Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania

5. Colonial Rule and the Fate of the Intellectuals

5 Colonial Rule and the Fate of the Intellectuals When the Germans conquered Shambaai in the 1890s, they seized control over the destiny of kings and chiefs and took for themselves the governmental power to decide who should live and who should die. l But the Germans were not powerful enough, or not willing enough to spend massive resources, to govern the area through an entirely alien administrative staff- to place a European administrator in every ward or chiefdom. They relied on Africans to serve as the crucial linking agents between the European over-rulers and the mass of the African population. This was not a peculiarly German strategy. All of Africa's colonial rulers, including the British who took Tanganyika after World War I, employed local African administrators. What varied from place to place and from one regime to another was the choice of African agents: clerks, or traders, or chiefs. The colonial regimes choice of African agents - of the intellectuals who served them - would profoundly influence the changing character of African life. The Europeans lacked the knowledge of African society to control day-to-day affairs on a practical basis. They did not understand African culture from within, and therefore could not reason with local Africans to convince them of the wisdom, or even the acceptability, of particular policies. They chose African agents who used their own words to support the colonial policies they administered. When the Europeans chose a set of agents, they were also choosing a form of African discourse; if they chose chiefs, then their policies would be justified in chiefly language . By choosing the agents, the colonialists shaped the language of African politics in powerful ways. Yet their own impact was one they did not fully understand (because of their ignorance of African culture), and therefore one they did not control in its particular form. In some cases the colonial rulers coopted preexisting leaders from within African society, as when they used chiefs or coastal Muslim traders as agents of colonial rule. In other cases they trained Africans to learn the traditions of European intellectuals, of Christian teachers or evangelists, for example. In any event the African agents of European rule brought 120 Colonial Rule and the Fate of the Intellectuals 121 Map 2. Tanzania, December 1960 HAYA ethnic names territorial boundaries provincial boundaries district boundaries o 20 40 60 80 100 Miles lo000oi lo000oi with them historically conditioned patterns of behavior, understandings of social reality, and definitions of the good society. When their tradition was an alien one, it entered the fabric of African society by this process, and shaped the terms of local political discourse; when their tradition was African in origin, discourse was reshaped from within, for now its context and significance were altered. In colonial-period Shambaai for all the years up to 1947, African politics and political ideas revolved around European choices among three 122 Colonial Rule and the Fate of the Intellectuals sets of local agents: members of a Muslim commercial and religious stratum, literate men who were mission-educated, and Kilindi chiefs. German governmental authorities destroyed chiefship and came to rely instead on members of the Muslim commercial stratum. German missionaries struggled unsuccessfully to replace Muslims with Christian clerks in government service. When the British took over they turned the German pattern upside-down. They restored a chiefship which appeared by then to have breathed its death-gasps. And they made tentative beginnings towards a Tanganyikan future dominated by Christian functionaries and teachers. The colonial choice of African agents had important consequences for economic practice, for the appropriate shape of African political discourse, and even for the choice of language (Swahili or Shambaa) to be spoken in daily administration. The German choice of Muslim agents brought about a close association between administration and commerce, for Islam had long been associated with trade and with patterns of interaction which tied people together across the lines of local language. In the German period, Shambaa who moved to trading towns in the plains below Shambaai , or who became involved in commerce, felt it appropriate in many cases to learn the practice of Islam. In this period the language of Muslim traders, government clerks, akidas (African agents of German administration ), and Shambaa travelers was Swahili. The German choice of Muslims as agents was in harmony with colonial policies calling for rapid economic change in the northeast of the country...