By: 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. | 3 |
| This article examines the Maji Maji rebellion through the lens of environmental history. In particular I am interested in the intersection between German forest and wildlife policies and African resource use in the coastal districts where the rebellion broke out in the middle of 1905. In the decade before the rebellion, German officials enacted policies that dramatically circumscribed African access to forests and forest products that rural people used in their commercial networks, subsistence economies, and cultural life. Colonialists furthermore mandated hunting proscriptions that impaired the ability of African peasants to protect their fields from crop pests, and that brought the decades-old ivory trade to an end. In the year before the rebellion, Germans began a forest-reserve policy that severed the peasant economy from forests, making them virtually off limits to African use, often requiring people to relocate villages and farms and to abandon fruit trees, ancestral shrines, and hunting frontiers. The Maji Maji rebellion looks different when considered in the context of colonial environmental controls. | 4 |
| Forest history furthermore challenges both the nationalist view of the post-rebellion period as an era of improvement and recent interpretations of imperial environmentalism that view forest conservation as an unequivocal benefit bestowed on colonized peoples.8 In the course of putting down the rebellion, Germans and Tanzanian peasants were drawn deeper into the forests, which acted both as places of refuge and battle sites. Once the war was over, patterns of fighting and refuge provided the colonial government with a blueprint for extended forest controls. These post-Maji Maji forest controls channeled rural dwellers to colonial economic pursuits and provided a template for the conservation and population-control policies of subsequent governments in Tanzania. Far from simply conserving the forest landscape for the benefit of the commonweal, as German colonial foresters asserted, forest reserves provided a mechanism for the state to control people, especially those who did not easily submit to its economic ventures. | 5 |
| African Forest Use in Early Colonial Tanzania | |
| ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after effective German control in East Africa began, the colonial state enacted laws circumscribing peasant access to forests and use of their products. (See Figure 1.) German rule in East Africa witnessed a steady expansion of state control over forest use, beginning with the DOAG (German East Africa) concession company’s efforts to usurp the coastal trade in forest products after 1885. The nascent colonial state introduced forest laws in 1893, leading to the creation of forest reserves shortly after the turn of the century. Then, after 1907, the number of reserves burgeoned. Indeed, just three years after the German East Africa Corporation began to occupy all the main coastal trading ports, including those surrounding the Rufiji delta, Africans of the mainland rose up in what has been dubbed the Abushiri rebellion.9 While most scholarly attention has concentrated on the northern coast, during this rebellion the entire Rufiji delta was occupied by Yao ivory and rubber traders whose allies most likely included the armed Rufiji men whom Elton encountered just fifteen years earlier.10 |
| That the colonial control of forests would elicit resistance should not be surprising given the multifaceted uses, cultural and economic, that forests held for southeastern Tanzanians. The best examples come from Uzaramo, just north of the Rufiji River, and Ungindo on the southern periphery of the Rufiji-Matumbi forest complex.11 Among the Zaramo and related peoples, the spirits of the deceased resided in forests as mwenembago, which the German missionary Martin Klamroth translated as Waldherr—”master of the forest.” Ancestral spirits selected individuals as mediums by possessing them in the forests. One informant named the mvule (the East African teak) and mhogwe trees as the locales where the initial spirit possession took place: The person so chosen returned to the living after the “forest mother” called him or her back. Klamroth’s informant identified seven principal “holy trees” as important to spirit possession, including mbuyu (the baobab) and mpongwe. The forests were thus important locales for spiritual and physical healing, since mediums who derived their authority and power from the forests were called upon to remedy a variety of sicknesses and social ills. Forests were also feared places, the abodes of malevolent spirits such as the kinyamkela, who resided in the hollows of large trees owned by ancestral spirits. Local norms strongly prohibited the felling of such trees, otherwise, unwelcome spirits might come and reside in one’s house. Spirit mediums and their adherents built “spirit huts” near trees that were necessary to propitiate malevolent spirits. Common people honored the graves of their ancestors with wooden figurines and by constructing replicas of spirit huts in their fields. This phenomenon speaks to the role of forest spirits as guardians of fields and general social health. Forests were furthermore sites of initiation and circumcision rituals that connected youth with their ancestors. Medicine used in circumcision rituals stemmed from the mkumbi tree, which was also the word for circumcision itself. Klamroth, a principal adviser to the German colonial administration and member of the Governor’s Council, understood this cultural role of the forests, which is important in considering the post-Maji Maji period when the administration asserted control of the forests aggressively, sometimes targeting forests that had a particular spiritual meaning. Before the rebellion, in contrast, German authorities were more inclined to allow Africans to maintain the graves of the deceased in forests that they declared as reserves.12 | 7 |
| A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott’s study of the Ngindo also speaks to the immense economic and cultural importance of the forests to southeastern Tanzanians.13 There is evidence that the Ngindo emerged as a people in the mid-nineteenth century in part as forest refugees fleeing warfare. Referring to the Ngindo as being “at home in the forest,” Crosse-Upcott demonstrated how important the interconnected agrarian and forest environments were to Ngindo survival. The forest was an important source of gathered food in times of famine, and important for a cash economy as the location of wild rubber, honey, wax, ivory, and game.14 Ngindo patterns of shifting agriculture paralleled their use of the forests, with clans holding de facto ownership of trees through a “theory of recognized forest zones.”15 Crosse-Upcott’s work demonstrated that the creation of boundaries between forests and agrarian lands was an artificial colonial construction that the Ngindo continuously violated in spite of forest laws. Ngindo homesteads themselves were located in close proximity to trees, and there was a tendency for “owned” trees “to stream behind the huts in a gradual movement of shifting cultivation, like the tail of a meteor.”16 Such patterns reflected movement over generations, showing the guardianship that individual clans held over forests. There was thus a “maximum diffusion” of Ngindo forest use, because concentrated use of trees (or of any resource) increased insecurity. The Ngindo exhibited a clear conservation ethic by refraining from chopping green wood for fuel and by thinning trees needed for construction purposes rather than cutting wide swaths. | 8 |
| Throughout the Rufiji-Kilwa region, specific forests had widespread reputations as centers of religious activity. Most important in the Rufiji region appears to have been Kipambawe kwa Kungulio, located on the upper Rufiji River near Mpanga, which Germans called the Pangani Falls. Mpanga itself was the base of a mganga spirit medium named Mkumbiro (or Mzee Mkando), who dispensed agricultural and rain medicines to people who often traveled for days for this purpose. German authorities believed that this was the spiritual center of the Maji Maji rebellion.17 Furthermore, the hot spring located at Utete, south of the river midway between Mpanga and the coast, was also a likely site of medicine dispensation. A decade before Maji Maji, the spring was a site where trials by ordeal were administered.18 Both the Mpanga and Utete hot springs were located in forests that the state would control as reserves. | 9 |
