Finding the Right Words Languages of Litigation in Shambaa Native Courts in Tanganyika, c.1925-1960
Stephanie Lämmert
Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute
Florence, 26 June 2017
European University Institute Department of History and Civilization
Finding the Right Words Languages of Litigation in Shambaa Native Courts in Tanganyika, c.1925- 1960
Stephanie Lämmert
Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute
Examining Board Prof. Corinna Unger, EUI (First Reader) Prof. Federico Romero, EUI (Second Reader) Prof. Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University Berlin (External Supervisor) Prof. Emma Hunter, University of Edinburgh (External Examiner)
© Stephanie Lämmert, 2017 No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author
Researcher declaration to accompany the submission of written work Department of History and Civilization - Doctoral Programme
I Stephanie Lämmert certify that I am the author of the work Finding the Right Words. Litigation Patterns in Shambaa Native Courts in Tanganyika, c.1925-1960 I have presented for examination for the Ph.D. at the European University Institute. I also certify that this is solely my own original work, other than where I have clearly indicated, in this declaration and in the thesis, that it is the work of others. I warrant that I have obtained all the permissions required for using any material from other copyrighted publications. I certify that this work complies with the Code of Ethics in Academic Research issued by the European University Institute (IUE 332/2/10 (CA 297). The copyright of this work rests with its author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This work may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. This authorisation does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that this work consists of 93,503 words.
Statement of language correction: done
Signature and date: 11. June 2017
Acknowledgements
This thesis would never have been finished without the support and advice of a number of people. Corinna Unger, my first reader, offered to take over the supervision of my thesis in my final year. I am very grateful that she took the pains of engaging with my work at such a late stage. Her insightful and substantial advice on my first and final drafts were extremely important to the development of my thesis and I wish to thank her for that. My second reader, Federico Romero, has always had an open ear not only for my work. I am grateful for his advice that stretched way beyond my academic work. I also want to thank Dirk Moses for his advice.
A special thanks goes to Andreas Eckert. His most generous support and advice, intellectual, career- and otherwise, was a steady source of reassurance throughout the past nine years. Without him, and many of the wonderful staff at re:work, I would not be where I am now. In Berlin, my thanks extends to a number of people who have encouraged me. Above all, I want to thank Stefan Hoffmann. He has not only thoroughly and critically engaged with my academic work, he is also the best friend one can wish for. I owe him a great debt of gratitude. Silke Strickrodt’s Werkstatt Geschichte in Berlin was a wonderful place to discuss research. I would like to thank her and all the participants. I also would like to thank Julia Tischler for her advice, encouragement and time. Sebastian Maggraff, Liese Hoffmann, Romain Tiquet, Vitale Kazimoto, Charlott Schönwetter, Kerstin Stubenvoll, Rajabu Kaoneka and Astrid Kiesewetter have all in one way or another been supportive of my work. I am very grateful for that. I also want to thank my students in Berlin for their fresh ideas about my source material, especially Romina Towfiq.
Florence Bernault took me in in Wisconsin. I want to thank her for her critical and encouraging advice and support. Her work and teaching has inspired my thesis and made my stay in Madison an enormously fruitful enterprise. Martin Chanock took the time to read through one of my chapters and discuss it with me in Melbourne. I am greatly indebted to him for his advice. His own work has certainly left its mark in my research.
In Tanzania, I am indebted to a great number of individuals for their assistance, advice, friendship, and help. Above all, I would like to thank Bakari Ali Saidi for his time, his connections and help, his small translations from Shambaa, his tireless explanations, and his personal support. Without him, conducting interview in Shambaai would have been an almost impossible task. Furthermore, I wish to express my gratitude to all my interview partners. I also wish to thank Yusuf Makamba, Ramadhani Mahanyu, Augustino Mhando, Hosea Joseph, Wilman
i Kapenjama, Mzee Kanyawana, Ngasuma Kanyeka, Dr. Arvind Pathak, Mwanaid Msuya and Dirk Smelty. They all contributed to making my research visits to Dar es Salaam and Lushoto even more captivating. Many thanks also the staff of the Tanzania National Archives and the Library of the Chama cha Mapinduzi. In addition, I am thankful that I have met a number of interesting researchers in the Tanzanian archives and I wish to thank them for our ongoing conversations: Samuel Mhajida, Harsha Pattni, Husseina Dinani, James Brennan, Rachel Taylor and Benjamin Brühwiler. Another special thank goes to my friend Susanne Erhardt who generously allowed me to use her research notes. A very big thanks goes to Jessica Bate for the language editing.
During my time at the EUI, I was always able to rely on the help, support, advice and friendship of my colleagues, some of which have become close friends. Many thanks to Sharon- Elisabeth Burke, Miguel Coelho, Roel Frakking, Anna Frisone, Donal Hassett, Bram Hoonhout, Miquel de la Rosa Lorente, Efstathia Politi, Suzan Meryem Rosita, Liam McHugh-Russell, Tetiana Onofriichuk, and Florian Wagner. Jonas Brendebach and Kornelia Konczal were the two persons who kept my spirits up when times were rough and they deserve a special thanks here. The same, of course, goes for my triple pillar of strength, Margot Béal, Esther Wahlen and Matthijs Kuipers.
The sole reason I survived the past four years are my wonderful friends outside of academia. I am enormously grateful for their quite extensive support on all possible levels. Massive thanks to Iris Ströbel, Nora Ströbel, Rosa Theye, Sarah Müller, Benjamin Weber, Nora Vissering, Lina Nientimp, Nura Treves, Kim Mercedes Osterwald, Uli Schneck and to my sister Lila.
ii Glossary
Akida (Swahili) A representative of the colonial state, a role introduced by the Germans under direct rule to strengthen German rule over a local population. The representative was usually from the same country, but a different region than the local population Bawanjama (Shambaa) Local Council Boma Town hall, headquarters of the District Office Bondei, Bonde The Bondei live in the Bonde region, East of the Usambara Mountains chama, vy- (Sw.) Association, party DC District Commissioner DO District Officer EEARS East African Agriculture Research Station in the Eastern Usambaras, formerly known under the Germans as Amani fitina (-) , (Sw.) Intrigue ghunda (Sh.) Tribute labor Jumbe (Sw.) Headman KCU Kilimanjaro Citizens Union Kilindi Royal clan of the Usambara Mountains Kimweri (Sh.) a) Nowadays used as the general title for the “Paramount Chief” of Shambaai; b) Its original meaning is generational; Kimweri is always the generation following a Shebughe generation; c) It has also become an extremely common name for royal Kilindi kitara kikuu (Sh.) Royal capital, royal court Kwavi Ethnic group living in parts of Shambaai MBRS Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme mgeni, wa- (Sw.) a) Stranger, foreigner; b) guest Mlughu (Sh.) “Prime Minister” in the council of the chief muasi, wa- (Sw.) Protester, rebel NA Native authority PC Provincial Commissioner raia (-), (Sw.) Citizen Shambaai (Sh.) Land of the Shambaa, Usambara Mountains Shebughe (Sh.) Title of the “Paramount Chief” of Shambaai; Shebughe is a generational name. Shebughe is always the father generation of the generation of Kimweri Sesa (Sw.) Flat cultivation Simbamwene (Sw./Sh.) Royal title of the Paramount TAA Tanganyika African Association TANU Tanganyika African National Union TNA\DSM Tanzania National Archives at Dar es Salaam TNA\KEW British National Archives at Kew
iii UCU Usambara Citizens Union UTP United Tanganyika Party uhuru (Sw.) Freedom Upare, Pare The land of the Pare, Northern Shambaai utumwa (Sw.) Slavery Uzigua, Zigua The land of the Zigua, Southern Shambaai uzushi (Sw.) Fabrications, lies vijana (plural, Sw.) Youngsters, young people Zumbe Mkuu (Sh.) Sub-chief
iv Illustrations
Maps 1 The Usambara Mountains 20
Figures 1 The Shita neighborhood 73 2 Ancestral chart of the Kilindi royal lineage 81 3 The Local Court of Mlalo 148 4 Anti-corruption poster 165 5 Timetable of political events in Shambaai, 1946-1961 168 6 Judgment of the Native Court of Vugha-Bazo, 1955 176
v Contents INTRODUCTION ...... 1 The Argument ...... 3 State of the Art – Law and Colonialism ...... 6 Legal Intermediaries ...... 7 A Cultural Approach to the Law ...... 9 The Context – Peasant Resistance ...... 10 The Chapters ...... 13 The Sources ...... 15 Brief Introduction to Shambaai and its People...... 17 Shambaa Protest as Part of Larger Unrest in the British Empire ...... 24 CHAPTER ONE Claim-Making, Petition-Writing and Political Imagination in Shambaai, 1925-1952 ...... 27 Conceptualization of Petition-Writing ...... 29 Tanganyika’s Judiciary ...... 31 Christianity, Literacy, Letter-Writing and Textual Imagination in Shambaai...... 33 “Something Delighted Me, and that was Reading”: Shambaa Love for Letter-Writing ...... 37 Indirect Rule and the Slavery Discourse ...... 39 Selective Appropriation ...... 43 The “Rightful Owners of the Land” ...... 46 Imperial Tensions and the War ...... 51 Post World War Two Petitions ...... 54 Conclusion: The Evolution of the Slavery Discourse ...... 57 CHAPTER TWO “Much unwanted hard labour and considerable breaches with custom” – Resistance to the Labor Regime of the Usambara Scheme ...... 61 Modernization through Development ...... 63 The Agricultural Sector ...... 65 Background to the Scheme: Tanganyika and Shambaai ...... 67 The Scheme’s Prehistory ...... 69 “Much Unwanted Hard Labour and Considerable Breaches with Custom” ...... 75 Outline of the Protest ...... 81 Practices of Resistance ...... 83 Rising Litigation Patterns ...... 92
vi The Role of Native Authorities ...... 97 The Inherent Contradiction of Indirect Rule ...... 103 Conclusion ...... 105 CHAPTER THREE – Land Disputes and Transactions in and beyond Colonial Courts ...... 109 Statistics from Shambaai Native Courts, 1939-1959 ...... 114 “There is no Father who Expels His Son and Lets him Die of Hunger” ...... 117 Pressure on the Land and Changing Customs ...... 122 “Mzitui Havina Ghisa”: Community Land and the Role of Chiefs and Headmen ...... 126 Family, Generation and Women’s Rights to Inherit ...... 130 Ethnic Tensions ...... 136 Conclusions ...... 137 CHAPTER FOUR The Language of Corruption in Shambaa Native Courts ...... 140 Corruption in Colonial Institutions ...... 143 Colonial Jurisdiction in Tanganyika under the British ...... 145 The Early British Discourse on Corruption ...... 147 Lost in the Procedural Jungle ...... 150 “Impartiality” and “Corruption” in Native Courts ...... 151 Owing, and Accepting Favors ...... 154 Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo, so-called “Bush-Lawyers” and the Rise of Cold War Discourse ...... 158 By Way of Conclusion ...... 162 CHAPTER FIVE The Politics of Nationalism in Native Courts: The Chama and False Accusations ...... 166 “Our Mwambashi” Shemsanga and the Chama ...... 167 The Perfect Intermediary ...... 180 The Tea Shop Case ...... 187 The Shemsanga Trial ...... 195 Excursus – How the Shemsanga Trial links to the Healing Discourse ...... 203 Conclusion ...... 204 CHAPTER SIX Closed-down Pathways of Communication and Incommensurabilities of Thought in the Extra-Legal Sphere ...... 209 Peasant Resistance and Public Ill-Health ...... 210 “The Normal Peasant Wants Justice and Rain rather than a Say in Running His Own Affairs” ...... 211 Remembering Resistance in Popular Culture: The Story of Osale and Paulo ...... 220
vii Outlaws or Freedom Fighters? ...... 224 The Danger of Power: Duality in Shambaa Thought ...... 229 Order and Disorder in Ritual ...... 232 Being a Criminal in Late-Colonial Shambaai ...... 234 Conclusion ...... 237 CONCLUDING REMARKS...... 239 Primary Sources ...... 249 Bibliography...... 253
viii INTRODUCTION
This Ph.D. thesis is concerned with the way litigants of the Usambara Mountains in Tanganyika spoke and wrote about their disputes and grievances under British rule. Language and narratives are at the core of my analysis. While I will give an overview of litigation patterns of the so-called “native courts”1 in the Usambara Mountains from the late 1930s to 1960, and will examine clusters of recurring cases, my main concern is not to write a social history of these courts, but a cultural one. I am interested in recurring narratives and their intellectual roots. What kind of language did the Shambaa and other African litigants use in lawsuits and the many petitions and letters that accompanied their suits? What might have influenced them in their strategic choice of language? What intellectual sources did they draw from? While I am also interested in the outcomes of cases and the success of narratives, my objective is to treat these emerging narratives as windows into specific local perspectives. Why did Shambaa litigants depart so markedly from legal language? Was the legalistic language unsuitable for a specific Shambaa understanding of the law, or were the courts themselves not perceived as places for the dispensation of justice?
My work brings together two strands of literature. First, it draws from the rich and quickly growing literature on legal intermediaries and legal pluralism, which I will discuss at length below. Secondly, my research is influenced by the body of literature about writing, wording, and creativity in non-Western contexts,2 or what has been referred to as an “intellectual history from below.”3 Emma Hunter’s study of the Tanganyikan public sphere seen through the lens of
1 I will use the expression “native court” in my work despite its negative connotations because it is central to the actors’ language and I feel that using another term, like chief’s court or lowest level courts would obscure the contemporary tension. I am, however, aware of its roots in racial theory and its embeddedness in the politics of indirect rule. The same applies for terms such as “native authorities”, “chief”, etc. From here on I will dispense with using inverted commas. 2 Francis Cody, The light of knowledge: Literacy activism and the politics of writing in South India, Expertise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Emma Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, democracy, and citizenship in the era of decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Stephanie Newell, Literary culture in colonial Ghana: 'how to play the game of life' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Derek R. Peterson, Creative writing: Translation, bookkeeping, and the work of imagination in colonial Kenya, Social history of Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). 3 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 7; this body includes the seminal work of Steven Feierman of which I made extensive use, see Steven Feierman, Peasant intellectuals: Anthropology and history in 1 newspapers has inspired me to follow the stories of “individual words which travel the world,” and how these words take on new meaning as they are integrated into “vernacular understandings of fundamental political concepts.”4 Perhaps the novelty of my work is not so much the themes themselves, which dominated litigation patterns in Shambaai under British rule – mostly land disputes and “corruption” cases – but the insights gained through unraveling the narrative and linguistic choices made by litigants as they were arguing their way through these themes. Various historians of Africa have insisted on the usefulness of court records for revealing aspects of Africa’s social5 or legal6 history. While I am deeply indebted to this literature, I also depart from it by looking in another direction. For me, court records serve not
Tanzania (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Steven Feierman, Concepts of Sovereignty among the Shambaa and their Relation to Political Action (Oxford: Unpublished PhD Thesis, 1972); Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A history (Madison, Wis: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1974). 4 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 9. 5 Jean M. Allman and Victoria B. Tashjian, I will not eat stone: A women's history of colonial Asante (Portsmouth, NH, Oxford, Cape Town: Heinemann; J. Currey; D. Philip, 2000); Carol Dickerman, “The Use of Court Records as Sources for African History: Some Examples from Bujumbura, Burundi,” History in Africa 11 (1984), 69-81; Susan F. Hirsch, Pronouncing and persevering: Gender and discourses in an African Islamic court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Margot Lovett, “"She Thinks She's like a Man": Marriage and (De)Constructing Gender Identity in Colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943-1960,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996), 52- 68; Kristin Mann and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Law in colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH, London: Heinemann Educational Books; James Currey, 1991); Derek R. Peterson, “Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006), 983–1010; Brett L. Shadle, "Girl cases": Marriage and colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006). 6 Elizabeth Colson, “Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tonga Society,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 23, no. 3 (1953), 199–212; Martin Chanock, Law, custom, and social order: The colonial experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Benjamin N. Lawrance, “Petitioners, "Bush Lawyers," and Letter Writers: Court Access in British-Occupied Lomé, 1914-1920,” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 94–114; Brett L. Shadle, “African Court Elders in Nyanza Province, Kenya, ca. 1930-1960: From "Traditional" to "Modern",” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 180-201; Elke Stockreiter, “"British kadhis" and "Muslim judges": modernisation, inconsistencies and accommodation in Zanzibar's colonial judiciary,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4, no. 2010 (3), 560–576. In the vast field of legal history and anthropology, it is the work of Sally Falk Moore that I am most indebted to, see Sally F. Moore, Social facts and fabrications: "customary" law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Sally F. Moore, “Inflicting Harm Righteously: Turning a Relative into a Stranger: An African Case,” in Fremde der Gesellschaft: Historische und sozialwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Differenzierung von Normalität und Fremdheit, ed. Marie T. Fögen (Frankfurt a.M: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 115–45; Sally F. Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts,” Law & Society Review 26, no. 1 (1992), 11-46; Sally F. Moore, “Past in the Present: Tradition, Land and 'Customary' Law on Kilimanjaro 1880-1980,” in Culture, history, and identity: Landscapes of inhabitation in the Mount Kilimanjaro area, Tanzania : essays in honour of Paramount Chief Thomas Lenana Mlanga Marealle II (1915-2007), ed. Timothy Clack and Thomas L. M. Marealle (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 39- 75. 2 only as windows into legal or social history, but also as sources that are particularly valuable from a cultural and intellectual perspective. In the case of Shambaai, court records and related documents reveal reasoning strategies presented in global (human rights, Cold War, corruption), regional (healing, slavery) and local (invisibility) narratives. My thesis is an attempt to explain how and why certain narratives found their way into the colonial courtroom, and what these narratives really say about local subjectivities. In short, this work reconciles narration with the law, two things which seem to be incompatible at first sight. What were the reasons that made creative narratives supersede legalistic language in Shambaai’s native courts?
The Argument It is not a surprise that much of the literature concerned with the lowest rank of the colonial legal system, the so-called native courts, treat them as sites confined to the “customary” realm, because custom was precisely the law at play in these courts. It is a matter of fact that at the heart of the politics of indirect rule lay the premise that Africans would remain in the “tribal realm.” As a general rule in the British African Empire, the colonial judiciary was based on a dual legal system, in which subjects and citizens were neatly separated from one another. Ellen Feingold has recently shown that Tanganyika’s judiciary was a particularly pronounced example of the politics of indirect rule. Here, not only were the subjects, the Africans, disconnected from the law that applied to citizens, but even appeals emanating from native courts were heard by administrative personnel instead of trained jurists. In other British colonies, such as Uganda and Northern Rhodesia,7 appeals from native courts lay to the higher courts, not to administrative officers. In Tanganyika however, since 1929 when Donald Cameron, the “governor of indirect rule” and a former disciple of Lugard, enforced a court ordinance, native courts were de facto separated from the rest of the colonial judiciary.8
My dissertation complicates the picture of native courts as sites where custom dominated. As evidence from Shambaai native courts suggests, Shambaa and other African litigants did not restrict their arguments to the customary realm when they presented their grievances in native
7 TNA\KEW, CO 1003/2: Colonial Native Law Advisory Panel. Papers 1948, 26.01.1948, A Survey of Courts Legislation in the British African Dependencies, p.8. 8 Ellen Feingold, “Decolonising justice: A history of the High Court of Tanganyika, c.1920-1971,” (Unpublished Thesis (D.Phil.), University of Oxford, 2012), 86-93. 3 courts. I argue that it was precisely the separation of native courts from the colonial judiciary that enabled African litigants to present their grievances to a broader audience beyond the judiciary. This may sound contradictory at first. Governor Cameron had argued that judges of appeal cases from native courts should be district officers because they knew “their tribe” and the local custom that applied, while jurists – being versed in judicial procedure – were, in his view, notoriously detached from the local worlds on the ground. Cameron got his way in a dispute with Chief Justice Alison Russell, and as of 1929, administrative officers held their own appeal courts. 9 Like the Chief Justice had worried, this move altered the judiciary dramatically. Administrative officers in Tanganyika in the 1930s and also in later decades did not receive much training regarding their judicial function. There were various manuals specifying appeal procedures, but these could not substitute legal training. Furthermore, their function as both executive and judicial authorities in fact signaled a departure from an independent judiciary.
But Tanganyikan litigants were not satisfied with their relegation to the customary realm. The conclusion the litigants drew from the altered appeal chain was that they addressed their grievances beyond the courtroom in letters and petitions to administrative officers. Soon they began to petition higher ranked officers who had nothing to do with the chain of appeal, or even to British MPs or the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. The disconnection of native courts from the judiciary allowed for a different form of communication. A wave of petitions flooded the offices of all sorts of officials of the British African Empire. The eagerness with which African litigants took up the opportunity to involve non-legal officials could have been a hint that they did not believe in the separation of powers and that really it was the courts that decided important matters. Involving as many independent non-legal personal networks as possible has since remained a strategy to settle disputes for many Africans.10 Broadening the legal sphere by introducing personal support webs can thus be understood as both connected to older forms of dispute settlement, where no such distinction existed, as well as to the new distrust of allegedly independent courts.
