Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 2000"

Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939

Abstract: THE recruitment of African labour at poor rates of pay and under primitive conditions of work was characteristic of the operation of colonial capitalism in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The implications of these conditions have been generalized very widely in the historiography of colonial Kenya. Where capital was centred upon extractive industries or upon settler agriculture (as in Kenya), historians have found much evidence to indicate that colonial states (and the metropolitan government) readily colluded with capital in providing the legal framework within which labour could be recruited and maintained in adequate numbers and at low cost to the employer. The state itself was the largest employer of labour throughout British colonial Africa and shared an interest in encouraging Africans into the labour market. Criticisms of labour conditions prevailing in any colony were thus likely to be interpreted as criticisms of the state itself.

Sorting out the tribes : The creation of racial identities in colonial Zanzibar's newspaper wars

Abstract: The days are approaching when you will hear new things. Soon you will hear that an Arab is not an Arab, a Shirazi is not a Shirazi, and an African is not an African. You will hear this, and you will be told that you are all Zanzibaris.Al-Falaq, paper of the Zanzibar Arab Association, 1946Nani awezaye kumnyoosha Binaadamu pindi alitiwa kibyongo na Mungu? [Who can straighten out mankind, whom God has made a hunchback?]Afrika Kwetu, paper of the Zanzibar African Association, 1952STUDENTS of the history of African ethnicity will recognize in the second of these quotes a Swahili version of the aphorism from Kant with which Leroy Vail introduces his important volume on the creation of tribalism in modern Africa: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight will ever be fashioned’. True to their spirit, both aphorisms can be interpreted in contradictory ways. Vail intended to point up a theme that runs throughout his volume: that ethnic categories are rarely as clear-cut as ethnic nationalists would have them seem, and that, where such clarity exists, it is only momentary, having arisen out of complex and messy historical processes. But the editors of Afrika Kwetu, the weekly newspaper of the Zanzibar African Association that published the Swahili proverb in 1952, drew less subtle implications. The immediate context was a plea against religious chauvinism, part of the newspaper's allegation that Zanzibar's Arab nationalist leaders had violated the Islamic injunction to respect other religions ‘of the book’. But the clear implication – elsewhere made explicit – was that God and nature had fashioned humankind into irreducibly separate races and nations, and that it was foolish and even blasphemous to mix or combine them, as (they charged) their Arab rivals were seeking to do.

Climate change and the rise of political complexity in western uganda

Abstract: A partir de donnees historiques, archeologiques et paleoenvironnementales nouvelles sur la region des Grands Lacs (Ouganda), les AA. examinent l'impact des changements climatiques sur l'histoire precoloniale de la region. Apres une presentation des recherches anterieures sur la question, mettant en lumiere leurs limites epistemologiques et methodologiques, ils proposent une nouvelle synthese de l'economie politique de l'Ouganda occidental a l'âge de fer. Precisant les sequences d'occupation des differents sites, ils soutiennent que l'agriculture tenait un role essentiel dans l'economie des populations des sites Cwezi et des sites ulterieurs. Ils presentent ensuite une synthese des donnees paleoecologiques sur l'ecosysteme de la region pour la comprehension des changements climatiques et vegetaux et la construction d'une sequence paleoenvironnementale durant la periode de l'âge de fer. Finalement, a partir d'un modele multicausal du changement culturel, ils proposent une synthese preliminaire des differentes perspectives disciplinaires qui permet de mettre en evidence la maniere dont les changements climatiques ont contribue a la formation demographique, politique et economique de la region.

‘a nation of porters’: the nyamwezi and the labour market in nineteenth-century tanzania

Abstract: The nineteenth-century ivory trade in Tanzania and surrounding countries, and European imperialist and missionary activities on the mainland in the second half of the century, created an expanding demand for long distance caravan porters. Along the central caravan routes, most traders and porters were Nyamwezi. The prevalence of the Nyamwezi was related to unique structural features of their domestic economy and society that made it possible to take advantage of new opportunities, rather than a cultural predisposition towards travel and adventure, as some historians have claimed. Nyamwezi caravans provided a model of organization with a unique labour culture that dominated the central routes, and was followed by caravans originating at the coast. According to recent histories, Nyamwezi and other up-country traders were undermined by the I87os through competition from coastal caravan operators, exposure to the world capitalist system, and changes in the international market for ivory. In contrast, there is evidence to show that the Nyamwezi remained vigorous traders into the early colonial period, while many of them also sought wage work for coastal European and local caravan operators. The development of a labour market for caravan porters which was partly connected to the success of Nyamwezi trading ventures, was crucial in the transition to a more market-based economy along the main central caravan routes. The expansion of Nyamwezi porterage was related to a massive expansion of the labour market, as the overall demand for labour increased at the same time that long distance trade remained viable. Explanations for the eventual decline of up-country traders and porterage must therefore be sought through analysis of change in the early colonial political economy.