| Besides regional religious centers that people resorted to in times of crisis such as drought, locust plagues, and famine, most areas had local centers where people could go for medicines to protect their fields. Such was the case at Mtondo, a few hours walking distance south of the Rufiji district capital of Mohoro, which, in late 1905, witnessed a great deal of pilgrimage activity.19 People from the region of the Rufiji delta traveled to Mtondo to receive medicines to protect their fields from wild pigs and birds—wild pigs had become especially destructive by 1905.20 The description given by a local district secretary, Otto Stollowsky, suggests that the people were acting according to the kinyamkela rituals by placing the medicines in “a small building” near their fields.21 | 10 |
| Apart from their deep spiritual significance, forests and their products played—and continue to play—a central role in the daily lives of southeast Tanzanians. Local household and commercial industries that predated the colonial period were oriented to the forest. Charcoal production, for which people favored the mtondo tree, was essential for household cooking and local industries.22 While the charcoal demand in 1900 was doubtless not what it is today, specialists needed charcoal for iron smithing, and for salt, sugar, and coconut oil production.23 About six logs were needed to boil a drum of cane juice for five hours to produce about one hundred pounds of jaggery (brown sugar), an important regional trade product. Salt production that relied on coastal mangroves as fuel was a commercial activity that coastal dwellers and Matumbi people of Kitope (Naminangu) forest occasionally fought over in the early 1890s.24 | 11 |
| Rufiji people used wood for many other local pursuits, such as building watchtowers in rice fields to protect crops from birds, baboons, and pigs. North of the river was a vast floodplain that seasonally joined other rivers to create a wet-rice agriculture that required people to live in stilt huts and get about by canoe during the rainy seasons. One hut required some fifteen hundred poles, especially boriti from mangroves for hut frames and roofing beams.25 A variety of household utensils and tools were made from wood, such as clapper systems to scare birds, and mortars and pestles for pounding grain. Along the Rufiji River a canoe-building industry was widespread. Indeed, far from seeing the river as an impermeable barrier, some local residents lived in villages on one side of the river and farmed on the other, relying on mitumbwi dugouts to traverse the river daily. Hans Paasche, a German officer, came across a canoe being constructed some ten kilometers south of the Rufiji River in the high forest of the Kichi hills.26 Some people lived on river islands in the delta and farther upriver as well. Farming and forest activities were symbiotic, and villagers lived close to forests to take advantage of their resources. | 12 |
| The forests were essential to commercial activity before the German arrival in the 1880s, as Elton and other visitors observed. The mangrove wood industry was centuries old.27 Rufiji and coastal peoples cut trees and transported them to wood stations awaiting the arrival of ocean-going dhows that carried the timber to Zanzibar or Arabia. Migrants to the delta carved rice and cassava fields out of delta islands while supplying mangrove trees to the many cutting stations that dotted the arms of the Rufiji. Coastal dwellers also constructed ngalawa outrigger canoes and mtepe boats for fishing and coastal transport, and built and repaired dhows and larger jahazi at construction stations located up and down the coast. The commercial wood industry was an important means for local people to obtain commodities like muskets and cloth, or even a cash income that they held in reserve to purchase grain in times of scarcity.28 Aside from timber itself, products of the forest such as wild rubber, copal, wax, and honey found steady markets on the coast, attracting Indian trading diasporas to the region. European and Indian traders were particularly keen to obtain copal, ivory, and rubber in the period from about 1880 to 1914, and many Rufiji people earned cash incomes in this way.29 | 13 |
| Ivory also must be added to the list of commercial forests products. Ivory was the single most valuable trade commodity along the coast at the time of the German arrival in the 1880s, when the DOAG struggled to compete with established Indian traders for this commodity. Until 1894, ivory accounted for half the value of all exports from the colony.30 Many chiefs of rural Tanzania had emerged as “big men” in the nineteenth century as elephant hunters who monopolized the ivory trade to the coast and created patronage networks in rural society by distributing cotton cloth and other imported goods. In southern Uzaramo, just north of the Rufiji, a generations-old tradition of elephant hunting for trade to the coast had preceded German rule, and had been a path to power of many local mapazi chiefs.31 Such men had widespread reputations in the Rufiji-Kilwa region during the period of early colonial rule. |
| Forest Policy in Southeast Tanzania, 1890–1905 | |
| A HINT OF the intersection between colonial forest policy and the Maji Maji rebellion comes from the northern border of Kilwa district in southeastern Tanzania. On 5 September 1904, a colonial land commission that included a reviled German cotton planter and local Arab elites met at the coastal trading town of Samanga to declare the entirety of coastal mangroves as Crown Land, forbidding wood cutting in the forests without explicit government permission.32 The commission acted according to the 1895 Crown Land ordinance and a revised Forest Protection Ordinance (actually enacted the following week on 9 September 1904) that empowered the colonial state to create forest reserves.33 In the next few months, land commissions met elsewhere along the Tanzanian coast to inform local people of the prohibitions against mangrove cutting. On 8 September 1904, a government commission furthermore demarcated as a forest reserve one thousand hectares of high forest at Naminangu about ten kilometers inland, demonstrating to the villagers present that colonial forest controls would not be confined to the coast.34 The Naminangu reserve was taken over as “unoccupied Crown Land” and declared to be devoid of settlements and free of any African claims to its resources. The people present were instructed that henceforth the forest parcel would be under the protection of the district office and that the colonial government reserved the right to cut wood and obtain any forest product from the parcel. Transgressions of the ordinance would be punished with a one thousand rupee fine or three months labor in chains. A year after it was declared as a forest reserve, Naminangu became the site of several battles of the Maji Maji rebellion, and a place of refuge for local villagers during wartime.35 | 15 |
| The culmination of a decade-long effort to bring forests under state control, the forest reserve policy in German East Africa sought to allow the colonial state to benefit from the fiscal exploitation of forests through scientific management.36 German scientific forestry had been developed in the eighteenth century, at a time when officials worried that their forests were being fast depleted, threatening the industrial development of German states.37 State control of forests aimed to regulate forest use by creating long-term cycles of tree planting and harvesting that would allow for a sustainable forest management. The ideal forest, according to this model, would be one of uniform tree species and size that could be quantified and harvested in set rotations to meet fiscal and industrial needs. By the end of the nineteenth century, conservationism also played a role in German scientific forestry. Scientists recognized the importance of forests for climate and watersheds, and some considered biodiversity itself to be an important facet of forest policy. In German East Africa, Governor Adolf von Götzen articulated these concerns when he argued that forest reserves were necessary to maintain water sources in order to create an environment conducive to white settlement.38 Nevertheless, the environmentalist argument always took a back seat to fiscal concerns. Toward this end the colonial state sought to supplant African forest use with its own. Forest policy most immediately aimed to curtail African wood cutting in designated forests and to prohibit bush fallowing (which Germans called “wild burning”), whereby peasants annually burned grasslands and forests to open up new lands for agriculture and to control weeds and vermin. Indeed, Germans considered Africans to be a clear threat to forests because of their kulturfeindliche Gepflogenheiten—”practices antithetical to culture” —a double entendre that implied that peasant land and resource use endangered cultivation of trees and land and also deterred a civilizing mission that came with German colonialism. African land and forest use was, in the colonial mind, responsible for the scarcity of forests in the colony and for a lack of water and moisture. Colonialists contrasted German Kulturwälder—cultivated or civilized forests—with African Urwälder—jungles or “aboriginal” forests—and German Kulturmenschen—civilized people—with African Naturkinder—children of nature.39 German foresters argued that the estimated 1 percent forest cover in Tanzania was a result of regressive African agriculture. In contrast, Germany’s tree cover had increased to 26 percent in the nineteenth century as a result of scientific forest management.40 | 16 |
