Before traveling, I always recommend travelers look beyond the Top 10 Lists or bucket list items and read books from another Culture to better immerse yourself into the culture and traditions of that place. While guidebooks and travel blogs provide valuable insight into the practice aspects of travel, they often fail to capture the essence of a culture. Reading the local literature, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, diving into the literary works of a country before visiting can offer an unparalleled understanding of its history, people, customs, and beliefs.

By exploring the pages written by authors deeply rooted in their cultural heritage, travelers can enrich their experiences and forge deeper connections with the places they visit. If you’re planning a trip to Tanzania, immersing yourself in literary traditions such as capturing the absurd, formalism, and an exploration of gender and sexuality and its history can provide valuable insights into its society, customs, and values. 

Whether you’re an avid reader, or simply interested in learning about your journey before it begins, here is a curated list of books that will transport you to Tanzania’s past and present while enriching your visit with knowledge and a deeper appreciation for all you see and do.

If you want to bring your books on vacation with you, a Kindle is essential. With a Kindle Unlimited Subscription, you could get the majority of these titles at a much lower price than buying them individually.

Check out my Tanzania Travel page to see more info on visiting this great country.

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Novels

Paradise-Abdulrazak Gurnah

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that “evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

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A Girl Called Problem- Katie Quirk

Thirteen-year-old Shida, whose name means “problem” in Swahili, certainly has a lot of problems in her life — her father is dead, her depressed mother is rumored to be a witch, her family bears the weight of a curse, and everyone in her rural Tanzanian village expects her to marry rather than pursue her dream of becoming a healer. 

So when the elders of Litongo make a controversial decision to move Shida’s people to a nearby village, Shida welcomes the change. Surely the opportunity to go to school and learn from a nurse can only mean good things. Nonetheless, mysterious calamities plague Shida’s people after their move. Desperate to stay, Shida must prove to her people that life can be better in their new home.

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Uhuru Stree: Short Stories- M.G. Vassanji

Uhuru Street is M.G. Vassanji’s stunning book of linked stories, set within the Asian community of Dar es Salaam. With delicate strokes, and with irony and humour, Vassanji brings alive the characters who live and work in the shops and tenements of Uhuru Street; among them: Roshan Mattress, so called because of her free and easy ways; a street-wise orphan fighting for survival; a Goan dressmaker who entertains her employers with local gossip; and a servant who opens up the world for the children in his charge, until he oversteps his bounds and has to leave. As the younger

 generation searches for a new destiny, and the older fiercely holds on to the past, Uhuru Streetresonates with the moment of moving on, of leaving the place where we have roots, knowing that things will never be the same.

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The Tree Where Man Was Born- Peter Matthiessen

A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published. Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity’s origins in the rift valley, The Tree Where Man Was Born is a classic of journalistic observation.

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro- Ernest Hemingway

Stranded on safari in the African plains, Harry apologizes to his wife Helen for the stench of the gangrene eating its way up his leg. The two of them watch the carrion birds that have encircled the camp, waiting for his death. The couple bicker over how to handle his illness, how to pass the time, and whether to get a drink from the servant, Molo.

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Read Also: Guide to Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro

Golden Boy- Tara Sullivan

Thirteen-year-old Habo has always been different—light eyes, yellow hair and white skin. Not the good brown skin his family has and not the white skin of tourists. Habo is strange and alone. His father, unable to accept Habo, abandons the family; his mother can scarcely look at him. His brothers are cruel and the other children never invite him to play. Only his sister Asu loves him well. But even Asu can’t take the sting away when the family is forced from their small Tanzanian village, and Habo knows he is to blame. 

Seeking refuge in Mwanza, Habo and his family journey across the Serengeti. His aunt is glad to open her home until she sees Habo for the first time, and then she is only afraid. Suddenly, Habo has a new word for himself: Albino. But they hunt Albinos in Mwanza because Albino body parts are thought to bring good luck. And soon Habo is being hunted by a fearsome man with a machete. To survive, Habo must not only run, but find a way to love and accept himself.

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The Magic of Saida- M.G. Vassanji

Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him. 

Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery.

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Blue Sunflower Startle- Yasmin Ladha

In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents’ flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana (Give me back my father) and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films?grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear.

Hush, not a word.

Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather’s passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her return: the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved.

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Afterlives- Abdulrazak Gurnah

When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

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Gravel Heart- Abdulrazak Gurnah

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict–the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.

When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him–and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most astonishing achievement.

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Memory of Departure- Abdulrazak Gurnah

Set in an unnamed African country, Hassan Omar is a gifted young man, with a potentially bright future but a past marred by poverty. In the wake of a national uprising, and with a new government in place, though, he is denied a scholarship to a university abroad and deprived of the opportunity to study further. Instead, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.

In Nairobi, Hassan experiences the collision of past secrets and future hopes, and the compounding of fear and frustration, beauty and brutality. In his debut novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Abdurlazak Gurnah creates a fierce tale of undeniable power.

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In the Shadow of Man- Jane Goodall

World-renowned primatologist, conservationist, and humanitarian Dr. Jane Goodall’s account of her life among the wild chimpanzees of Gombe is one of the most enthralling stories of animal behavior ever written. 

Dr. Goodall’s adventure began when the famous anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that a long-term study of chimpanzees in the wild might shed light on the behavior of our closest living relatives. Accompanied by only her mother and her African assistants, she set up camp in the remote Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. 

For months the project seemed hopeless; out in the forest from dawn until dark, she had but fleeting glimpses of frightened animals. But gradually she won their trust and was able to record previously unknown behavior, such as the use—and even the making—of tools, until then believed to be an exclusive skill of man. As she came to know the chimps as individuals, she began to understand their complicated social hierarchy and observed many extraordinary behaviors, which have forever changed our understanding of the profound connection between humans and chimpanzees.

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Why It’s Important to Learn About Other Cultures

Exploring and understanding different cultures is a valuable aspect of personal growth and global awareness. Whether you are traveling to new places or a destination is not feasible, reading about other cultures can offer an introduction to a culture you’ll soon experience, or provide an enlightening alternative. There are three main reasons of why it’s important to learn about other cultures: 

1. Promoting Cultural Understanding: Reading about other cultures allows us to gain insights into their traditions, customs, values, and ways of life. By exploring diverse perspectives through literature or non-fiction works, we develop empathy and understanding for people from different backgrounds. It helps break down stereotypes and fosters appreciation for the complexity and richness of human experiences. 

2. Expanding Our Worldview: Through reading about other cultures, we expand our worldview beyond our immediate surroundings. Our own cultural lens often limits our understanding of the world; however, delving into literature from various regions lets us examine different historical events, social structures, political ideologies, and religious beliefs that shape societies across the globe. 

3. Enhancing Empathy: Understanding the experiences of others cultivates empathy within ourselves. Literature provides a medium through which we can step into another person’s shoes and see life through their eyes – be it a coming-of-age story set in Japan or a memoir detailing life in Africa. Such stories help us relate to individuals who may have vastly different lives from ours but share universal emotions like joy, pain, love, or loss.

And there we have it, my list of books to read before visiting the Tanzania. While there is no way I could list every book that I think you should read, we would all be reading for eternity (maybe that’s not a bad thing), but this list is a great introduction to Tanzanian culture, politics, and life through the eyes of writers and novelists from the country.

Are there any books I need to add to my list?  Let me know so I can scope them out!

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**All Book descriptions come from Goodreads

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