof that geographic logic eventually overrides political neglect. In 1862, Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar looked at the natural deepwater harbor on the East African mainland coast and envisioned a trading city to complement Zanzibar's island commerce. He named it Dar es Salaam — 'Abode of Peace' — and began building. When he died in 1870, patronage evaporated and the settlement collapsed into obscurity for nearly two decades. The harbor waited.
German colonizers rediscovered it in 1887, recognized the same geographic logic Sultan Majid had seen, and made it capital of German East Africa. The harbor's depth and shelter made it the finest port on the East African coast — a natural chokepoint for landlocked Burundi, Rwanda, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose goods had no other ocean outlet. British Tanganyika inherited the city; independent Tanzania kept it as commercial capital even after officially moving government functions to Dodoma in 1974. Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, actively tried to suppress urban growth, calling cities 'dens of decadence that consumed the wealth of the countryside.' Dar es Salaam grew anyway.
The suppression ended with economic liberalization in the mid-1980s, and what followed was bacterial-grade exponential growth. From roughly 1 million in 1990, the city surged past 7 million by 2024 and is projected to reach 13.4 million by 2035, crossing the megacity threshold. Manufacturing produces 59.6% of national output. The port handles 93.3% of all Tanzanian cargo and has overtaken Nairobi in intraregional trade ($12.1 billion in 2023). Most remarkably, 89% of Tanzania's total tax revenue flows through Dar es Salaam — a single-organ dependency that makes the entire national economy functionally reliant on one city.
The Standard Gauge Railway now links Dar es Salaam to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC, reducing freight costs by 40% and reinforcing the same landlocked-nation gateway logic that Sultan Majid identified 160 years ago. A city that almost vanished when its founder died is now becoming the metabolic core of East Africa.