| Even with modest state control in much of the colony, forest policy hemmed in rural dwellers of the Rufiji-Kilwa region markedly during the decade before the Maji Maji rebellion. From the early 1890s, the colonial administration sent forest experts to the Rufiji to prepare it for scientific forestry. Most immediately, this meant curtailing African use of mangroves and other trees that had a fiscal value while recruiting German concession companies to market mangrove timber and bark.41 In 1894, the government proscribed the cutting of “strong, straight boritis (mangroves)” as firewood in the Rufiji forests.42 By 1897, the district officer recommended that the cutting fee for wood in the delta be raised 60 percent to 100 percent and that Africans be allowed to collect only fallen wood for their household construction needs.43 Local district authorities also sought to curtail African settlements in the delta mangrove forests to deter further cutting. In 1898, the colonial government made the Rufiji delta into “a regulated state forest economy on the European model,” and two years later Rufiji became the only administrative district in the colony to originate as a state forest, allowing for greater enforcement of forest ordinances.44 The creation of the political district was a sign of creeping state control of this otherwise inaccessible region. Altogether some sixteen thousand hectares of mangrove stands in the Rufiji delta were under firm state control by 1900, and Rufiji was in effect designated as a wood reserve for the capital city of Dar es Salaam.45 During this time, the governor leased forest stands to German businessmen interested in marketing mangrove logs to Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, and South Africa, and enlisted German chemical firms as buyers of mangrove bark for leather dye.46 While wood cutting was not totally prohibited to Africans, limits were set on quantities of fuel and construction wood, and the state designated where cutting could take place. In the view of Governor Götzen, “the hitherto irregular, irrational and insufficiently supervised wood cutting needs to be made orderly, planned and rational.”47 After 1904, when the state’s creation of forest reserves made whole parcels virtually off-limits to African use, villagers could have concluded only that an essential part of their economic and cultural existence was being taken away. | 17 |
| One further forest declaration on the eve of Maji Maji warrants attention, that of the Liwale forest reserve in the southwest corner of Kilwa district, the home of the Ngindo people. Liwale town was the site of a government rubber plantation that struggled to make profits in a region well known for its wild rubber trade. In 1904, the government adjoined the rubber plantation to a tract of forest and bush land, which in April 1905 was demarcated as Liwale forest reserve.48 Located on a 7,500 hectare expanse north of Liwale town, the forest reserve was a sudden and dramatic encroachment that carried with it all the prohibitions on forest use that applied to other reserves. This meant that forest economies, including the trade in wild rubber, copal, wax, ivory, and timber, were effectively circumscribed. Historians have for some time suspected that the outbreak of Maji Maji in this region was connected to the decline of the rubber trade, but have failed to tie that thesis to the curtailment of forest access that had wider social, economic, and cultural ramifications.49 While many forests were left outside of effective state control, forest and hunting regulations implemented by 1905 meant that the era of free forest access was over, even in areas where reserves were yet to be declared. | 18 |
| Apart from forest controls, colonial regulations sharply circumscribed elephant hunting and ivory procurement at the turn of the century. It is difficult to tease out the role of ivory in the economy of the Rufiji and its environs during the German period since most of the sources describe the northern coast. Ivory exports from mainland Tanzania declined sharply with the assumption of formal German rule in 1891, as the following table shows: |
| While historian John Iliffe believes that this decline occurred because elephants were becoming hunted out in Tanzania by the end of the nineteenth century, evidence points to German conservationist policies as an important factor in the decline in the ivory trade.50 In 1898, the administration of Eduard von Liebert enacted an ordinance that required elephant hunters to purchase a five hundred rupee hunting license and pay an additional one hundred rupees, or one tusk, for every elephant bagged.51 This ordinance is perhaps responsible for the sudden drop in ivory exports over the next few years from a value of about 1.2 million marks in 1898 to about a third of that by 1905. While the amount of ivory from the south is not clear in these figures, it is clear that the Rufiji-Kilwa region had at one time been a major conduit for the export of elephant and hippo ivory to the coast.52 Hans Paasche noted that during Maji Maji Rufiji villagers still obtained hippo teeth to sell.53 The forests of the region certainly at one time teemed with elephants, and there is also no doubt that elephants remained in the coastal regions at the turn of the century and recovered rapidly once the state curtailed hunting. Paasche came across five elephants near Mohoro town just south of the delta in 1905.54 In 1913, Rufiji planters complained of elephant devastations of their estates and African fields, as did Rufiji villagers shortly after World War I and throughout the British colonial period.55 The 1898 hunting ordinance apparently led to a dramatic exodus of elephant hunters from coastal districts seeking to avoid colonial controls, and that exodus exposed villagers’ fields to elephant incursions.56 When the colonial state began its rapid declaration of forest reserves after 1904, it created islands of refuge for elephants within the agrarian economy where villagers were prohibited from freely hunting crop predators. In 1902, Governor Götzen reported that fauna in the hunting reserve created on the upper Rufiji in 1896 had increased significantly. Ten years later German planters of the region suggested that the reserve be abolished owing to elephant incursions.57 Colonialism curtailed the profits of ivory hunting, usurped elephant hunters of the influence they once had, and exacerbated the destruction caused by elephants and other crop predators by protecting them from villagers. | 20 |
| Maji Maji and the Forests | |
| MAJI MAJI in Rufiji region was a struggle for access to the forests and their resources. The opening battles of the war have a close connection to the forest reserves. R. M. Bell’s account of Maji Maji around Liwale is telling. The “moving spirit” of the rebellion around Liwale was an elephant hunter named Abdullah Mapanda, whose village of Kitandangangora lay close to the Liwale forest reserve, thus establishing a direct connection between state control of forest resources and local grievances.58 By mid August 1905, a rebel force that included Mapanda converged on the Liwale military station under a sergeant named Faupel, and attacked the Liwale rubber plantation administered by a German named Aimer. Both men sat on the land commission that had created the Liwale forest reserve four months earlier. Two sons of Jumbe Rihambi (Lihambe), who also sat on the land commission, willingly or not, eventually killed Aimer on his rubber plantation as he sought to escape from Liwale.59 Faupel was killed after a rebel siege of the Liwale fort. The rubber plantation itself was all but destroyed. Before the rebellion the plantation had possessed 49,000 rubber trees on 164 hectares. By December 1906, there were 2,000 trees left on 12 hectares. | 21 |
