Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization

Conclusion

Conclusion 171 This study has attempted to shed light on a vast archive of interconnectivity and socioeconomic experience that constitutes the world in mundane ways. I began with the supposition that global relations consist of reciprocities that trouble unilinear accounts of global integration. My strategy has been to start with place-based actions and perceptions of the world and then trace the repercussions of these out to distant places and people. The overlapping scales, strategies, and meanings that I have described here suggest not only differences in the ways East Africans related to people from elsewhere but also shifting perceptions of East Africans. Mutsamuduans and Zanzibaris attempted to strategically manipulate outsiders’ perceptions of them, but changes in Western geopolitical concerns and worldviews in the latter nineteenth century made East African visions of global relationships increasingly irrelevant to the interests of the imperial powers that were rapidly colonizing much of the world. By the 1880s, East African cosmopolitanisms faced Western competitive interests and moral discourses rooted in perceptions of difference and bound to projects of global domination that East Africans could not significantly alter. Colonial imposition would shape East Africa’s global relationships in profound ways, and yet East Africa’s precolonial refashionings left legacies both in the world economy and in the self-definitions of people from Zanzibar to Buganda, eastern Congo, and Lake Malawi. Colonization created new and shifting structures of interaction, but its processes were grafted onto routes of relation forged in the nineteenth century and continually reshaped in their shadow.1 I began by suggesting that the circumstances of East Africa’s global relationships can elucidate larger processes of interrelation and raise epistemological questions of import to the theorization of globality. Though each chapter has addressed particular themes in specific locales, three broad conclusions warrant additional reflection because they are relevant beyond the contexts that I have narrated. The first and most evident point is that contemporary globality has myriad forgotten antecedents. Not to be mindful of this is to dispossess “peripheries” of their global historical relevance. Tylor’s “civilized moderns” were not the only ones to travel the world, develop knowledges of it, and attempt to understand and characterize their place in it. East Africans too were cognizant of “events and their consequences far and wide over the world.” For instance, when Count Teleki and Ludwig Ritter von Höhnel had difficulties engaging porters for an ascent of Kilimanjaro, Miriali intervened, warning the men to treat Europeans well since, “all Europe watched what was going on at Kilimanjaro.”2 East Africans did not simply react to global change; they affected the world in important ways. This is not to say that East African images of and actions in the world were more important than those of others—only that East Africans maintained particular visions of global relation that were lost in Western theorizations of Africa. Colonialism did not wrench East Africa from its isolation or introduce the benefits of the modern world. Instead, it superimposed a particular vision of universal interrelation over East Africa’s global relationships , while excluding Africans from many of the social, economic, and political rights championed by theorists of modernity.3 The notion that contemporary globality has precedent also begs the question of comparison. It may seem futile to measure nineteenthcentury globality against the present. Configurations of relation are, after all, always unique to the moment. Yet historical comparison does offer the possibility of locating analogies to, and discontinuities from, the past in the world we have inherited. The rapidity of significant change during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been astounding. Capital, people, and information move faster than ever before. There are more people on earth, material consumption is greater, and the natural environment is being altered in decisive ways. Perhaps more important, there seems to have been a discernible shift in consciousness over the last two decades. Our very way of seeing the world has changed, and this has had repercussions that transcend and shape the material and digital real172 Conclusion ities that more commonly gain our attention.4 But just as the past is not always what it seems, the present is not always as unprecedented as we tend to believe. We should remain mindful of the fact that change, be it in perception or relation, is relative. Has the Internet had as much impact on the world as the telegraph did? Comparatively, the...