9 TNA\Kew, CO 691/189: Native Courts Legislation, in: Administration of Justice in Tanganyika, 8; TNA\DSM, 13638: Court Ordinance 1929, Tanga Province, 6C; J.P Moffett, “Native Courts in Tanganyika. A History of the Development of Native Courts from German Times,” Journal of African Administration 4 (1952), 19-21. 10 Sara Berry, No condition is permanent: The social dynamics of agrarian change in sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 104; Moore, Social facts and fabrications, 310-317. 4 Petitioning did not only change the scope and scale of the appeal chain, but also the language used in the courts. Court records, petitions and letters from Shambaai are rich sources and present a wide array of languages in which African litigants chose to present their grievances. I argue that most often, Shambaa and other African litigants chose a language they thought would resonate well with their judges. Again, that is administrative officers, not trained lawyers. In other words, Tanganyikan litigants tried to make use of “colonial knowledge” they had come across such as lessons learned at mission stations or government schools. Others referenced knowledge brought to them through war propaganda or newspapers, or cited the articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rrights (UDHR) and more generally from the growing international rights talk or the Western discourse of anti-communism. But litigants did not only open court culture to colonial narrative repertoires, they also made use of regionally or locally specific narratives. Arguments based on the latter category were not always commensurable with British thought, especially if they drew from the pool of thought the British referred to as “native superstitions,” such as allusions to invisibility, rain-making or healing. Whichever repertoire they chose, the consequence was that the language used in native courts was far less constrained by legal language and procedure than one would expect. Instead, they used creative, sometimes lyrical, and often allusive language, but their language was hardly confined to the legal realm, and as such not exclusively to the customary law, but also to the repertoire of international law. In a way, this can be seen as an unintended consequence of Cameron’s decision to disconnect the native courts from the rest of the judiciary. The disconnection enabled the use of language informed by loans from specific Shambaa narratives as well as from British history, literature, war propaganda, legal and corruption discourse – all of which Shambaa litigants regularly evoked. Ironically, Governor Cameron did not succeed in keeping the natives in their tribal realm. Instead, he contributed to broadening the language used in native courts.
Studying native courts thus opens a broad window into intellectual thought and historical narratives during colonialism that is not necessarily confined to the “tribal realm.” This approach stresses the agency of Africans and the way their various litigation strategies could influence the courts’ decisions. It also allows me to unravel the discursive narratives of Tanganyikan history and Shambaa thought that have found their way into the courtrooms. 5 State of the Art – Law and Colonialism The general trend in Africa-related research is to portray Africa as the “problem child” when it comes to law and the administration of justice. The literature focuses on Africa’s alleged deficiency regarding the respect and protection of rights. At first sight this literature seems to touch on my research subject only slightly, yet it is worthwhile noting that the experience of colonial law shaped African responses, conceptions and perceptions of law and rights deeply and permeated far beyond the colonial period.
Until today many scholars have viewed rights and law in Africa as a mere transplantation of Western concepts.11 Others underline the incompatibility of Western and African concepts of rights, thereby getting mired in the debate on universality and cultural relativism.12 Still others describe the recurring references to rights in the late colonial period as nothing more than a self-serving project created by the national elites to obtain the right to self-determination and thus national independence.13 A common explanation for the alleged absence or scarcity of a rights discourse in Africa is the colonial legacy. Authors who support this view argue that Africans, disappointed by the contradiction that lies at the heart of colonial law – namely violence and arbitrariness in spite of the alleged universality of rights14 – turned away from law as an emancipatory and universal ideology.15
11 Micheline Ishay, The history of human rights: From ancient times to the globalization era (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004); Eike Wolgast, Die Geschichte der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009). 12 Josiah A. M. Cobbah, “African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective,” Human Rights Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1987), 309–331; Okey M. Ejidike, “Human Rights in the Cultural Traditions and Social Practice of the Igbo of South-Eastern Nigeria,” Journal of African Law 43 (1999), 171–198; Alison D. Renteln, “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights,” American Anthropologist 90, no. 1 (1988), 56–72. See also Bonny Ibhawoh, “Cultural Relativism and Human Rights: Reconsidering the Africanist Discourse,” Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 19, no. 1 (2001), 43–62. 13 Jan Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009), 437–484; Samuel Moyn, The last utopia: Human rights in history (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). 14 Alice L. Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998), 419–442; Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperialism and human rights: Colonial discourses of rights and liberties in African history (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Fabian Klose, Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: Die Dekolonisierungskriege in Kenia und Algerien 1945-1962 (München: Oldenbourg, 2009). 15 Florence Bernault, “What Absence is made of: Human Rights in Africa,” in Human rights and revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 121–35. 6 Both historians and legal anthropologists have recently addressed the issue from different angles. The historians call for a contextualization of the history of rights that would shed light on discontinuities and ruptures in the history of rights instead of presenting a teleological narrative.16 The recent work of legal anthropologists focuses on a concept of culture that emphasizes communalities, exchange and interaction and leads away from an essentializing concept of culture, contrary to the dichotomic binaries of universality and cultural relativism, the “west and the rest.”17 In doing so, the question that has long seemed the most crucial, namely the debate about the intellectual origins of specific rights, is no longer relevant. Instead, the main focus has shifted to how actors from the global South draw from a linguistic and conceptual pool of legal discourse, while appropriating and transforming legal norms and practices, and combining them with local elements along the way.18
Legal Intermediaries There has been a recent expansion in the body of literature on the historization of the legal profession as well as on other local intermediaries in legal spheres, especially in India and the Arab world.19 These intermediaries share the task of translating and negotiating between two
16 Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945”, 438. See as well Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, ed., Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); Moyn, The last utopia. 17 Sally E. Merry, Gender violence: A cultural perspective (Malden, MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Pub., 2009); David Penna and Campell Patricia, “Human Rights and Culture: Beyond Universality and Relativism,” Third World Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1998), 7–27. 18 Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, eds., Between indigenous and settler governance (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013); Shannon Speed and Jane Collier, “Limiting Indigenous Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico: The State Government's Use of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 22 (2000), 877. See also Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard Wilson, eds., Culture and rights: Anthropological perspectives (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 19 Omoniye Adewoye, “Sapara Williams: The Lawyer and the Public Servant,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 6, no. 1 (1971), 47–64; Michael Anderson, “Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India,” in Institutions and ideologies, ed. David Arnold (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1993), 165-85; Martin Chanock, “The Lawyers' Self. Sketches on Establishing a Professional Identity in South Africa 1900-1935,” Law in Context 16, no. 1 (1998), 59–79; Assaf Likhovski, Law and identity in mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Mary J. Mossman, The first women lawyers: A comparative study of gender, law and the legal professions (Oxford, England, Portland, Or: Hart Pub., 2006); W. W. Pue and David Sugarman, eds., Lawyers and vampires: Cultural histories of legal professions (Portland, Or: Hart, 2003); Ronen Shamir, The colonies of law: Colonialism, Zionism, and law in early mandate Palestine (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mitra Sharaf, “A New History of Colonial Lawyering: Likhovski and Legal Identities in the British Empire,” Law and Social Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2007), 1059–1094. 7 worlds. They have been labelled “cross-cultural brokers.”20 The position of these intermediaries as a bridge between the rulers and the “uneducated masses” and the necessity to translate and negotiate between the two worlds was often a difficult task, but also one to which power was attached. Focusing on intermediaries has the advantage of placing exchange and interaction at the forefront instead of being stuck with the dichotomy of tradition and modernity21 or the either-or view of collaboration with or resistance against the colonial power.22 Even more important, settling on intermediaries prevents us from seeing the colonial legal system as the neatly defined dual system of “native” law versus “received” law. Instead, it opens a perspective on the complexity of legal situations, whose variety has witnessed many attempts at conceptualization, including legal spheres23, legal pluralism,24 venue shopping25 or forum shopping.26 The common ground of all these conceptualizations is to demonstrate that Africans were able to continuously cross the boundaries of the legal spheres (of which there were more than two); just as they were able to challenge them by selecting which court they wished to use, by choosing the kinds of grievances they brought forward, and by introducing new concepts of social relationships.27
20 Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts, “African Intermediaries and the “Bargain of Collaboration”, in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 3. 21 See here Andreas Eckert’s study on Tanzanian bureaucrats, Andreas Eckert, Herrschen und Verwalten. Afrikanische Bürokraten, staatliche Ordnung und Politik in Tanzania, 1920-1970 (München: Oldenbourg, 2007), 168. See also Andreas Eckert, “Julius Nyerere, Tanzanian Elites, and the Project of African Socialism,” in Trajectories of decolonization: Elites and the transformation from the colonial to the postcolonial, ed. Marc Frey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 223. 22 Stefan B. Kirmse, ed., One law for all? Western models and local practices in (post-)imperial contexts (Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 2012), 17. 23 Sally E. Merry, “The Articulation of Legal Spheres,” in African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives, ed. Margaret J. Hay and Marcia Wright (Boston, Mass.: Boston University Papers on Africa, VII, 1982), 71. 24 Lauren A. Benton, Law and colonial cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, UK, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. 25 Richard L. Roberts, Litigants and households: African disputes and colonial courts in the French Soudan, 1895- 1912 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005), 18. 26 Keebet v. Benda-Beckmann, “Forum shopping and shopping forums: dispute processing in a Minankabau village in West Sumatra,” Journal of Legal Pluralism 19 (1981), 18-19. 27 Case studies are Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Ulrike Schaper, Koloniale Verhandlungen: Gerichtsbarkeit, Verwaltung und Herrschaft in Kamerun 1884-1916 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012); for further conceptualization see Daniel Siemens, “Towards a New Cultural History of Law,” InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology 3, no. 2 (2012), 18–45. 8 Even though the conceptualization of a dual legal system falls short of the often messy reality of the various legal spheres, one must not forget the ideological impact of indirect rule. Under indirect rule, the focus was not only on “tribal units”, but also on the structural separation of “native” and “received” law. “Tribal” customary law was seen, through colonial eyes, not only as a tool to bind “tribal units”, but also to separate one tribe from the other. As Martin Chanock has noted, “the whole concept of a ‘tribe’ upon which the system of indirect rule came to rest depended upon the idea of a discrete group with an established system of customary law if not peculiar to itself than at least accepted by all its members.”28 The link between indirect rule and customary law is important as it influenced African ideas about litigation strategies. The focus on intermediaries reveals both the multiple ways in which individuals could shape the colonial encounter, how they appropriated and renegotiated their grievances within the existing legal spheres as well as how the ideology of indirect rule shaped the language of their litigation strategies and their intellectual challenge to perceived injustices.
A Cultural Approach to the Law By focusing on legal intermediaries and litigants from different social layers, I try to reconcile a micro perspective with the broader context of the transformations brought about through colonial rule and persisting pre-colonial patterns. This is possible by studying the way individuals could “surf” between them, as well as by studying how their language varied according to the different forums they addressed. Taking litigants seriously and being sensitive to recurring claims and grievances eventually allows the reader to connect litigation patterns to patterns of social change beyond the courtroom. In the disputes and conversations with colonial administrative and legal staff, local actors were able to renegotiate and alter their ideas of what in fact was “custom” and what was not. For example, Martin Chanock has shown that local custom was “invented” by the British in concert with local chiefs in an effort to legitimize male privilege.29 Understood that way, disputes are “processes and long conversations”30 in contrast to a more rule-oriented approach, as John Comaroff and Simon Roberts have argued. Therefore
28 Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 9. 29 Ibid., 239; Martin Chanock, “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” in African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives, ed. Margaret J. Hay and Marcia Wright (Boston, Mass.: Boston University Papers on Africa, VII, 1982), 66-67. 30 John L. Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and processes: The cultural logic of dispute in an African context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 29. 9 it is not so much rules, but processes of negotiation such as bargaining strengths and their effects on maintaining neighborly relations that often shape the outcome of disputes in small- scale societies.31
If disputes are processes and negotiations play a much larger role than rules, then it is important to focus on the language in which negotiations are held. Therefore, I aim to go one step forward by trying to study the nature of the cultural production of litigants – their narratives. The insight that legal action produces culture and gives meaning to law is common- place for anthropologists and lawyers.32 Following their lead, I have attempted to treat law not only as an object to study, but also as an analytical category to understand cultural expressions.
The Context – Peasant Resistance Native courts were not places confined to the customary realm and neither were they confined to the language of customary law. Instead, they were places where generational, gender, class and ethnic conflicts played out. In that sense, all cases were political – land disputes as much as false accusation cases, which were more obviously tied to political activism against chiefs and often fought by members of the newly founded political parties. Although I will refer to the wave of false accusation cases as “political” cases (Chapter Five), I am aware that disputes about inheritance, land or matrimonial issues were as political as those more closely linked to the cause of post-war nationalism. This insight is yet another argument for a broader understanding of the nature of native courts. The life of litigants was shaped by a more encompassing reality than that of “tribal custom.” This is reflected in the disputes dealt with at native courts. Many Shambaa men were wage workers in the coastal towns of Tanga and Mombasa. Others, although fewer, worked on the sisal plantations in the plains, which had a bad reputation because of injuries caused by working around sisal blades.33 Women travelled to markets and sometimes found work in towns, though on a much lower scale. And even for those who stayed
31 Sally F. Moore, “Imperfect Communications,” in Understanding disputes: The politics of argument, ed. Patricia Caplan (Oxford, Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1995), 24. 32 Mark Goodale and Sally E. Merry, eds., The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lawrence Rosen, Law as culture: An invitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); June Starr and Mark Goodale, eds., Practicing ethnography in law: New dialogues, enduring methods (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 33 Sunseri, Thaddeus, Vilimani: Labor migration and rural change in early colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 139. 10 in the same vicinity for a lifetime, newspapers, public discourse, mission stations and rumors offered rich sources that transcended the realm of custom, narrowly defined as it was by the British.
A significant rise in appeals, petitions and letters was spurred by protests against the late colonial state’s new activism in the agricultural sector. The introduction of an environmental conservation scheme against soil erosion, introduced in Mlalo in 1946 and in the rest of Shambaai in 1950, threatened customary Shambaa land tenure, and added an enormous additional work load to the cultivators’ schedule. It resulted in various forms of protest and resistance until its final abandonment in 1957. In its wake, the volume of scheme-related litigation in Shambaai’s native courts rose to new heights in the mid-1950s. As much as one has to be careful not to read political resistance into each breach of the cultivation rules, it is striking to see the enormous amount of scheme-related cases and the high number of letters and petitions that accompanied them, expressing anger about court decisions and the conduct of native courts’ personnel. Therefore, we briefly have to turn to expressions of peasant resistance in African history.
The concept of resistance in African history has been criticized for the danger of romanticizing rural African lifestyle and peasant protest against colonial capitalism34 and reading resistance into ordinary everyday life.35 As the early research on primary and secondary resistance to colonial rule and Maji Maji exemplifies, there is a risk of anachronism and the danger of inserting an implicit teleology in assuming that all forms of protest and resistance eventually lead to independence.36 However, a recent critical reconceptualization of peasant resistance calls for retaining resistance as an analytical category. It has been argued that as long as there is proof of the intention to resist – as opposed to reading resistance into activities in hindsight –
34 Terence Ranger, “The People in African Resistance: A review,” Journal of Southern African Studies 4, no. 1 (1977), 130, 142. One of the romanticizing accounts is certainly Hydén’s “economy of affection”. He assumes that “these societies are more human”, see Göran Hydén, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry (London: Heinemann, 1980), 14. 35 J. Abbink, Mirjam d. Bruijn and Klaas van Walraven, eds., Rethinking resistance: Revolt and violence in African history (Leiden, the Netherlands, Boston: Brill, 2003), 5, 33. 36 G. C. K. Gwassa, Record of the Maji rising (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), see also Andreas Eckert, “Historiker, “nation-building” und Rehabilitierung der afrikanischen Vergangenheit. Aspekte der Geschichtsschreibung in Afrika nach 1945,” in Globale Konflikte, Erinnerungsarbeit und Neuorientierungen seit 1945, ed. F. R. Ankersmit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 162-87. 11 the concept is as useful as ever.37 In addition, this approach departs from previous research by overcoming the binary opposition between resistance and collaboration as it acknowledges the full range and variety of possible human action between the poles of resistance and domination.38 Because of its focus on the actors’ intentions – if possible to recover – the concept of resistance is an instrument that zooms in on the specific nature of peasant protest.39
Peasant resistance, as distinguished from other forms of resistance against colonial rule, plays a special role in the literature. Allen Isaacman has argued that the uniqueness of peasant protest in colonial society is determined by the degree of relative autonomy the peasantry had vis-a-vis the state and its representatives.40 He claims that this partial autonomy is linked to the labor process, in other words to their “ability to mobilize their own labor power through the household and their access to land, which, together, gave them command over subsistence.”41 Because of this relative autonomy, they were able to retain their own language, historical memories and forms of cultural expression, whereas other groups under colonial rule did not.42 Isaacman’s argument further maintains that a degree of surveillance and labor control of peasants in densely populated work areas such as on plantations or in urban work settings like harbors was simply impossible with the means available to the colonial state. Because the colonial state never had the power to destroy the peasantry, but only to control it, peasant protest did not challenge the existing structure – unlike rural or urban workers’ protest. In fact, through protest, peasants only sought to expand their autonomy.43
Being influenced by Marxist historiography, Isaacman comes close to essentializing the peasant. Whether there are essential qualities of “peasantness”, such as the negative essentialism of backwardness or the positive notion of village community, and whether peasants represent a distinct social class are contested issues, however.44 The case of Shambaai demonstrates that a
37 Abbink, Bruijn and van Walraven, Rethinking resistance, 8. 38 Eric Allina-Pisano, “Resistance and the Social History of Africa,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003), 193. 39 Allen Isaacman, “Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa,” African Studies Review 33, no. 2 (1990), 32, 58. 40 Ibid., 58. 41 Ibid., 3. 42 Ibid., 3. 43 Ibid., 58. 44 Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres, “From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change,” Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 1 (2001), 6-7, 34, 36; see also Lionel Cliffe, “Rural Class Formation in East Africa,” Journal of Peasant Studies 4, no. 2 (1977), 195-224. 12 specific local discourse prevailed in Shambaai. The narrative about “healing and harming the land”45 as portrayed by Steven Feierman was one of the central motifs in Shambaa thought, and it was associated with a peasant mode of living. In fact, it applied to a much wider realm than soil fertility. Besides sufficient rainfall, “healing the land” symbolized besides sufficient rainfall a mostly peaceful and healthy relationship between the ruler and his people. In a similar vein, James Scott has suggested understanding peasant resistance in terms of what he calls “public health.”46 And certainly, conceptualizing the readiness for protest as a question of public health makes sense for the case of Shambaai. But the high rate of male absenteeism in late colonial Shambaai village life indicates that few households actually depended completely on a peasant subsistence economy.47 In other words, many peasants were also wage workers. I will argue that while localized discourse shaped the rural peasant lifestyle, not only was there no such a thing as a pure class of peasants but neither did mixed class affiliation hinder peasant cultivators from employing the famous “weapons of the weak” in acts of everyday resistance, such as foot- dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, ridicule, and acts of petty revenge.48 My work is influenced by the literature on resistance. But, as with the literature about the law, I go one step further here and examine cultural expressions of resistance rather than social practices. Again, I will focus on language since it was common for the residents of Shambaai to express resistance through words, be it in the courtroom, through petitions or rumors.
The Chapters In different ways, all the chapters are concerned with language and the law. They examine repertoires used in courts and changes in court culture from different perspectives. Chapter One and Six, the opening and the closing chapters, are based on local and regional narratives and idioms of resistance. In the first chapter I focus on petition writing in Shambaai and look back at an earlier tradition of petitioning which eventually came to shape the protest against the soil conservation scheme. I argue that the regional narrative of slavery in concert with a peculiar appropriation of Christian symbols shaped the way litigants put their grievances
45 Feierman, Concepts of Sovereignty among the Shambaa and their Relation to Political Action, 364-417. 46 James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 197. 47 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, No title, 130. 48 James C. Scott, Weapons of the weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 29. 13 forward. By turning the slavery discourse into a mere container to shame its addressee by accusing him of being the “slaver,” the slavery discourse turned out to be a handy tool to address grievances of all sorts. The petition-writers’ growing emphasis on ethnic identities and divisions expressed through the language of slavery can be understood as a consequence of the politics of indirect rule. Chapter Six presents a discussion of rumors and petitions phrased in localized idioms which I suspect were incommensurable with British thought. Through a detailed analysis of the popular rumor about the two “criminals” Osale and Paulo, who were said to command the power of invisibility when they roamed Shambaai at night and “visited” settlers, I establish the previously ignored link between the language of resistance and magic in Shambaai. I will also show how the perception of who was a “criminal” changed in late colonial Shambaai. The sources presented in Chapter Six are a window into very specific local expressions of dissent, but as I argue, they remained “unheard.”
Chapter Four and Five are concerned with international languages of protest that found their way into both Shambaai’s native courts and politics. In Chapter Four I discuss the implications of the court reforms of the early 1950s on Shambaa native courts. I argue that those reforms, in concert with the British discourse about German-inherited “corruption”, inspired a new language of expressing grievances. As the court reforms provided tools discontent litigants could use to report abusive behavior of local court staff, Tanganyikan litigants increasingly came to realize that the role British administrators played in the adjudication of justice was also critical. By drawing from the language of “corruption” as well as the growing language of human rights, they brought the old dispute between the colonial Bench and the administration to the fore. I argue that the partiality of administrative officers, who were the role models for native authorities, led to increasing abuse of office and distrust in colonial courts by the population. The emergence of so-called “bush-lawyers” conversant in various languages of the law was one reaction. Chapter Five traces the nationalist cause in Shambaai’s colonial courts and in it, I demonstrate how local court-holders attempted to hold the new TANU elite down in a wave of false accusations. Chapter Five takes a biographical approach. Using opposition leader Zemu Simon Shemsanga as an example, I demonstrate how individuals appropriated the lessons learned from the court reform and turned them against the chiefs by attacking their double function as executive and judicial agents. Being part of the TANU web, they sported contacts to 14 advocates and other Tanganyikan nationalists and thus were able to risk severing their ties with local networks of patronage. Their litigation strategies were influenced by the potent anti- communist discourse of the West and references to the UDHR.
