Queen Elizabeth II visited Tanzania in 1979.
It was the Queen’s first and apparently also, her last time in the country.
In the rather aged picture, she is seen inspecting the guard of honor at the Terminal One of Dar-es-Salaam International Airport (DIA).
From the old photo taken in the 1979 special guard of honor event for the Queen, some Tanzanian military personnel could be identified.
Among them was Brigadier Abdallah Twalipo and Major Sekwao.
All the same, the late Queen Elizabeth II essentially dropped into Tanzania only once and that was in 1979.
She was received here by her host, the country’s first head of state, President, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.
She was en-route here on her way back to England from Zambia.
Queen Elizabeth II went to Lusaka in 1979 to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
That was the fifth Meeting of the Heads of Government of the Commonwealth of Nations taking place in Lusaka and was attended by 39 countries.
Elizabeth II as it happens was the Queen of Tanganyika (Present Day Tanzania) from 1961 to 1962.
That was when Tanzania, then called Tanganyika was both an independent sovereign state and also constitutional monarchy.
Queen Elizabeth II was also the monarch of other sovereign states, including the United Kingdom.
However her constitutional roles in Tanzania were mostly delegated to the Governor-General of the then Tanganyika.
Queen Elizabeth II became monarch while in Kenya, On February 6, 1952.
A visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Kenya in 1952 occurred during their 6-month Commonwealth Tour; the tour ended a few days after King George VI’s death.
The then-Princess Elizabeth was staying at Treetops Hotel in Kenya with her husband Prince Philip.
During their itinerary in Kenya, Princess Elizabeth was told by her husband that her father King George VI had passed away in his sleep from a coronary thrombosis.
At the time, Elizabeth was just 25 years old and cancelled the rest of her royal tour so she could return home as soon as possible.
The Queen and Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, visited Uganda in 2007 to open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kampala.
Queen Elizabeth II would return to Kenya in 1983 during the reign of President Daniel Arap Moi.
Apparently Elizabeth, who has made more than 120 trips abroad as British Monarch, never returned to Tanzania after the 1979 commonwealth trip.
The year before her trip, that is in 1978 her son, and heir to the throne, Prince Charles visited Tanzania.
Prince Charles went as far as Njombe, the Southern Highlands Region, which by then was still part of Iringa Region. He was reportedly inspecting some projects.
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