Mikidadi: individual biography and national history in Tanzania by Pat Caplan (review)

This biography of Mikidadi, one of Pat Caplan’s main interlocutors during decades of anthropological research on Mafia Island, Tanzania, reflects her long and fruitful engagement with Swahili society. Prompted by Mikidadi’s untimely death in 2003, the book is a eulogy of sorts, but above all an attempt to capture Mikidadi’s life through an original mixture of Caplan’s recollections of him, post-facto reflections and Mikidadi’s own words. Their written exchanges, in fieldwork notes and letters, extend over decades, and Caplan quotes them extensively. They serve to illustrate a broad range of topics, from initiation rituals in his home town to Mikidadi’s scholarly ambitions and recurrent economic difficulties, and to the waxing and waning role of the Tanzanian state in its citizens’ lives.

Born in the 1950s, Mikidadi belonged to the tail end of the ‘independence generation’: the cohort of Tanzanians whose lives were defined by the high hopes of independence, and their gradual erosion. If members of this generation have something in common, it has to be the need to bid a very long farewell to the early expectations of independence and to cope with the intellectual whiplash threatened by Tanzania’s postcolonial twists and turns: the shift from nationalism to ‘African socialism’, and then on (or back) to a business-friendly, multiparty and, as critics would say, neoliberal dispensation. Caplan’s book makes this progression traceable in the life of one man and his family, allowing the reader to appreciate the enormous resilience and adaptability that so many Tanzanians mustered living through it.

The major turning points in Mikidadi’s life resonate with those of many Tanzanians. The first were forced on him by his determination to pursue an education in Tanzania’s sorely limited school system, leading him to leave Mafia first for Zanzibar and then for Dar es Salaam. The fact that villagization profoundly changed the social geography of Mafia, and that subsequent economic liberalization led to a new ‘scramble for livelihood’, as Deborah Bryceson has called it, is likewise an experience that Mikidadi shared with millions of Tanzanian villagers. Caplan’s observations and Mikidadi’s communications bring these events vividly to life and offer distinctive perspectives.

Two points in particular strand out. First, there is the way in which Mikidadi wove between the formal, state-sponsored and the private, Islamic education systems. This experience of millions of Muslim Tanzanians rarely gets an inside view. Mikidadi adapted himself to the different spheres with ease, moving smoothly between frames of reference. This ease is testament to an inclusive attitude towards different kinds of knowledge that, I think, helps explain Tanzania’s climate of religious tolerance despite the noise made by religious activists. It is likely to become more embattled as different religious communities elaborate their separate identities, and as the importance of differential access to education as a mechanism of social stratification becomes evident. The insights Mikidadi provides here highlight how much more there is to know about the history and current state of education in Tanzania, and the way in which Tanzanians relate to it.

Second, Mikidadi’s life experiences adds important facets to our understanding of both villagization and the transition to liberalization. Many accounts of the campaign and its aftermath have focused on how it rode roughshod over rural people’s preferences, fostered deep resentment, and subsequently left them to the mercies of markets. Mikidadi’s experience certainly illustrates the campaign’s top-down character but also provides evidence of a pragmatic, sceptical but not embittered readiness among Mafians to see where villagization would take them and to make the best of it. In part, it reflects the particular adaptability of fishing villagers who have always placed themselves in an urban tradition. But it also demonstrates the enormous trust rural Tanzanians placed in their government, and their determination to make wildly contrasting institutional forms and political languages work for them.

Mikidadi’s life unfolded amid the...