Working-class respectability: the example of the western areas of johannesburg, 1930–55

Abstract: This was no picturesque semi-fairy story. The drunken gambling merry makers in Bethlehem, heedless of the awful wonder of that night, might easily have been figures in a Sophiatown street scene on Christmas eve…Later while Mary, Joseph and the Holy Child were still in the stable, two Roman soldiers descended upon them – a take off of African Police, complete with assegais and notebook, demanding to know their tribe, place of birth, and reason for being in Bethlehem…This description of a nativity play, complete with a send-up of the South African police, is one snapshot from the life of the Western Areas of Johannesburg. Others could include a large demonstration to back the wage demands of teachers and a home-grown police force. Such idiosyncratic and divergent portraits of community are the backdrop to this study. This article contends that, in their commitment to religion, education and law and order, the people of the Western Areas were deeply attached to respectability. The Western Areas was a cluster of townships – including the famous Sophiatown – which formed one of the most significant black centres of population in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. The removal of black people from the Western Areas between 1955 and 1962 constituted one of the most notorious acts of apartheid and ensured the district's place at the heart of protest against white domination. Consequently, to assert that respectability was essential to a working class district such as the Western Areas is to imply that it had a much wider significance.

Desiccation and domination : Science and struggles over environment and development in colonial Guinea

Abstract: Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative agendas. But by the end of the colonial period it can be argued that anxiety about desiccation had become a cornerstone of development practice and state penetration. This article uses a case study to consider the transformation of the status of the ‘science’ of desiccation within colonial development agendas, the responses this transformation eventually provoked and its enduring legacy.Our reflections here complement what has, in West African studies, become a general consensus about shifts in colonial forest policy. From the outset, many colonial administrations – both francophone and anglophone – were concerned both about the effects of forest loss on climate, hydrology and soils, and about the effects of ‘irrational and wasteful’ exploitation of forest as an economic resource. But early policy imperatives to establish reserves either failed to reach the implementation stage or could not be implemented due to the resistance they engendered, both from populations and indeed from agricultural or political administrations. A significant phase of reservation, at least in West Africa's humid forest and transition zones, began only in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was pursued until the mid 1950s by colonial states which increasingly gained the strength to impose unpopular policy despite resistance. From this perspective, and given that nationalist sentiments in pre-independence struggles were often pitted against repressive colonial forest services, it could be hypothesized that independence would bring regimes more responsive to local concerns and more likely to heed resistance. Yet such a view, focusing simply on state capacity in changing political contexts, overlooks qualitative changes in the configuration of science-policy relationships within the state, a reconfiguration that it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand how post-colonial forest policy was less a rupture than a continuation or, indeed, reinforcement.

Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period

Abstract: The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdeveloped. The scale and intensity of development interventions increased dramatically, and a language of planned development, undergirded by ‘science’, came to frame the policy debates of colonial administrators and the technical experts they relied on, as well as nationalists and local elites. But development had been a central feature of encounters between the West and Africa since at least the early twentieth century, so that by the 1950s, all parties involved in the encounter had substantial experience of its policies and practices. Using detailed ethnohistorical and archival data, the papers in this special issue examine development programs in the late colonial period from across the continent in order to analyze how such historical experiences contributed to the conceptualization, implementation and outcomes of these programs.These papers, like much recent research on development, explore development discourses and the ways in which experts and government officials defined particular development problems and conceptualized solutions. But in examining particular development programs across Africa, these papers seek to bring development practice into the analysis of development discourse. Rather than situating persistence and change in development discourses largely within dominant international and government institutions, these papers argue that such discourses were inevitably intertwined with development practice. In considering the local configurations within which experts and officials sought to implement their ambitious master plans, these papers show that few if any plans remained uninfluenced by local struggles over land, labor or agricultural and environmental expertise. Neither hegemonic nor unchanging, late colonial development agendas were in fact rooted in the experiences of earlier colonial efforts to manage rural livelihoods and tied to both the global changes and local realities of the late colonial era.

