The Archives

By MARCIA WRIGHT*

London, England Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

HE National Archives of Tanganyika originated in with a vote of funds by the first Parliament convened T after independence. The domestic budget commitment primed a flow of external aid for the project. Unesco through the Technical Assistance Board became its sponsor during the vulnerable first 2 years. In those years a preliminary report was compiled, and the services of an archivist, Jeffrey Ede of the Public Record Office, were obtained. The following descrip- tion of the archives situation is based on the writer's personal ex- perience of advocating the cause of archives in 1961 and 1962, on materials gathered in preparing a preliminary report for Unesco, and on impressions of the National Archives in , re- visited in August 1964. Official records in Tanganyika have been affected in general by two conditions: first, the tropical climate and, second, the lack of constitutional continuity—the shifting transfers of power from the of , to the , to the British, and in to an independent Government. Tanganyika is a large country, stretching from the littoral across from Zanzibar westward to the Central African lakes, where it borders the Congo. and Northern bound it to the south, and to the north. In the precolonial era and again today Zanzibar and Tanganyika were and are linked,1 but in the intervening period, of all neigh- bors, Kenya became the most constant area of contact and com- parison. Both countries were created as a result of the colonial competition of the 1880's that limited the sphere governed nomi- nally by the Sultan of Zanzibar. They were literally created by lines drawn on a map in negotiation of the Helgoland-Zanzibar Treaty between Germany and Great Britain in 1890. * The author's interest in and activities on behalf of African archives will be ap- parent to the readers of her paper. From 1958 until 1961 she was on the staff of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, working 2 years in the presidential papers program. More recently, her surveys, reports, and support were of major as- sistance to the Government of Tanganyika in the establishment of its National Ar- chives. Miss Wright is now a graduate student in the University of London. 1 Tanganyika is now one of the two units of , a union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which came into being on Apr. 26, 1964. VOLUME 28, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER 1965 511 5i2 MARCIA WRIGHT The German colonialist group, which wished to make German a country for settlement by immigrants from Europe, had its opportunity to rule between 1885 and 1890 a part of the territory, under power granted to a chartered company. The com- pany's unsound policies and the political ineptitude of its officials Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 brought about the Bushiri Revolt of 1888 and direct intervention by Germany's armed forces and Government. From the creation in 1891 of a directly under the Kaiser can be dated the colonial administration of Tanganyika. Definition of the polit- ical boundaries and policies took about a decade. After the turn of the century the records emphasize the priority of economic de- velopment geared to meet the needs of Germany. The economic potential of the country was officially considered to lie more with the African sector than with the small European settlement. During a colorful sideshow was played out in Tanganyika. The long duel between British and German forces brought disruption to the German administration and to economic development and large-scale dislocation of the people. When the British began to govern the occupied territory through a civil ad- ministrator in 1916, they had perforce to carry on German prac- tices. The and the 1920 Tanganyika Order in Council formed the basis for continuing British authority al- though the exact terms of the mandate were not made formal until 1924. Tanganyika was then geographically defined as the former German area minus Ruanda-Urundi, which the Belgians gained as reward for their share in the war effort. The status of the country as an international mandated territory reporting to the gave an opportunity to hu- manitarian groups and theorists of administration to influence in- stitutions developed under the British. The official philosophy known as "" emphasized government of the African population through their traditional tribal authorities. Although a was created, the civil service under the Gov- ernor undeniably reigned supreme, ever cautious that the European- settler political influence existing in Kenya should not be trans- posed to Tanganyika. To carry through the benevolent principles of the mandate that promised eventual African self-government, the British administration therefore depended on fairly static tribal institutions, recognizing that rapid economic and technical develop- ment must be sacrificed. The policy of upholding tribal institutions and bolstering tribal authorities continued until the mid-1950's, when the British admin- THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST TANGANYIKA NATIONAL ARCHIVES 513 istration, under pressure of a nontribal nationalist political party and United Nations visiting commissions, was forced to concede to a virtual revolution. Independence came as an avalanche, faster than anyone had foreseen, and left past institutions and expecta- tions in wreckage. The records of the old regime suffered. When Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Philip Curtin visited East Africa on his "reconnaissance" of the archives in the continent, he was not allowed even to see the old records. His conclusion: "None of the four British East African territories can match the care or efficiency shown in or Ni- geria, but only Tanganyika falls to the low standard of ."2 The stresses of the transition period, 1955—61, produced official indifference or defensiveness, for the past seemed both irrelevant to the new political organization of the country and too alive with potential embarrassments. The confidential and secret files, sub- jected to a harsh preindependence review, were purged of all com- ments and information considered inadvisable to transfer to the new Government. The whole series of Executive Council minutes was transported to the Public Record Office in London, there to be guarded by the 50-year rule. Only after completion of this ex- ercise did the civil service turn to the more constructive task of preserving its remaining records as permanent archives. The Archives will eventually collect all available official records for the colonial period, 1891-1961, but those of the British ad- ministration form the first consideration because of their mass, their dispersal throughout the country in perilous physical condi- tions, and their potential usefulness to the present Government and those allied in building the nation. The shape of the records for the British period follows that of the government as organized in 1927. In the capital, Dar es Salaam, the Central Government kept its policymaking and implementation files in a secretariat reg- istry, where they were divided into general and confidential-secret series. Departments maintained separate registries for their tech- nical files, though the directors of the most important departments —such as Agriculture, Medical, and Railways and Harbours—sat as members of the Governor's Executive Council, and all depart- mental decisions of a political nature—a very broad category— were documented in the files of the secretariat. The country as a whole was governed through the provincial ad- ministration and the native administration, dual structures inte-