Chapter Two and Three examine the direct consequences of the Usambara Scheme. Chapter Two highlights the various practices of protest against the scheme in- and outside the courtroom. In this chapter, I demonstrate how litigation patterns in Shambaa native courts were affected by the scheme-related cases and how the contested scheme changed relations between native authorities and their subjects. Many of native authorities found themselves in the uncomfortable in-between position created by indirect rule: they were held responsible for rules the British had introduced, yet they did not necessarily support them. I will show differing career paths of both opposing and allied chiefs. Although I do rely on petitions and court records, creative language plays a smaller role in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three I demonstrate how land scarcity became the major “trouble spot” in Shambaai’s native courts as a result of the Usambara Scheme. In the abundance of court records, again, there is a wealth of creative language, but phrased in a different idiom. It was young men and women who were most threatened by the land shortage. Theirs was often the language of mutual obligation and status hierarchies as they tried to appeal to the sense of honor of privileged male elders.
The Sources My doctoral thesis is partially based on previously unseen archival material and oral sources that I collected in Tanzania from 2013-2016, as well as administrative records and biographies from the British National Archives and the Rhodes House Library. The majority of my material relies on the holdings of the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam (TNA\DSM). Many of the regional files of the Tanga Province have been lost. Whether this happened due to the centralization of the regional files in the main branch in Dar es Salaam, or if they were lost before the move, is unknown. Whatever the case, many of the Tanga files have disappeared, among them a number of court files from the Lushoto division. Only the court records of the native courts of Mlalo, Mlola, Mtae, Vugha-Bazo, Bumbuli, Lushoto and Gare of the 1940s to 1960s have survived, as well as some of the case files of the Chief’s appellate court at Vugha and some of the DC’s and PC’s appeal court files of the time period. Most of the files of the
15 Governor’s (later the Chief Justice’s) appeal court are non-existent, as are all the case files from before the late 1930s. I do not know whether the lack of accessible court records from the period before the mid-1930s is an accident of history, or colonial strategy. But we do know that the official rule said that after a grace period of thirty years, the files of criminal cases were to be disposed of,49 while major civil cases were to be preserved unconditionally. Minor civil cases were to be destroyed after ten years.50
I came to realize that the existing case files of native courts from the late 1930s to 1960 also have a number of gaps. Therefore, even the preserved court records of the native courts are not a full representation of the volume of litigation in its entirety. For example, the “Tea Shop Case” in Chapter Five is entirely based on one case that began in the native court of Vugha-Bazo and ended on the desk of the district registrar of the resident magistrate’s court at the High Court at Tanga. However, there is no documentation of the case in the court records of the given period whatsoever, neither in the case files of the native court of Vugha-Bazo, nor in the DC’s appeal court files. I came across it by sheer luck in another file and then found bits and pieces in other files, yet none of them case files.
Therefore, throughout my work I was fully aware of the clear methodological challenge regarding the representativity of the preserved court records. Other sources such as communications between district officials and chiefs or headmen reveal that the problem of documentation was already a concern for contemporaries. It was not rare for a DC to reprimand one of his local court-holders for sloppy record-keeping. Moreover, in several specific cases of interest that reached the DC’s court of appeal through the chain of appeal, the district official learned that the documentation of the case he was supposed to reconsider had never been entered into the court books in the first place. Another methodological challenge is that it is impossible to know how many land and other disputes were settled outside of courts, within the patrilineage or through other means of non-legal dispute settlement. It is very likely that
49 TNA\DSM, 72, 32/6: Correspondence with High Court, 27.08.1948, Magistrate to the Reigstrar HM High Court, Dar, 77. 50 Informal conversation with the court clerk of the Local Court of Bumbuli, 20.09.2015. 16 extra-legal settlements were a common practice – according to Sally Moore, the most common way for the neighboring Chagga of Kilimanjaro was to handle matters “at home.”51
Yet despite issues of representativity, the case files I had access to revealed rich and dense information. As Victoria Tashijan and Jean Allman remind us, against all odds and limitations of courts records, their depth and richness when it comes to documenting the history of the less privileged, such as commoner women, far outweighs the difficulties.52 In addition, another very rich source that complemented court records in surprising ways were the endless letters and petitions that often accompanied court cases, highlighting grievances and forwarding complaints that would otherwise have been lost. Letters and petitions and the court records were more often than not in Swahili, very rarely in Shambaa, and mostly handwritten. I also made use of other records held at Dar es Salaam as well as at the British National Archives (TNA\KEW) such as administrative reports, many of which are related to the Usambara Scheme or any other matter under the responsibility of the designated native authorities. Remaining gaps were complemented by a few records from the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford (RHL) and the Archives of Tanzania’s ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) in Dodoma. Chapter Six relies most heavily on oral histories collected in Shambaai between 2014 and 2015.
Brief Introduction to Shambaai and its People In order to make the following chapters more comprehensive, I will now describe the Usambara Mountains and give an overview of the history of the area. Oral traditions have it that the Shambaa kingdom came into being in the eighteenth-century. In its more glorious times, even the coastal towns Tanga and Pangani were under the control of the kingdom’s strong centralized hand.53 Shambaai is a Shambaa term meaning “the land of the Shambaa.” Shambaai was never isolated or culturally or ethnically discrete. Instead, the kingdom was firmly embedded in pre-colonial regional patterns of trade and migration.54 In pre-colonial nineteenth- century Tanganyika, coastal commercial networks, trading mostly in slaves and ivory, spanned
51 Moore, Social facts and fabrications, 302. 52 Allman and Tashjian, I will not eat stone, xxvi. 53 Abdallah H. A. Liajjemi, Habari ya Wakilindi (Holy Cross (Msalabani), Magila: Universities' Mission, 1907), 52; Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 91. 54 Ibid., chapter 8. 17 inland up to the towns of Tabora and Ujiji, and up to today’s Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The trading patterns changed local economies, trading habits and (religious) identities55 and the changes also influenced Shambaai. King Kimweri traded in slaves and supplied food for caravans to the interior and his kingdom received immigrants from various areas along the trade routes.56
Shambaai’s core region was in the hills and high mountain basins of the Usambara Mountains. Vugha, built of stone was the royal capital city. The borders of the kingdom stretched down to the plains into the Pangani Valley, an old route for trade and later slave caravans. The Kilindi were the royal ruling clan. According to a widely popular myth, Mbegha, their first ancestor, had been invited by the Shambaa to the village of Bumbuli and later to Vugha to settle and rule the country. They had done so because of their admiration for Mbegha’s hunting skills. Not only did he present them with gifts of meat, but also kept their fields free of ravaging wild pigs. Mbegha’s powerful care was understood as an obvious symbol of providing protection and security.57 Mbegha then managed to spread his rule over the entire mountain region and firmly placed his sons in the position of Zumbe, the Shambaa word for sub-chief, through intermarriage with Shambaa women from each of the chiefdoms he dominated. His own position as “king” or ruler of the Shambaa is locally referred to as Simbamwene or Kimweri.58 The British introduced the expression “Paramount Chief” instead. The Kilindi and the Shambaa share the same language, which is called Shambaa as well. Still today, most Shambaa and Kilindi identify with and often evoke the Mbegha myth. It is common custom for a Kilindi to identify as Shambaa when asked about their ethnicity. Only further inquiry by an informed outside listener might bring the Kilindi identity to the fore. Within Shambaai, however, everybody knows one another’s position in relation to the royal clan and the commoner lineages. Several other ethnic
55 Richard J. Reid, A history of modern Africa: 1800 to the present (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 54. 56 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 169. 57 Ibid., 43-45; 54. For an encompassing and detailed analysis of the different versions of the Mbegha myth, see Feierman’s The Shambaa Kingdom, chapter 3 and 4. 58 The original meaning of Kimweri is generational, as it is typical for many Eastern African societies. Kimweri always signifies the royal generation following a royal Shebughe generation. Another term for Kimweri is Shekulwavu. However, Kimweri has become a popular Shambaa name, so not every person called Kimweri is in fact a royal male born to the Shebughe generation. Furthermore, the term Kimweri is often used as a title, meaning the king of Vugha, the Simbamwene, or the Paramount Chief. Throughout this thesis, I will use the name either as a royal title, or will specify my use accordingly. 18 groups migrated to the Usambaras at some point before or during colonial rule, namely Pare and Mbugu, and even Taita from across the Kenyan border. Others, like the Zigua, Kwavi and Bondei always lived at the margins of Shambaa rule and sometimes under Shambaa sovereignty.
The kingdom lost its momentum with the advent of German colonial rule. In 1895, the Germans hanged the then Kimweri and installed an Akida, a non-local coastal literate Swahili official, who from then on was in charge of legal and administrative affairs. With the advent of indirect rule, under Governor Cameron during the British period, the Akida’s post was renounced and a Paramount Chief with the title of Kimweri was reinstalled. The Kilindi dynasty thus regained its influence and was again in charge of administrative and judicial matters.59 However, the British did not fully accept Shambaa ideas of chieftaincy nor did they accept rules of succession. The British would follow Shambaa traditions, whether they be related to succession or other matters, only if they thought them suitable. Refractory chiefs were gradually replaced with better-suited candidates. The main incentive for the British system of indirect rule was not to keep local “tradition” untouched, but to have neatly segregated “tribal units” that were perceived as more suitable for administrative, scientific and political reasons.
Local patterns of labor and agricultural produce changed in the entire region with the abolition of slavery. Colonial rule brought the introduction of a cash economy, taxation, forced labor, land confiscation and forced production of cash crops for export on a large scale, changing the life cycle in Shambaai much more drastically than did abolition and the end of the caravan trade. Colonial labor demands led to a further change in the migration patterns, especially after the First World War. Many male young Shambaa either left the mountains to procure cash in the nearby coastal cities of Mombasa and Tanga,60 or accepted work on one of the sisal plantations in the plains at the foot of Shambaai. Wages on sisal plantations were at least double those of casual labor in the mountains.61 Despite all these connections, Shambaa society remained a
59 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 122. 60 Christopher A. Conte, Highland sanctuary: Environmental history in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 131. 61 The wages for plantation work were 24 Shs per month; for labor in the mountains one could earn between 12 and 15 Shs monthly, see ibid., 100. Conte states that most Shambaa found it too dangerous to work in the plains, but in fact one third of the taxpayers did, see Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, footnote 24 in chapter 6. 19 peasant society based on agriculture, but in non-harvest periods, a considerable number of residents relied on wage labor procured elsewhere.
Map of the Usambara Mountains
Map in: Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, 47.
Under the British as was the case under the Germans, Shambaai was part of the administrative unit of Tanga Province. Tanga Province stretched over an estimated area of 16,102 square miles and consisted of five districts, three of which were coastal: Tanga, Pangani and Handeni, and 20 two of which were hillside: Usambara, later renamed to Korogwe, and Pare which later became part of the Kilimanjaro province. According to the 1948 and 1957 censuses, between the 1930s and 1950s, the population of Tanga Province increased to between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Of this population between 112,000 and 200,000 were living in the Usambara District, which covered an estimated area of 3000 square miles.62 The districts of Tanga Province were also home to some 50,000 immigrants from a multitude of East and Central African ethnic groups. The British referred to these groups as “detribalized” or “alien natives.” They were mainly employed by the sisal industry, the dominant economic activity of the province.63
Since the introduction of indirect rule in 1926, Kimweri and the elders of his council in Vugha, known as the Bawanjama, and the Zumbe of each of the seventeen chiefdoms were salaried by the British.64 Their responsibilities were manifold, but certainly the judicial work and tax collection were the most important tasks in the eyes of colonial officials, at least before the scheme-work began. In the various sub-chiefdoms of Shambaai alone, there were seventeen native courts.65 From there, appeals lay to the Paramount Chief’s appeal court in Vugha, before appeals could reach British administrative officers.
Generally speaking, the British found Shambaai a suitable place for indirect rule. For the longest time, Tanganyika’s colonial administration thought of the Shambaa to be a particularly well- suited people for indirect rule. First, they had a relatively well-developed and ancient system of chieftaincy that made their incorporation into the British system of indirect rule easy. The British were well informed about the founding myth of the Shambaa kingdom, the above- mentioned Mbegha myth. The theme of a noble stranger coming to a “native” land, being made king and ruling over a less advanced majority is not only well-known in local portrayals of
62 TNA\KEW, CO 691/187/2, Provincial Commissioners Reports: Notes on the Provinces, Notes regarding the Tanga Province, 1; TNA\KEW CO 736/ CO 736/54, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1958, 139; TNA\KEW, CO 736/16, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year of 1936, 53; RHL MSS. Afr. s. 550, Tanganyika Census 1957, Explanatory Tables for Census 1957, 1; RHL Reel No.3, Lushoto District book, Land and Land settlement, Sheet 1. 63 TNA\KEW, CO 736/16, Annual Report of the Tanga Province of the Year 1936, 53. 64 For a detailed list of the chief’s yearly salary and the way he spent it and of the different salaries of the council’s elders, see TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara district, 04.11.1947, DC Korogwe to PC Tanga, 383-384. 65 TNA\DSM, 12954 Tanganyika Secretariat. Native Courts Tanga Province, 19.03.1929, the Courts Ordinance 1920, 7. 21 Eastern and Central African history,66 but also found expression in the all too eager reception of the deeply racist Hamitic hypothesis by various colonial administrations.67 British perception of African societies was indeed influenced by the Hamite hypothesis, not least because it was a straightforward way for them to translate the various complex and heterogeneous local contexts into an easily graspable paradigm of divide and rule along racial lines. It thus suited the British authorities to depict the populations of the Usambara Mountains according to this paradigm. In this view, then, the Kilindi were described in positive terms as the descendants of the “Bantu Hamitic race, [who had] migrated at a far more recent date from the opposite direction, that is to say from NORTH to SOUTH and became the dominant race [sic].” Analogous to this geographical description was the reference to skin color: the British felt the Kilindi were of a lighter complexion, with a “skin light in colour and semi Arab features”. By contrast, the Shambaa were presented as the less advanced people, Bantu Africans. They were known as “the aboriginal inhabitants of Usambara,”68 lacking the noble immigrant background of the pastoral Hamitic peoples. Before the British, German missionaries had subscribed to the same view. Paul Wohlrab, too, evokes the dichotomic image of an old-established peasantry, the Shambaa, owners of the land, and the immigrant pastoral tribe, the Kilindi: “a master race [Herrenvolk] and a dominated people. [Volk der Beherrschten] How tempting it is to draw the comparison to our new mission area Rwanda and the relation between Hutu and Tussi. [sic]”69 This kind of portrayal was an easy justification for the British and likewise for the Germans to privilege the Kilindi, as well as to fix ethnic boundaries. This boundary fixing was not as consistent as in the sadly famous example of Rwanda.70 Yet a few of the most radical Shambaa rebels have argued
66 David Schoenbrun, “A Mask of Calm: Emotion and Founding the Kingdom of Bunyoro in the Sixteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013), 634–664. 67 Edith R. Sanders, “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective,” Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969), 521–532. 68 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Tribal History and Legends, the Wakilindi dynasty in Usambara, p.1. 69 Paul Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Bielefeld: Bethel, 1915), 8. 70 With respect to the Hamitic hypothesis and the genocide in Rwanda, see Mahmood Mamdani, When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2001). For the broad discussion about the fixation of ethnic boundaries and the ‘invention of traditions’ in colonial Africa see Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 211–62; Thomas Spear, “Neo- Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003), 3- 27. 22 in a similar vein when claiming independence not only from British colonial rule, but also from the oppressive Kilindi yoke.71 The colonial interpretation, leaning on the Hamitic hypothesis, ignored the much more complex dynamics between the Kilindi and the Shambaa, their age-old customs of intermarriage, and their system of checks and balances that helped the Shambaa keep their Zumbes in check. For example, the second most powerful man in the Paramount’s council, the Mlughu, which means “prime minister” in Shambaa, as well as all other elders of the Simbamwene’s council, were never of Kilindi origin, as a general rule.72 Another indicator is the special role Shambaa men married to Kilindi women played – they always carried the name Hoza to indicate their marriage into the royal clan.73 A great deal of evidence suggests that it was not ethnic background, but the possibility to gain access to local centers of power that shaped an individual’s prospects to prosper and to gain political influence. But British insistence on ethnic background eventually led to a fixed distinction, where earlier perceptions of ethnic belonging had been more fluid. As elsewhere in Eastern Africa, metropolitan concepts of racial thought and the politics of ethnicity influenced local self-perception.74 Even in the more recent literature one can find the old distinction. Sharifa Zawawi, for instance, claims that the Kilindi were descendants from one of the twelve tribes of Mombasa, the founding fathers of the coastal city and partly of Arab origin,75 thereby suggesting that the ancient Shambaa kingdom had only come into being with the “civilizing” help of coastal Arabs.
Another reason why the British felt the Shambaa were an “easy tribe” which would not create trouble was because Shambaa society was a peasant society. This was important because, despite a comparatively high degree of social organization and political structure and despite
71 J. J. Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation (University of Dar es Salaam, Political Science Dissertation (B.A.) 1969), 13. 72 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara district, 11.11.194, Assistant DO Lushoto to DC Korogwe, 382. For a list of the various functionaries of the council, all of them commoners, see Edgar Winans, Shambala: The Constitution of a Traditional State (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1962), 121. Winans mentions 29 different titles for functionaries at the chief’s council, but he is “by no means certain that this is a complete listing”, 122. 73 John Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 497. 74 Jonathon Glassman, “Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar's Newspaper Wars,” Journal of African History 41 (2000), 395–428. 75 Sharifa M. Zawawi, “The Gift of a Mountain: A 19th Century Swahili Document,” Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 8, no. 2 (1987), 374. 23 their having “a history with a certain claim to authenticity,”76 Shambaa society was mainly composed of peasant farmers. Thus, although they were perceived and described as well organized socially, they were still tribal and small-scale enough not to be perceived as threatening like the “detribalized natives” who worked on the sisal plantations on the plains. The British wished to encourage so-called tribal hierarchies and thought of the Shambaa as a positive role model. To honor their mentality and “tribal structure,” the British awarded the King’s Medal for African Chiefs to Kimweri in 1939.77 Thus the Shambaa were just right from a British point of view: “developed” enough to be ruled easily, but “backward” enough to stick to a rural life style and a peasant subsistence economy which guaranteed that they stayed on their land and cultivated it. In the Tanga District Book one can read about how “they are quiet people, who give no trouble and were perfectly happy if left to themselves.” In other words, the British thought that the Shambaa would not break out of their “tribal realm” in the way “detribalized natives” such as plantation workers or dockers did. These “detribalized natives” had come to coastal plantations or port cities to find work, and had been organizing a series of strikes since the 1940s which had begun to shake the British Empire not only in Tanganyika. However, despite the efforts to reward the Shambaa native authorities for their exemplary estimation of tradition and the Paramount’s cooperation with the British, Shambaai was not spared from the post-Second World War unrest that swept the British and French Empires in Africa.
Shambaa Protest as Part of Larger Unrest in the British Empire From the 1930s onwards, protests, resistance and strikes were part of everyday life in many parts of the British and French Empires, not only in African colonies. Most of these forms of protest against imperial labor or land policy were driven by “detribalized natives,” mostly dockers or clerks, who had enjoyed a mission education or had in some other way benefitted from the opportunities created by the colonial state.78 The term “detribalized natives” itself reveals much about imperial self-assuredness. Yet in those troublesome inter-war years, British supremacy, it was feared, was in danger. The underlying discourse, namely that the colonial
76 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Tribal History and Legends, the Wakilindi dynasty in Usambara, p.1. 77 TNA\KEW, CO 736/19, Annual Report of the Tanga Province of the Year 1939, 86. 78 TNA\KEW, CO 736/9, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1930, 76. 24 administrations in Africa were guilty of having “corrupted” harmonious African “primitive backwardness” by bringing them face to face with “modernity,” now gave rise to the assumption held even by some colonial officials that the colonial state was responsible for the unrest and political awakening that lasted from the 1930s to 1950s. It was a common for the conservative faction of British officials to attempt to expose the future leaders, chiefs’ sons, as little as possible to the “un-graces of our Western civilization.”79 The idea that Western influences corrupted the African “noble savage” closely corresponds with the recurring trope of the “nigger in suits,”80 suggesting Africans had better stay in their “primitive” stage instead of badly copying their masters. By mocking “modernized”, educated Africans, European settlers throughout the European Empires tried to portray “Europeanized” Africans as poor imitations of their colonial masters. The idea that the “tribal” African reality did not fit with the European civilization, and that attempts to make it fit such as dressing European-style or appropriating European repertoires were not proper, just barely reveal the underlying fear of losing the upper hand in one’s own colonies.81
From the 1930s onwards, new options presented themselves to African workers and their struggles benefitted greatly from international debates, for example internationally set wage standards.82 A series of docker, railway, plantation and general strikes shook both the French and British Empires.83 In Tanganyika the Chagga and Pare organized a large-scale protest against land alienation, using the international forum of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations
79 TNA\DSM, 19653 Tanganyika Secretariat. Report by Capt. John Craig Guthrie on the system of Administration of Justice and on the subject of Native Courts, 14. 80 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 81 Paul Ritter, “Afrika: weiß oder schwarz?” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 47, no. 2 (1935), 57; Andreas Eckert, “Historiker, “nation-building” und Rehabilitierung der afrikanischen Vergangenheit“, 165. 82 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African society: The labor question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andreas Eckert, “"We are all planners now." Planung und Dekolonisierung in Afrika,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34 (2008), 375-397; Frederick Cooper and Randall M. Packard, eds., International development and the social sciences: Essays on the history and politics of knowledge (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997). 83 TNA\KEW, CO 691/209/8, Strikes and Riots. For docker strikes in the 1940s in the Eastern African ports of Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Tanga see TNA\KEW, CO 691/179/6, Labour. Strikes and Disturbances and TNA\KEW, CO 736/27, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1947, 134; with respect to unrest on sisal plantations see TNA\KEW, CO 736/52, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1957, 157; TNA\KEW, CO 736/56, Annual Report for the Tanga Province for the Year 1959, Korogwe Division, 9: between 1957 and 1959 about 25 strikes happened annually, in 1958, for instance, with “the loss of 123,000 man-days.” 25 to hold the British accountable.84 Resistance in Tanganyika often transcended ethnic boundaries and invoked universal rights. But this kind of organization was certainly nothing the British expected from a peasant farmer population like the Shambaa, who did not have to grapple with large-scale land alienation. In that sense, the radical peasant protests in the relatively homogenous Usambara Mountains was a unique event.
