Fipa Families: Reproduction and Catholic Evangelization in Nkansi, Ufipa, 1880–1960 (review)

Blinkers have their value, excluding distractions and keeping eyes trained on a path. Kathleen Smythe has presented us with a blinkered work in her Fipa Families, which concerns the socialization and education of several generations in Ufipa, particularly in and around Chala, a Catholic center in the historic Nkansi principality in the extreme corner of southwestern Tanzania. The principal sources for this study are oral, with 270 interviews listed, 194 of them conducted between January 1995 and April 1996 and the remainder during a follow-up visit from February to May 2002. Without doubt, her earnest efforts to acquire Kifipa endeared her to the proudly provincial Fipa and led to her passage from person to person along networks of Catholic affinity.

Smythe acknowledges that the realities of Chala and Nkansi surprised and obliged her to see that the Church had come to be thoroughly internalized in Fipa culture. The ways in which socialization within the Catholic family proved to be congruent with the customary practices and markers of advance toward adulthood are laid out in an interesting way. A key moment in the process was reached after the children had passed from their natal homes to their grandparents, and then to a peer hostel. The missionaries targeted the latter site of adolescent autonomy and substituted their own boarding schools. In time, the Catholic family became composed of those dependent upon the priests as their social fathers and (at times) employers. The missionaries in the 1950s successfully campaigned to recruit nuns as well as priests from among the Fipa and thus, Smythe concludes, set up a rivalry between two families, the Catholic family and the popular family. She has a rich corpus of oral data from the side of the Catholic family members, and this book is essentially their story.

The title advertises a period extending from 1880 to 1960. In fact, there is nothing of originality and much confusion in her treatment of the decades before 1900. Geographically, she might have located the work more appropriately in the parish of Kate, founded in 1905, which was subdivided to create the Chala parish in 1912. Instead she focuses on the present-day Nkansi district, which contains only about half of the historic Nkansi. She also discounts the persistence of political culture, in favor of an overemphasis on the power of the Catholic establishment at Karema, on Lake Tanganyika to the north of Nkansi. As it stands, her treatment of Nkansi history from 1897 to 1912—that is, the proximate background for her study and the remotest reliable point for the living memories upon which she relies—is garbled and opaque.

Limited vision in the study of Catholic history and family history in Ufipa has negative consequences not only for an understanding of the society in question, but also for the argument Smythe advances. The presentation of the popular family, a remarkably resilient affinity group, required deeper consideration. Clearly, raising children in Ufipa was dispersed. Indeed, patriarchy in this culture was in many ways muted; women enjoyed an unusual degree of equality in their semiautonomous spheres, occupying some community offices and even qualifying as successors to group leadership. The Catholic model and practice were far more patriarchal. Was the Catholic family of missionary making or was it not? A strong case can be made that Fipa society at its base has been extremely leveling and intolerant of individual accumulation. However, the culture allowed for overt wealth accumulation by a stratum originally identified with the rulers, whose charter asserted their origin as strangers. The White Fathers behaved like, and were inserted into the popular conception of, stranger accumulator-benefactors who could absorb a following and also lubricate relationships among ordinary villagers, rulers, and the wider world that impinged upon them.

Where the oral data has greatest value is for the 1950s. Indeed, at that time Chala served as the seat of the Bishopric, replacing...