Around the World in 32 Countries: Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni
Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2013

Because it has been clear lately that my reading hasn't been representative of the world's populations, I've begun a new project. For the 32 most populous countries of the world, according to a count for the year 2000, I want to read 1 book per 20 million inhabitants.

First, the countries whose population was estimated at 38 million to 58 million in 2000:
Tanzania, Poland, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy.

It has been easy to find Tanzanian books on an online book subscription website, and I've nudged colleagues to recommend Polish books.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_5.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

First, a brief introduction to Tanzania:
***

Number of languages: 126
Official Main languages: Swahili and English; "Approximately 10 per cent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 per cent speak it as a second language"

Modern-day state formation year: 1964
Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago merge to form the United Republic of Tanzania
Colonial 'overlords': Germany, Britain

Tanzania is also home of the African continent's highest mountain:

"Eastern ice field in Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_icefield_Mt._Kilimanjaro.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

Capital city: Dodoma
Surface area: 947,303 km2 (larger than Nigeria and smaller than Egypt)

Currency: Tanzanian shilingi (shilling)
Driving side: left

Main exports to these countries: India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, China
Main imports from these countries: India, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates
Crops that are food: maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, millet
Cash crops, food or not food: sugar, cotton, cashew nuts, tobacco, coffee, sisal, tea
Main meat products: beef, lamb, chicken, pork

***

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History is an academic book, published in Dar-es-Salaam, by a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Aside from teaching at an American university, he also taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Although the words 'academic book' may strike fear into one's heart if one associates it with the hundreds of pages of dry or waffling prose that one is forced to read as a student, Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni's style is pithy and fluent. His choice of anecdotes is also striking and often funny.

He does not write about Tanzanian prehistory — famous after archaeological excavations at Oldupai Gorge — or much of the years of Muslim influence and Arab rule until he treats Zanzibar in the late 1800s through the 1960s at the end of the book.

He writes of the British society in the early 20th century. Unlike neighbouring Kenya, the former German colony of Tanganyika fell to the share of the British government mainly after World War I. His, and later Her, Majesty's Government paid salaries to local chiefs, and had a small administration besides. The remaining European contingent was, for example, big game hunters or gold miners who had come to reap the natural resources of the country; doctors; etc. There were few British people who came systematically as settlers.

I was surprised that the 'fool's paradise' of modern-day Tanzania for British government workers and visitors in the early 1900s, and the 'Happy Valley' expatriate society of Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiong'o lampooned in Wrestling with the Devil, sound so similar.

To borrow from Dr. Mbogoni's turns of phrase and to attempt to put his portraits in a nutshell: a British newcomer to Tanzania could listen to the radio, or become a naturalist. If these hobbies weren't to the Briton's taste, the newcomer could drink liquor — whisky, gin, beer, ... the list goes on — and run into debt, to try to cope with homesickness and tedium.

This colonial (mis)rule rather proves the essential ridiculousness of colonialist ideology even from a European standpoint.

Kipling wrote in his famous poem (1899),

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

[...]

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

The question is why this 'heavy harness' and 'thankless years' were ever thought necessary by anyone — except for financial motives.

At any rate, I am perhaps 1/6th of the way through the book; the next part is about elephant-hunting.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

***

Additional information taken from:
List of countries by population in 2000 [Wikipedia]
Languages of Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni [African Books Collective]
Kipling quoted from: The White Man's Burden [Wikipedia]

Wrestling with the Devil in (Post-)Colonial Kenya

Right now I am reading Wrestling with the Devil [originally entitled Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary], a memoir that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o published in 1981, after he was imprisoned for a year without trial, for being an intellectual with whom the government of Kenya disagreed.

The imprisonment of the author is part of a pattern that anyone who has read case descriptions published by Amnesty International in the 1990s would know well; and he was in fact adopted as a prisoner of conscience by the organization.

“Armed members of the Intelligence, then known as the Special Branch, who swarmed my study amid an awe-inspiring silence, were additionally guarded by uniformed police officers carrying long-range rifles. Their grim, determined faces lit up only a little whenever they pounced on any book or pamphlet bearing the names of Marx, Engels, or Lenin.”

Ngũgĩ sketches his transfer to prison — the midnight raid of his library for incriminating material, abduction by car, the lack of knowledge of his family what had become of him — with irony. Life in prison itself — fellow prisoners, guards, the general purpose of it in the eyes of the government — he describes with less detachment.

And then he presents a biting portrait of the grand inspiration for this unjust application of the law: the British colonial government.

*

University of Nairobi (c. 2006)
Ngũgĩ was a professor here for 10 years
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

When I read Karen Blixen's Out of Africa in Canada, my fellow students and I were given an essay from Ngũgĩ's Decolonising the Mind to read alongside it. To my recollection, it was a meditation on the importance of writing in native languages (for example Ngũgĩ's Gĩkũyũ, not just English) and being exposed to something beyond British literature.

Little did I know that the Kenyan writer had in fact also written a sharp denunciation of Out of Africa and Blixen, directly.

There's also a blighting portrait of Louis Leakey, whom I'd heard about in far more flattering terms when I grew up:

"In science, they [British Kenyan society] could of course display Louis Leakey, undoubtedly a great archaeologist. Leakey’s specialty was in digging up, dating, and classifying old skulls. Like George Eliot’s Casaubon, he was happier living with the dead. [. . .]

"Colonel Leakey, and even Louis Leakey, readily proposed ways of killing off African nationalism, while praising skulls of dead Africans as precursors of humanity."

*

Ngũgĩ sketches the history of Kenya from the 1800s to the late 1960s. He mentions the labour camps; the British figures like Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who asked resistance fighters to peace talks but then killed them, and who massacred an entire village; and the irregularly-prosecuted murders of native Kenyans when British Kenyans were drunk or angry. A British social worker or politician would travel to Kenya every now and then, peer behind the scenes, and write an aghast report — perhaps effect changes. But as Kenyan independence from Britain grew nearer, colonial laws and their application did not become fairer.

Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman

Apologies for any factual inaccuracies in my review. I don't know much of the history of India.

These letters first appeared in 1937. They are one side of a correspondence between a young Cambridge graduate who works in the civil service for the British government in India and then gradually rises in the ranks to become a judge, and the English wife of an army officer.

"Cambridge. Gonville and Caius College, Senate House and University Library"
ca. 1870-85
via Wikimedia Commons

Whether they are genuine is another question, and in any case they have a certain charm along the lines of Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's Candide. Cambridge, it seems, is this book's El Dorado, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The writing is briefly kept but pithy, and it ranges from describing the personalities in a town when the British ruled Burma, to the street life of Paris during the later interwar years.

In the judge, Aravind Nehra's, view, even before Indian Independence — which looms over the whole book but never happens, as it occurred in 1947, ten years after the book came out —, 'the centre cannot hold,' and British administration is ineffective in India.

Local traditions like folk medicine persist, despite all that British educational systems and law and medical establishments can do, in the rendering of the judge. Also, the staff that are sent out from Britain to India are disenchanted with their roles and unwilling to 'civilize' further. (They no longer have that fervour to convert the heathen that is disconcerting to read fictionally in, for example, Jane Eyre. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing it's hard to tell, but likely from a historical perspective it's a good thing.) The administrators are more eager to make a living, because civil service appointments in India are well paid, than to administer wisely.