The protest was mirrored through the growing volume of litigation in the native courts of the Usambara Mountains, signifying the discontentment of Shambaai residents that connects to the bumpy decades during the 1940s and 1950s in general. The Second World War and the Usambara Scheme both led to changes in Shambaai’s leadership culture and the way the population perceived their authorities, both local and British. The two decades were characterized by lingering passive resistance against the laborious scheme rules of the freshly introduced Usambara Scheme. Moreover, an increasing politicization had taken hold of the mountain area. However, languages of dissent had already been put in place much earlier, as the following chapter will show.
84 TNA\KEW, CO 691/202/2: Petitions to Trusteeship Council. Chagga Council; TNA\KEW, CO 822/1459: Speech to UN Trusteeship Council by Chief Marealle of the Chagga. 26 CHAPTER ONE Claim-Making, Petition-Writing and Political Imagination in Shambaai, 1925-1952
During the period of British colonial rule in Tanganyika, petition- and letter-writing was the most popular way for the residents of the Usambara Mountains to express their discontent vis-a-vis the judgments of native courts or the colonial Bench. This chapter explores the role of petition- writing as a strategical instrument deployed by Tanganyikan litigants as a means of improving the prospects of their on-going law-suits. References to the slavery discourse, inspired by both, colonial-abolitionist and Christian narratives as well as locally specific experiences of slave raids, were looming large in the petitions of the four decades from 1920 to 1960. In this chapter, I argue that Tanganyikan petitioners disconnected the slavery discourse from its original meaning and began using it as a more general “crisis narrative” in which the figure of the “slaver” altered according to circumstance. While the claims petitioners presented were constantly changing – just as the political realities were – the language in which they presented these claims remained the same. In this context, Derek Peterson has referred to the abolitionist rhetoric used by Eastern African petitioners as “an arena of moral discourse.”1 Shambaa petitioners used the slavery discourse also largely as moral leverage. It is in that sense that I refer to it as a crisis narrative. More than anything else, the Shambaa use of the slavery discourse reflects ethnic tensions among the different groups inhabiting Shambaai, which had arisen from British politics of indirect rule. Because the role of the slaver could be adapted to circumstance, the slavery discourse proved to be such a powerful tool in Tanganyikans’ petitioning strategies. While the narrative has a regional currency in Eastern Africa,2 its use in Shambaai was rooted in the specific experience of local slave raids.
Emma Hunter has recently shown how the meaning of the term uhuru, freedom, has changed in Tanganyika throughout the course of the twentieth century, from “freedom from slavery” to
1 Derek R. Peterson, “Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa,” in Abolitionism and imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek R. Peterson (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010), 5. 2 Ibid., 1-3. 27 “freedom through belonging to independence.” These meanings would co-exist, not necessarily replace one another, without having one clear-cut single meaning attached to it.3 As the history of the term uhuru, the history of the Swahili term slavery, utumwa, has proven to be flexible. The association of freedom with Christianity, and its “other” in the specific Eastern African context, the equation of all things connected to slavery with the image of the “Arab slaver,” also reverberates in the Shambaa petitions.4 Four decades after abolition, the term slavery, utumwa, still kept reappearing in contexts unrelated to abolition, particularly during the first decade of British rule and during the Second World War.
While the early petitions portrayed the Germans and their Akida system as slavery, the label was later used by minority groups to criticize the Paramount Chief’s overrule, misuse of office by certain chiefs, and eventually colonial rule itself. In using the slavery discourse and linking it to contemporary events such as the Second World War, the outward-inspired but inward- directed focus of local agency becomes apparent – certainly a strategy to lend weight to local claims. I argue that by their very choice of language, petitioners showed their abilities to “subvert” British colonial repertoires and turned them on its head. In addition, I demonstrate that precisely because of the insecurity that had accompanied the profound transformations in local economy and agriculture since the 1940s, older narratives of crisis became salient again as the litigants’ sense of stability faltered. By clinging to these old crises narratives, yet transforming them to the new needs, Tanganyikan litigants were able to influence colonial courts’ decisions precisely because their wording brought pressure to bear on local or British judges.
In the following pages, I will give an overview over the recent literature on petition-writing and the specific situation of Tanganyika’s judiciary that encouraged petitioning. Because the specific brand of Shambaa petitioning is linked to their love of narration, a brief introduction to the history of literacy and narrative imagination in Shambaai follows. I will then portray the different contexts of petitioning in which the slavery trope was employed. Finally, I will draw
3 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 140-157. 4 Jonathan Glassman, “Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar,” in Abolitionism and imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010), 175- 206. 28 some conclusions from the presented material regarding the narration strategies of petitioners and their success prospects.
Conceptualization of Petition-Writing Shambaai in the 1940s had witnessed the advent of novel forms of order. As mentioned in the introduction, the British had introduced new institutions and altered existing ones. Designated native courts were old institutions, but they were transformed with the advent of colonial rule. Appeal courts outside Shambaai were entirely new creations. The central role of the written word in the court bureaucracy, such as judgments rendered official by writing, was new, too. Similarly, petitioning was a tool of the novel order. Petitioning as a written practice was open to people who identified as subjects of the new bureaucratic state and wished to address the state on its own terms. Petitions offer rich information about claim-making strategies. Because petitioning was not restricted to elites in Shambaai, letters and petitions can provide insights into ordinary people’s struggles and conflicts. The language used in the petitions is a window into a particular Shambaa way of framing grievances. Early petitions demonstrate that before the political upheavals of the late 1940s and 1950s, many of the tropes later used in the fight against British imposed changes in land tenure and “corrupt” leadership culture were already in use. The most fascinating feature of petitions is that they allow the writers to formulate grievances, if need be even with the help of pseudonyms, that otherwise would have been very difficult to address at all. Due to the boom of the scribal profession, illiteracy could not hamper access to claim-making.
Recent works on petition-writing in non-European contexts have highlighted the highly political notion of emerging writing cultures.5 These studies underline the link between the practice of petition-writing as partaking in the colonial bureaucracy and the world of political claim-making on the (inter)national terrain.6 Addressing the state machinery by way of petitions is perceived
5 Cody, The light of knowledge; Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and scribes in early colonial south India (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012); Meredith Terretta, Petitioning for our rights, fighting for our nation: The history of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949-1960 (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing, 2013). 6 For the Tanganyikan case see Ullrich Lohrmann, Voices from Tanganyika: Great Britain, the United Nations and the decolonization of a Trust Territory, 1946-1961 (Berlin, London: Lit, 2007) as well as Thomas Spear’s chapter on the Meru land case, Thomas T. Spear, Mountain farmers: Moral economies of land & agricultural development in 29 as an inherently legitimate act by senders and receivers; that is state officials and the state’s subjects alike. It represents both the state’s compliance to be confronted with its citizens’ opinions and the citizens’ acceptance of this written, bureaucratic procedure confined to certain standards of representativity and officialdom – contrary to voting with one’s feet or other physical acts including violent behavior. Accepting and taking part in the bureaucratic realm means not only accepting state legitimacy. It can also be understood as laying claim to help create a legitimate state confined by law and its bureaucratic procedures. Bhavani Rahman, for instance, highlights that colonial petitions created a “new order of subjecthood that articulated rights based on proprietorship and ascription. Petitions were now central to an official effort to hear complaints, but the signatures and marks inscribed on the colonial petition carried the filtered imprint of those being schooled into a new form of subject behavior. The most striking feature of the colonial petition is the normative place and nature of ‘proper’ dissent.”7
But not all petitioners followed the rules of proper dissent. Although the formal criteria were mostly clear to petitioners and scribes alike, some of them contested those criteria to draw specific attention to their cases, as Meredith Terretta’s example of Cameroonian women proves. They evoked their fear of colonial biomedicine in very local terms, intertwined with local ideas of fertility and reproduction that hardly translated into bureaucratic language.8 For others, choosing to ignore or alter bureaucratic form might have been the expression of a perceived incommensurability of local claims with colonial bureaucratic procedure. This can be seen in the example of Tamil petitioners who opted to draw on the traditional formal and verbose forms of address to highlight their respect towards colonial officials before they presented their cause. Yet this time-consuming and imaginative practice annoyed the busy Cutcherry bureaucrats, be they Indian or British.9 I suggest that these deviations, some of which also appeared in Shambaa petitions, explain why certain petitions were mostly ignored by colonial officials. As many petitions demonstrate, the novel form of petitioning did not necessarily eradicate older ways of presenting grievances. But what Brinkley Messick noted for the Yemeni case holds also for
Arusha & Meru (Dar es Salaam, Berkeley, Calif, Oxford: Mkuki na Nyota; University of California Press; J. Currey, 1997). 7 Raman, Document Raj, 181-182. 8 Terretta, Petitioning for our rights, fighting for our nation, 102-103, 106-134. 9 Cody, The light of knowledge, 180-182. 30 Shambaai. Instruments of the novel order, such as petitions, brought a world defined by status and kinship into the “imagined simultaneity and homogeneity of a national citizenry.”10 The fixed presence of an official document was often perceived as more valuable in the new order than the former “ideals of voiced presences.”11
I assume for the case of Shambaai, too, that in some cases parts of the meaning the writers wanted to convey might have been lost on colonial officials because it was presented in old ideals of the spoken word. Other petitions might have been deliberately dismissed for lack of formal criteria. The mission educated new elite of Shambaai, however, made sure to meet the formal criteria by using language bureaucratic enough and arguing within a range of international languages while creatively interweaving local circumstance. Most petitions prior to the Usambara Scheme, which had been introduced in 1946 to prevent soil erosion and had sparked a wave of peasant protest (see Chapter Two), had to do with succession politics. When a certain group felt misrepresented by their new chief or headmen, they described themselves as his slaves, listing his atrocities. The other common theme was complaints about favoritism or corruption committed by local officials. Both types of petitions are symbolic for the major issue people worried about, notably the way leadership culture was changing.
Tanganyika’s Judiciary
The reason for the quickly growing popularity of petition-writing in Shambaai and Tanganyika as a whole can only be understood in concert with Governor Donald Cameron’s decision of 1929 to have administrative officials hear appeals from native courts, rather than trained jurists. Letter- writing and petitioning was a strategy of claim-making connected to the lawsuit because of the specific situation of the colonial judiciary. The Court Ordinance of 1929 was very much a product of the British politics of indirect rule in their African colonies. Cameron, who had been one of Lugard’s most eager disciples in Nigeria,12 emphasized the importance of the judge’s
10 Brinkley M. Messick, The calligraphic state: Textual domination and history in a Muslim society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 254. 11 Ibid., 253. 12 Prosser Gifford, “Indirect Rule: Touchstone or Tombstone for Colonial Rule?,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalery and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford, William R. Louis and Alison Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 378; H. F. Morris and James Read, Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays in East African Legal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 3. 31 expertise of “native custom.” Trained lawyers, he argued, were notoriously detached from the tribal, social and political context of the lawsuit and therefore not suitable for this job.13 In so doing, Governor Cameron enforced a severance of the native courts from the High Court and deprived Tanganyikans of their right to final appellate jurisdiction by the High Court.14 The Court Ordinance can thus be read as another step towards the attempt to keep Africans in their “tribal realm.” Yet Tanganyikans did not necessarily perceive the changes in the chain of appeal as a disadvantage. One of the central arguments of my thesis is that the decisive role that administrative officials played in native courts’ jurisdiction instead paved the way for the enormous volume of petitions and letters that flooded Tanganyika’s administration offices in both the remotest districts and the headquarters in Dar es Salaam. The most common form that this took was the handwritten petition in Swahili, often written by a scribe and signed by its illiterate author with a thumb-print or occasionally in Arabic letters. Other petitions, especially those emanating from Lutheran mission centers or written by native clerks in their offices after duty hours, were typewritten and in English. These documents can be read as complementary correspondence to lost cases, cases that were not allowed to be opened in the first place, and dismissed appeals. This new tool gave litigants the advantage of choosing their audience by copying their correspondence even to officials without appellate jurisdiction.
District administrative officers like the District Commissioner were well-known in the area they served and could be addressed more easily than a member of the Tanganyikan Bench based in the colonial capital city of Dar es Salaam. District officers themselves made extensive use of letter-writing: they authored countless dispatches, circulars, ordinances and rules, and were the employers of a number of messengers who delivered their notes throughout the district. The importance of writing in the colonial bureaucracy could not have been lost on Africans and fostered litigants’ engagement in extensive letter-writing, too. Besides the fact that it was easier for litigants to reach out to “their” district officer than to contact a far removed and unknown jurist, there was another more important advantage to petitioning. This was the possibility to
13 TNA\Kew, CO 691/189: Native Courts Legislation, in: Administration of Justice in Tanganyika, 8; TNA\DSM, 13638: Court Ordinance 1929, Tanga Province, 6C; J.P Moffett, “Native Courts in Tanganyika. A History of the Development of Native Courts from German Times,” Journal of African Administration 4 (1952), 19-21. 14 Ibid., 21. 32 express themselves in letters in a way that was not confined by legal procedure and the power asymmetries of court sessions. It allowed petition-writers to use their creative imagination as they interwove local symbols and discourse with the language of colonial bureaucracy.
It lies in the nature of the petitioning that the recipients were seldom sympathetic to the petitioners’ cause, and the British officers in Shambaai grew less tolerant after the Second World War. As a result, many dissatisfied litigants began to send letters to higher-ranked administrative officials and to British MPs in the United Kingdom, among them Fenner Brockway.15 Like letter-writers from other UN trust territories, a number of authors also petitioned the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations in New York, since, from 1947, Tanganyika was a UN Trust Territory under British administration. I argue that the opportunity of using a language in petitions that differed from a jurist’s dry language of procedure could influence the success prospects of litigants. In a way, Cameron’s separation of the native courts from the colonial judiciary had unintended consequences. Contrary to Cameron’s expectations, many Africans did not remain in the tribal realm each district commissioner was supposed to control, but instead addressed officials as far away as Dar es Salaam, London or New York. African litigants did not see their prospects diminished by the fact that administrative officials adjudicated their cases. Instead, it worked in their favor. They had larger room for maneuver because neither of the parties was firm in legal procedure, and because court cases tended to be discussed in letters and petitions, thus broadening the audience for native litigants. The petitioning business flourished; native litigants found a successful way to circumvent their being cut-off from the colonial judiciary that could not be controlled by district officers. Before turning to the petitions themselves, I will give an overview over the reception of literacy in Shambaai, which in turn influenced the petitioning.
Christianity, Literacy, Letter-Writing and Textual Imagination in Shambaai I will now turn to the specific Shambaa attitude towards writing and literacy, because it is the reason for the eagerness of Shambaa petitioners in later periods. As in other African contexts,
15 Juma Kalata, a Vugha resident, had contacted the British liberal Fenner Brockway because he felt unfairly judged in a court decision of the DC of Lushoto in 1950. The Member for Local Government informed him that Brockway did not see legal procedure violated, however. I will discuss the case in Chapter Three. See also TNA\DSM, 4/6, 2 Vol.II: Administration Native. Usambara District, 22.02.1949, Usambara Union to Victor Collins, MP, 507A. 33 the “technology of writing” that enabled participation in the bureaucracy, in Shambaai, too, was often learned at mission stations. Like in the South African case, the “new culture of papers, reading, and writing” not only provided students with textbooks and magazines in local languages, a printing press and access to typewriters, but also with ideas about justice and Christianity.16 These mission-inspired centers of literary activity, referred to as “epistolary networks” by Vukile Khumalo, “paved the way for one-to-one official correspondence with colonial administrators,”17 – in Shambaai more often than not in the form of petitions. The link to the Lutheran Bethel mission stations in the Usambara Mountains is crucial for understanding the peculiar appropriation of the ancient discourse about slavery on the Eastern African coast.
Like many rulers in the vicinity of the Swahili coast, the famous Kimweri ye Nyumbai of Shambaai was no stranger to letter-writing. Since the mid-nineteenth century, coastal Muslim scribes were in charge of Kimweri’s court correspondence. Kimweri ye Nyumbai himself could neither read nor write, but he put his scribes in charge of his official correspondence, which must have been substantial, as by then his rule through tribute payment stretched as far as to the coastal towns of Tanga and Pangani.18 It is reported that only two decades later by the end of the 1880s his grandson and heir Kimweri was able to read and write in Arabic.19 The dissemination of literacy to a broader population, however, happened only when by the end of the nineteenth century the Protestant German Bethel mission opened its first so-called “bush schools” in Shambaai. In 1899, under German administration, the written Swahili script changed officially from Arabic to Latin,20 although to some residents of Shambaai the Arabic script remained the one of choice.
16 Nancy R. Hunt, A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo, Body, commodity, text (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 101; Vukile Khumalo, “Ekukhanyeni Letter-Writers: A Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa,” in Africa's hidden histories: Everyday literacy and making the self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 131. 17 Ibid., 126, 136, 138. 18 Philemon A. K. Mushi, History and development of education in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Dar es Salaam University Press, 2009), 55; Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 11-12; J.P Moffett, ed., Handbook of Tanganyika, 2nd ed. (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, Tanganyika, 1958), 250. 19 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 198. 20 Lene Buchert, Education in the development of Tanzania: 1919-1990 (London: Currey u.a., 1994), 16. 34 The following section is meant to provide the historical context of mission education in Shambaai because the Bethel mission has influenced the Shambaa political imagination and petitioning strategies. Bethel missionaries working in the Usambara Mountains since 1891 portrayed the Shambaa as a curiously imaginative people with a rich tradition of sayings, stories, myths, and moralistic fables.21 They particularly admired their detailed memory of legends and local history and “tribal” custom. They were also struck by the chief’s “surprising” art of poignant summaries at the end of long conversations, or as summaries at the end of court sessions when he passed the sentence.22 Missionary Paul Wohlrab was impressed by the Shambaa’s gifted and lively narrative style when recollecting past events that was often combined with amusing re-enactments of past events or the captivating satires about some European’s curious behavior.23 Despite this admiration, Bethel missionaries ridiculed the Shambaa for recalling long, yet meaning- and plotless stories.24 Wohlrab pictured them as verbose speakers and indecisive fusspots. Contrary to the “vivid coastal man,”25 he noted,
The Shambala is terribly laborious when he wants to deliver himself on a subject; never will he be straight forward, such directness and haste does not sit well with his feeling of decency. First he has to clear his throat meaningfully and a little sheepishly, and then follows a verbose introduction, and only then will he come down to business, that is, however, to be presented as concealed as possible. He is likewise laborious in his social behavior as well as at his work.26 Clearly the missionaries did not understand that the Shambaa sense of politeness required the art of conveying a message by very sophisticatedly only alluding to it. Linguistic subtleties might have been lost on them, too. It is precisely this narrative style that some of the petitions of the 1930s to 1960s evoke, some of which annoyed colonial officials thoroughly, while others were dismissed out of hand.