Taking Stock: State Control, Ethnic Identity and Pastoralist Development in Tanganyika, 1948-1958

Abstract: Through a detailed analysis of the Masai Development Plan (MDP) of 1951-5 in Tanganyika, the A. explores the shifting relationship between state control, ethnic identity and development. The project was the product of broader modernization agendas, which at once reflected and produced a shift in the racialized ethnic premises undergirding the colonial project. Ethnic differences were now perceived as barriers to modernization. Ironically, however, ethnic differences were both disavowed and reinforced by the plan. Despite its claims to merely address technical problems, the MDP was deeply intertwined with colonial imperatives to order, control and compel the progress of their most unruly subjects. At issue were the land, labor, livestock and livelihoods of Maasai people, as well as contested visions of poverty, prosperity and progress. As such, the project served to justify and enable the expansion of state control into numerous realms of Maasai life and its implementation became the site of struggle between administrators and Maasai. Designed in part to build confidence among Maasai in government and development, the project backfired, fueling anti-government mobilization for decolonization.

'Discipline Without Oppression': Sequence, Timing and Marginality in Southern Rhodesia's Post-War Development Regime

Abstract: The regime of development in post-war Southern Rhodesia was organized around a naturalized racial axis that differentiated among African and European populations and devoted to reform four domains of rural life: the hygienic practice, the monogamous family, the land tenure and the agrarian techniques. An analysis of two adjacent African reserves in the north-west (Sanyati and Gokwe) illustrates the importance of the timing and sequence according to which regions were drawn into the prescriptive apparatus of the development regime. These lowlands were located in a region distinguished by the historical absence of competing claims by European settlers to land. Sanyati began to receive immigrants forcibly resettled from white farms, at a time when the coercive, hyper-rational model of development was reaching its apogee behind the passage of the Native Land Husbandry Act. A decade later, Gokwe received waves of the same immigrant population under conditions of greater administrative freedom. Targeting immigrants who had already internalized the discipline of development and styled themselves as modern, Gokwe's extension staff was able to institute a voluntary, cotton-based regime, one widely regarded as a model of African rural advancement.

Population decline and delayed recovery in Bunyoro: 1860-1960

Abstract: RAPID population growth is commonly depicted as one of the greatest problems facing modern Africa. For decades, the tendency of birth rates to exceed mortality rates has prompted predictions of land shortage, resource depletion and mass starvation. Underlying causes of high fertility are hypothesized to have been an unusually high demand for human agricultural labour, ‘traditional religious pronatalism’ and a ‘horror of barrenness’, while in some areas the later colonial period saw a shortening of the durations of post-partum sexual abstinence and lactation. Mortality decline from the 1920s is commonly linked to the establishment of cash crop economies, networks of roads and railways, and the diffusion of western medicine, maternity facilities, missionary activity and primary education. Yet the empirical evidence supporting this model of population growth is contradictory. Areas such as Buhaya, Buganda and Bunyoro should have experienced rapid demographic expansion by natural increase in the colonial period according to dominant theories but instead experts in the early decades of this century feared the extinction of the Haya, Ganda and Nyoro. This paper will attempt to explain why population decline among the Nyoro was more severe than anywhere else in colonial Uganda, and probably East Africa.

Disjunctures in Theory and Practice: Making Sense of Change in Agricultural Development at the Office Du Niger, 1920-60

Abstract: In the introduction to their edited volume International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge , Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard take on the thorny question of why development policies change and why they sometimes persist or reappear after a period of dormancy. Much recent scholarship has located the reasons for persistence or change in development approaches within international institutions such as multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and Western scientific and social scientific disciplines. Both Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson argue for the existence of a hegemonic development discourse with standardized interventions aimed at ‘solving’ homogenized ‘problems’. Grounded in Western institutions such as the World Bank, this development discourse is maintained by an interlocked network of experts and expertise. In their analyses, development approaches and interventions are minimally affected by the particularities of locale. Other scholars concerned with identifying and understanding significant change in development policy have also focused their studies on Western organizations and disciplines and excluded from their analysis the role that development practice might play in change. But Cooper and Packard challenge scholars to consider the ways in which development policies might be molded by the practice of development, when they note ‘it is not clear that the determinants of these policies are as independent of what goes on at the grassroots as they appear to their authors or their critics to be’.

