Thirty houses instead of thirty cases
The Village Museum is the National Museum of Tanzania’s open-air site in Dar es Salaam, at Kijitonyama near the junction of Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road and Mwenda Street. The museum service gives its founding year as 1967 and its purpose as collecting, researching and conserving the cultures of Tanzanian communities, and in particular their traditional house-building styles.
More than thirty traditional houses stand on the site. The museum groups them by form rather than only by ethnic group: tembe, the flat-roofed rectangular house of the drier interior; msonge, the round house with a conical roof; and banda. Alongside the buildings are the tools and household goods that went with them, plantings of indigenous vegetables and trees, craft stalls, and a restaurant serving food from different parts of the country.
What the museum says about its own subject
The framing on the museum’s own page is unusually candid and worth carrying round the site. It states that some of the house types built here are no longer used, while others are still lived in by rural communities but in improved or altered form — in its own words, with their original character removed. That is the real content of a visit. This is not a preserved village and nobody lives in it. It is a study collection of building traditions, some extinct, some changing, assembled in one place so that a comparison is possible in an afternoon that would otherwise take a month of driving.
Performances of music and dance by Tanzanian community groups are part of what the museum offers rather than an add-on. The wider subject is covered under traditional music and dance, and the craft side under craft workshops. For how the national collections are organised as a whole, see museum tours.
How it fits a day
It pairs naturally with the Museum and House of Culture in the city centre — objects and galleries there, buildings and open ground here — and the two together make the most useful single day in Dar for anyone about to travel into the country. Go here in the morning or late afternoon rather than in the middle of the day: the site is outdoors, it is flat, and there is very little shade between the houses.
Rain closes it down as a pleasure rather than as a fact. The Tanzania Meteorological Authority’s Masika season, from March to May, is the period most likely to interrupt a visit.
Practical notes
The museum service publishes its description of this site in Swahili only; there is no English page for it, which is worth knowing if you are checking details before you travel. Opening hours, closing days and the current fee schedule are not published online in a retrievable form. Confirm them with the museum service directly.
Common questions
Do people live in the houses?
No. It is a museum collection of building types, not an inhabited village. The museum is explicit that some of the forms shown are no longer built at all.
How long do you need?
An hour and a half to two hours walks the site properly. Longer if there is a performance on.
Is it the same thing as a cultural village tour?
No. A village tour visits a working community where people live and farm. This is a curated open-air museum in a city suburb. They answer different questions and both are worth doing.