In the early period of the German rule, and perhaps even later, the web of Bethel mission schools in the Usambara Mountains was probably the only possibility to acquire reading and writing skills. Since 1891, the Bethel mission had expanded to six central stations and 79 out
21 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 19. 22 Ibid., 81. 23 Ibid., 123, 216. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 If not otherwise indicated, translations from both German and Swahili to English are mine. 26 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 17. 35 stations.27 In 1915, there were 62 schools in Shambaai,28 in 1934 the number had risen to 83 village schools with 2,565 pupils under the instruction of 215 local teachers.29 The Bethel flagship was the central schools for girls and boys at Lwandai that never lost its government funding, even after the severe budget-cuts on secondary education due to the depression in 1934 that left many central schools reduced to mere teaching training centers.30 Yet the great majority of Bethel mission schools were classified by the government as “Unassisted Village Schools” or, in their critics’ jargon, “bush schools.” Bush schools were presided over by Shambaa speaking local teachers and mainly focused on learning the ABC and on religious instruction. Paul Wohlrab recollects that there were about 20 children attending each of these schools, although there should have been three of four times as many.31 The remainder probably spent their time earning money, as Tanga’s PC put it: The Tanga province offered “ample opportunities for the children of all ages to find employment. Many children, together with nearly all their parents, prefer to pick up a few cents in this way rather than to attend school regularly and pay school fees.”32
The Bethel missionaries created and printed the teaching materials and primers for their pupils with their own press, Vugha Press, assisted by the German professor of linguistics, Carl Meinhof. The first primer was printed in Shambaa in 1892, containing the alphabet’s characters and a few sentences, including the beginning of the Biblical story. In later primers, the Bethel missionaries chose from the rich pool of Shambaa cultural orature some 100 selected sayings as well as a couple of fables and stories.33 Subjects taught in Bethel schools were catechism, local history, European history, geography, maths, a little German, Swahili and drawing.34 It is likely that this was only the case in the central schools though, not in the “bush schools.” While after 1908 Swahili became more important in the Bethel mission schools, Shambaa always remained the
27 Julius Richter, Tanganyika and its Future (London: Word Dominion Press, 1934), 19. 28 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 86. 29 Richter, Tanganyika and its Future, 19. 30 Allan J. Gottneid and A.R Thompson, eds., Church and education in Tanzania: Report of the ISS/FERES Tanzania project (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1976), 59-60. 31 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 86. 32 TNA\DSM, 4/962/15 (1954): Annual Reports by Departmental Officers, Tanga Province Educational Report, 2. 33 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 88-89. 34 Ibid., 91, 104-106. 36 language of missionary work.35 St. Mark’s Gospel was translated into Shambaa by the Bethel missionaries Ernst Johanssen, Paul Wohlrab, and Karl Roehl, and published in 1896, followed by other portions until the New Testament was finished in 1908, and published by the British and Foreign Bible Society. A revised version was issued in 1930. 4,000 copies of the New Testament and 1,000 of the Portions were circulated.36 The insistence on Shambaa being the language of missionary work and on the translations of the bible hints at the difficult co-operation with the Department of Education of the Tanganyika Government. Government policy favored Swahili as the language of instruction.
The Bethel mission’s great educational emphasis besides religious instruction was always the accentuation of manual labor, be it agricultural or vocational work.37 In their vocational school, young converts could learn the popular since comparatively profitable professions of tailor, saddler, shoemaker, carpenter, or shop-keeper.38 The missionaries’ emphasis on “education for work” is illustrated best by the lack of a teacher training institution for higher education.39
“Something Delighted Me, and that was Reading”: Shambaa Love for Letter-Writing Many sources echo the enthusiasm and eagerness with which the Shambaa and other Africans embraced the technology of writing. Soon a writing culture emerged among the mission graduates that involved what Khumalo calls close-knit “epistolary networks”40 among the students and their social networks at home. It is not difficult to imagine why reading and writing became so popular. It brought a new way of communication that was an important skill for hunting down a profitable job in the administration, be it as tax clerk, official letter writer or interpreter.41 In addition, literacy was the key to communicate with the government, especially if one wanted to circumvent the so-called “native authorities” and get in touch with British
35 Angelika Krug, Die Bethel-Mission in den Usambara-Bergen von 1891-1914: Zwischen Sendung und Kolonialismus (University of Hannover: Unpbulished Manuscript, Dissertation in Theology (M.A.)), 50. 36 Richter, Tanganyika and its Future, 78. 37 Sebastian Conrad, “"Eingeborenenpolitik" in Kolonie und Metropole. "Erziehung zur Arbeit" in Ostafrika und Ostwestfalen,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 107-128; Krug, Die Bethel-Mission in den Usambara-Bergen von 1891-1914, 46-48. 38 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 107. 39 Krug, Die Bethel-Mission in den Usambara-Bergen von 1891-1914, 45. 40 Vukile Khumalo, Epistolary Networks and the Politics of Cultural Production in KwaZulu-Natal, 1860 to 1910 (Univ. of Michigan, unpublished PhD Thesis, 2004). 41 Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks. 37 officials directly. Abraham Kilua, a Shambaa assistant working in the mission station of Neu- Bethel, today’s Mtae, put it as follows:
I did not know the Word of God in the past. I did not understand its power. Even when the missionaries came to this country to preach it I was not mindful of it. I said: “It’s only lies.” But something delighted me, and that was reading. I marveled when I saw that Europeans could decipher mail that came from far away, and that they knew everything that was written in them. Then I wanted to learn how to read and I began reading at home. When I understood the difficulties I said to myself “I will go to the mission station and live there so I shall learn to read.” Then I moved to the station.42 Not only letter-writing, but also reading the word of God, or anything else, seems to have become a pastime for literate Shambaa women and men, some of whom preferred reading in groups which probably was more similar to older forms of information sharing and communication.43
Some twenty years later, the Tanga Province Annual Report of 1936 mentions the “disappointment of the African, literate in the vernacular, when he finds he has nothing more to read.”44 Elders wondered whether the technology of writing and schooling in general corrupted the youth and made them indulge in depravity.45 This was also a concern for certain administrative officers who worried about the dangers of “detribalization.” Generally, the administration suspected that 90 per cent of the pupils wanted to master the new technology in order to find salaried employment instead of caring for “the opportunities it offers for learning good citizenship, better forms of agriculture, and general usefulness in the family and village circle.”46
The German missionaries had other concerns. Missionary Wohlrab’s account of 1915 reveals his worry that many Shambaa wanted to master the new technology and enjoyed learning in mission schools without becoming Christian converts. Like the people in the trading towns of Shambaai of the 1870s and 1880s learned Islam without “taking it as seriously as the Shambaa
42 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 229-230. 43 Ibid., 167, 169. 44 TNA\KEW, CO 736/16: Tanganyika Territory Administration Reports 1936, Report of the Provincial Commissioner, Tanga, 58. 45 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2 Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 24.01.48, Ramadhani Msumari to PC, 417-418. 46 TNA\DSM, 4/962/15 (1954): Annual Reports by Departmental Officers, Tanga Province Educational Report, 4. 38 religion of their ancestors,”47 missionaries worried that they were now able to integrate Christianity into their lives without losing ties to older beliefs, yet picking out the important new skill of literacy. In fact, Wohlrab provides us with evidence that many Shambaa used their freshly acquired skills for various, yet hardly religion-related goals. Some produced memoirs not necessarily influenced by Christian thought on their deathbed, others used their writing skills to ask for an increase in salary. Still others had intellectual concerns about the meaning of God’s word, provoking the question as to whether the “inconsistencies” of God’s word were due to an unsatisfactory translation of the Bible into Shambaa.48 The most unconventional of Shambaa letter-writers mused over the missionaries’ priorities. In a rather practical approach, he was wondering whether the time used to study the word of God should really have priority over the time period reserved for the checking of traps. To him, a leopard’s skin left to rot in a trap was certainly more sinful than a skipped study period.49 The mastery of reading and writing allowed the Shambaa to address Europeans in the form the latter preferred, yet on Shambaa terms. As a consequence of the bureaucratic character of the colonial state, Tanganyikans used letters and all sorts of documents of proof not only in an attempt to fix their own grievances. They also used letters and petitions as a means to pinpoint and to produce proof of unbecoming behavior by native authorities or British officials, as the following sections will demonstrate.
Indirect Rule and the Slavery Discourse Many petitions were inspired by the inadequacy of indirect rule. Despite the British had thought Shambaai particularly suitable for indirect rule, many of Shambaai’s residents saw it differently. When petitioners criticized the system of indirect rule, they chose to do it through the slavery narrative. The following example of John B. Mdoe is a case in point. In 1925, the district office of Tanga received a petition by John B. Mdoe, who advocated for a representative council for his ethnic group, the Bondei, in the name of freedom. Mdoe’s petition is representative for the claims of non-Shambaa residents of the Usambara Mountains. Other minorities living in Shambaai, but most fiercely the Bondei, tended to link German rule with the ancient discourse about slavery at the Eastern African coast, a discourse that has been employed by a variety of
47 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 200. 48 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 172, 224- 226. 49 Ibid., 226. 39 actors and twisted and manipulated throughout times.50 So did John B. Mdoe, spokesperson for the Bondei, who praised the British for having introduced the new system of indirect rule “to remove Akidas and install the natives of the country.” Under German rule, Mdoe contended, the Bondei whose country was to the East of Shambaai, had lived under a Kilindi chief “like mere slaves.”51
Mdoe’s insistence on behalf of “many elders, certain Jumbes, and all clergy and teachers,” on the link between the German Akida system and slavery must be understood in the wider context of the history of slavery. Mdoe rejected a Kilindi chief on the grounds of indirect rule: “It is a matter of right and freedom to reject an alien.”52 To convince the colonial administration, he took another twist in conjuring up the old image of slavery. After first portraying their lives like slaves under German rule and praising the new British government John Mdoe points out that the Bondei were tired of being ruled by aliens. He reasoned: “If we are slaves under the British Government, so we have no right to speak anything. But if the Government has brought to us civilization and freedom, so by this freedom we have [the] right to refuse that our country be ruled by an alien or an Mkilindi [sic].”53 He conveys his Anglican background when he pleads: “This is the time of stopping barbarity and ignorance and to remove darkness from Africa: and this I think is the only duty of the British Government.”54 His rhetoric reminds of missionary portrayals of slavery. As a vulnerable group, freed slaves were often the first converts to Christianity,55 and the Anglican Mdoe had certainly been subjected to stories of slaves’ liberation. His quotation also evokes the rhetoric of the civilizing mission, the European “duty” to free ignorant Africans of pre-colonial barbarity, slavery and lawlessness.56 John Mdoe must
50 Glassman, “Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar”, 175-206. 51 TNA\DSM, 4/6/1, Vol.I: Native Administration, Tanga District, 08.11.1925, John B. Mdoe to Administrative Officer, 27. 52 TNA\DSM, 4/6/1, Vol.I: Native Administration, Tanga District, 08.11.1925, John B. Mdoe to Administrative Officer, 26-27. 53 TNA\DSM, 4/6/1, Vol.I: Native Administration, Tanga District, 08.11.1925, John B. Mdoe to Administrative Officer, 26-27. 54 TNA\DSM, 4/6/1, Vol.I: Native Administration, Tanga District, 08.11.1925, John B. Mdoe to Administrative Officer, 26. 55 Buchert, Education in the development of Tanzania, 73. 56 Generally about colonial civilizing mission, see Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Konstanz: UVK, 2005); Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms”, 419–442. As Martin Chanock showed, memory of the pre-colonial past in Malawi and Zambia was both harmonious (the idea of an idyllic, moral and timeless past of communal solidarity) and 40 have been aware of both discourses and transformed them creatively to strengthen his argument.
I use Mdoe as my pathway into Shambaai’s own local history of slavery. John B. Mdoe was a member of the Mhina/Mdoe family, a family that the British believed had to be watched carefully.57 The Mdoe family were a small group of educated Anglican Bondei, who were in competition with the current Bondei chief of Muheza (near Tanga and outside of Shambaai), John Juma. They attacked Juma on the grounds of his Kilindi ancestry, but lost their case resoundingly.58 Justin Willis argues that the Mhina/Mdoe claim to leadership was only based on “mythical history”, and their representatives were “dealing in history and identity to their own advantage.”59 Whatever the case, Mdoe’s unconventional wording is remarkable. Like many other petitioners, he did not only subvert British repertoires, he also used them for his own political gain. His language was informed by colonial and Christian discourse, and we can be sure he used the wording deliberately. Yet his slavery allusions drew not solely from European and abolitionist discourse on slavery, but also from the Bondei’s particular memory of slave raids whose roots lay deep in the past of the Kiva revolution. The Kiva revolution was the unintended consequence of the long civil war in Shambaai between different factions of Shambaa and Kilindi following the death of the great Kimweri ye Nyumbai in 1862. Bondei rebels referred to as Kiva had allied themselves with Shekulwavu, Kimweri ye Nyumbai’s grandson and successor against the latter’s contender for the chiefly paramountcy in Shambaai, Semboja. Bondei was traditionally controlled by Semboja’s faction of Kilindi. The Bondei alliance with Shekulwavu and the revolution therefore meant their open defiance towards the traditional Kilindi chiefs of Bondei. Although the Bondei eventually succeeded in freeing themselves from Kilindi overrule,
extremely violent (detailed description of the atrocities of slavery, despotic lawlessness.) The discourse about pre- colonial barbarity was thus fueled by the colonial “civilizing mission”, but also by an emphasis on brutal punishment, since Africans were used to and thus would only understand this kind of language, see Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 125. With respect to the discursive link between barbarity and slavery at the Eastern African coast, see Jonathon Glassman, War of words, war of stones: Racial thought and violence in colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 57 TNA\DSM, Tanga District Book. 58 Justin Willis, “The Administration of Bonde, 1920-60: A Study of the Implementation of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika,” African Affairs 92, no. 366 (1993), 56-57. 59 Ibid., 57. 41 the Kiva revolution led to two decades of intense slaving to finance the ongoing wars.60 This example demonstrates what I am trying to argue here. The slavery discourse as used by Shambaai’s residents was deeply rooted in Shambaai’s history. This local embeddedness influenced the specific use of the slavery discourse in Shambaai as much as the abolitionist rhetoric that permeated Eastern Africa as a whole. The backdrop of the Kiva revolution and Bondei’s strained relationship with Kilindi chiefs explains Mdoe’s quest for the establishment of an independent Bondei tribal authority, as well as his references to the slavery trope.
Mdoe managed to twist the image of slavery three times. His first mentioning describes the Germans and their Akida system as slavery. Then, probably intending to play off feelings of guilt, he used the educative if-then-else strategy to underline the reasonability of his request as well as the possible consequences: if the British government had brought civilization and freedom to Africans (which government official would deny that?), then it must grant its subjects the right to choose their leader by this very freedom (because otherwise it could not be called freedom). Here, the similarities with the civilizing mission’s quest are striking. The third reference, though a subtle, yet unmistakable allusion only, was Mdoe’s link to the well-known portrayal of the African continent as a place of barbarity, ignorance and darkness. The image of the ignorant African who falls prey to a greedy Arab slave trader comes to mind. Here, Mdoe chose his wording carefully from narratives of Christian zeal to enlighten African “pagans” as well as from official legitimation of colonial rule. It was a general feature of colonial self-conception and justification to depict colonial rule as an act of “saving” Africans. In this colonial reading, they had to be saved from various things– from their oppression by savage rulers through the rule of law, from slave traders through abolition, and from pagan darkness through the civilizing mission and Christianity. It is noteworthy that the very discourse to legitimate colonial rule became a weapon in the struggle for more autonomy by Africans. Similar statements were not uncommon in Shambaai. Mbugu elders, for instance, who also requested their own Mbugu chiefdom and likewise rejected the Kilindi, begged the British government in a similarly peculiar mix of Christian and colonial discursive elements to “help us […] as Mr. David Livingstone did
60 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, see chapter 6-8. 42 and saved all Africans from the clutch of the Arabs. […] If we succeed God will bless you and all the Wambugu will pray for you. [sic]”61
Selective Appropriation Another instructive example are the petitions by Zigua writers. Through the lens of their petitions, we can see the selectiveness inherent to the appropriation process. The Zigua, a significant ethnic minority living in the Sub-Chiefdoms of Mombo and Korogwe, were particularly eager petition-writers. They had fallen in and out of Shambaa hegemony throughout the past decades. Most Zigua lived in the neighboring Handeni district, but I focus on the significant Zigua minority of Shambaai. Since the takeover of the territory by the British, the residents of Shambaai found themselves under the British system of indirect rule. The British were convinced that in Shambaai, where the ancient history of the Shambaa Kingdom provided them with a useful blueprint for the rest of the territory, indirect rule would work just fine. Yet the philosophy of indirect rule was ambiguous. While it lent authority to the royal Kilindi chiefs, indirect rule also had the potential to initiate the question about who could represent those of Kimweri’s subjects who were not of Shambaa or Kilindi origins. This was precisely what happened in Mombo, a settlement at the edge of the Usambara Mountains and in vicinity to the plains. The Mombo chiefdom was traditionally one of the rather mixed chiefdoms in Shambaai, where Kwavi, Bondei, Zigua, Shambaa and Kilindi lived together.
While the image of German tyranny and even slavery proved worthwhile to the Zigua cause of claiming their own native authorities, the British benevolence to defend Europe was more and more questioned. Zigua and other Africans still remembered the strict German rule62 and found it easy to connect to the oppression image. Their assertion of German oppression was certainly motivated by their own experiences, but probably also used to please the British by contrasting them in a more positive light: “the majestic British Government waged war to oust the German Government which was the government of magnitude oppression and after only a little while
61 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 16.04.1947, Mbugu elders to DO Lushoto, 353- 354. 62 Interview with Daniel Magogo, 7.11.2014. 43 the majestic British Government made end to the great injustice exercise by the German Government [sic].”63
Yet if the British magnitude or alternatively their “grace of compassion”64 was as great as the Zigua readily believed, they reasoned, the responsibility to fight tyranny should be taken seriously also in Uzigua, where the Zigua felt oppressed by the Kilindi. It was argued that after the Germans had been driven out by the “majestic British government,” the British had restored justice for the neighboring Pare. The Pare had been given their own district and were since freed from Kilindi suzerainty, and the Zigua minority of the neighboring district of Pangani had been united with the Zigua of the district of Handeni.65 The only group who were still waiting for justice were the Zigua of Mombo, the petition implied.
The authors of the letters claimed that the institution of a Zigua Zumbe in Mombo had a long history under Kilindi sovereignty even before German times. In those days, the Zigua Zumbe of Mombo had had freedom, uhuru, in domestic matters under Kilindi rule.66 Whether these officially contested claims were true or not (the British claimed that one of the first visitors of the region, German pastor Gleiss who travelled Mombo first in 1900 did not meet people other than the Shambaa there)67 has been discussed by others.68 Important for the Zigua reasoning was the fact that the British had given up the German Akida system. Like the Bondei, the Zigua referred to the Akida system, probably to contrast the “benign” British from the “oppressive” Germans, but certainly also to show that not all that much had changed. Some letter-writers argued that despite their ancient claim to the land, they were still deprived of it. De facto, they
63 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 10.11.1947, DC Lloyd to PC Tanga, 388; TNA\DSM , 4/6/2 Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 24.08.1950, Mikael Maligito, Petro Asumani Benedicto John, John Gila, Hilary Kilo, Karlo Bungale, Luka Koko, Salehe Puyanga, Mohammed Bakari, Mohamedi Kilo, Omari Hoza, Shabani Ali to DO Korogwe, 543. 64 TNA\DSM , 4/6/2 Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 24.08.1950, Mikael Maligito, Petro Asumani Benedicto John, John Gila, Hilary Kilo, Karlo Bungale, Luka Koko, Salehe Puyanga, Mohammed Bakari, Mohamedi Kilo, Omari Hoza, Shabani Ali to DO Korogwe, 543. 65 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 10.11.1947, DC Lloyd to PC Tanga, 388. 66 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 20.07.1942, Zigua of Mombo Mavindi Munju, Abdalla Jaha, Msenga Munju and others to PC Bonavia, 245. 67 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 09.06.1943, PC W.J. Bonavia to the Chief Secretary, 270. 68 James L. Giblin, Famine, authority and the impact of foreign capital in Handeni District, Tanzania, 1840-1940 (University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1986 PhD Thesis). 44 were still living under “German akidaship.”69 The authority they referred to as an alien Akida was Zumbe Raphael of Mombo, who was stranger to the land, a Bondei.70
Uzigua under the British was re-made to lend new importance to the clans in order to provide the basis for the “tribal units” of indirect rule, yet as Justin Willis has argued, there was no evidence to believe the clans were “capable of acting in unison.”71 Most certainly, the Zigua claims for a Zumbeship in Mombo can be understood as resulting from the official British policy to emphasize the role of clan and tribe in Zigua history. As elsewhere in the British Empire under indirect rule, British officers were keen to “find the chief.”72 Capitalizing on the role for tribal identity the British had designed, the Zigua of Mombo again and again invoked their ancient right to the land and did not grow tired asking the “majestic government to make arrangements regarding our just right.”73
In 1943, it dawned on the British that the Zigua of Mombo were supported by the Zigua of Handeni. In his report on the Zigua agitation the DC stated that he knew from some “fairly intelligent and reasonable thinking Zigua natives in the Handeni division” that the Zigua of Mombo received sympathy from Handeni. The issue at stake for the Zigua of Handeni was not Zumbe Raphael’s arbitrariness, but their wish to return to pre-German borders.