| The other major opening episode of Maji Maji occurred at Samanga town on the coast, about twenty kilometers south of the Rufiji delta. On 31 July, a German settler named Steinhagen, who sat on the commissions that established the mangrove and Naminangu reserves, sent a letter to Mohoro requesting aid against Matumbi rebels who were besieging his cotton plantation.60 Rebels also destroyed property of influential Arab planters and Indian traders at Samanga and its environs, and threatened the area for about two weeks.61 Many members of the Kilwa and Samanga land commissions that established the mangrove and Naminangu forest reserves were targets of rebel attacks, as were scores of other influential people. While we cannot know the reasons rebels targeted these individuals and their property, this new evidence points to colonial control of the forests as one of the motivating factors. | 22 |
| Members of the German commission sent to investigate causes of the rebellion believed that forest controls were a major grievance leading people to rebel. The Dar es Salaam District Officer Gustav Boeder thought that the forest ordinances were a heavy burden, especially the requirement to buy an expensive permit to cut wood intended for sale. Africans complained of difficulties in cutting and procuring wood, and Boeder concluded that the ordinances were part of the “general dissatisfaction of the natives with the existing conditions” at the time of the rebellion.62 One member of the Maji Maji commission, a commercial beer brewer named Schultz, believed that the end of free access to the mangrove forests of the coast caused great discontent and led some people to rebel.63 The wood business was no longer profitable because fees were higher than in times past, and much time was lost obtaining permits, especially for those who lived far from forest stations. As a result, dhow construction on the south coast had virtually ceased, and in Dar es Salaam housing construction was sharply curtailed since rural dwellers no longer could market wood in the city without burdensome oversight. Schultz, whose beer brewery was the biggest industry in the colony at the time and a major consumer of wood, asserted that all industries were adversely affected by the scarcity of fuel wood in light of forest ordinances: “I have no question that the natives, since olden days accustomed to the free use of the mangrove forests, have a strong ground for discontent owing to the rigorous closing of the mangroves” as well as inland forest reserves. In Lindi district in the far south as well it was reported that the closing of the mangrove forests and the creation of inland forest reserves coupled with wood cutting fees “endangered the economic existence of definite circles of natives and fed a general discontent.”64 | 23 |
| In the case of Abdullah Mapanda of Liwale, leadership of the rebellion came in part from elephant hunters who had lost their prestige owing to the collapse of the ivory trade and their inability to protect rural society from crop predators as a result of hunting ordinances.65 The most prominent Zaramo chief to participate in Maji Maji, Kibasira, was the last among a line of mapazi chiefs whose power stemmed from elephant hunting. The forests near Kibasira’s village of Kissangire had been targeted as a reserve by 1904, and the nearby game reserve of the upper Rufiji (the future Selous reserve) had been virtually closed to African hunting by the turn of the century.66 Hans Paasche, sent to fight rebels along the Rufiji River, also was confronted by a rebel group led by a renowned hunter, whom Paasche himself killed. While frequently mentioned individually in accounts of the rebellion, hunters have not been integrated into analyses of the rebellion’s outbreak. The colonial administration apparently took the role of hunters seriously by overturning some limitations on ivory trading in November 1905, a few months after the rebellion broke out. At that time, Governor Götzen directed local district officials to treat all ivory brought for sale by Africans as “found,” even if it might have been obtained by hunting, which allowed the seller to keep the proceeds from both tusks. As Götzen’s successor, Albrecht von Rechenberg, pointed out, this amelioration was more generous than the African “ground tusk” custom of relinquishing one tusk as tribute to local chiefs. One report claimed that the ameliorated rule led to a revival of ivory caravans; one arrived in Lindi in early 1907 with forty-six tusks, some freshly hunted.67 The relaxation of ivory fees perhaps was responsible for a jump in ivory exports from a value of 443,000 marks in 1906 to 663,000 marks in 1907, and steady growth over the next few years.68 Nevertheless, in response to criticism of the ameliorated policy, Rechenberg directed local authorities to treat tusks as a product of the hunt unless sellers could prove they had been found. | 24 |
| The evidence of connections between German conservationism and social rebellion demonstrates that the declaration of forest reserves and the introduction of hunting laws were not simply innocuous facets of German colonialism. Forest laws and reserves hurt rural dwellers, and led many to resist representatives of colonial forest commissions. Germans belatedly realized the damage that the rebellion inflicted on their colonial venture. Maji Maji was a black eye on German colonialism, and forced the colonial state to back off some of the policies that officials believed fed discontent. For example, the colonial administration dropped its objective of eliminating African field burning and bush fallowing, mainstays of forest policy in the 1890s. However, Germans did not back away from forest reserve declarations once the war was over. On the contrary, the end of the war ushered in a rapid creation of forest reserves. To explain this we need to examine how forests intersected with settlement patterns during the war. |
| Forests and Refugees in the Rufiji Basin | |
| THE FORESTS of Rufiji-Kilwa districts had been used at least since the mid-nineteenth century as havens for people in times of conflict.69 As a highway into the southwestern interior, or, conversely, from the interior to the coast, the Rufiji River’s navigability by dugout canoe exposed local villagers to often unwanted outside forces, including slave raiders and grain plunderers. The insecurity caused by this exposure led Rufiji dwellers to depend on the forests as hideouts, which often meant long-term occupancy. This was clearly the case in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when Mbunga (also called Mahenge) people of the upper tributaries of the Rufiji raided downriver periodically both to plunder grain and to capture people as dependent laborers to be taken back into the interior.70 William Beardall learned of these Mbunga raids during his trip up the river in 1880 and wrote of how Rufiji people lived on river islands surrounded by reeds that they used to hide and store grain. While some regional chiefs dealt with Mbunga raids by establishing relationships of tribute with them, others, such as the villagers of Kigumi, situated themselves in “a patch of thick jungle,” well stockaded, that offered a haven for diverse peoples of the river basin.71 | 26 |
| Fifteen years after Beardall’s journey, the German explorer Z. S. Fromm made a similar trip up the Rufiji.72 At that time, the effects of a generation of Mbunga raids were more noticeable, as Fromm described an environment of greater insecurity. Whereas Beardall noted that most people of the central Rufiji plain lived in well-populated villages along the river, Fromm described how the fear of kidnaping and plundering of grain led many people to completely evacuate their villages, move into the forests or bush, or build huts in less visible locales among the reeds. Fromm wrote that agriculture had become extremely difficult owing to the Mbunga danger, and many people had completely abandoned fields in a region that was exceptionally fertile. Well-established villages that also served as trading centers for caravans, such as Kologelo and Mloka, had by then been abandoned. A few years later the situation showed signs of reversing as German conquest of the interior and the establishment of military posts at Ulanga and Kisaki brought the Mbunga under temporary control.73 | 27 |
