A History of the Excluded: making family a refuge from state in twentieth-century Tanzania (review)

A History of the Excluded is a social history of the Bena people of Njombe District in Tanzania, written in the genre of Helge Kjekshus’s Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History and Juhani Koponen’s People and Production in Late Pre-colonial Tanzania, which are earlier path-breaking socio-ecological histories of pre-colonial Tanzania. The book traces ‘the succession of developments that compose the historian’s conventional state-centred chronology from the onset of colonial rule in the 1890s to the first years of post-colonial independence in the 1960s’, and provides a chronology of the life course of a generation of men and women that reached maturity under colonial rule.

The Giblins have ingeniously brought historical meaning to sometimes very parochial social events and ensuing narratives. They draw attention to the social meaning and historical relevance of place names, names of individuals and nicknames in Bena society. Such names and concepts are shown to be more than just words. They embody a plethora of special social and historical meanings derived from otherwise very simple daily life struggles. For instance, the word ‘avasiwoning’ale’ which in daily Bena parlance means a robber or highway man has in this book been elevated to also include the use of plunder for political accumulation.

Much of the material on which this book is based is from individual narratives detailing a ‘life cycle of birth, maturing, childbearing and death’. Several historians dealing with similar subjects elsewhere in Tanzania have drawn attention to the weaknesses of such data sources. Koponen, for example, has pointed out the trap researchers may fall into when they depend on information received from a few possibly manipulative informants who might have ‘an axe to grind’. Hence, avasiwoning’ale could easily be people from feuding clans that the people telling the stories did not like, as presumably is the case with Bernard Gadau sub-chiefship (p. 45).

A more critical issue, however, stems from the fact that individuals whose narratives are chosen for analysis are almost exclusively drawn from the northern half of Njombe District – mostly from the Kaduma clan and clans related to them. This sample selection leaves most of southern Njombe out of the story, especially so the land of the Mung’ong’o in Unyikolwe/Unyikongwe. This is a serious omission, as it leaves out a peculiar historical strand that is much more related to the Ngoni penetration and later Maji Maji struggles than to Mkwawa and the Hehe hegemonic expansionism that is characteristic of the pre-colonial history of northern Njombe. It is due to this omission that A History of the Excluded fails to explain in convincing detail the Maji Maji struggles in southern Ubena – especially so for the battles at Yakobi Mission and the Nyikamtwe (the Valley of the Skull). The same is true of the downplayed role of the military school of the Wanyikongwe so well described by Ndembwela Ngunangwa in Indigenous African Education (1988). Narratives of the descendants of people who fought those battles could have provided a more rounded picture of the Bena’s early colonial resistance and social history.

The theme of ‘exclusion within incorporation’ permeates the book. It is argued that Njombe District was ‘marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy’. Under the two colonial regimes the district provided migrant labour for the mines and plantations, while being effectively excluded from ‘agricultural markets, from access to medical services, from schooling – from all opportunity … to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labour’ (p. 1). One would like to query whether the creation of a labour reserve in Njombe devoid of other development initiatives was really an act of exclusion or one of...