The majority of the Zigua natives residing on the land between the boundary demarcated by the German Government in the South, and the lower edges of the Usambara Mountains in the North, consider themselves the rightful owners of the land in question, that it should be included in the Handeni division of this district, and be segregated from the Usambara Native Authority. In my opinion, they will continue to make a nuisance of themselves until what they consider, their grievance, i.e. subordination to no other tribal authority, but one of Zigua origin, is remedied.74 The British refused to make any concessions. The example of the Zigua is instructive for understanding indirect rule. I did not so much use it to shed light on British reactions to them, but to underline the impact the Zigua petitions had on other petitioners and the genre of
69 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 10.11.1947, DC Lloyd to PC Tanga, 388A. 70 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 20.07.1942, Zigua of Mombo Mavindi Munju, Abdalla Jaha, Msenga Munju and others to PC Bonavia, 245. 71 Willis, “The Administration of Bonde, 1920-60: A Study of the Implementation of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika”, 59. 72 Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 323. 73 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 02.10.1950, Salehe Puyanga, Mombo, to PC Tanga, 536. 74 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 29.05.1943, Report on Zigua Agitation, 267. 45 petitions in general. I argue that the persisting claim-making of the Zigua and the particular language they were using spurred claims that were eventually made by other groups. One of the elements which could later on easily be appropriated were the Ziguas’ various references to the alleged Kilindi tyranny. To make use of the British concept of indirect rule and to beat them at their own game, Zigua petitioners drew from the language of tribalism, a clear legacy of indirect rule. The words haki [right], -huru [free] and kabila [ethnic group] were never missed in those letters: “We claim our right. Our protest and petition are for the claim of our right. This letter demands that our tribe should be reunited only with people of our clan, and that we should not be mixed up with other tribes.”75 While the British were interested in neat tribal units, they had not intended to give rise to particularism, and certainly not particularisms as tiny as the one of the Zigua minority in Shambaai. Increasingly, the question about who had come first, who were the real “sons of the soil,”76 became the prevalent one.
The “Rightful Owners of the Land” Already in 1933, four years after the reinstallation of Kimweri through indirect rule, a petition signed by “all the subjects of Usambara” reached the DO in Lushoto. Their grievances were scarcity of money yet no decrease in taxation, and the fact that “it is not raining.” Due to famine “it is impossible to pay tax” because the little money the Shambaa had went into purchasing foodstuff.77 In the writers’ logic, it was obvious who was responsible for the situation:
The source of all this trouble is “WAKILINDI”. They are quarrelling amongst themselves on account of the country. Every one says the country belongs to my father, every one tells the same story, and therefore all the Wakilindi are not on good terms an account of the country of Usambara. […] This country does not belong to them. The rightful owners of the country are WAKINATULI.78 Wakilindi are only aliens, their home is Nguu (Zigua). […] You had better either return the Akidas to us as they were previously or just consider yourself to give the country to the rightful owners WAKINATULI, then the intrigue will end. This is the only way to suppress the rest of the intrigue. During Akidas’ reign we did not experience any trouble or inconvenience such as this. Just remember, Sir, that
75 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 10.11.1947, DC Lloyd to PC Tanga, 388A. 76 See here Peter Geschiere’s book about autochthony and belonging, Peter Geschiere, The perils of belonging: Autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago, Ill., London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2, 26-28. 77 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, without date (probably between April and June 1933), all subjects of Usambara to the DO Lushoto, 70. 78 Wakinatuli or Kina Turi is a term used when referring to the earliest inhabitants of the Usambara Mountains, the “real” Shambaa. 46 Wakilindi wish that all people would die of hunger. […] The rightful owners Wakinatuli. They cannot speak for themselves. [sic]79
Again, this quotation is not only proof of the Kilindi dynasty quarrels of the early 1930s when Shebughe Magogo took over.80 It is also a reminder of the chaotic times that followed Kimweri ye Nuymbai’s death in 1862 and lasted until the German conquest. In the troublesome slave raids of the 1870s and 1880s, chiefs even turned against their Shambaa subjects.81 Great insecurity and a loss of trust between rulers and ruled was the consequence. When the Germans, after a brief interlude of Kilindi rule, hanged then Kimweri Mputa Semboja and introduced the Akida system, they forced an end to dynastic wars of the past decades. But they did so by sacrificing the last trust in the rulers the Shambaa could possibly have had left, and thus “power passed from the hands of the Kilindi.”82
According to Steven Feierman, the Shambaa explicitly say that famine and death are the result of nguvu kwa nguvu, “force against force”, in other words, political competition. “When there is competition, leaders use their magical charms to assault one another, and not to bring fertility to the land. Fertility and life are the result of unchallenged domination by a single ruler who collects tribute from the entire land. When a ruler is unchallenged, he is able to use his magical charms for the welfare of the subjects. At the time, there is peace rather than war.”83 Although we know from contextualizing Shambaai regionally that dynastic quarrels between different factions of Kilindi did not bring famine and slave raids, yet made it easier for rulers to become involved in the slave trade, it is the way the Shambaa interpreted their history at the time Feierman did his research. References to famine, lack of rain and slavery in the sources, can be read in this context. The “tribal” language, however, was as much the legacy of indirect rule, and it emerged quickly after the re-introduction of Kilindi rule. The DO of Korogwe noticed already in 1930 “a few young mission followers [who] made anti-Kilindi speeches in Bwiti.”84 He quickly took action and suggested that anyone who objected to rule by the Wakilindi were at
79 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, without date (probably between April and June 1933), all subjects of Usambara to the DO Lushoto, 70. 80 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 139. 81 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, chapter 7. 82 Ibid., 204. 83 Ibid., 182. 84 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 18.08.1930, DO Korogwe to DO Lushoto, 47. 47 liberty to go elsewhere, and that active opposition might result in application being made of deportation order.85
Against the backdrop of several violent decades in Shambaai, it is also not surprising that already in 1933 petitions referred to internal struggles about succession politics among the Kilindi. The long-lasting quarrel between the sons of Semboja and those of Mnkande (Shekulwavu’s father and Kimweri ye Nyumbai’s son) had come to an end on account of German brutality. British ideology of indirect rule reintroduced Kilindi rule. But the memory of the civil war was still alive. In addition, with the Bushiri uprising on the coast, in which Shambaa were involved,86 and the German conquest still fresh, insecurity had taken hold of many residents of Shambaai. In this context, protest against the first Kimweri under the British, Shebughe Magogo, son of Semboja Mputa, the king who was hanged by the Germans three decades earlier, was not yet phrased in the language of indirect rule, of aliens and newcomers. Instead, a faction of Kilindi challenged Shebughe Magogo’s rule due to the fact that one of the fingers of his right hand was deformed, which was, according the petitioners, a knock-out criterion in succession politics.87
Other petitioners took up this kind of language. In February 1940, Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo, a young Shambaa commoner from the chiefdom of Bumbuli, addressed his grievances concerning Kilindi oppression. In his letter, Tekelo asked PC W.J. Bonavia to free the Shambaa, the “rightful” residents of the Usambara Mountains, from Kilindi rule. He implied that the Kilindi, who were once freely invited to rule the country by the Shambaa, were now practicing utumwa, slavery, in Shambaai. Tekelo asked how the British administration could tolerate Kilindi slavery, especially as they themselves were involved in fighting a war against the “slavery of Nazi Germany.” He went on: “If only London accepted to be ruled by Germany; I think then even we would be
85 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 18.08.1930, DO Korogwe to DO Lushoto, 47B. 86 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 202; Zawawi, “The Gift of a Mountain”, 73; Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and riot: Revelry, rebellion, and popular consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; London: James Currey, 1995), 226-248. 87 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 22.04.1933, Zumbe Omari Kinda, Ex-Akida Salim Tunutu, Salehe Mwanyoka, Ex-Akida Nyelo Chambi and Kibanga Mtoi to the PC, 69. 48 content to be ruled by the Kilindi.”88 As he referred to slavery, Tekelo specified that he meant the fact that every Shambaa town was administrated by a Kilindi headman, while the Shambaa themselves, the “sons of the soil”, were not supported by the British. “Is that rightful?” he asked. In addition, Tekelo made a point about favoritism. He pointed to the practice of colonial administration to put people of different backgrounds like Goans and Africans together in the name of indirect rule, “because we all are [sons] of the British Empire. So it is not only the Kilindi who are [sons] of the British Empire!” He ended by reminding the PC that the Kilindi “are only guests here” 89 and that he wished him to consider the four clans of the Shambaa in his response.
At the time he wrote the letter, Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo was a young man known to the administration as a regular letter writer, but rather harmless and well-educated, perhaps with aspirations to find work in the colonial administration, as the DC specified in a letter to the PC. He also explained to Bonavia that he and Tekelo had “a pleasant argument regarding the old invasion of the Usambaras by the Kilindi.”90 Both the DC and PC did not understand Tekelo’s letter as a political message. Bonavia invited Tekelo to discuss the matter with the DC of Korogwe or with himself in Tanga.91 Tekelo suggested that the PC send him the bus fare to Tanga so he could visit personally and present the PC with his book which was called Uthabiti wa Usambara, the Truth of Usambara, in which he had explained his ideas further.92 But the PC turned him down. They never discussed Tekelo’s history of Shambaai.93 The DC, too, dismissed Tekelo’s letters lightly. He argued that Tekelo only wanted to show off his knowledge in order to secure himself the position as a clerk in the government.94 Tekelo’s references to global political events like Nazi Germany’s threat in Europe and the Second World War were dismissed as showing-off. In 1940, the British did not feel threatened by slavery rhetoric. Only after the
88 TNA\DSM,4, 6/2 Vol.I: Administration, native, Usambara District, 2.2.1940, Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo of Bumbuli to Provincial Commissioner, Tanga Province, 147. 89 TNA\DSM,4, 6/2 Vol.I: Administration, native, Usambara District, 2.2.1940, Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo of Bumbuli to Provincial Commissioner, Tanga Province, 147. 90 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 21.2.1940, DC J.L. Fairgclough Korogwe, to PC Tanga, 150. 91 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 28.02.1940, PC W.J. Bonavia to Abdulla Hamisi Tekelo, 151. 92 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 25.03.1940, Tekelo to PC Tanga, 152. 93 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 28.03.1940, PC to Tekelo, 153. 94 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 21.02.1940, DC Korogwe to PC Tanga, 150. 49 introduction of the Usambara Scheme and the protests that accompanied it would they come to realize the full brunt of anger the Shambaa felt.
But it is possible to read Tekelo’s claims differently. There are several fascinating tropes in his letter. His reference to the Shambaa as the “sons of the soil” and the Kilindi as the “foreign intruders” is one of them. As in many of the petitions mentioned above, it is likely that the practice and language of indirect rule was a major influence in Tekelo’s choice of wording. The history of the first Kilindi King, the hunter Mbegha, who was invited by the Shambaa themselves, referred to in Tekelo’s letter, is widely documented.95 Despite the tensions between different groups of Kilindi, Shambaa and Bondei in pre-colonial times, it is also clear that the divisive language of neatly tribal separation was inspired by indirect rule. It presented a useful tool for claims to empowerment for any minority that felt misrepresented under the Paramount. Before German and British colonialism, claims to power had been made in a different language. It was not the Kilindi overrule that was challenged in itself (only by the Kiva of Bondei, as showed above), but the ability of a ruler to rule his subjects well. In local terms, ruling well meant to bring fertility to the land. Tekelo’s neat “tribal” language, however, can be understood as alluding to the racist “Hamitic hypothesis”96 that influenced British officials’ perception of their subjects’ complicated tribal structures. Tekelo’s almost impossible twist, his equation of Nazi tyranny with Kilindi rule, did not alarm the colonial administration. Yet it already anticipated the language and claims of the troublesome late 1940s and 1950s.
Again, the evocation of slavery is striking. Tekelo described the Kilindi as the slavers. By referencing to the slavery discourse, Tekelo thus turned the rhetoric against the colonial rulers themselves, yet in an indirect twist: if the colonial officials supported the Kilindi, they supported slavery, but had they not come in order to abolish slavery? How could they tolerate the enslavement of their faithful subjects? Tekelo’s evocation of the language of equality in his example of Goans, Africans and others working together peacefully as equal representatives of the British Empire is a similar trick. It was certainly a witty move to make claims in the language of equality and against slavery. Yet there was another less obvious argument. Now that that
95 See for a detailed account relying on oral traditions Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 40-90. 96 Lushoto District Book, Rhodes House, Tribal History and Legends, the Wakilindi dynasty in Usambara, p.1. 50 Shambaa were fighting for the British in World War Two, the Shambaa felt the British owed them. The cause of the war, the threat of Nazi tyranny, was well-known in the Usambara Mountains, and it was easy to imagine after the harsh decades of German rule. If Nazi aggression was inacceptable, Tekelo reasoned, then so was Kilindi aggression. But the underlying feature of this reasoning was in fact that British rule was inacceptable as well: if Kilindi were only guests, even if invited a long time ago, the British were guests that had never been invited at all. It might have been too dangerous for Tekelo to express this openly, but it was most probably meant to be anticipated by the reader.
I argue that the specific choice of the moralistic language of rights and equality against slavery and the fight against the Nazis were an attempt by local actors to turn British colonial rule on its head. In fact, Tekelo argued against nothing less than double standards: what held true for London must hold for its African Empire as well. However, it appeared to be too early for the British to understand the implicit threat of Tekelo’s rhetorical inversion. It was only in the turbulent late 1940s and 1950s that the colonial administration understood the gravity of the situation, probably partly through the Meru land case in the border province of Kilimanjaro and the Mau Mau war in neighboring Kenya, events which did not go unreferenced by Shambaa petitioners.97 The rage of Mau Mau fighters and supporters – although the war was about land in the first place – was also inspired by the hard labor required by the new soil conservation measures. Just like in Shambaai, terrace-ridging was a much despised activity for the Gikuyu, too.98 As the protest rhetoric, specifically of the opposition against the Usambara Land Usage Scheme, became more pronounced in the next two decades, a sudden concern from the colonial administration would rise with it. The roots of the rhetoric, however, were much older and already in use before the introduction of the Usambara Scheme, as shown above.
Imperial Tensions and the War The economic and political implication of the Second World War brought another wave of slavery allusions. While Tanganyikans were mostly loyal to the British cause in the Second World
97 TNA\DSM, 171/3/2, Vol.I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.10.1954, Citizens of Tanga province to DC, 86. 98 David Anderson, Histories of the hanged: The dirty war in Kenya and the end of empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 34; David W. Throup, “The Origins of Mau Mau,” African Affairs 84, no. 336 (1985), 421-427. 51 War,99 they certainly realized that the British had to rely on their colonies more heavily than ever before. Only few Shambaa participated directly in the war, and those who did were sent to Burma or the Middle East.100 The major toll of the war for Tanganyikans was the intense deterioration of living conditions due to the “war effort”, a euphemism for enhanced economic exploitation. The British enforced increased war-time food production.101 Inflation, then sinking imports and government-controlled prices for the peasants’ harvest made life particularly hard for poor peasants, urban workers and low-ranked clerks. Furthermore, droughts in the 1940s led to food shortages despite the increased food production. A similar situation as in the 1880s arose. Back then, agricultural production had risen in Upare and Shambaai due to the new business of food provisions for the caravan trade, but food security was disrupted as a consequence of slave raids.102 Similarly in the 1940s, peasants were asked to produce for the war effort, yet many cultivators were absent as they fought in one of the armies. Despite the higher volume of activity, food security was not achieved. Furthermore, labor shortage led for many Tanganyikans to the traumatic experience of labor conscription.103 The government’s intervention in the local economy did not bring greater equality. On the contrary, many peasants saw no alternative but to sell their produce on thriving black markets where the prices offered for their produce were more adequate than the government’s centralized stable but too low prices.104
99 TNA\KEW, CO 736/23, Annual Report of the Tanga Province of the Year 1940, 60; TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 04.04.1947, Wambugu elders to DO, Lushoto, 356- 357. 100 Interview with Daniel Magogo, 7.11.2014; TNA\DSM, 171/72/33: War. Visit of native chiefs to troops, 31.08.1943, DO Lushoto to DC Korogwe, forwarding message from Shebughe for personnel serving the Middle East, 20. 101 Judith A. Byfield, “Producing for the War,” in Africa and World War II, ed. Judith A. Byfield et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24-42. 102 Isaria N. Kimambo, “Environmental Control and Hunger in the Mountains and Plains of Northern Tanzania,” in Custodians of the land: Ecology & culture in the history of Tanzania, ed. Gregory Maddox, James L. Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo (London, Athens: James Curry; Ohio University Press, 1996), 93. 103 Each of Tanganyika’s provinces had conscription quote to meet, see TNA\DSM, 27427, Tanganyika Secretariat, Vol.I: African man power, 11.03.1942, Saving Telegram to all PCs from Manpower, Dar, 3. See also Nicholas Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49,” in Africa and the Second World War, ed. David Killingray and Richard Rathbone (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 144-145, 147, 149. 104 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 135; Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 147- 150. 52 Another result of the “war effort”105 was the increase in mono-cropping among Africans, especially of maize for the market and cassava for subsistence.106 In Shambaai, where already the necessity to procure cash for taxation had led to increasing maize farming, maize mono- cropping led to planting maize in the historical centers of subsistence, the banana zone at 1,400 meters elevation.107 This change promised more cash for the peasants. Yet in the long run the shallow root system of the maize plants exposed soil to dangerous effects of wind and rain, thus leading to soil erosion108 – the central issue in post-war Shambaai. The growing significance of economic production and the extensive control rationalized as “war effort” indeed paved the way for development programs and the creation of the modern, directive and interventionist colonial and post-colonial state.109 Small wonder that these hardships contributed to the slavery connection, especially as the term freedom, uhuru, had been employed by the colonial government to describe the war as a war for freedom.110 In such a situation, the British war propaganda’s portrayal of the enemy furnished a fit occasion to once again revive the slavery trope.111 In a “war time letter” of 1940, Shambaa letter-writers, for example, sent a letter of support to the DC stating that they stood by “our Government to the last,” also indicating they were “prepared to bear any sacrifice.” Apparently, they were eager to join the cause particularly because it was a cause against the former rulers. They stated:
We understand our adversary regards us as half ape and half man, or only the former, without crediting us with the latter. Further in view of what he is treating the people of the countries which are now under his heel, we feel we should show in refutation of above-mentioned assertions, that the African is not the ape he indulges to think [sic].112 Although there is not direct use of the word slaves or slavery, it is clear that the Shambaa drew from the rich pool of slave images as they described how the Germans saw them as “half ape half man” – one of the strong and well-known images of America’s plantations based on slave labor. A popular song during war times included the line kamwe hatutakuwa watumwa – we
105 David Killingray and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa and the Second World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 5. 106 Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 148-149. 107 Ibid., 105. 108 Ibid., 115-116. 109 Killingray and Rathbone, Africa and the Second World War, 7. 110 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 143. 111 Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 155. 112 TNA\KEW, CO 736/23, Annual Report of the Tanga Province of the Year 1940, 60. 53 will never again be slaves.113 Never again, the song implies, would the Shambaa accept to be treated like slaves, as they had been under the Germans. It was this kind of rhetoric that became popular under the British, who had made a language spiked with references to slavery and race possible. British war propaganda in concert with the tribal rhetoric of indirect rule had stroked a chord with Shambaa letter-writers. With British help, many Shambaa and other Africans transformed the image of the precolonial slaver onto the much despised Akida of German origins. From there, it was an easy step to cast any undesirable chief as an Akida, and as the main negative characteristic of the Akida was his alienness, soon the alien nature of British rule was contested, too.
Post World War Two Petitions After the end of World War Two the language used in the petitions grew bolder. British freedom from Nazi Germany had been achieved through the collective effort of the various parts of the Empire. Having worked for the victory, be it in terms of producing for the war effort,114 participating in combat operations, or in any other way,115 led to different kinds of claims. Now that Africans had fought or worked to maintain Britain’s freedom, their own freedom became the most important issue at a tearing pace. As it happened in many other colonies, the support of the Tanganyika War Fund produced liabilities after the war. Kwavi petitioners, belonging to an ethnic minority in Shambaai rich in cattle, began to reference directly to their contribution to the war effort. They had fought loyally for freedom, but not only for the King and against German oppression, but also for uhuru for themselves and against oppression at home.
What I knew and was explained during the war was this: we are fighting for freedom. That did not mean after the war each of us would be able to do what they like behind the back of the government, but that each of us would be free under the guardianship of King George. Now I see the opposite happening; we have been placed under the yoke of other tribes whose customs never sat will with ours even in previous times. […] I together with all Kwavi […], we heard the voice of the government during the war, and we have attempted to fulfill the war effort to help the government with money and cattle, we fought for the freedom of our country. Today it looks like only the Shambaa
113 Interview with Bishop Jali, Lushoto, 06.11.2014. 114 Byfield, “Producing for the War”. 115 Yasmin Khan, India at war: The subcontinent and the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Carolyn A. Brown, “African Labor in the Making of World War II,” in Africa and World War II, ed. Judith A. Byfield et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 43-67. 54 and the Pare have freedom, and if they fail to teach themselves, it is due to their slackness. If you had placed us under the authority of our companions the Zigua, we would not utter a word. Our help during the war: we contributed 838 Shs and 80 cattle to help our father to get freedom for us. I do not claim the mentioned wealth, I only [wish to] demonstrate our industriousness of those days.116 While the Kwavi dwelled in detail on their contribution to the war that entitled them, in their perception, to more freedom, others chose to evoke the image of slavery. Tanganyikans chose from the large pool of historical representations of slavery and blend it with the British war rhetoric of fighting German “barbarians.” The outcome of this creative appropriation process fired back on the British, who all of a sudden found themselves being targeted. Indirect rule came under fire almost at the moment of its introduction. Even in a region like Shambaai, conceived of by the British as relatively homogenous one and with a strong history of “tribal” institutions, the edges and borders could turn fuzzy. In a fragile situation like the post-World War Two order of the British Empire, not only voices from the blurry borderlands, but eventually also from the heartland of chieftaincy threatened to bring down the rule of native authorities. As the majority of Shambaa joined into the complaints about Kilindi oppression, in other words, about indirect rule, the colonial administration was forced to change its course.
