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8 Gender, Slavery, and Chiefship: Peasant Attempts to Create an Alternative Discourse The Usambara Citizens Union, as we have seen, was tied to the politics of rain and the politics of the hated Usambara Scheme in a very peculiar way. This political association won a large number of members in Care and Vugha, places where government chiefs had no claims to control the rain.! Citizens Union leaders in those places were not limited by the same constraints as peasant rebels in Mlalo or Bumbuli, where rainmakers held office. The UCU leaders could build a popular movement to oppose chiefship as an institution without seeming to attack rain chiefs. They left implicit the message that only the rainless chiefs, enforcers of the Usambara Scheme, were under attack. The ambiguity of the attack on chiefship under these circumstances left UCU leaders free to speculate on the ideal Shambaa form of government and, in the process, to create new forms of political language. They discussed the character of chiefs who were responsive to colonial masters , and of chiefs who represented the popular will; they explored local history to find precedent for nonroyalleadership and discussed the process by which a wise elder came to be known for his wisdom without the formality of elections. They also talked about the difference between the arbitrary authority which characterized a regime of slavery and the acceptable authority necessary for social continuity. It is difficult to know, for the years of Citizens Union influence in the early and middle 1950s, just how widely the language of the rebels spread among the men and women of Shambaai. This chama was an illegal organization for most of the years of its existence, and for those years continuous records have not been found. Nevertheless, we know that it had thousands of members during its brief periods of legality (3354 in 1951), and that the leaders were fully integrated within peasant society.2 Virtually all derived an important part of their livelihood from peasant farming. Neighborhood kinship patterns made it likely that each active UCU member shared some ties of descent or affinity with nearly every 204 Gender, Slavery, and Chiefship 205 other individual living within a radius of several miles (Feierman 1972: chap. 3). A review of archival notes, combined in many cases with knowledge drawn from personal acquaintance, made it possible to review some details of the activities of sixty-eight Citizens Union leaders. Of these, fortyseven are known to have had some education, although in almost every case this was limited to primary education, supplemented by brief periods of job training. Many or all of the remaining twenty-one leaders may also have been literate, but the data on their education are lacking. Most of the leaders were occupied primarily with farming at the time they were members, but many had been minor functionaries in the past: clerks, tribal dressers, or forestry guards. These were not members of an isolated elite; they were an integral and influential part of the village communities in which they lived and farmed. It is a paradox of the period that the political language created by Citizens Union leaders had its broadest effect on large numbers of people in Shambaai only after the organization declined. This happened when the UCU became submerged in TANU, the Tanganyika African National Union, which won national independence and had its first major impact in Shambaai in 1956. TANU spread through the entire district; unlike the UCU, it grew rapidly even in the domains of the major rain chiefs. TANU grew in influence just as peasants were seeing the benefits of their own resistance to government authority, for this was the time the Usambara Scheme went rapidly into decline, to be abandoned finally in 1957. Kimweri's Native Authority was clearly on the defensive. The consequence of these victories as they unfolded was to open up, among many peasants , speculative discussions on the political future of Shambaai and more broadly on the nature of the good society. We know that the new ideas played a real role in peasant life because they became a basis for peasant action. In 1954, at a time when the Citizens Union was still not a legally recognized organization, its leaders sent the first of a series of petitions to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. The language of the petitions defines important new issues in the period's political discourse, yet preserves alongside these the earlier ways of defining political issues. In...

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