This site has been set up to share scanned copies of the Twende Pamoja newspaper, published in Njombe, Tanzania in 1956 and 1957. The paper provides a unique glimpse back in time, a snapshot of what was important to the people of a small town in rural Tanzania. "Twende Pamoja" means "let's go together" in Swahili, and remains the Njombe District Council's motto to this day.The paper was published monthly during this time, with each issue having eight pages. This site has 23 issues of the paper, covering the period from February 1956 to December 1957. If more copies of the paper can be traced, they will be added to this site.
Each issue is available as a single post under the heading of its month of publication, containing all 8 pages in order. Each page is presented as an image file. Clicking on an image will open an enlarged version of the page.
More information about the paper and its history can be found here.
Analysis and commentary on the paper can be found here. If anyone makes use of these papers, we would be grateful if you could tell us about it, so that we can add a note or link to your work here. Alternatively, if you find something of interest, you can use the comments section at the bottom of each post to share what you have found.
Issues of the paper can be found here for 1956 and here for 1957, or using the links in the sidebar on the right.
This site has been created by Daraja, an NGO based in Njombe working on local governance and accountability. Our work includes running a local newspaper covering Njombe region - Kwanza Jamii Njombe - hence our interest in local history. Having found these papers, we felt it was better to make them easily accessible to anyone - hence this site.
We are grateful to the Library of the University of Dar es Salaam for making it possible for us to make copies of this newspaper.
