Zaramo people

Zaramo people

Zaramo in German East Africa (1906)
Total population
~0.7 million
Regions with significant populations
Tanzania	~0.7 million
Languages
Swahili language
Religion
Islam (Sunni)

The Zaramo people, also referred to as Dzalamo or Saramo, are an East African ethnic group found along the coast of Tanzania, particularly in its Pwani Region. They are the largest ethnic group in and around Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. Estimated to be about 0.7 million, over 98% of them are Muslims, more specifically the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam.

Their original language is the Zaramo language, a Bantu language belonging to the Niger-Congo family of languages. However, in contemporary Tanzania, only a few speak it, and most now speak another Bantu language namely Swahili language as their first language, and have adopted Swahili-Arabic names.

The term Zaramo, in scholarly studies, also reflects a macro-ethnic group. The larger Zaramo group consists of Zaramo proper but includes a number of related peoples such as the Kaguru, Kwere, Kutu, Kami, Sagara, Luguru, Ngulu and Vidunda peoples.

The Zaramo society has been historically victimized by slave raids and slave trading by the Swahili-Arab traders of Zanzibar. To resist this persecution, they developed stockade-fortified villages. Many just ran away from the coast, and would return during the day time to farm and fish. Zanzibar Arabs, state William Worger, Nancy Clark and Edward Alpers, however pursued their slave raiding into the mainland, where they would seize pagan Zaramo adults and children, gag them so they would not cry out, and then sell them to the traders. Sometimes during famines, such as in the 19th-century rule of Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar, desperate Zaramo people pawned and sold each other to survive.

The Zaramo society's history has long been influenced by the coastal encounter between the Arab-Persian and African populations typical of East Africa, since the 8th century. During the colonial era, the influence came from the encounter between the African people, Arab-Swahili trader intermediaries and the European powers, but it broadly coopted the older slave-driven, social stratification model.

According to Elke Stockreiter – a professor of History specializing on Africa, the slaves seized from Zaramo people and other ethnic groups such as Yao, Makonde and Nyamwezi peoples from the mainland and brought to the coastal Tanzania region and Zanzibar sought social inclusion and attempted to reduce their treatment as inferiors by their slave owners by adopting and adapting to Islam in the 19th century. Conversion to Islam among the coastal Zaramo people began in the 19th-century. These historic events, states Stockreiter, have influenced the politics and inter-ethnic relations in 20th-century Tanzania.