| Paasche’s account of how Rufiji peoples used the river and the forests during the Maji Maji war is the most thorough. Paasche observed how Rufiji villagers made use of the forests as sanctuaries for the duration of the conflict. Indeed, one of Paasche’s primary goals in fighting the war was to destroy all signs of forest habitation, since he believed that huts in the forest were proof of complicity in the rebellion. During the war, Rufiji people simply were repeating a pattern of using the forests for refuge learned during the late-nineteenth-century conflicts. A couple of weeks after Paasche’s arrival in early August 1905, he noticed “dispersed settlements in the forests” with cassava and beans planted nearby.74 It seems unlikely that this was evidence of a rebellion that was only one month old at the time. More likely it was a semi-permanent forest settlement that was a reaction to fifteen years of German rule and the burdens that came with it, including corvee labor, taxation, and hunting and forest controls. Loyalist spies learned from local people that women and children were hidden in the forests of the Kichi mountains just south of the Rufiji River.75 The decision of Rufiji people to find refuge in the forests was validated by German actions in burning and plundering all forest villages they came across as rebel hideouts. Once the war was over, peasants, particularly women, continued to seek refuge in forests to avoid colonial development policies, especially a concerted drive to get householders to plant cotton or work on German plantations. Germans came to identify forest habitation as a rebellious act at worst, and an obstacle to colonial development at best. | 28 |
| German perceptions by the end of Maji Maji were that forests and people must be brought under the control of the colonial state in order for development to take place. While the goal of protecting forests was articulated frequently in published articles and colonial correspondence, not as pronounced was the connection between forest control and social control. Germans believed that only by controlling the forests would it be possible to relocate people in a manner that facilitated agricultural development. This relationship between forest control and social control was repeated under British rule in Tanganyika following World War I, and became an ongoing legacy of colonial rule that continues to this day in independent Tanzania. |
| Controlling Forests and People | |
| THE ACTIONS and movements of southeast Tanzanians during the war provided Germans with a template for social control that intersected with forest policy following the war. Between 1907 and 1914, the administration demarcated four additional reserves in Kilwa district. In Rufiji district the state extended preexisting reserves and created an additional nineteen, encompassing some 53,305 hectares in 1913, triple the extent of 1909.76 Rufiji reserves would grow by another 20,000 hectares by the end of German colonial rule during World War I. These reserve declarations frequently targeted forests used as havens for rebels and villagers during the war as well as locales of cultural significance, particularly bases of spirit mediums who offered medicines of protection to rebels. Thus, preventing villagers from escaping colonial controls and using forests as bases of resistance must be considered alongside conservation and fiscal management as goals of colonial forestry practices. | 30 |
| The use of forest reserves for social control is seen in the vast highland forest complex along the Rufiji-Kilwa border that in 1911 was made into the Namuete, Nerumba, Kumbi, and Nadunda forest reserves.77 This region was used as a refuge during Maji Maji. Incorporating nine forested mountains surrounded by settlements, the forest declarations were the beginning of the erasure of forest settlements from the landscape as people were forced to settle along open roads near administrative centers. While German-era maps demonstrate that peasant settlements were closely integrated into the forest landscape, modern maps of the forest complex show it to be completely devoid of settlements. Another case is the Mpanga forest reserve on the upper Rufiji River, which a land commission demarcated in 1910 on the site that Germans believed to be the main ritual center of spirit mediums involved in the Maji Maji war.78 Two areas of intense fighting during Maji Maji on the north bank of the Rufiji—Kipo and Mtanza—also were taken over as forest reserves in 1908 and 1910 respectively.79 Throughout the Rufiji basin, forest reserves were created or extended in areas of Maji Maji conflict.80 The same can be said of Selous game reserve, which began as a German hunting preserve before Maji Maji. A major refuge for villagers during Maji Maji, the region since the war has been marked by removal of villagers in order to enlarge the wildlife domain.81 While the administration demarcated many forest reserves because of their proximity to government stations and their value as sources of timber, others were chosen because they were points of refuge where people could avoid colonial controls. | 31 |
| Population movements after the war also contributed to German designs for forest controls, and here there is a strongly gendered pattern.82 Following the war, German policy makers sought a quick recovery from wartime devastation by inaugurating a peasant cotton policy throughout the southeast. Peasants of the region—especially women whose husbands or sons were away as migrant laborers in the northeast, penal laborers from regions of conflict, or workers on the Central Railway—sought to escape the pressure to grow cotton by carving out niches in the bush and forests away from colonial supervision, just as they did during Maji Maji and other times of conflict. In the mountainous Matumbi landscape, for example, women practiced an agriculture using matimbe strips along rivulets that trickled down from the mountains.83 Creating a hidden, dispersed agriculture that was subsistence oriented, women evaded the intense cotton program of the open lands. Colonial officials complained frequently about this pattern, which one traveler referred to as pembeni, living “in the corners” of the landscape.84 In 1910, a lone widow was discovered farming a small parcel hidden in a forest reserve just outside the capital city of Dar es Salaam.85 The unabated declaration of forest reserves that pronounced forests to be ownerless, uninhabited, and off-limits to peasant use was aimed in part at forcing villagers out into the open where they could be taxed, regulated, and channeled to cash-crop production. Villages that show up clearly on detailed maps of forest parcels during the German period were erased in subsequent years. Social control and directed population movement were conscious aims of forest policy in East Africa in part because the colonial state was frustrated by the low population of the colony (about 4 million people excluding Rwanda-Burundi, regions virtually closed to labor recruitment under German rule), which had stymied colonial development for twenty years. |
| Conclusion | |
| THE INTERSECTION between the colonial control of forests in German East Africa and social conflict should not be surprising given the almost formulaic connection between forests and rebellion in other parts of the world throughout history.86 As a long literature on European moral economies has shown, a major feature of the bureaucratization of the forests since the Middle Ages was the struggle between the state and peasants over access to forests for pasture, game and other food, farmland, cooking fuel, fodder, and construction materials.87 Conflict over forest use was not confined to Europe. When European colonial regimes established forest administrations in Asia in the nineteenth century, they attacked indigenous practices of shifting agriculture that they deemed to be a threat to forests, particularly to the teak forests desired for their commercial value.88 The earliest days of European rule in Africa also were marked by state regulation of forests and their use. Most cases of African social protest aimed at forest restrictions had a religious dimension, as local people sought to protect their access to sacred shrines located in forests.89 Despite these cases, there are few studies of the effects of colonial forest policies on local communities in Africa, and fewer still that look for peasant reaction to forest regulations. This absence is puzzling given that in most parts of Africa colonial control of forests was a sudden and dramatic departure from past practices, in contrast to the parallel growth of states and forest controls in Europe, and state curtailment of forest access in India and Southeast Asia that predated colonial rule.90 | 33 |
