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Chiefs and Bureaucrats: Independence and the Fate of the Intellectuals TANU's electoral victories of 1958-59 and 1960, and national independence which followed so quickly on their trail, led to the steep decline of chiefship throughout Tanganyika and to the dominance of educated functionaries. The years just before and after independence (which came in December 1961) marked a formal transition for the nation 's intellectuals, more dramatic than the evolution which came before it. As we have seen, indirect rule as established in the 1920s based its dynamic on the shifting fortunes of a context between chiefs and educated Christian clerks. Cameron and others at the top of Tanganyika's government expected the clerks and teachers to become more powerful as the years passed; they expected the chiefs to weaken. The postwar years pushed that double process along ever more rapidly . The pressures for moving the economy on to a more productive basis threatened the influence of chiefs. When plantation and urban workers moved towards permanent residence near the workplace, leaving their country homes behind, their home chiefs lost authority over the daily lives of these subjects. Erosion-control schemes in Usambara, Uluguru, and other places around the territory forced chiefs to serve as enforcers of unpopular regulations. When TANU introduced the demand for selfgovernment and democratic rule, the government used chiefs as a shield, to be held between the aggressions of the nationalists and the defensive position of the British. Through the postwar years chiefs lost support. The educated functionaries in the meanwhile lived in a very strange sort of shadow world. They suffered a double disadvantage if they wished to assert leadership: they were cut loose from local roots and prohibited from taking part in political activity. Men with secondary educations, who held the highest administrative positions open to Africans, usually moved from one place to another across Tanganyika in the line of work. Many of these men had lived through peasant childhoods but now found no opportunity to lead the rural folk from amongst whom they were 223 224 Chiefs and Bureaucrats drawn. If we scan a list of the educated Africans from Tanga Province who achieved high positions after independence in the early 1960s, we see that only two out of seventy-six remained in their rural home districts for most of the 1950s.1 A typical career saw a young man from Lushoto or Handeni go off for schooling in Dar es Salaam, or Tabora, or Kilimanjaro , then to work elsewhere in Tanganyika. These men might, in the process, achieve a national vision of Tanganyika's problems, but they had only the weakest political base with their home folks. The second disability of the functionaries was the rule of 1953 prohibiting civil servants from participating in political activity (a rule later waived in the case of chiefs). A few important leaders stayed outside the civil service in the 1950s to work full time for TANU; Julius Nyerere and Oscar Kambona were the most notable of these. But those who remained in the civil service were apolitical, cut off from their roots if they had rural origins, and they moved from one place to another around Tanganyika , forbidden to play a political role.2 This pattern left the rural branches of TANU - the key to its political success - in the hands of leaders who, for the most part, had not attended secondary school, and whose social origins in other respects varied from one district to another. The chiefs, meanwhile, suffered disabilities which were at the opposite pole from those of the new functionaries. The new functionaries were never able to sink local roots; the chiefs always did. The new functionaries were not to participate in politics; the chiefs were expected to do so: the role of chiefs was inherently political, for they were the enforcers of order. In the 1950s it was the chiefs who prohibited meetings, locked up peasant rebels, and enforced erosion-control rules. Even though the peasant rebels did not take charge of government after independence, Tanganyika's new African rulers understood that peasant rebels had been a central source of the nationalist movements's energy. During the transition to independence, the chiefs' control over local administration violated TANU leaders' sense of the fitness of things. In October 1961 Nyerere described his discomfort at finding the chief in control each time he visited a district headquarters. He regretted seeing that the peasant rebels still remained impoverished outsiders: It is always a government...

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