Societies, Religion, and History: Central-East Tanzanians and the World They Created c. 200 B.C.E. to 1800 C.E. (review)

According to the publisher, this work, along with the others in the Gutenberg e-series of history monographs (accessible free at www.gutenberg-e. org) was originally meant to be available only in an electronic format. They have now been published in book form as well, although the electronic versions are more complete and the figures, tables, maps, and index for this book are available only online. It is therefore difficult to review only the print version of this volume, which is described as "not a substitute for or facsimile of the online version of this work" (ii). Including the maps in the published book would have been especially useful to readers, if costly.

The book is a historical-linguistic study of the Bantu people of Central-East Tanzania, who around the ninth century C.E. became part of the globalized Swahili world. Gonzales emphasizes that these people have not occupied a Swahili hinterland, but instead represent a thriving group of cultures with their own history. Until the last two or three decades, the coast and interior were usually seen as having no history before the emergence of the Swahili civilization. As if this were not enough of an insult, most early historians and archaeologists emphasized the external origins of Swahili civilization. As was the case for many African complex societies, colonialist researchers believed that only through the influence of outsiders could Africans progress. More recent work, of course, has emphasized the role of indigenous societies in the development of cultural complexity. Gonzales has consulted historical linguistics, oral history, and archaeology to trace the history of one such group, the speakers of Ruvu languages in East-Central Tanzania. Ruvu languages are classified as part of the Northeast-Coastal Bantu Group of the Kazkazi (= north in Kiswahili) branch of Mashariki (= east) languages. Today there are ten language groups in Ruvu. These can be traced back to a proto-Ruvu language group, to the Bantu language family that represents the first farmers here, and even to more ancient Niger-Congo language groups.

Gonzales's study has three goals: (1) to review the history of the Ruvu language group from its origins to the emergence of the ten extant languages; (2) to recover information about the material and sociocultural features of past Ruvu communities; and (3) to establish a framework consisting of the ideas and worldview that organized Ruvu life in the past. In chapter 1 she presents her methodology and data; drawn from lexicostatistics, her method involved the recording of a basic or core vocabulary for a language, usually consisting of words for basic concepts such as body parts, personal pronouns, and features of the natural world. These tend to be present in all groups, and the number of words that are cognates or are shared between individual languages reflects how recently they split from a common ancestor. She also presents a review of the history of this region before the emergence of Ruvu languages.

In chapter 2 she explains that Ruvu is a subgroup that split from Proto-Mashariki Bantu, the language spoken early in the last millennium B.C.E. in the Great Lakes region around Lake Victoria, which is regarded by archaeologists as the center from which Iron Age people dispersed throughout East Africa. Rejecting the idea of an unpopulated coast and hinterland, the Tanzanian archaeologist Felix Chami has argued that Bantu farmers, whose pottery styles show similarities to those of contemporary peoples living in the Great Lakes region, were present here well before the first millennium B.C.E. Chapter 3 reviews the evidence from historical linguistics and oral history that allows the researcher to reconstruct the material culture and worldview of proto-Ruvu people, which centered on the need to maintain prosperity and harmony...