| This examination of the social history of Rufiji forests demonstrates that the Maji Maji rebellion had direct connections to German forest policy that have escaped the attention of historians. When the resource landscape of Rufiji peoples is examined, many features of the established Maji Maji historiographic tradition are found wanting. Considered to be a sudden reaction to German cash-crop campaigns after the turn of the century, backed by an innovative proto-nationalist ideology of resistance, the rebellion’s connection to long-term historical change has escaped the attention of nationalist historians. This article began with an episode that showed the willingness of Rufiji people to fight to maintain their rights to forest resources ten years before German rule began. Fifteen years after that event, coastal people rose up in the Abushiri rebellion to maintain African control over trade in forest and other products. The interpretation here of the Maji Maji rebellion as a similar attempt by Rufiji and related peoples to maintain access to the forests in light of outside encroachment places it squarely in a longstanding tradition of coastal resistance rather than a sudden event of the turn of the century. | 34 |
| The lens of forest history also suggests a different outcome of the Maji Maji war than that handed down by the nationalist historiography. That interpretation sees the war as having led to a period of reform and improvement in the last decade of German rule. Denied the right to grow cash crops on their own fields before the war, African peasants, assumed to be modernizing “men of improvement,” embraced cash crop regimes following the war. At the same time, forced labor regimes were ameliorated after the war. Forest history revises that view. While initially the colonial government eased forest reserve declarations and obstacles to hunting, by 1907 reserve declarations reemerged with a vengeance, and revised hunting laws reinstituted previous bans on African hunting. Indeed, in many respects the last decade of German rule can be characterized as a battle for the forests, as the German regime sought to clear reserves of settlements and to police forests to prevent illegal cutting of trees and collecting of forest produce, such as wild rubber and beeswax. Many cases of arson in the forests preoccupied authorities; most seemed to be cases of negligence in field preparation, but many were suspected to be premeditated and intentional acts of protest.91 Forests also became hideouts for unsavory characters and malcontents, including rubber collectors and elephant hunters seeking to evade colonial controls.92 The easing of colonial authority seen in some cases under the Rechenberg regime was not noticeable in forest policy, in spite of the clear connections that existed between colonial forestry and the Maji Maji rebellion. | 35 |
| German scientific forestry was couched in a rhetoric of development and modernization. The “pressing task” of colonial forestry included protecting, increasing, and improving forests.93 Scientifically and economically managed forests were expected to provide environmental benefits, making an arid land blossom once again, providing fiscal benefits and enabling colonial officials to substitute local for imported timber and to export timber to overseas markets without damaging the forests. This rhetoric of the benefits of colonial forestry sounds familiar to those versed in the colonial forest histories of Asia, especially Indonesia and India, and, indeed, German experts were at the forefront of those forest policies.94 However, modern environmentalist concerns about a vanishing forest landscape in Africa and elsewhere should not blind historians to the intent and outcome of early colonial environmentalism.95 The colonial conservationist rhetoric must be placed in the context of wider development policies, just as the motives and outcomes of contemporary environmental and forest policy in Tanzania and elsewhere should be similarly scrutinized. Imperial scientific forestry in German East Africa severed rural societies from their economic and cultural links to the forests, inaugurating a twentieth-century pattern of forced population movement and social control. |
Thaddeus Sunseri received his Ph.D. in African history from the University of Minnesota. An associate professor of history at Colorado State University, he is the author of Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001) and many articles on the social history of Tanzania. He currently is working on a history of forest use in the Rufiji region of Tanzania.
Notes
My thanks to James C. McCann, Lorne Larson, the anonymous reviewers of Environmental History, and my colleagues in the history department of Colorado State University for their critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1.� Frederic Elton, “On the Coast Country of East Africa, South of Zanzibar,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 44 (1874), 227–51 (here 228).
2.� Elton, “On the Coast,” 248–49; Hans Paasche, Im Morgenlicht: Kriegs-, Jagd-, und Reise-Erlebnisse in Ostafrika (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke und Son, 1907), 82, 96, 112, 118, 134.
3.� John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 168–202; G. C. K. Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji,” in The Historical Study of African Religion, ed. T. O. Ranger and I. N. Kimambo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 202–17; G. C. K. Gwassa and John Iliffe, eds., Records of the Maji Maji Rising (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1967); John Iliffe, “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,” Journal of African History 8 (1967), 495–512.
4.� John Iliffe, “The Effects of the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–06 on German Occupation Policy in East Africa,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 557–75; Walter Rodney, “The Political Economy of Colonial Tanganyika 1890–1930,” in Tanzania under Colonial Rule, ed. M. H. Y. Kaniki (London: Longman, 1979), 128–63.
5.� C. George Kahama, T. L. Maliyamkono and Stuart Wells, The Challenge for Tanzania’s Economy (London: James Currey, 1986), 1.
6.� Recent analyses of the rebellion include Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, ed. David Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (London: James Currey, 1995), 124–42; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania),” Journal of African History 38 (1997), 235–59; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Ellipses,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33 (2000), 567–84; Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918,” Journal of African History 39 (1998), 95–120.
7.� Harald Sippel, “Aspects of Colonial Land Law in German East Africa: German East Africa Company, Crown Land Ordinance, European Plantations and Reserved Areas for Africans,” in Land Law and Land Ownership in Africa, ed. Robert Debusmann and Stefan Arnold (Bayreuth: D. Gräbner, 1996), 32.
8.� Gregory Barton, “Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism,” Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001), 529–52.
9.� Iliffe, Modern History, 88–98; Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994); Robert D. Jackson, “Resistance to the German Invasion of the Tanganyikan Coast, 1888–1891,” in Protest and Power in Black Africa, ed. Robert Rotberg and Ali Mazrui (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36–79.
10.� On the role of Yao as ivory traders see Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). The occupation of the Rufiji delta during the rebellion is mentioned in K. Grass, “Forststatistik für die Waldungen des Rufiyideltas,” Berichte über Land- und Forstwirtschaft (hereafter BLF) 2 (1904–06), 167.
11.� The following discussion is based on Martin Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Daressalam (Deutsch-Ostafrika),” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, Vols.1–3 (1910–1913), 37–70, 118–53, 189–223.
12.� Examples include Tanzania National Archives (hereafter TNA) G8/663, Massangania Forest Reserve, 4 February 1904; TNA G8/632, Vikindu Forest Reserve, 28 January 1904.
13.� A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott, “Social Aspects of Ngindo Bee-keeping,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 86 (1956), 81–108.
14.� A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott, “Ngindo Famine Subsistence,” Tanganyika Notes and Records, 50 (1950), 1–20; Crosse-Upcott, “Social Aspects”; W. A. Rodgers, “Past Wangindo Settlement in the Eastern Selous Game Reserve,” Tanzania Notes and Records 77 & 78 (1976), 21–26.
15.� Crosse-Upcott, “Social Aspects,” 84.
16.� Ibid., 87–88.
17.� Gilbert Gwassa, “The Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, 1973), 151–60; Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BAB) R1001/726, Winterfeld report, 4 December 1905, 91b–92a; Otto Stollowsky, “On the Background to the Rebellion in German East Africa in 1905–1906,” trans. John East, International Journal of African Historical Studies 21 (1988), 677–97 (693).
18.� BAB/R1001/214, Berg report, 12 June 1895, 12.
19.� Stollowsky, “On the Background,” 684–86.