Memory, migration and the authority of history in southern tanzania, 1860–1960

Abstract: According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level, ‘light of day’ was a metaphor for the remembered cohesion of a distinct Bena tribal identity, distinguishable from the ‘shadows’ of prior ethnic obscurity. The Culwicks considered the chief or mtema of this period, Ndaliwali, to be the founding ancestor of a new political lineage.The defining moment for the emergence of the Bena of the Rivers was the Battle of Mgodamtitu in 1874, when neighboring Hehe attacked Bena settlements in the foothills and forced the Bena permanently out of the highlands and into the valley. Once they had taken up their new residence, the Bena absorbed the existing settlements of the western end of the valley into their kingdom. They did this initially ‘under the guise of protector’, wrote the Culwicks, but their goal was political control of the region. By 1890, they wrote, most of the Ndamba as well as several smaller valley groups had become subjects of the Bena chief.The Battle of Mgodamtitu caused a ‘sudden and wholesale change’, according to the Culwicks, because Bena were forced to give up cattle keeping and take up rice cultivation; to learn the ways of the river and skillful use of canoes. They had previously looked down upon ‘rice and fish-eaters’, but after their migration they found that ‘there is but one crop really worth growing, and that is rice’.

A chieftaincy dispute and ritual murder in elmina, ghana, 1945–6

Abstract: Between 6.30 and 7.00 a.m. on Monday morning, 19 March 1945 the body of a young girl of ten was found on the beach a short distance from the town of Elmina at a popular bathing spot known as Akotobinsin. According to the coroner, she had been dead for between 24 and 48 hours. There was no water in her lungs or stomach which indicated that she had not died by drowning. Instead, her upper and lower lips, both cheeks, both eyes, her private parts and anus, and several elliptical pieces of skin from different parts of her body had been removed. Many of these wounds exposed large blood vessels and the coroner concluded that ‘death was due to shock and hemorrhage’. She was identified as Ama Krakraba who had been missing since the evening of Saturday, 17 March. Her frantic mother had immediately suspected foul play and had confronted Kweku Ewusie, the Regent of the Edina State, who was later accused of having ‘enticed’ the young girl to the third floor of Bridge House, where he lived, ‘by the ruse of sending her out on an errand to buy tobacco’. There she had been murdered so that her body parts could be used to make ‘medicine’ to help the Regent's faction win a court case that was critical for their political standing in Elmina. On the 24 March, after a preliminary investigation, the colony's attorney-general brought charges of murder against Kweku Ewusie and four others from Elmina: Joe Smith, Herbert Krakue, Nana Appram Esson, alias Joseph Bracton Johnson, and Akodei Mensah. They were tried at the Accra Criminal Assizes from 16 May to 2 June, found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to be hanged. The West African Court of Appeal turned down their appeal on 28 June 1945 as did the Privy Council on 14 January 1946. On 1 February 1946, Kweku Ewusie, Joe Smith and Herbert Krakue were hanged at James Fort in Accra, and on 2 February, J. B. Johnson and Akodei Mensah met the same fate.

Doli: translating an african environmental history of loss in the sangha river basin of equatorial africa

Abstract: This essay is about a conceptual category of historical and environmental knowledge and about how a particular group of Africans use that category to understand and debate change. It is, in effect, an exercise in translation. In the middle and upper Sangha basin forests of the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Cameroon, Mpiemu speakers have articulated a broad category, doli, through which they express, debate and make claims of truth about the past and present. Glossing doli as ‘history’ does little justice to the richly complex dimensions of this category, for doli encompasses a multitude of relationships to the past. It can refer to a distant unchanging past, as well as to the knowledge, beliefs and practices associated with that past. Mpiemu people hold up the knowledge, beliefs and practices as an idealized framework to guide their behavior toward one another and their uses of fields, forests, rivers and streams. But doli can also describe and frame the accumulated experiences – identifiable events, people and places – of elderly people. In all of these expressions about the past, Mpiemu use idioms linking persons and their environments, those of cords and vines and of mobility (wandering) and stasis (sitting), to articulate doli's central aim of ‘leaving a person behind’. Tracing doli's different meanings, genres and aims can illuminate how the category has changed over the twentieth century, how Mpiemu have interpreted environmental interventions in the Sangha basin, and why they have engaged in conflicts over their entitlement to valued forest resources. Hence, it offers insights into why people use natural resources as they do and provides an alternative to exclusively materialist explanations for conflicts over resource use.

