|
|
|
Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915
Thaddeus Sunseri
| IN 1874, WHEN the British officer Frederic Elton visited the southeast coast of Tanzania around the Rufiji delta, he noted how important the region's forests were to local commerce. Rufiji people obtained a wide variety of forest products, including wax, rubber, ivory, mangroves, and "immense quantities" of copal to trade with Indians and Arabs who settled on the coast. Elton traveled north and south of the delta and crisscrossed the land in between, and thus provided a view of the region ten years before German colonial rule began. Observing how local people guarded access to copal diggings and other forest tracts jealously, Elton wrote "the natives are only too ready to unite against the slightest encroachment on their monopoly."1 In one instance while camped along the Rufiji, Elton's party was surrounded by "about 800 men, more than half of whom were armed with guns, the rest carrying spears and bows." The leader made it clear that they were there to guard local trade against interlopers and "they heard there was to be a fight, and they would join the fight." Thirty years later the German colonial administration made the Rufiji delta and a one hundred mile stretch of coastal mangroves into a forest reserve, severely circumscribing African rights of access. With the advent of German rule, state-regulated forestry had arrived in Tanzania for the first time. In 1905, peoples of the Rufiji basin, wearing the same blue kaniki cloth around their hips as those whom Elton encountered, attacked representatives of German authority, including many involved in the declaration of forest reserves, in what is known as the Maji Maji rebellion.2 |
1
|
|
The Maji Maji rebellion (1905–1907) has been considered a pivotal event in the history of early colonial Tanzania and Africa. According to the nationalist historiography that was written in the first decade of Tanzanian independence after 1961, Maji Maji was the first manifestation of a united, interethnic opposition to colonial rule in Africa.3 In particular, the rebellion has been portrayed as a sudden reaction to a policy of forced labor on cotton plantations that the German administration implemented shortly after the turn of the century. Named after a water medicine (maji) that purportedly gave African fighters immunity to the bullets of German colonizers, the dissemination of the maji ideology spread a message of common opposition and resistance to symbols of German rule. Though the rebellion failed to oust Germans from East Africa, it led the colonial administration to implement a series of reforms after the war that some historians have called the "age of improvement."4 It furthermore created a proto-nationalist tradition that could be tapped into during the 1950s decade of independence from the British colonial rulers who supplanted Germany during World War I. As one modern study put it, the rebellion "provided the beginnings of a tradition upon which national unity would one day be built in Tanzania."5 |
2
|
|
The nationalist historiography of Maji Maji went unchallenged for a generation.6 The weight of the nationalist discourse and its permeation of textbooks and surveys of African history made it into a historical tradition that has not been friendly to more nuanced interpretations of early Tanzanian colonial history. The story of a purposeful, ideologically oriented anti-colonial rebellion that was "a response of Africans to the brutal conditions under which they were forced to work" has not allowed room for analyses of long-term continuities in African patterns of warfare that predated German rule, of gendered interpretations of the rebellion, or of fuller investigations of African resource use before and after the rebellion. For example, one study notes that land was not an African grievance on the eve of the Maji Maji war, because Germans guaranteed Africans ample access to land.7 However, this assertion errs by severing land as an economic resource from its surrounding environment, something that African peasants and pastoralists would not have done. When considered as part of a larger landscape that includes mountains, forests, streams, shrines, animal habitats, and myriad resources and threats, land takes on a different meaning, and so does the rebellion. |
. . . |
There are about 10898 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