In the case of the Zigua who fought for their own “tribal” representation and against Zumbe Raphael, neither pushing the guilt button by framing claims in the international language of rights and appealing to British paternalism or debt, nor trying to receive sympathy points for mutual bonding against the cruel Germans helped in the end. The PC, annoyed by what he referred to as “malicious half-truths and malignant insinuations”, told the petitioners during a meeting in 1943 that “were it not for the protection given to them by the British Government they would have been driven out of the country long ago, since they are definitely unpopular with, and objectionable to, the rest of the African community in Mombo.”117 The detailed lists of accusations against Zumbe Raphael of 1946 were simply returned with the statement that none of them had been found to be substantial. The PC considered a further investigation a “waste of
116 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 9.10.1951, Loiboni Muleto bin Maitei to Zumbe Rashidi Sedenga, Mkalamo; Benedict John; Bartolomaio Juma and all the elders of Korogwe, 553-554. 117 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I, Administration native, Usambara District, 09.06.1943, PC W.J. Bonavia to the Chief Secretary, 270. 55 time.”118 He eventually informed the Zigua that “it is administratively impracticable to divide off the Korogwe Division Zigua as we suggest.”119 Their claims were dismissed, their petitions casted as “vague and imaginary claims” that wasted the precious time of administrative officers and ridiculed as the greedy “intention of creating a special chiefdom so that they can get salaries as chiefs and headmen.”120 In their reply to the ultimate refusal to alter their borders, the Zigua repeated their plea once more. At this point, they copied in the Chief Secretary and other officials and individuals121 in a lyrical allusion to England’s greatest author: “We plead you earnestly if you would think and recollect of the old example “Oh gentlemen friends, I beseech you that, for your game is our death. [sic]”122
The borders of the Mombo Zumbeate were not adjusted and Zumbe Raphael stayed in power. In the 1950s, he turned out to be one of Kimweri’s few allies and harsh prosecutors in the wave of land cases and false accusation cases related to the Usambara Scheme.123 The refusal of the British to listen to their subjects’ claims with respect to succession politics was not new. Yet the rigor with which it was done was representative for a new post-war attitude. In Westcott’s words, “The DOs previous painstaking attention to the niceties of tribal succession evaporated. What was needed was an efficient administrative machine, and tribal legitimacy had to be subordinated to this.”124 Examples of this kind can be found in other regions of Tanganyika, too, namely in Uluguru.125 The British administrative staff saw the case of the Zigua of Mombo as a minor one and subordinated a close investigation of the complaints to Zumbe Raphael’s Vugha-
118 TNA\DSM, 31207: Local Government. Native Chiefs: Usambara District, Tanga Province, 5. 119 Quoted in TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 08.12.1950, Salehe Kanyaga, Mombo, and Benedicto John, Korogwe, to PC Tanga, 547 (original lost). 120 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 04.10.1950, DO Korogwe to PC Tanga, 540. 121 They copied the petition to the Hon the Chief Secretary to the Gov, Dar; the Social Welfare Organizer, Dar; the Administrative Secretary, Dar; The DC Lush; the DC Same, the DO Korogwe, the DC Handeni, the DC Pangani, Mr. Bakari Mdoe, Handeni, Mr. Lewis Mynah, Kwasigi P.O. Maurui, Mr. Anthony Mochiwa, Health Office Moshi, Mr. Michael L. Kikurwe, P.O. Mombo, see TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 08.12.1950, Salehe Kanyaga, Mombo, and Benedicto John, Korogwe, to PC Tanga, 547. 122 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 08.12.1950, Salehe Kanyaga, Mombo, and Benedicto John, Korogwe, to PC Tanga, 547. 123 TNA\DSM, 171/3/2, Vol.I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 87, 100, 103. 124 Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 152. 125 In Uzigua, “tribal authorities” were invented for this reason, see Willis, “The Administration of Bonde, 1920-60”, 53. In Uluguru, succession became much less free in the late 1940s when British began to install their allies only, see Peter Pels, “Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 72, no. 1 (2002), 9. 56 loyal attitude. Contrary to Westcott’s point, I argue that the British did not keep Zumbe Raphael in office because of his administrative efficiency, but because of his loyalty to Vugha. As I will show in the next chapter, the directions from Vugha grew more authoritarian after Shebuge’s abdication in 1947 and the introduction of the Usambara Scheme. In these turbulent times, the most important matter for Kimweri, and thus for the British administration in Tanganyika – contrary to the opinions of the Colonial Office in London – was loyalty to Vugha. Only the case of mass protests, as it happened in Mlalo and Vugha, would bring the British to force Kimweri into concessions.
British war time propaganda had “brought even the most backward areas in touch with the war through the free, official newssheet Habari za Vita.”126 Discontent peasants, urban dockers struggling for better pay, and teachers began to turn the luring war time promises against the British, often picking on similar rhetorical strategies. Unrest in the rural parts of North-Eastern Tanganyika and the Lake Victoria province as well as waves of docker and general strikes in the coastal cities shook the government.127 One of the famous tropes was used by the dockers and the Kwavi alike (and many others, see below). It was the claim to a right to freedom earned during the war times through helping Britain to protect Europe’s freedom from German tyranny and slavery. Another petitioning strategy was to provoke the British by posing curious questions that alluded they had lost control in their Empire. “Who is it really that says we cannot have our land, the British government or the Kilindi, the rulers of the mountains?”128
Conclusion: The Evolution of the Slavery Discourse It comes as no surprise that in the political context of indirect rule, in which great emphasis was placed on ethnicity, many letter-writers took pains to define themselves in contrast to both neighboring ethnic communities and against the Asians who dominated the colonial civil service, and eventually against the British themselves. Although the literary imagination of letter- and
126 Killingray and Rathbone, Africa and the Second World War, 155. 127 Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 156; TNA\KEW, CO 691/209/8, Strikes and Riots. For docker strikes in the 1940s in the Eastern African ports of Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Tanga see TNA\KEW, CO 691/179/6, Labour. Strikes and Disturbances and TNA\KEW, CO 736/27, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1947, 134; with respect to unrest on sisal plantations see TNA\KEW, CO 736/52, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1957, 157. 128 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 02.10.1950, Salehe Puyanga, Mombo, to PC Tanga, 536. 57 petition-writers was inspired by the “tribal” language of indirect rule, it was the discourse about slavery that functioned as the linguistic vessel through which Shambaa letter-writers chose to express their claims. In these, ethnic differences were stressed and exploited even where they had not existed before. Questions of belonging and autochthony became the most important tropes in the petitions from 1925 onwards, and even more so after the intense experience of the Second World War. Four decades after abolition, the slavery discourse was more alive than ever.
After the slow abolition of slavery in German East Africa,129 and after the period of German rule in Deutsch-Ostafrika, the antagonistic image of slavers and their slaves came into use as a critical assessment of past German oppression. By appropriating the British anti-German propaganda after the First World War, and again during the Second World War, African letter- writers were able to express their urgent claims to the British government in a language that underlined British benevolence in sharp contrast to the devastating memories of their crude predecessors. That is, recalling the German times during those of British rule meant remembering relations with German officials in terms of German slavers and oppressed Shambaa slaves. Furthermore, the representatives of aggrieved parties or communities who felt underprivileged began to use the slave – slaver image as a tool to describe ethnic tensions among so-called “tribal units” such as the Shambaa, Kilindi, Bondei and Zigua, but also in its cruder form of antagonizing Africans against Asians in purely racial terms. Ethnic minorities in provinces dominated by one large ethnic group began to call for equal representation by accusing the dominant group of having them enslaved and of preventing them from having their own council of representatives. The peculiar intertwinement of the historically tricky slavery discourse with the language of indirect rule demonstrates the letter-writers rich imagination. In these petitions, they revealed the internal contradictions of indirect rule. The arbitrary implementation of indirect rule (“tribal” representation only for some groups and “correct” succession only when it suited the administration) led to the weakening of native authorities and thus of British rule itself.
129 Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without abolition in German East Africa: C.1844 – 1914 (Oxford: Currey, 2006). 58 The petition-writers’ growing emphasis on ethnic identities and divisions expressed through the language of slavery must be understood as an unintended consequence of indirect rule. While the language in which claims were presented and phrased remained the same throughout decades, the nature of these claims changed constantly. The slavery discourse had been transformed into a more general “crisis narrative” that was a most suitable tool to portray a variety of actors as illegitimate. In the 1950s, again transformed by the postwar nationalist cause, it proved to be a powerful tool in Tanganyikan’s petitioning strategies. As the imperial tensions grew more palpable day by day and petitioners began to understand that the Empire was slowly beginning to crumble away, they welcomed the opportunity to express themselves through an even more pressing writing style. The image of British benevolence in contrast to the previous harsh German regime began to fade away thanks to the war experience. By the late 1940s, petitioners accused the British of backing the “corrupt” system of the “native authorities” distorted by favoritism (see Chapter Four). Not later than the early 1950s, Shambaa petitions began to reach the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations, and the ones being portrayed as slavers were no longer the Kilindi or the native authorities, but the British themselves. Tanganyikan petitioners had developed outward perspectives. They understood and absorbed historical changes and imperial tensions and creatively interwove them with their own political agenda to further local cases. The transformation of the slavery discourse demonstrates how the same narrative was adopted to address ever changing political realities. The power of the narrative rested in its capacity to address asymmetric power-relations, in “shaming a slaver.”
Early petitions were not often successful. In the long run, however, people’s claims were effective. The well-chosen wording and creative writing culture contributed to the growing protest culture because it could serve as a blueprint for later grievances. Through the stubborn repetition of tropes that were uncomfortable for British ears, the petitioners’ power lay in their endurance. The creative mixing of elements from various tropes and narratives made the petitions outstanding examples that would inspire later petitioners.
Petition-writing became a viable alternative for lost appeal cases. Petitioning at once embraced and pushed against colonial bureaucratic formalisms. In addition, petitions highlighted the
59 tensions between district and central government officials in their way of dealing with local interests. Because administrative officials instead of jurists held appeal courts, it was easy for litigants to address them in creative, not legalistic language. Many Africans chose to participate in the practice of creative letter- and petition-writing. Petitioning had several advantages. First, it is impossible to overlook a certain strategic tenacity: by addressing the same issue over and over again throughout years as in the Zigua case, petitioners tried to wear British officials down. Furthermore, petitions reached a much wider audience. By copying their letters to as many officials as possible – often the higher ranked and the further away from Shambaai the better – the authors tried to draw the attention of Tanga and Dar es Salaam posted officials to their cases. Petition-writers chose the addressee carefully. It appears that the involvement of higher officials was chosen as much for reasons of acknowledging seniority as for the hope that officials living far away and not familiar with Shambaai’s political context were less biased in decision- making. While petitions could be formulated relatively quickly and were designed to reach a broad audience, they were not often a powerful instrument for immediate change. I assume this was because British officials often just dismissed petitions, especially if they were hand- written and had spelling or grammar mistakes. Therefore, if anything, the small elite were much more successful than ordinary people, as Chapter Five will show.
Petitioning had become a powerful tool. It was in the language of slavery that Shambaa petitioners imagined a better future. But, as the next chapters will demonstrate, Shambaa and other African petitioners and litigants also drew from other languages that helped them imagining and claiming a better future. The practice of creative writing by making use of colonial repertoires and the possibilities to express themselves in petitions were a legacy of the early missionaries. Shambaa writing culture was powerful. Paired with a Shambaa sense of persistence, petitions had the potential to be a weapon in the struggle against the British. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how Shambaa love for word plays played out in the collective protest against the Usambara Scheme.
60 CHAPTER TWO “Much unwanted hard labour and considerable breaches with custom” – Resistance to the Labor Regime of the Usambara Scheme
The Usambara Land Usage Scheme was the source of decade-long mass protests in Shambaai. The agricultural scheme was introduced by the British in 1946 in the sub-chiefdom of Mlalo as a trial area. By 1950, the scheme measures were extended to the whole of Shambaai. The Usambara Scheme was meant to eradicate soil erosion in an over-populated mountain region suffering from pressure on the land and declining soil quality. This chapter investigates the various forms of protest against the scheme and how they played out in and beyond the courtroom. The chapter argues that despite scientific efforts by the British to assess the agricultural situation, the scheme was perceived as an attack on the moral economy of the Shambaa.1 In order to understand the forms the protest took and in which ways the scheme was perceived as harmful to Shambaa society, we have to turn to the colonial state’s aggressive intervention in the agricultural sector. The focus on agriculture and soil fertility that occupied British officials in many parts of the British African Empire peaked in a series of so-called development schemes, the Usambara Scheme being one of them. The designated “native authorities”, chiefs and headmen, were supposed to implement the scheme rules, which led to a drastic decline in their popularity. The scheme and the protests it sparked in the broader context of British agricultural policy allows us to see two things. First, the language of petitioning grew more radical and was perceived as more dangerous by the British compared to previous petitions. Second, British agricultural policy was the reason why women were at the core of the protest, even though their voices are hardly found in petitions. A number of theses petitions are a precious window into locally specific formulation of protest.
A few studies touch on the peasant protest. J.J. Hozza interprets the protest as a Shambaa revolt against the “Kilindi yoke.”2 Christopher Conte highlights the events in light of ecological
1 I use the term “moral economy” here in Scott’s sense of “economic justice”, see Scott, The moral economy of the peasant, 3. 2 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 13. 61 changes.3 In his encompassing account on Shambaa culture and thought, Steven Feierman shows how peasant rebels tied the ancient language of healing and harming the land to the fierce protest in a time of rapid changes.4 The Usambara Scheme channeled the protest against cultivation rules, as well as other grievances, into broad resistance. The protests soon turned into an instrument to address larger issues such as the allegedly illegitimate rule of Kimweri and the rise of nationalism and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Shambaai and Tanganyika as a whole.5 In this chapter, which is based on court records and petitions, I will first outline the scientific roots of the Usambara Scheme and the intellectual environment from which it sprang. Secondly, I will give an overview of the importance of the agricultural sector for the late colonial state in terms of its depiction in the literature. Thirdly, I shall turn to local expressions of dissent. Finally, I will examine the changing relations between the designated “native authorities”, who had the burden of implementing the schemes, and their “subjects” as these encounters played out in native courts.
By the turn of the century, European visitors were struck by both the fertility of Shambaai and the sophisticated cultivation practice of Usambara’s residents. Early missionaries referred to the land as a fertile paradise6 and praised the Shambaa as skillful and industrious cultivators. Missionary Wohlrab observed that irrigation canals had been in use since the times of Bughe, the son of Mbegha, founder of the Kilindi dynasty in the eighteenth-century. This fact has also been confirmed by others.7 The image of the Shambaa as sophisticated and knowledgeable cultivators changed dramatically with the Usambara Scheme. During the period in which the scheme was in place and after its collapse, Shambaa peasant farmers were portrayed as stubborn and backward cultivators. By the 1950s “it was felt that the Shambala would have to remain in the ‘waiting-room’ of economic development, for neither stimulation nor pressure
3 Conte, Highland sanctuary. 4 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 7-8. 5 For a very brief summary, see Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 497. More details can be found in Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, chapter 6. 6 Christopher A. Conte, “Colonial Science and Ecological Change: Tanzania's Mlalo Basin, 1888-1946,” Environmental History 4, no. 2 (1999), 226. 7 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 6; Manfred Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas: Die Usambara-Berge im Übergang von der Subsistenz- zur Marktwirtschaft (München: Weltforum, 1967), 42. 62 was able to bring about an agricultural ‘take-off.’”8 In the next section, I will demonstrate how the British perception changed so dramatically from portraying the Shambaa as an example of people who were committed to careful husbandry to casting them as backward peasants ruining their own land by exacerbating soil erosion.
Modernization through Development After the Second World War, the British Empire, visibly grappling with the loss of its most precious possession, the crown colony of India, came to view its African territories with more demanding eyes. The increasing influx of attention on and financial efforts that were put into African colonies has been termed the “second colonial occupation”9 and was accompanied by new development strategies.10 The period was characterized by the frustrations and contradictions resulting from the concept of indirect rule, which came to be perceived as “backward” by the British.11 While initially the promise of indirect rule had been to use local dignitaries for British ends, the system now appeared to be archaic. It had little power to “modernize” hierarchical “tribal structures.” On the contrary, the focus of indirect rule on the tribal realm strengthened existing hierarchies that were now perceived by the British as obstacles to development. Many Africans thought that indirect rule was controversial, too, to say the least, among them many Shambaa. We saw this in the previous chapter in the way Shambaa and other Africans used the language of indirect rule to criticize certain chiefs or to call for their “own” ethnic representation when they felt that they had been unjustly put under the yoke of the “wrong” chief. A rethinking of the ideology of indirect rule had already set in also in the Colonial Office in the wake of inter-war depression. Instead of stressing distinctive “tribal” units, African societies came to be perceived as poor and underdeveloped rather than distinctly (racially) different – the idea of colonial welfare closely connected to the experience of
8 Manfred Attems, “Permanent Cropping in the Usambara Mts.: the Relevancy of the Minimum Benefit Thesis,” in Smallholder Farming and Smallholder Development in Tanzania, ed. Hans Ruthenberg (München: Weltforum), 141. 9 D. A. Low and J. M. Lonsdale, “Introduction: Towards the New Order 1945-1963,” in History of East Africa vol iii, ed. D. A. Low and Alison Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 12-16. 10 Andreas Eckert, “Britische Agrarpolitik und "Entwicklung" in Tanzania nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Navigieren in der Weltgesellschaft: Festschrift für Rainer Tetzlaff, ed. Rainer Tetzlaff and Ulf Engel (Münster: Lit, 2005), 15; Killingray and Rathbone, Africa and the Second World War, 10. 11 Andreas Eckert, “Britische Agrarpolitik und "Entwicklung" in Tanzania nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg”, 15; Rohland Schuknecht, British colonial development policy after the Second World War: The case of Sukumaland, Tanganyika (Berlin, London: Lit, 2010), 13. 63 depression and the rise of the British welfare state.12 But it took another decade until the new policy reached the African colonies. Eventually, the old colonial dichotomic discourse on civilization and backwardness, gave way to the idea of progress and the possibility of development.13 Indirect rule had to be substituted by “modernization” and “progress”; the language of development and welfare came to replace the older narrative of racially bound “civilization.”
As Frederick Cooper has demonstrated, the practical side to this line of argumentation was an internal change in the conceptualization of the colonial state: the Colonial Office, insisting on five or ten year development plans as a fixed variable of the post-war order, transformed the colonial machinery from a restrained “night-watchman state” into the reform-driven, interventionist gate-keeper state of the late 1940s and 1950s.14 Post-war imperialism, as Frederick Cooper puts it, was the imperialism of knowledge, based on the presence of a myriad of local technical officers and research practitioners operating on the ground, gathering data on local conditions. Their task was bringing progress to Africa, especially to the “backward African farmer,” an image that has much persisted in post-independence times.15 The “imperialism of knowledge” was grounded in the growth of the colonial service between 1918 and 1931, which has been unmatched in any other period. The staff of the agricultural, medical, survey, forestry, and game departments more than tripled across British Africa, and many of the new employees were assigned to research rather than to administrative tasks.16 As Frederick Cooper and
12 Ibid., 15. 13 Eckert, “"We are all planners now." Planung und Dekolonisierung in Afrika”, 376, 396. 14 About the gate-keeper state, see Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The past of the present (Cambridge, U.K, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5. For the interventionist aspect, see Andrew Burton and Michael Jennings, “Introduction: The Emperor's New Clothes? Continuities in Governance in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial East Africa,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2007), 4. 15 With respect to the imperialism of knowledge, see Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International development and the social sciences: Essays on the history and politics of knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall M. Packard (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 64; the idea of the “backward peasant” can be found in Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, “Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world” (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 19. For a further description of the “myriads of experts” pouring into developing countries, see Joseph M. Hodge, Triumph of the expert: Agrarian doctrines of development and the legacies of British colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 146; for post-colonial continuation of the development paradigm, see Melakou Tegegn, “The Impact of dominant Environment Policies on Indigenous Peoples in Africa,” in Indigenous peoples in Africa: Contestations, empowerment and group rights, ed. Korir Sing'Oei and Ridwan Laher, 45–63. 16 Helen Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory: Empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870- 1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 129. 64 Randall Packard have pointed out, the development framework should be understood as an effort to reinvigorate and re-legitimize Empire even after its official failure: in the end it provided a means by which imperial powers could reconcile themselves to their loss of power, while maintaining a connection with their ex-colonies and a continued sense of their mission in shaping the future.17 The developmental efforts also provided the tools for continuing economic exploitation.