2 Philip D. Curtin, "The Archives of Tropical Africa; a Reconnaissance," in Jour- nal of African History, i: 138 (i960). VOLUME 28, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER 1965 514 MARCIA WRIGHT grated in the persons of district and provincial officers who acted as political reporters, magistrates, civil engineers, and supervisors of the native tribal administration and of local courts based on customary law. The country was divided into 50-odd districts dis- tributed among 9 provinces. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Over the years, the old secretariat records were well kept be- cause many were required for reference in the continuing work of the administration. In the 1950's, however, the Government ex- panded so rapidly that a single secretariat registry became too cum- bersome for efficient management. The first agency to detach a number of files as a nucleus for a separate registry was the Devel- opment Organisation, established in 1947. Wholesale decentraliza- tion occurred between 1953 and 1955 during a period of constitu- tional evolution when departmental heads became ministers with greater autonomy. The integrity of the secretariat registry was maintained by attaching new files to the old and returning the files when closed to their former numerical order and series. As a detached group, the general series of the secretariat was still used occasionally almost up to the time of independence, when the building housing it was to be demolished. It was then moved to a hangar at an old airport some distance from town, until the hangar's requisition for a trade fair in i960 caused another trans- fer, this time to a thatch-roofed warehouse in the neighborhood. In mid-1961 this place accommodated these permanent records, surrounded by financial records awaiting their statutory expiration. The roof let in daylight and weather from above while damp and pests were taking their toll within. Luckily, new buildings at the center of government contained some air-conditioned rooms re- served for archives. The office supervisors of various ministries were quite ready to take up the space with their own materials until the Public Works Department declared the old warehouse a fire- trap. Then the secretariat records were speedily transferred to provide for their safety and also to secure the preemption of the space for the future National Archives. This timely rescue operation brought the files to safety, but it destroyed their last vestige of order. A rough sort revealed that besides the secretariat records those of three other defunct agencies had been caught in the net. These included the Development Or- ganisation and its successors and two wartime agencies, the Aliens Department and the Custodian of Enemy Property. The secretar- iat series itself provided some disappointments, for only 20 per- cent of the first 5,000 general files remained, none of them for the

THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST TANGANYIKA NATIONAL ARCHIVES 515 period 1916—19. The men charged with reorganizing the adminis- tration between 1924 and 1927, so as to provide for "indirect rule," regarded their predecessors as weak and aimless, too ready to continue German policies. To symbolize the new start, files opened from 1927 were numbered beginning with a round 10000. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 The earlier files retained for reference included district reports from 1919 onward, legal materials of local importance such as land records, and records of international importance regarding former enemy persons and property. Other earlier records must have been moved to dead storage and have been sacrificed to the local scrap-paper mill during shortages in the Second World War. Thus vanished the documentation for the uncertain first years of British administration. The post-1927 files are relatively intact, lacking only routine office files culled periodically over the years. Altogether the general secretariat group occupies about 1,000 linear feet of shelving. Files on the treatment of records show various attempts to es- tablish a permanent Archives. A few of the early documents owe their continued existence to permission given the Curator of the Dar es Salaam Museum just before the war to make a selection of materials that might be of interest to researchers. After the war— when the Central African Archives blossomed as depository for the records of the and —the local cultural associations in East Africa (the Tanganyika Society and the Uganda Society) petitioned their respective Governments to co- operate in a similar way. The Colonial Office dispatched a detailed circular with a memorandum and questionnaire about archives. These initiatives brought forth reports from all East African ter- ritories, and the Governors discussed a joint service. Tanganyika seems to have backed the idea most heartily, to judge from the relative completeness of its report in comparison to Uganda's and even more in comparison to the simple Kenya statement that secre- tariat files there before 1939 had been burned in an accidental fire. Tanganyika commissioned the Chief Archivist and founder of the Central African Archives to report "on the better care, custody and control of the public records of Tanganyika." All administra- tive and departmental offices received forms on which to supply particulars of records, and the returns have value today for the history of the Archives. Unfortunately the Central African model dominated the Archivist's report, which banked everything on in- terterritorial cooperation and centralization as the most efficient and historically sound solution. Local political considerations ex-

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER 11)65 516 MARCIA WRIGHT ploded this balloon, in Uganda because of the Kabaka crisis, in Kenya through the Mau-Mau emergency, and in Zanzibar by sim- ple disinclination to let its records leave the island. Very shortly the pace of political change caught Tanganyika too in a network of more urgent considerations. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Secretariat files concerning the provincial administration give some indication of its recordkeeping history. Controls were vir- tually unknown. The only central directive, a circular of 1927 en- titled "Destruction of Old Records," gave great discretion: "You are authorised to destroy any obviously useless routine correspon- dence and returns, except financial which must await the issue of orders. Papers dealing with land questions should, of course, be preserved." Particulars supplied by the provincial administration indicate that many records had disappeared from district offices over the years, destroyed by authority of officers of various ranks or by "nil." Experience in visiting remote district headquarters had increased the impression that no broad generalization about the contents of surviving files could be made. Some offices in the early days were weeks away from telegraph or telephone; others might be cut off for as long as 4 months during the rainy season. Thus local pecu- liarities in recordkeeping came about. Approximately two-thirds of the offices were physically moved at least once, and these moves seem almost always to have been the occasion of a general clear-out. If the officer in charge happened to be the pragmatic type who hated paperwork and considered closed files as rubbish, the danger was all the greater. Some men of the more bureaucratic type played a positive role in organizing office practice and managed to apply their particular filing systems in successive posts. Otherwise, file headings followed either categories in the annual reports or subjects prescribed for the district books, looseleaf volumes on which was lavished all the love of the country in descriptions ranging from tribal genealogies to fauna. Various attempts to install a standard filing system were given up in 1939 because of the unwillingness of components of the provincial administration to change established practices and to spend the required time in office detail. In 1952, at the very time when the Central Government planned decentralization of the sec- retariat registry, the provincial administration tightened its con- trols by imposing a "Standard Filing Index." Each province deter- mined the pace of the changeover and its uniformity. The process was finished in 1962.

THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST TANGANYIKA NATIONAL ARCHIVES 517 Lack of control over the years and the detachment of the old, closed series during this provincial standardization made the trac- ing of old files in districts still harder. In questioning messengers and officials in up-country offices in 1962, one's best practice was to accept no statement that old files did not exist. As a last resort Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 it was often necessary to find the oldest employee, who almost in- variably led the way to a padlocked shed shared by records, road- building equipment, and old rags. Only in time will these caches be sifted and centralized to give a general idea of what has sur- vived. Perhaps the most interesting problem of official records facing the National Archives is the fragmented remainder of the German period. After 1924, German precedent becoming less and less important, the devotees of "indirect rule" applied the same stan- dard of relevance to German as to early British records—maintain- ing for their usefulness land, legal, and technical files. Political and general policy files have disappeared. It is hard to tell what was included in the collection of the "Keeper of German Records" that existed from 1919 to about 1933, for the Germans themselves ini- tiated the breakup of their records by burying them before retreat- ing and stating that they had been burned. Various tactics were later employed to obstruct their recovery, but a series of excava- tions brought many valuable records to light. Some optimists think that even today more might be unearthed, but in a country where preservation of paper in the open air is difficult there is strong probability that any records not already exhumed have dis- integrated. After 1933 many German files of a technical nature were dis- tributed to the interested departments, and a residue was kept in the Land Office, where the German land records already occupied a well-protected position as the basic documents for continuing land policies and obligations. Today the only set of German district files extant is in Bujumbura, where they were preserved by the Belgians. The National Archives has once again called in all German rec- ords not subject to continuing reference. The Bundesarchiv in Koblenz is expected to give material assistance in organizing, de- scribing, and preserving the German colonial legacy to East Africa. The fact that the central records of German administration are at Potsdam in East Germany gives further interest to surviving field records in Tanganyika. For Tanganyika itself these files give interesting if intermittent insights into its origins, as an integrated political unit, under the impact of . VOLUME 28, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER 1965 518 MARCIA WRIGHT In 1962 three distinct lines of development of the future Na- tional Archives seemed clear: first, that the preservation of the records themselves be announced in all branches as the will of the Government and facilities for their proper care when centralized be planned; second, that a service to the Government be supplied, Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 both in the sense of records management and of publicity for the reservoir of information contained in archives; and, third, that the collections be built for the general documentation of the country's history and to meet the particular, immediate demands of the aca- demic community. At all levels the good will of the Government and of the civil service was essential. This good will was fostered by concentrating on essentials and economy, for in a state whose revenue cannot be guaranteed to cover the budget unrealistic cultural projects are sure to suffer. A survey of technical facilities in various departments turned up an unused microfilm camera, a photostat apparatus that might be taken over, and, in a corner of the museum, a homemade fumigator. The newly founded University College, where an em- inent library builder was at work, furnished an example of high standards and the promise of some technical support. Mr. Ede took the National Archives far beyond its overmodest beginnings by gathering in district records and by persuading the Government to include an Archives Building in the 5-year development plan ini- tiated in 1964. This building will be situated near the University College, a location physically advantageous because it is on a hill a little away from the corrosive sea air and the damp heat of Dar es Salaam. The University College has grown up in the period of independ- ence, sharing the Archives' mandate to assist the Government to fulfill its ambitious development plans. Two university depart- ments, the Institute of Public Administration and the Faculty of Law, can become very closely allied to the Archives in this service. For example, the law faculty is interested in collecting precedents and practices of local and customary law heretofore practically un- documented. Not only academic but also Government purposes would be served by the collection of these records, for the judicial reorganization of 1962 abolished the old dualism between cus- tomary local courts and courts based on territorial legislation and the Indian Codes. The integrated court system requires clarifica- tion and codification of the law if it is to be applied effectively. As custodian of local court materials, the Archives will have to con- sider the whole category of records generated by former native authorities, most of them in Swahili. THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST TANGANYIKA NATIONAL ARCHIVES 519 Training of the clerical ranks of the civil service is done through the Government's special training center. Here some elements of records care are taught, but far more could be done were the policy on disposal clearly denned. It is especially important to train clerks well, for the African officers of the higher ranks tend to revere Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 precedent less than the British do. With time and settled proce- dures, recordkeeping will doubtless become more appreciated. It will be some time before the National Archives is sufficiently developed internally to render its full potential service to the Gov- ernment. When staff is increased and trained and order and finding aids are developed, it should be possible to offer the numerous visit- ing experts and technical advisers background materials from the Archives that will save them needless work. The problems of the country, both social and economic, tend to be perennial and re- current. Even if it is Utopian to hope for active use of the archives by experts, their availability is certainly a worthy goal. The needs of a nation in equatorial Africa for historical evidence are parallel to but different from those of Western countries. For example, registries of births and deaths do not exist for the African population. They have heretofore been unnecessary because of the careful perpetuation of genealogies by oral tradition. The impor- tant records for anthropologists and social historians are tax re- turns and receipts or statistics of cattle, the measure of wealth in rural areas. The Archivist and his assistants must take the advice of social scientists in developing criteria for evaluating provincial and local records. It is especially incumbent upon the National Archives to take a broad view because the chances for other deposi- tories to handle special collections are remote. Beyond selecting materials from old local-authority records, the National Archives intends, of course, to collect private papers of important persons or families, -station diaries, and rec- ords of such institutions as coffee and cotton cooperative unions. Cooperatives have figured especially in the recent economic and political history of the country. The first nonofficial deposit is a small set of records of the Universities Mission to Central Africa. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant missions are important for the precolonial to present-day history. Not to be neglected in a time when is modish are the multiracial elements that have been important especially to the commercial development of the country. , Indians, Greeks, and South Africans have played their part alongside the ruling powers. The eventual collec- tion may well include materials in a variety of languages, principal

