Dodoma's history runs far deeper than its 1974 promotion: 10,000-year-old rock paintings in the Irangi hills, a German railway that created the town in 1910, and mission stations where Gogo chiefs met the British. Three days tracing all of it.
Tanzania's only UNESCO-listed rock-art site: red-ochre hunter figures, elongated humans and eland painted on a granite overhang, dated from roughly 2,000 to over 10,000 years old. A 30-minute uphill walk from the Kolo car park.
The Antiquities post in Kolo village issues permits and assigns the compulsory guides for all 150-plus painted shelters in the Irangi hills. Its display room explains the Sandawe and later Bantu painting phases and Mary Leakey's 1930s surveys.
Quieter than Kolo: shelters above Pahi village hold white infill figures painted by later Bantu-speaking farmers directly over older red hunter art, plus giraffe and cattle scenes marking the arrival of herding in central Tanzania.
Kondoa's old trading street grew where the Arab-Swahili caravan route towards Lake Tanganyika met Irangi farming country; mud-brick shops, a 19th-century mosque and the German-era district office still line the main road.
The German Central Line reached Dodoma in 1910 and turned a Gogo watering point into a town. The stone station building, water tower and goods sheds are still in use; the Dar es Salaam–Kigoma train calls here twice a week.
The ceremonial square laid out after Nyerere's 1973-74 decision to move the capital inland. National Uhuru Torch races and Union Day parades assemble here, and plaques record the party vote that chose Dodoma over Dar es Salaam.
Chama Cha Mapinduzi moved its national headquarters up from Dar es Salaam in the 1980s, making Dodoma the party capital decades before ministries followed. The congress hall hosted the debates that ended one-party rule in 1992.
The Libyan-funded grand mosque, completed in 2010, is a monument to Tanzania's long diplomatic ties with Tripoli. Its four minarets are the tallest structures in the old town and dominate every rooftop view of central Dodoma.
The Church Missionary Society reached Mvumi in 1876 and built the region's first school and hospital here. The stone church, missionary graves and 1930s hospital wards record the encounter between British missionaries and Gogo chiefs.
Chief Mazengo led the Gogo through German rule, the Maji Maji years and the great famine, and lies buried at Mvumi. Elders at the chief's homestead still recount the cattle-tribute system German officers taxed and the British later reworked.
Nyerere's up-country State House at Chamwino, 35 km east, was where he retreated to write and where villagisation policy was argued out through the 1970s. The settlement around it was itself a planned Ujamaa village.
Colonial Dodoma was zoned in three: European Kilimani on the ridge, Indian Uhindini around Kuu Street's arcaded dukas, and African Majengo beyond the railway line. The 1920s shopfronts and the Ismaili jamatkhana still trace those borders.