20.� Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001), 76–112.
21.� Stollowsky, “On the Background,” 685–86.
22.� TNA G8/652, Kilwa Waldreservate “Naminangu” 1904–1914.
23.� The following discussion draws largely from Kjell J. Havnevik, Tanzania: The Limits to Development from Above (Motala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1993), 146, 161–65, 169–70; Alexander Wood, Pamela Stedmann-Edwards and Johanna Mang, eds., The Root Causes of Biodiversity Loss (Sterling, Va.: Earthscan: 2000), 309–36.
24.� TNA G8/19, Schroeder to Imperial Government, 7 September 1893, 40–41.
25.� TNA G8/630, Boeder to Government, 21 December 1907.
26.� Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, 109.
27.� British Institute in Eastern Africa, “Kilwa: A History of the Ancient Swahili Town,” in Azania 33 (1998), 113–69; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Currey, 1987); Erik Gilbert, “Sailing from Lamu and Back: Labor Migration and Regional Trade in Colonial East Africa,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19 (1999), 9–15. According to Baumann, wood for the Chole shipbuilding industry came from the Msala mouth of the Rufiji delta. Wood for the keels came from west Mafia and Bwejuu island. Oskar Baumann, Der Sansibar-Archipel. Erstes Heft: Die Insel Mafia und ihre kleineren Nachbarinseln (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1896), 20.
28.� In 1881, Rufiji people approached the explorer William Beardall desiring to buy rice with Maria Theresa dollars. William Beardall, “Exploration of the Rufiji River under the order of the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 11 (November, 1881), 641–56.
29.� Elton, “On the Coast,” 227–30, 244. Juhani Koponen discusses the demand and use of these products in People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania (Jyväskylä: Finnish Society for Development Studies, 1988), 66–68.
30.� Bruno Kurtze, Die Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (Jena, Gustav Fischer: 1913), 95, 98–99; Heinrich Schnee, ed., Deutsches Kolonial-Lexicon (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920), 1:390.
31.� BAB/R1001/726, Booth report to Götzen, 16 January 1906, 126.
32.� TNA G8/651, Waldreservate Bezirk Kilwa, 5 September 1904.
33.� BAB/R1001/7681, Götzen memorandum, 27 July 1904, 125–26. The Crown Land ordinance has been analyzed by Sippel, “Aspects of Colonial Land Law.” Sippel omits how the ordinance affected forest policy.
34.� Several montane forests had by then been taken as forest reserves in nearby Dar es Salaam district, affecting the Zaramo people discussed above. TNA G8/632, Vikindu Forest Reserve, 28 January 1904; TNA G8/633, Massangania Forest Reserve, 4 February 1904.
35.� BAB/R1001/721, Back to Berlin admiralty, 6 August 1905, 11. The rupee was the currency of German East Africa. One rupee equaled 1.33 marks or 32 cents.
36.� For an overview of German forest policy in East Africa, see Hans G. Schabel, “Tanganyika Forestry under German Colonial Administration, 1891–1919,” Forest and Conservation History (July 1990), 130–41. On German forest policies in the Usambara Mountains of northeast Tanzania see Christopher Conte, “Nature Reorganized: Ecological History in the Plateau Forests of the West Usambara Mountains, 1850–1935,” in Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania, ed. Gregory Maddox, James Giblin and Isaria Kimambo (London: James Currey, 1996), 96–121.
37.� Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forest Management in Germany,” in The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, ed. Tore Frängsmyer, J .L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 315–42; Ravi Rajan, “Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Foresters and the Agendas of Forest Management in British India 1800–1900,” in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 324–71; James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 11–12.
38.� BAB/R1001/7681, Götzen to Foreign Office, 8 March 1904, 111–112.
39.� M. Büsgen, “Forstwirtschaft in den Kolonien,” Verhandlungen des Deutschen Kolonialkongresses (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1910), 804.
40.� Büsgen, “Forstwirtschaft,” 802; “The Forest Lands of Germany,” Indian Forester 31, 6 (1905), 729–30. The German estimate of 1 percent tree cover omitted savanna woodlands that covered much of the colony.
41.� BAB/R1001/7680, Die Wald- und Culturverhältnisse in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika, 3 October 1894, 29–43. This report was published in edited form in Deutsches Kolonialblatt 1894/5, 623–29.
42.� BAB/R1001/7680, Rundererlass Governor von Schele an Bezirks- und Bezirksnebenaemter sowie die Zolldirektion, 5 December 1894, 52.
43.� BAB/R1001/7722, Liebert to Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, 14 May 1897, 10–11.
44.� “Forstwesen,” in Schnee, Deutsches Kolonial-Lexicon Vol. I, 652; Karl Grass, “Forststatistik für die Waldungen des Rufiyideltas,” BLF 2 (1904–06), 165–96.
45.� Grass, “Forststatistik,” 168–69. On the importance of Rufiji region for the growth of Dar es Salaam, see Thaddeus Sunseri, “Fueling the City: Dar es Salaam and Colonial Forest Policy, 1892–1915,” (London: James Currey, forthcoming).
46.� BAB/R1001/7722, Stuhlmann to Foreign Office, 5 May 1898, 82; German Consul, Johannesburg, to Consul Schuckmann, German Consul, Cape Town, 29 April 1898, 83–85; BAB/R1001/7723, Mangrove Bark in DOA, 1900–1901.
47.� TNA G8/651, Götzen to Kilwa and Lindi, 25 July 1905.
48.� TNA G8/653, Waldreservate Bezirk Kilwa “Liwale,” 1899–1909.
49.� On Maji Maji and the decline of the rubber trade, see Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Berlin/Helsinki: Lit Verlag, 1995), 237–40; Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” 137. On the wild rubber economy of the Kilombero Valley (the upper Rufiji) during German rule, see Jamie Monson, “From Commerce to Colonization: A History of the Rubber Trade in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, 1890–1914,” African Economic History 21 (1993), 113–30.
50.� Iliffe, Modern History, 130.
51.� BAB/R1001/7776, Verordnung betreffend die Schonung des Wildstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 17 January 1898, 56–57.
52.� Elton notes this in “On the Coast,” 229, 234, 244, 246. He believed that ivory was an irregular trade commodity to the coast at the delta, but was part of a thriving trade at Samanga. Pfund met a Greek rubber and ivory trader on the upper Rufiji at Kungulio in 1899. Kurt Pfund, Kreuz und Quer durch Deutschostafrika (Berlin: n.p., 1912), 25.
53.� Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, 152.
54.� Ibid., 126.
55.� TNA G8/589, Gouvernementsrat, Wald- und Jagdreservate und gesunde Eingeborenenpolitik, June 1913; TNA AB94 Rufiji Annual Report 1924, Colonial Secretary to Forest Conservator, 23 May 1925; TNA AB 97, Rufiji Annual Report 1925; TNA 274/G1.1, Mwenyenzi Kikale Rufiji to D. C. Utete Rufiji, 26 December 1946, 278.
