Exploring State and Society in Tanzania

Considered together, these three books provide the student of African history with a grand window onto the ways that historians currently view local history, power, and experience in Tanzania. The works permit the reader to eavesdrop on a scholarly exchange between James L. Giblin and Gregory H. Maddox—thoughtful and productive historians of Tanzania—that has been long in the making and is rich in content as well as form. In their respective monographs, Giblin and Maddox offer insightful perspectives on local people’s relationships to the state (whether in the precolonial, colonial, or national periods); they also provide clear examples illuminating the relationships among theory, method, and sources.

Their works are complementary, addressing some of the same issues, sharing largely the same theoretical underpinnings, and grounded in similar objectives: a nuanced explication of the way that local people integrate the actions, ideas, and institutions of the state into their lives, as one set, among many, of the floating variables shaping life in Tanzania for the last century. Further, both historians take pains in their work to demonstrate how this integration of the state into local strategies, negotiations, memories, and stories—regardless of the fact that local people often do not privilege considerations of the state in their decision-making—ineluctably shapes the state and the nation as a result. Truly, the contribution of these two historians to what we know about Tanzania, and to how historians think about the relationship between local people and the state as an apparatus in Africa as well as elsewhere, is remarkable. This essay considers Maddox’s and Giblin’s individual monographs, published in 2006, before turning to an assessment of the collected essays they edited together, published in 2005.

Both Giblin and Maddox are bothered by the methodological challenge presented by a source base issuing from and dominated by elites. This is a challenge that has long animated subaltern studies; it will resonate with most academics working with nonelite written and oral sources. The solipsistic vanity of the state, state domination in producing sources, and perhaps the preoccupation of professional historians with the state have often resulted in histories written from statist points of view. (Alternatively historians have been entirely neglectful of the same in an effort to avoid these sins). Certainly states have had dramatic power over people’s lives in ways that have shaped local thinking and action, but people in Tanzania do not often speak among themselves or write directly about the state. For the student of Tanzania this poses the conundrum of how to write about Tanzanians without reifying the power of the state in that history.

In collaborating with Ernest Kongola, Maddox addresses this tension (admittedly without resolving it) by placing at the center of his work Kongola himself—a practicing Mugogo historian whose later life’s work has been to gather and articulate local history. Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory and Performance draws on Maddox’s twenty years of association with this local public historian. Two chapters provide an introduction to the book and to Kongola’s own theory and method. Chapter 3 is Ernest Kongola’s twenty-five-page autobiography, translated by Maddox from the original written Swahili. The remainder of the monograph is Maddox’s analysis of the meanings and process of Kongola’s written and oral production of family and local history.

Ernest Kongola was a primary- and middle-school...