The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru by T. O. Beidelman (review)

The Kaguru are agriculturalists who live in what is today east-central Tanzania. They are an almost canonical example of a stateless society. They became so prosperous from the caravan trade of the late nineteenth century that the first Europeans who passed through their country assumed that hierarchy and centralized power lay behind the newfound wealth. Firm in the belief that all African societies had chiefs and kings, missionaries and explorers treated up-and-coming warlords as if they were representatives of a centralized authority. Under German rule, Europeans who were willfully ignorant of the qualities of leadership valued by the Kaguru promoted men who could most reliably supply labor for transport and plantations.

When Britain assumed control of the territory by mandate of the League of Nations after World War I, the idea of indirect rule—governing through indigenous local authorities—had gained an unsteady prominence. The families and clans that had curried favor with German administrators were now in a perfect position to produce traditional claims to authority. They were reinforced not only by their subjects but also by colonial governors, who by 1925 had begun to recommend that chiefs be appointed for the Kaguru and every other stateless people whom colonial officials mentored and trained in the ways of good governance and just tax collection. To be safe, Sir Donald Cameron advised the appointment of a range of native authorities who would, in the absence of customary constraints, counter some of the worst excesses of appointed chiefs. The result was a complicated and cumbersome bureaucracy that quickly created new forms of authority and local politics among the Kaguru. Beidelman describes them with great care.

Beideleman did extensive anthropological research among the Kaguru during the mid-1950s, basing numerous monographs and articles about Kaguru society on it. In 1986, he revisited his ethnographic material to write Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Washington, D.C., 1993), which argued persuasively that a mature scholar steeped in comparative material might be capable of a breadth and depth that a young graduate student might not. In the same vein, The Culture of Colonialism revisits his fieldwork from another point of view: How do we understand Kaguru politics and society as the result of colonial policies and practices, most especially indirect rule? Beidelman knows his way around colonial studies, but his long-term engagement with people and place has taught him that no policy or scholarly analysis thereof can be removed from the context of specific, local practice. Thus, tribes were neither a primordial identity nor a colonial invention; they were an extremely useful way of articulating claims for the allocation of resources, utilized by both British officials and Kaguru native authorities. Native authorities did not outlast the colonial era, or even the years before the country’s independence, not because they represented colonial despotism but because they had been continually weakened by the colonial failure to provide, or even promote, higher education for them.