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER 1965 520 MARCIA WRIGHT among which will be English, German, Swahili in and Latin script, and Arabic itself. Tanganyika has as yet no good school textbooks on national history. Major areas of its colonial, social, and political history are now the subjects of Ph.D. theses that, it is hoped, will provide Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/28/4/511/2744815/aarc_28_4_t6p7847l874586t4.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 a basis for a general history. While the major themes are being formulated, the National Archives has an excellent prospect of building a wealth of holdings to test them and to enrich them in detail. Many losses have occurred in the past because of the indif- ference or the preoccupation of former governments, but, on the positive side, support for the National Archives is increased by the Archives' entire identification with the postcolonial era. The chal- lenges of the coming years for both the nation and the National Archives are clear. The demands of the present are arduous. Nevertheless, Unesco has helped launch a sound venture, with a good future enhanced by the interest of the University College faculty. Above all, however, credit must go to the leaders of the Tanganyika Government for committing to the National Archives their moral and financial support, an expression of concern not so much for the present as for future generations who may take pride in a well-founded national history.

Quelque chose de mysterieux Si nos depots d'archives se sont formes par les hasards de l'histoire, (et ils sont nombreux pour notre pays), il ne faut pas croire qu'on pourrait fixer des principes generaux qu'on n'aurait qu'a appliquer au cas particulier. Les docu- ments qui composent les ,,fonds" des archives n'etaient pas concjus pour avoir une ,,portee historique", ils n'etaient que des ,,titres" de biens, des ,,preuves" des droits ou des preventions, des ,precedents" des affaires traitees . . . gardes et conserves jalousement par leurs proprietaires: les souverains, les princes, les institutions civiles et religieuses les plus disparates. Si les archives ont toujours quelque chose de mysterieux, si on considere les conservateurs et les archivistes comme gardiens de tresors, on le doit aux sou- verains qui transportaient, parmi leurs bagages, leur ,,tresor des chartes" quand ils se deplagaient et qui conservaient les archives dans les parties les moins accessibles de leurs palais. Les villes, les abbayes et les particuliers cach- aient leurs archives a la moindre alerte. —PAUL SPANG, Directeur des Archives de l'Etat, in introduction to Antoine May, Les Archives de l'Etat du Grand-Duche de Luxem- bourg et l'histoire locale (Luxembourg, 1964). THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST