The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru

Preface

xi This work is the product of over fifty years pondering the nature of one East African society, the Kaguru. When I commenced fieldwork in 1957, Kaguru society was located in what was termed Tanganyika, a British United Nations mandated territory that was in most respects virtually a British colony. That was a social world now gone. Yet the impact of that lost world, the world of colonial life, remains an important influence on Kaguru and many other East Africans. When I later did more fieldwork from December 1961 until mid-1963, Kaguru society was located in a Tanganyika newly independent of colonial rule but still mainly run locally by the same British and African colonial officials who had managed things earlier. Still later, in 1965 and 1966, I briefly worked in Tanganyika, after it had become Tanzania. By then almost all formal vestiges of colonial rule were gone, and British officials had been entirely replaced by local Africans. While the impact of colonial rule remained, the way of life itself had profoundly altered from what I had originally encountered. This study is about my experiences during my first two field trips, when Kaguru society was still essentially ruled along a colonial model. In an epilogue I briefly mention some of the many changes that took place after that period. This is mainly to show how much has vanished but, ironically , also to show how modern Tanzania has still not entirely escaped the colonial imprint. I considered writing this volume while I was first doing fieldwork in Ukaguru (1957–58). I attended court hearings, local moots, and political meetings. I spoke to numerous Kaguru leaders and to British colonial P R E F A C E xii · preface officials and examined what local government records I was allowed to see. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Oxford, I included a section on colonial rule. In large part, this book is an expanded and revised version of my doctoral dissertation (1961e). I later published some of these findings in articles on Kaguru government and law and on Kaguru political movements (1961a, 1961b, 1961d, 1966, 1967a, Winter and Beidelman 1967). None of these works attracted much interest from my colleagues, so I abandoned colonial topics and concentrated on writing about Kaguru traditional beliefs and social organization. When I again wrote about colonialism, it was about the local Christian missionaries and their impact on Kaguru life, and about the impact of life in Ukaguru on the missionaries themselves (1982a, 1982b, 1999). I neglected the piles of data I had collected on the colonial Kaguru Native Authority. I now return to this colonial political material, partly because colonialism has always interested me, but also because colleagues assure me that a study of colonial life in Ukaguru would interest others, that indeed colonialism is a topic of renewed interest to scholars in the social sciences, including anthropologists (A. Smith 1994). Since this book aims at creating a picture of local colonial political rule, I have provided little material on Christian missions or on colonial economy. Of course, I consider these important and relevant topics, but I have already published extensively on colonial missions (Beidelman 1974a, 1982a, 1982b, 1999) and on the economy of colonial Ukaguru and Tanganyika (Winter and Beidelman 1967). Before embarking on writing this book, I examined much of the current writings on colonial societies in the course of teaching a graduate seminar on colonialism. Some writing was provocative and interesting , but much struck me as mechanistic, narrow, shrilly self-righteous, and unduly doctrinaire, especially that by authors who seem keen to condemn the entire colonial endeavor in the name of liberal political correctness. It also struck me that almost none of these more negative critics had ever actually lived in a colonial regime. I realized then with surprise that I must be one of the few anthropologists still working who actually experienced colonial life. That seemed an added reason to write this work. I do not mean to argue that those of us who lived in a colonial society are necessarily better analysts than those who did not. It might even be argued, wrongly I think, that our very experiences may cloud Preface · xiii our vision. Yet I believe that first-hand experiences provide a vividness and insight lacking in accounts by those who did not have those experiences . At the least, I can provide another point of view...