The Sukuma are a Bantu ethnic group from the southeastern African Great Lakes region.

They are the largest ethnic group in Tanzania and North Western Uganda, with an estimated 10 million members or 16 percent of the country's total population.

Some claim they were a Nyamwezi people who had moved northwestward to escape Mirambo's raids with the result that game and tsetse re-occupied the deserted area.

Unyanyembe, the most important kingdom of the Nyamwezi, centered on Tabora and obtained its meat supplies from the Sukuma.

As with all Nyamwezi, the Sukuma, being agriculturalists, ridged their fields to accommodate the fertile but rather arid region.

The Sukuma believe in spirit possession and have a holistic view the world as interconnected with all living things, natural and supernatural.

Because snakes and porcupines are a danger to people and crops in Sukumaland, medicine men and healers captured them to be used as entertainment.

[6] A study was conducted in the Busega District of Tanzania, an area comprising the Serengeti Game Reserve and Lake Victoria, to determine which faunal resources healers use to treat illnesses within the community.

The biggest threat to conservation in Tanzania is the legal and illegal trafficking of wild animals for pets.

[7] The Nyamwezi (also called Dakama, or people of the South[citation needed]) and Sukuma (also called people of the North) are two closely related ethnic groups[10] that live principally in the region to the south of Lake Victoria in west-central Tanzania.

Sukuma took over the Geita area of Mwanza Region during the colonial period, and they have expanded farther west since then.

These Sukuma movements have stemmed from political factors, such as colonial cattle-culling policies, and from local overcrowding and deteriorating soil conditions.