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5 w Resistance to Colonial Incorporation Becoming “Poachers,” 1900–1950 In a history of memory, colonialism was the next crisis that precipitated changes in imagined landscapes just as western Serengeti communities were recovering from the disasters explored in the last chapter. Colonial officials promoted a view of the landscape as a reserve for economic exploitation, resulting in demands for labor and resource extraction as well as radical changes in political authority. Oral narratives about this period use the new core spatial images of hiding and subterfuge as a strategy for resisting these demands. A European view of the landscape that had to be regulated, classified, controlled, and managed emerged in the context of industrial capitalism and the civilizing mission of the empire, which included the conquest of nature. The necessity of “developing ” Africa, whose “primitive” patterns of land use were deemed inefficient, unproductive, and destructive to the soil, legitimized colonial rule, particularly during the 1930s depression years.1 At the same time, the government set aside areas of pristine natural beauty—which were understood as underutilized by natives —for elite hunting, separating nature and culture as the respective sites of leisure and production. As Juhani Koponen argues, amid their contradictory impulses , the Germans sought to develop Tanzania in order to exploit its resources for their own interests.2 Finding enough labor for these enterprises was a constant struggle throughout the colonial period, and various measures—including taxation, consumer incentives and coercion—aimed at squeezing labor out of the peasant economy.3 Economic development, with the proliferation of agricultural , veterinary, health, labor, and mining experts, became the overriding goal of the British after World War II, when debt to the United States necessitated an increase in exports from, and a decrease in imports to, the colonies.4 Although the colonial actors, including administrative officers at various levels, experts, 169 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. missionaries, and merchants, varied in their advocacy of local native interests, they shared a view of the landscape that was meant to be rationally developed for economic gain and to preserve the productive capacity of the land.5 Western Serengeti peoples resisted state demands but their responses were conditioned by past ways of seeing the landscape, which led them to seek recovery from the late-nineteenth-century droughts by trading hunting products to restock their herds rather than to join the colonial migrant labor force. Unfortunately those same strategies designed to gain livestock wealth, develop new leadership styles based on patronage, and avoid both the labor market and cash crop campaigns also brought them into direct conflict with colonial ideas about proper land use, which marginalized them as poachers and unruly natives. Although the social landscapes of the past had ongoing utility during this period, ecological and sacred landscapes were rendered less relevant as the state took increasing control over both political life and the environment. The colonial authorities attempted to transform the appearance of the landscape into consolidated peasant farmsteads with large areas of wilderness set aside for sport hunting, while western Serengeti peoples began to disperse their settlements to move further away from colonial control. Colonial demands for rational administrative units as discrete territories led to the creation of “tribes” as elders recontextualized oral traditions to serve their interests in controlling those processes. Oral traditions about colonial rule begin with the appearance of German military officers in the region soon after 1900 and thus overlap with the dynamics described in the last chapter. Once the Germans acquired their piece of the “magnificent African cake” in the 1884–85 Berlin conference they had to prove that they could administer and control German East Africa. Although the Germans established a military post in Mwanza, at the southern end of Lake Victoria , by 1891, they did not attempt to administer the area to the north, known as Shashi,6 until after 1900, when they established posts at Schirati and (Nyabange) Musoma along Lake Victoria.7 Western Serengeti peoples felt German rule most directly when the Germans built a permanent station called Fort Ikoma between 1905 and 1907 on the western edge of the Serengeti plain.8 The Ikoma chiefs were compelled to supply labor, both men and women, for building the fort and feeding the soldiers.9 In 1916, during the campaigns of World War I, the...

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