Politics and Violence in the 'Russian Zone': Conflict in Newclare South, 1950-7

Abstract: The urban townships of South Africa have been contested terrain since their inception. Different groups have struggled to control territory, various resources and political activities within the confines of the locations and, all too frequently, violence has been an integral part of these struggles. Groups as varied in composition and ideology as squatter movements, well-organized criminal outfits, student groups, vigilantes, traditional courts (makgotlas), migrant gangs, youth gangs, municipal political groups and national political movements – with much overlapping between these categories – have all at one time or another sought to impose their will on township residents and have regarded violence as an essential element in their campaigns.While much attention has been deservedly devoted to the violence employed by the state as a means of subjugating, dividing and controlling township residents, the different ways in which black urban groups struggled to assert control over their environments have received relatively little scrutiny. These processes cannot be regarded in isolation from the state's quest for control, but neither should they be subsumed by the larger focus on a revolutionary struggle. Rather, I would argue that a more informed understanding of the conditions and challenges faced by black urbanites requires study of the nature of localized power and violence within the townships. African groups pursued agendas which served their own interests and had a considerable impact on social relations and perceptions of power and authority, both within the locations and in the broader context of national/racial politics.

Shaping a settler elite: students, competition and leadership at south african college, 1829–95

Abstract: Shortly after South African College, the predecessor of today's University of Cape Town, opened its doors in 1829 faculty members found that they had a problem. In one meeting of the Faculty Senate alone, four students were brought up on charges that one had been ‘fighting and noisy’, another ‘fighting – kicking open the door of the Messenger's Room’, another ‘writing on the Professor's desk with chalk’ the words ‘Ziervogel is a vagabond’ as well as ‘threatening the messenger with his fist’, and another ‘idle, insolent & insubordinate in writing class’ who, in replying to a reprimand from the writing master, said: ‘You may go to the Devil’. Several others were noted in the records as absent from class and lying about it. Moreover, the young college had only two dozen or so books, but already nine of them had been ‘mutilated by tearing out the leaves & c’. And virtually all the means for securing property from theft – ‘various locks, claps and staples’ – had been ‘broken in the College, apparently by some of the Students.’ So intractable had the students become, in fact, that the college authorities constructed a small one-room prison with no windows on campus, which they called the ‘Black Hole’, in which to confine offenders who could be identified and condemned. Students were regularly sentenced to terms of three or four hours per day without bread or water, usually in the early evening, the number of days depending on the severity of the offense. Students at South African College engaged in violence and intimidation of all sorts in the first half of the nineteenth century. They attacked professors and townspeople in Cape Town, preyed on each other, stole and destroyed property, and continually disrupted the operations of the college. These were not boys striving to become upstanding citizens, yet in the end they did for the most part, largely because in organizing campus violence some SAC students produced a reputation for leadership and a constituency that followed them. And that reputation proved useful later in securing positions in the city's merchant houses and in the colonial government. Later in the century, however, the violence subsided and was replaced with different means by which to produce a reputation for leadership, mainly structured competitions among students in a debating society, in sports and for high rankings in the examinations offered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. What I wish to argue here is that the social relations created among students at South African College were important to forming elites in each successive generation. Moreover, it is important to know how these social relations were formed – mostly in competitions among students which centered around acts of violence, at first physical and later symbolic.

Race, identity, politics and history

Abstract: Presentation et commentaire de Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes de Stephen Howe (1998), ouvrage qui propose une approche historique du mouvement afrocentriste. L'A. met plus specifiquement en evidence l'interpretation de Howe de l'afrocentrisme en tant qu'ideologie ethnonationaliste, et le probleme de l'interpretation historique et anthropologique, faite par les mouvements afrocentristes, aux Etats-Unis ou en Afrique, de la realite historique.