Bringing Tanzania’s dinosaurs back to life

Tanzania is famous for the life that moves across its landscapes today: lions, elephants, giraffes, and great herds crossing the savannah.

But the country also holds traces of creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.

In the hills of southeastern Tanzania lies the Tendaguru Formation, one of Africa’s most important dinosaur fossil sites. Early twentieth-century excavations, led by Germans and involving hundreds of local workers, recovered more than 200 tons of fossil-bearing material from the area. The finds included the remains of Giraffatitan brancai, one of the largest dinosaurs ever to walk the continent. Much of the material was shipped to Germany, where Tendaguru’s dinosaurs have been studied and displayed for generations.

Yet in communities close to the site, many people know little about them. For Martha Moswery, a history teacher at Tandika Secondary School, this was more than a gap in the curriculum. It was a missing part of Tanzania’s story.

“They don’t know, not because they don’t care,” she says. “They just never had the chance to learn.”

Then a digital classroom arrived on wheels.

A door to another world

Tandika Secondary School has an ICT room. But many of its computers did not work, limiting what teachers could show their students. ”What they cannot see, they have to imagine,” Martha says.

When the DigiTruck first pulled up at the school, Martha stared. “I didn’t know what it was,” she recalls. “But I saw a line forming to get in. I realized it was more than just a truck.”

DigiTruck is a mobile classroom equipped with computers, internet access, and digital learning tools. By traveling between schools and communities, it brings training to people who might otherwise have little opportunity to use a computer.

Inside, trainers including Argentina Kalinga introduced learners to Word, Excel, and basic document formatting. For Martha, those simple lessons offered something much larger.

“They felt like a door opening onto another world,” she says. “I wanted to use those skills to uncover a story buried beneath our feet.”

Martha had first encountered the history of Tendaguru in college. The site contains fossils dating from the Late Jurassic period, roughly 150 million years ago. According to site curator Gustav Kambay, evidence indicates that more than 13 dinosaur species once lived there.

But Martha found that the story was rarely taught locally.

Some residents had seen foreign tourists visit and take photographs. Others knew little or nothing about the fossils. “I never learned about this at school,” one man said. A Kiswahili book about the Tendaguru dinosaurs had once been published, but it was already out of print.

Martha began to wonder whether her new skills could help keep the story alive.

From computer lesson to history lesson

With guidance from DigiTruck trainer Kelvin Mbing, Martha began experimenting with AI tools. She learned how to upload photographs and write prompts that could turn still images into something more vivid.

“Technology doesn’t tell stories for us,” Martha says. “It puts the ability to tell our stories back in our own hands.”

Using photographs and information about Tendaguru, she created a video that reconstructed the dinosaurs that once inhabited the region. Then she brought it into her classroom.

On screen, long-extinct animals appeared to move again. For students accustomed to learning without computers, the sight transformed an abstract place name into a living world.

“When the students saw those dinosaurs come alive, Tendaguru suddenly was no longer just a strange name to them,” Martha says. “They finally understood that the stories that once amazed the world come from our own land. These are our dinosaurs.”

Turning learners into storytellers

The video changed how some students understood their country and their place within its story.

“Suddenly I’ve realized that Tanzania has its own unique heritage,” one girl said.

Another saw the lesson continuing beyond the classroom: “Those who hear stories will become storytellers.”

When young people can find information and present it in their own language, they can help preserve historical memory and make local culture meaningful to a new generation.

“Knowing your culture is actually telling you who you are,” says Lilian Peter Masele, the DigiTruck project manager for Huawei Tanzania. “What made us to be Tanzanians? Why are we in Lindi?”

The Tanzania DigiTruck program was launched by Huawei and Vodacom Tanzania in 2024 to expand access to digital skills, particularly in underserved communities. By the end of 2025, it had trained 4,992 people, 52% of them women, across 23 schools.

Those numbers show the scale of the program. Martha’s project shows how far even an introductory lesson can travel. Digital tools helped her recover a neglected piece of local history, while her video gave a classroom of children a new understanding of the ground beneath their feet and of a story that belongs to them.