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118 4w  Continental Shift Civilization, Racial Thought, and the Intellectual Foundations of an African Nationalism Ndugu zangu Mwafrika jivuneni kabisa kwa taifa letu. (My African brothers take pride in our taifa.) —Kwetu editorial, February 14, 1938 The intellectual tenets of African nationalism in Tanganyika took firm shape during the 1940s. Black Tanganyikan thinkers—informed by urban experiences in Dar es Salaam and cosmopolitan ideas obtained from travel abroad—employed Pan-Africanist convictions to reforge colonial discursive themes of civilization and race. New terms of an exclusionary national categorical order based on race emerged out of long-standing discussions that addressed the relationship between civilization and uncivilized “natives.” These thinkers appropriated civilization as a vehicle to realize an African nation, coherent in itself and distinct from European or Asian nations. They affirmed many popular tropes in European and Asian racial discourses, including the geographical determinism of continents, the duty to maintain racial purity and discourage interracial marriage, and the evolutionary development of families and tribes toward normative nations. But they also mobilized the idiom of patrilineal descent, itself profoundly embedded within normative Swahili notions of civilization, in order to invert unjust hierarchies imposed upon Africa by the imperial Indian Ocean world. The African nationalist inversion of normative Swahili-language thought lies at the heart of this chapter. We begin by first tracing a history of nationalist key words and their employment within debates over civilization, continental descent, and interracial liaisons. This chapter next assesses how African travel to South Asia sharpened racial thought. Racial thought is understood here in the similar sense that Jonathon Glassman has mapped out in his pioneering study of colonial Zanzibar—not as the elaboration of genetic and biological differences, but instead as a discursive field in which people generally assume humanity to be divided into discrete natural categories, each with its own traits Civilization, Racial Thought, and the Intellectual Foundations w 119 and characteristics.1 This became newly important and newly explicit among African thinkers in the 1940s. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how intellectual convictions to realize the African taifa (race/nation) shaped the political history of Tanganyikan nationalism, both within the urban space of Dar es Salaam and the legal space of the country’s national citizenship laws. As we have seen in preceding chapters, contested legal rights, communalized social institutions, and burning economic resentments had made race central to colonial urban life. Africans readily appropriated urban administrative categories of “race” as an instrument to claim political space and acquire material benefits during the 1940s, just as “tribe” had been by interwar Africans confronting policies of indirect rule.2 Yet “instrumentalist” literature on race in coastal East Africa has disallowed African intellectual production; instead, the sole agent of racial consciousness is the colonial state.3 The production of African racial identity was intellectual work as well as instrumental response, and its leaders were the pamphleteers, letter writers, poets, and polemicists of colonial Africa’s rich print public. Printed in newspapers like Kwetu and Mambo Leo, these were public arguments, written with the intent of being read aloud in the streets and cafés, in the forms of letters, articles, and shairi poetry, in order to be also consumed by Dar es Salaam’s majority nonliterate African population.4 As Benedict Anderson has argued more generally, nationalism was in major part a literary undertaking, in which print languages were the critical vessel—they created a unified field of exchange and gave a new fixity to language.5 This literary undertaking, as Heather Sharkey reminds us for colonial Africa, “much like empire itself . . . was reliant on the power of the written word to affirm and eventually popularize its values.”6 This involved the appropriation of multiple discourses that not only contested colonial hierarchies, but created new intellectual communities. Rather than begin from conceptual definitions of race that typologize what it is and what it is not, we should instead investigate how the term “race” has been used at different times, what it has signified, and how it has served to articulate a conception of identity among its users. The English-language words “race” and “nation” emerged simultaneously in the late sixteenth century, and signify, as David Goldberg argues, “intersecting discourses of modernist anonymity.” Race and nation as concepts are irreducibly political and “largely empty receptacles” through which population groups may be invented, interpreted, and imagined.7 Such an approach, as Jonathon Glassman has argued, restores intellectual agency to colonial subjects whose sources of racial thought were both...

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