ABSTRACT
The diligence and determination of past and present members of the History Department at Dar es Salaam has produced a substantial corpus of Tanzanian and East African history. That work is characterized by a sufficient number of common concerns and approaches to make it perhaps legitimate to refer to a 'Dar es Salaam school' of historiography. For whatever reasons, the Dar es Salaam school have written history which can be described as nationalist. The connections between the themes are implicit in the description already quoted of the African historian 'who persists in treating national movements as something of genuine importance and formidable energy. The precise historical relationship between nationalism and earlier events and trends, therefore, becomes almost impossible to establish. The emergence of nation-based histories is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the foundation of national universities in newly independent African countries. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