56.� BAB/R1001/726, Westhaus testimony, 21 December 1905, 122b. Westhaus testified that since the enactment of hunting ordinances, only two to three permits were issued, compared to fifty to sixty in earlier years. Permits were necessary for large game, but not for “vermin” like wild pigs.
57.� BAB/R1001/7776, Götzen to Foreign Office, 15 July 1902, 135; TNA G8/589, Gouvernementsrat, June 1913.
58.� R. M. Bell, “The Maji Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950), 38–57; TNA G8/653, Waldreservat Liwale, 9 April 1905; Lott to Government, 20 December 1906.
59.� Bell, “Maji-Maji,” 47–48. The first names of Aimer and Faupel are unavailable.
60.� Stollowsky, “Background,” 689.
61.� BAB/R1001/721, Back telegram, 10 August 1905, 29. Claims for compensation for losses from rebel attacks are found in TNA G3/101, Kilwa Entschädigung, 83–84.
62.� BAB/R1001/726, Boeder report, 21 December 1905, 119.
63.� BAB/R1001/726, Schultz report, 23 December 1905, 121a–b. Also see BAB/R1001/726, Causes of the Uprising in Dar es Salaam District, 11 December 1905, 111b.
64.� BAB/R1001/726, Haber report, 9 September 1906, 88a.
65.� BAB/R1001/726, Booth report, 16 January 1906, 126; Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, 108.
66.� A map designating Kibasira’s forests as “projected forest reserves” is found in TNA G8/581, Waldkarte des Bezirks Dar es Salaam, 1904, 40.
67.� BAB/R1001/7682, Rechenberg to Colonial Department, 17 May 1907, 22–23; “Sonderbare Finanzpolitik,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 9 (26 January 1907), 1–2.
68.� Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 293.
69.� Crosse-Upcott emphasizes that the Ngindo used forests and thickets in like manner as havens from Ngoni raids. Crosse-Upcott, “Social Aspects,” 84–85.
70.� The Mahenge (or Mbunga) raids are discussed in Lorne Larson, “A History of the Mbunga Confederacy ca. 1860–1907,” Tanzania Notes and Records 81 & 82 (1977), 35–42.
71.� Beardall, “Exploration,” 647–48.
72.� “Bericht des Lieutenants Z. S. Fromm über eine Rekognierungsfahrt nach dem Rufiji,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 4 (1893), 291–94.
73.� “Zur Reise des Kaiserlichen Gouverneurs,” DKB (1896/97), 247–48, Larson, “History of the Mbunga,” 40.
74.� Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, 94, 106, 109.
75.� Ibid., 96.
76.� Siebenlist, Forstwirtschaft, 7.
77.� The files on these declarations include: TNA G8/683, Namuete; TNA G8/684, Nerumba; TNA G8/685, Kumbi; TNA G8/686, Nadunda.
78.� TNA G8/677, Waldreservat Mpanga, 26 August 1910. Mpanga was the gateway for the game reserve that was to become Selous south of the Rufiji.
79.� TNA G8/674, “Kipo,” 31 October 1908; TNA G8/676, “Mtanza,” 12 November 1910. On the wartime role of these forests see Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, 111–15, 282, 292–92.
80.� A sense of where conflict took place can be gained by examining locations where compensation had to be paid following the war in TNA G3/101, Kilwa Entschädigung. Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, mentions other locations, as do reports from the battlefield during the war.
81.� Paasche mentions the area of the upper Rufiji as a hunting preserve in Im Morgenlicht, 150; Gordon Matzke, “The Development of the Selous Game Reserve,” Tanzania Notes and Records 79 & 80 (1976), 37–48.
82.� Sunseri, Vilimani, 113–35.
83.� “Die Entwicklung Kilwas im Jahre 1908,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Rundschau, 6 November 1909, 1.
84.� “Die Reise des hochwürdigen Herrn Bischof Thomas Spreiter nach Matumbi and Kwiro,” Missions-Blaetter von St. Ottilien, 13, 4 (1909), 131.
85.� TNA G8/882, Holtz to District Office, 21 February 1910.
86.� For an overview of historical intersections between forest regulations and social protest, see Richard Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History 1400–1940 (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997), 195–223.
87.� John F. Freeman, “Forest Conservancy in the Alps of Dauphiné, 1287–1870,” Forest and Conservation History 38 (October 1994), 171–180; Josef Mooser, “Property and Wood Theft: Agrarian Capitalism and Social Conflict in Rural Society, 1800–50. A Westphalian Case Study,” in Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 52–80; Douglas Hay, “Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase,” in Douglas Hay, et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 189–253; Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Regina Schulte, Das Dorf im Verhör: Brandstifter, Kindsmörderinnen und Wilderer vor den Schranken des bürgerlichen Gerichts Oberbayern 1848–1910 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989); Tom Scott and Bob Scribner, eds. and trans., The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1991), 67, 69–71, 79–81; Julia J. Serovayskay, “People’s Struggle Against the Institution of Royal Forest Reserves in England in the 11th–14th Centuries,” in Forest History, ed. M. Agnoletti and S. Anderson (Wallingford: CAB International, 2000), 253–61; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Tamara Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
88.� Raymond L. Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma 1824–1994 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1996), 67–76, 117–26; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 146–80; Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” Past and Present 123 (1989), 141–77; David Hardiman, “Power in the Forests: The Dangs, 1820–1940,” in Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha, ed. David Arnold and David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 89–147.
89.� Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire, 147–52, 215; Terence Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 1999).
90.� Examples of precolonial state regulation of forests in Africa and elsewhere include James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land (Portsmouth, N.H., Heinemann: 1999), 79–107; Nancy Lee Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 32–36; Chetan Singh, “Forests, Pastoralists and Agrarian Society in Mughal India,” in Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, ed. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21–48.
91.� “Sonderberichte der Forstverwaltung von Deutsch-Ostafrika für das Jahr 1909,” BLF 3 (1911), 294.
92.� “Videant Consules,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 8 January 1913, 1–2.
93.� Büsgen, “Forstwirtschaft,” 810.
94.� Indra Munshi Saldanha, “Colonialism and Professionalism: A German Forester in India,” Environment and History 2 (1996), 195–219; Gregory Barton, “Keepers of the Jungle: Environmental Management in British India, 1855–1900,” The Historian 62 (2000), 557–74 (558); Rajan, “Imperial Environmentalism,” 324–371; Peluso, Rich Forests, 63, 65; Peter Boomgaard, “Forest Management and Exploitation in Colonial Java, 1677–1897,” Forest and Conservation History 36 (1992), 4–14 (11); Raymond L. Bryant, “From Laissez-faire to Scientific Forestry: Forest Management in early Colonial Burma, 1826–85,” Forest and Conservation History 38 (1994), 160–70 (164).
95.� For a critical examination of developmentalist views of African forest use, see Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, The Lie of the Land: Challenging the Received Wisdom in African Environmental Change and Policy (Oxford: International African Institute, 1996). For a critique of forest policy in British Tanganyika and in modern Tanzania see Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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