The Agricultural Sector In the eyes of the “developers”, the agricultural sector was at the core of the modernization reforms. The most important aspect, it was believed, was to control and promote rural change.18 David Anderson argues that the various soil protection schemes that mushroomed in British Africa in the 1940s were stimulated by four main factors. Being developed in the 1930s, soil protection schemes were firstly influenced by the Depression. Another driving force was the media coverage of the American dust bowl, which was at its height in 1935 and was portrayed as the first global environmental problem. In addition, growing demographic pressure, induced by British settler politics, as well as stock increase, and lastly the understanding that African soil was not necessarily fertile, also contributed to the soil protection imperative.19 Concern about droughts was highest in Tanganyika, where famine was more common, and the colonial administration feared that East Africa was “drying up.”20 Very quickly soil fertility became the most important topic discussed by agricultural officers, soil experts and others scientists.21 In the preceding decades, colonial officials were thrilled about the abundance of soil fertility in the African tropics, and in the few cases where colonial officers worried about the soil fertility from the get-go such as in Guinea, this worry was “forgotten” and only rediscovered in the mid- 1930s.22 Generally, in the inter-war period, colonial scientists became increasingly aware of the poor soil fertility in many regions. One of the painful triggers for the shift was the acknowledgment of high soil acidity in the Eastern Usambara Mountains, where the attempt to
17 Cooper and Packard, International development and the social sciences, 7. 18 Schuknecht, British colonial development policy after the Second World War, 22. 19 David Anderson, “Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s,” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (1984), 321-343. 20 Ibid., 331. 21 Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 348-350. 22 James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, “Desiccation and Domination: Science and Struggles over Environment and Development in Colonial Guinea,” Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000), 53. 65 grow coffee by both Germans and British was a crushing failure.23 This led to a paradigmatical shift in colonial sciences.24 This shift can be traced in the shifting portrayals of the Mlalo basin: by the advent of German colonial rule, missionaries and early settlers had described the Mlalo basin as a very fertile and lush area, but only fifty years later the basin was cast as one of the most devastating examples of soil erosion in East Africa.25 It is likely that the impression that Usambara soil was extraordinarily abundant was incorrect in the first place. Moreover, concern about the land’s productivity emanating from the small settler community in Shambaai certainly contributed to an exaggerated emphasis on soil erosion.
As Helen Tilley shows, the new findings regarding poor soil quality triggered self-criticism from within the colonial service. Colonial scientists understood that some of their methods, approaches and premises had been false and needed to be re-worked.26 Scientific coordination conferences for East Africa and other regions blossomed and the number of official reports and memoranda discussed by the Colonial Office on the subject of erosion grew rapidly by the 1930s. The most endangered area, it was agreed, was Eastern Africa.27 By the end of the 1930s, soil was understood as the “chief asset” or “natural capital” of the colonies. Not only was a more thorough education for colonial administrators insisted upon, but so too was the introduction of a separate section in the annual report on soil erosion.28 Tilly points out that the fear of ecological devastation and overpopulation was exaggerated, and that this overstated worry instilled a new sense of urgency for imperial interventions.29 The new awareness of the dangers of soil erosion led to intensive research into the nature of tropical soils as well as into local methods of cultivation. The overarching fear that stood behind the “soil mania” was that soil erosion, allegedly caused by ignorant African peasants who stuck to destructive, “un- scientific” cultivation methods, could lead to declining yields, food (and export) shortages, and eventually, to social unrest.30 The development narrative suggested that “primitive” local
23 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 62, 113-114; Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory, 156. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Conte, “Colonial Science and Ecological Change: Tanzania's Mlalo Basin, 1888-1946”, 228. 26 Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory, 122. 27 Hodge, Triumph of the expert, 163; Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory, 132. 28 Hodge, Triumph of the expert, 164-166. 29 Ibid., 145; Schuknecht, British colonial development policy after the Second World War, 26. 30 Hodge, Triumph of the expert, 151-152. 66 methods of agriculture and animal husbandry as well as the fast growth of human and livestock populations – a result of improved colonial epidemic control – constituted a serious threat to tropical fertility and the natural resources of the colonies, as recent famines and droughts had shown.31
Critical voices were rare, yet one was that of Geoffrey Milne, a young soil chemist who worked at the East African Agriculture Research Station (EAARS) in the Usambara Mountains, previously known as the Amani Institute (under the Germans). In 1932, he reasoned that, “if the native is going to be convinced by our ‘modern enlightenment,’ then we must be very sure that the objections we advance do actually hold good.”32 But his observation went unheard. As a result, colonial officials more often than not condemned African practices and were even willing to use compulsion when it came to enforcing developmental measures to ban soil erosion.33 As the following pages demonstrate, this is exactly what happened in Shambaai.
Background to the Scheme: Tanganyika and Shambaai Many of these general trends hold true for the case of the Tanganyika Territory. In Tanganyika, too, the agricultural sector received the most attention. The development of manufacturing industries, the expansion of cash crop production and agricultural schemes were the primary focus.34 Already in 1929, the then director of Agriculture in Tanganyika, E.H. Harrison, declared soil conservation as a top policy priority.35 Despite the absence of a significant lobby group of settlers, Tanganyika’s colonial administration could not remain unaffected by general trends floating through the Empire. The dangers of soil erosion concerned everyone, not only agricultural officers. When the Senior Collector of Customs of Tanganyika Territory, Mr. Smith, returned from a drive through large parts of Tanganyika in 1939, he was alarmed at the visible soil erosion he encountered and shared his opinions with the Chief Secretary: “Whatever the remedy, it is my opinion as a lay observer, that measures cannot be adopted too soon. Nobody pretends that Tanganyika can ever become a Garden of Eden, but, at least, steps can be taken
31 Schuknecht, British colonial development policy after the Second World War, 16. 32 Quoted in Hodge, Triumph of the expert, 156. 33 Cooper and Packard, International development and the social sciences, 72. 34 Andreas Eckert, “Britische Agrarpolitik und "Entwicklung" in Tanzania nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg”, 14, 17. 35 Hodge, Triumph of the expert, 159. 67 to prevent it developing into a second Kalahari.”36 Anti-soil-erosion measures had already been introduced in the entire territory by 1937. However, as the quotation above shows, change was coming very slowly. The tendency to blame Africans for their destructive cultivation practice was common, but some officials were aware of the fact that the lack of rules for European plantations was a tricky issue. Regarding the discussion of the legal foundation for anti-soil erosion measures, the DC of the Western province commented:
No one will contest the need of some sort of legislation, at least I hope that nobody could be so blind as to be ignorant of its need, on the other hand are not the proposals somewhat one-sided? Natives are responsible for the greater part of erosion but not for all. It makes one shudder to see the clouds of good brown soil being blown off the Irambu Plateau but I have seen clouds of soil being blown off European ploughed lands in Arusha District. We could probably mention good European hillside plantations which have been ruined, and what will be the effect of intensive sisal cultivation has not yet been shown and the history of other countries with similar atmospheric and geological conditions should make us pause. I would rather make the present proposals more embracing by a formal soil protection ordinance than seek to get them via the Native Authority.37 Both the legislation and implementation made the Department of Agriculture pause, yet not due to Longland’s thoughtful comments, but rather because of financial issues. Furthermore, the planning and research on soil qualities took time. The real work began only after World War Two. Tanganyika’s largest schemes were the Uluguru and Sukumaland Schemes. Some smaller agricultural projects were introduced to the Great Lakes region and to Masailand.38 They were all driven by the developmentalist state’s desire to control their subjects more comprehensively in the name of development. And they all failed in one way or another, due to local resistance or lack of proper planning. The bench terrace system used in the Uluguru mountains and Sukumaland, also sometimes referred to as the Hehe system after its inventors from Iringa, which was to be introduced in Shambaai, was in fact a system used all over the British African Empire in places as different as the Transkeian Territories and Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia
36 TNA\DSM, 25754 Tanganyika Secretariat. Anti-Erosion Measures by Native Authorities, 01.03.1939, The Senior Collector of Customs, L.J.D. Smith to the Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 33. 37 TNA\DSM, 25754 Tanganyika Secretariat. Anti-Erosion Measures by Native Authorities, 03.05.1938, PC Western Province Longland to the Director of Agriculture, Morogoro, 16-18. 38 Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Taking Stock: State Control, Ethnic Identity and Pastoralist Development in Tanganyika, 1948-58,” Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000), 55-78. 68 and Basutoland.39 It provoked fierce resistance in many places, like in the Ulugurus and in Sukumland. In Sukumland, the protest arose due to the additional focus on cash cropping that was attached to the scheme. Bukoba’s population refused to change their traditional cultivation pattern from bananas, their every-day diet, to the colonially introduced coffee.40 In Uluguru, people protested against the hard labor regimen of the scheme.41 One protestor was shot dead by police.42 In both cases, TANU activists were involved, and the nationalist agenda was evoked in the protest against the unwelcome schemes.43 Likewise, the gigantic Groundnut Scheme, planned as the prestige project of the British in Southern Tanganyika near the coastal town of Mtwara, ended in a disaster. Initiated due to the belief that it could solve the food-oil shortage in post-war Britain, the Groundnut Scheme foundered because of poor planning regarding the soil conditions and unpredictable weather.44 Being “the greatest white elephant the African bush had ever seen,”45 it had to be abandoned in 1951. British agricultural policy in the Usambaras and the residents’ reactions to it followed a similar pattern. The largely negative reception of the Usambara Scheme, which I will turn to in the following sections, must be understood in this context.
The Scheme’s Prehistory Colonial scientists and other officers thought of environmental change and losses in soil fertility as humanly induced. The concept of nature’s equilibrium was not contested. Scholars and colonial scientists have mostly held tight to this idea instead of emphasizing the inherent variability of ecosystems.46 In other words, environmental catastrophes have always been interpreted as caused by man. Shambaai’s colonial officers were no exception. They also blamed the Shambaa for causing the loss of fertility due to both their ignorance and greed as
39 William Beinart, “Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration, 1900-1960,” Journal of Southern African Studies 11, no. 1 (1984), 54; Throup, “The Origins of Mau Mau”, 321. 40 Andreas Eckert, “Britische Agrarpolitik und "Entwicklung" in Tanzania nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg”, 20. 41 Pels, “Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania”, 13. 42 Hydén, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania, 62. 43 Ibid., 50; Pels, “Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania”, 14. 44 Hydén, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania, 63. 45 Nicholas Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 152; Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 440-442. 46 Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds., The lie of the land: Challenging received wisdom on the African environment (Oxford, Portsmouth, N.H: International African Institute in association with James Currey; Heinemann, 1996), 10; see also Gregory Maddox, James L. Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds., Custodians of the land: Ecology & culture in the history of Tanzania (London, Athens: James Curry; Ohio University Press, 1996). 69 cultivators.47 Although the literature equates a rise in resistance with the introduction of the official schemes in 1946 and 1951, there is much evidence that Shambaa unease with British agricultural policies began as early as the 1920s. This does not come as a surprise since British agricultural policy had already focused on measures to avoid soil erosion before the introduction of the schemes. In the annual agricultural and administrative reports of the Tanga Province, the themes of soil erosion and the need for re-afforestation as well as local resistance against these interventions occurred frequently between 1925 and1945. The same topic dominated the petitions of the time. To ease the tensions, the Department of Agriculture ensured that, in addition to the coverage of soil erosion in the popular and broadly circulated Swahili paper Mambo Leo, edited by the colonial government,48 supplementary leaflets about the improvement of agricultural methods and the dangers of soil erosion were circulated in both Arabic and Roman script to reach as many peasants as possible.49 However, re- afforestation projects had failed completely and operations had been closed down. The “natives, if not actually hostile, were indifferent to the scheme and lent their assistance under protest. Afforestation was a complete failure,”50 complained the Conserver of Forests, D.K.S. Grant, in the same year as 1926. With British pressure, Shebughe Magogo eventually signed the Anti-Erosion Order in 1937, which included fines for offenders and an order to dig terraces.51 Those terraces, known in Swahili as matuta, came to be the major bone of contention in the later protests.
Within the Usambara Mountains, the Mlalo basin was always the center of hostility towards anti-erosion measures. According to the Department of Agriculture, the Mlalo basin was best suitable for detailed investigations into soil as it was densely populated and showed the most severe signs soil erosion. In 1947, there were 181 inhabitants per square meter in the Mlalo basin, including the uncultivated parts such as very steep slopes.52 Contrary to other parts of the
47 TNA\KEW; CO 892/11/1. Tanganyika Territory, Agriculture, Agriculture Development Schemes, Animal Husbandry, Soil erosion, 1. 48 Martin Sturmer, The media history of Tanzania (Mtwara, Tanzania: Ndanda, 1998), 51. 49 TNA\KEW, CO 736/6, Report of the Department of Agriculture for the Year ending 31st March, 1928, 1; and TNA\KEW, CO 736/ 5, Report of the Department of Agriculture for the Year ending 31st March, 1927, 2. 50 TNA\KEW, CO 736/5, The sixth Annual Report of the Forest Department, Tanganyika Territory, 1926, 7. 51 RHL Reel No.3, Lushoto District Book: System of Government, Native Administration in practice, Sheet No. 1, Anti Soil Erosion Measures. 52 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 29. 70 Usambara Mountains, the Mlalo basin lacked the third intermediate rainy season that was characteristic of the Bumbuli and Vugha chiefdoms and key to their fertility. Since much of the original forest had been cut down and turned into cultivated land, the water reserves in the Mlalo basin often dried up during the dry period, thus causing even more erosion.53 Besides the degree of soil deterioration in the basin, the administration’s decision to single out Mlalo might also have been intended as a disciplinary measure directed to the traditionally defiant and unruly chiefdom. When Northern Shambaai, that is the Mlalo and Mlola basins, experienced a series of food shortages and famine during the 1940s, the colonial administration justified choosing Mlalo as the demonstration area instead. As Christopher Conte shows, the institution of soil erosion control was as much a political as it was an ecological struggle. The British colonial government understood Mlalo’s breakdown as a precursor of the disaster that had been brewing across colonial Africa since the early 1930s. As soon as post-war funds became available, the British government subsidized the introduction of the designated Malo Rehabilitation Scheme.54 The Shita neighborhood of the Mlalo chiefdom was being singled out and turned into the official experimental trial plot.
Christopher Conte’s comprehensive environmental history of the Usambara Mountains highlights that the scientific trajectory of the Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme and later the Usambara Land Usage Scheme were clearly products of the developmental discourse as they targeted the “backward peasant” and their destructive cultivation practices. Two British colonial scientists studied the soil conditions of Shambaai before the scheme was introduced. Geoffrey Milne was one of them. He was the soil scientist at EEARS, mentioned above, and knew the mountain region very well. The officials at the Department for Agriculture, however, felt that the study should be conducted under their authority, probably because the research institute had a pretentious ivory tower reputation instead of focusing on economic output.55 Milne’s results differed from those of Clement Gillman, who had been chosen by the government to study the Usambara soil. Whereas Gillman placed his analysis very much in the dominant development discourse, Milne’s account was more differentiated. Although Milne’s study
53 Ibid., 20. 54 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 97. 55 Ibid., 47. 71 showed that the greater part of Shambaai had indeed suffered soil erosion, he argued that it was still possible to farm in the mountains successfully. He was also aware that the Shambaa were rooted in their cultural history as mountain dwellers. He argued that “Mlalo’s farmers could not be expected to move to the plains, but must be provided with land in the mountains.”56 Rumors about resettlement and forced eviction created intense fear among the Shambaa and certainly contributed to the later protests. Indeed the officials of the Department of Agriculture believed that only a transformation of local cultivation patterns and the removal of parts of the population could bring about a solution to the soil erosion problem.57 As in the case of Togo, the resettlement scheme was meant as a development incentive to provide new land for cash cropping58 and to allow the overused mountain soil to rest. The stance of the colonial government may have been influenced by the position of the settler union. The settler union had an ambiguous position about the rehabilitation scheme. Generally, settlers were worried that they might have to give up on land. They did not welcome the discussion about soil erosion instigated by the scheme because they were not ready to implement the measures on their own land. On the other hand, the proposed resettlement of the local population would definitely ease the pressure on the land. With a certain irony, the union’s secretary advised the DC in a letter to ask the Shambaa “to pack up with their flocks and herds like Abraham of old and migrate to the land of promise which a benevolent Government is preparing for them.”59
56 Ibid., 113. 57 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 04.02.1950, Extension of the Usambara Schemes. Methods and requirements, 25, Appendix A, p.1+2; TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23.11.1949, Minutes of a meeting held at Lushoto, no number. 58 Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German empire, and the globalization of the new South (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 167. 59 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2: Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 25.02.1951, Secretary to the Usambara Association to DC, 45, p.2 72 Figure 1 The Shita neighborhood
The photograph shows the Shita neighborhood as of 2014. No traces of terraces have remained in the trial area. (Photo: Stephanie Lämmert, 2014) But in the end the government realized that it was impossible to force the Shambaa to resettle. The resettlement option was almost completely ignored and the newly created plots on the plains remained unused.60 Neither sweet cajoling nor the promise of benefits could break the long-held resistance of the Shambaa to move to the plains. Had the agricultural experts considered ancient Shambaa knowledge, they would have known that the binary opposition between the hills (Shambaai) and the plains (Nyika) that structured Shambaa life prohibited a move to the plains.61 Shambaa environmental consciousness was based upon a set of oppositional pairs between the two different agricultural and climatic zones. Bananas,
60 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 15. 61 A similar contrast between nyika and plains exists for the close neighbors and mountain dwellers, the Pare and Chagga, see Isaria N. Kimambo, “Environmental Control and Hunger in the Mountains and Plains of Northern Tanzania”, 8. 73 traditionally the most important dietary staple, grow well in Shambaai and less so in Nyika. Furthermore, nyika had dangerous wild animals and malaria-infested regions, whereas Shambaai was nearly malaria-free and the appearance of wild animals other than wild pigs was very rare. In Shambaa thought, nyika was thus connected to danger and death, and the cool hills of Shambaai symbolized the safe and fertile homeland.62
Returning to Milne’s report, he furthermore highlighted the various differing soil types he had encountered and suggested that they needed different erosion control methods. This was not new, but in fact ancient knowledge, as a passage in one of the first annual reports of the British period prooves.63 Yet due to the rivalry betwee Amani’s scientists and the Agricultural Department, Milne’s report disappeared from the government’s table.64 In addition, another careful proposal by F.J. Nutman, Amani’s plant physiologist which was concerned with the future organization of post-war Shambaai was dismissed. Instead, H.J. van Regensburg drafted the Mlalo scheme after only two days spent in the mountains, which the government eventually endorsed.65
Its main objectives were the prevention of soil erosion through the large-scale laying of bench terraces, the famous matuta, the halt of cultivating on slopes steeper than 25° in gradual steps by a demarcation strip lined with bananas,66 crop rotation, the prohibition of the grazing of cattle who were to be stall-fed with Elephant Grass that had to be planted, and a general reduction of livestock, as well as the control of burning and compulsory re-afforestation.67 Gradually, all parts of Shambaai were to be included, but the Shita neighborhood was where it all started. The vision was that by the end of the project, the whole of Shambaai would be covered with bench terraces in order to keep further soil erosion in check. It was thought that additional afforestastion, and the final closure of steep slopes as well as the lying fallow of other
62 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 19-22. 63 TNA\DSM, AB 23: Annual Report Lushoto 1923, p.1. 64 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 111-115; TNA\KEW, CO 691/190/6: Development of Tanganyika Western Portion of the West Usambaras, Memorandum by Mr. Nutman. 65 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 128. 66 RHL MSS. Afr. s. 1196, Kernahan, Usambara Scheme, Annual Report 1953, 4. 67 TNA\KEW, CO 736/28, The Development Plan, Report of 1948, Appendix I: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 14-19. 74 endangered plots would help the soil to recover. In June 1946, Agricultural Officer Clegg was placed at Mlalo and several African staff received training in order to work as local instructors.
“Much Unwanted Hard Labour and Considerable Breaches with Custom”68 When the Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme was finally introduced in June 1946, it was immediately greeted with resistance. For several reasons, peasants found the scheme unbearable. First, the additional workload was enormous. Terrace riding is not only extremely time-intensive, but also very hard work. The peasants were asked to build tie-ridges consisting of a series of steps dug out of the slope of a hillside. In this system, the topsoil was being replaced on top of each step. Thus the sloping land was turned into a number of level narrow strips to prevent further erosion. After two years, the ridges were supposed to be turned into terraces, the classic instrument against soil erosion.69 In the traditional division of labor, women were in charge of the fields surrounding a Shambaa house, being responsible for subsistence cultivation. Furthermore, they were responsible for collecting firewood and water, no small burden in a country which requires long and arduous climbs up and down steep slopes. Caring for the traditional banana gardens was a male task. Moreover, men either farmed special cash crops for sale like tobacco, sugarcane or coffee or followed any other craft or trade to meet the cash needs that had developed with taxation. Another way to procure cash besides working at the sisal plantations in the plains was seasonal migration to Tanga, Mombasa or other towns in the vicinity to work as houseboys. 70 In households with absent husbands or men, the care of traditional banana gardens was often neglected and added to women’s tasks. Due to the high rate of male absenteeism – estimated at 30% in Mlalo71 - most of the scheme work naturally weighed on women’s shoulders. The labor-intensive ridges thus threatened to push the boundaries of the women’s already busy schedule of seasonal chores – in some parts of
68 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23. Sept. 1950, by DC W. Macmillan to J. Mitchell Hoedgers, Publicity Officer, 53, p.2. 69 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, 31st October 1949, Report of the Rehabilitation of the Mlalo Basin, covering the first phase of the scheme now completed, by J.B. Clegg, Agricultural Officer, and Mr. C.J. McGregor, Senior Agricultural Officer, Annex III, 162-163. 70 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports,The Mlalo Basin A sociological study covering 14 days in the field. June 1946, 6G, p.7; 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, report to PC, 31. August 1946, 5B, p.3 71 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, No title, 130. 75 Shambaai the peasants had three harvesting periods per year.72 Many women were either unable to manage the extremely physically demanding labor alone,73 or if they were they neglected their many other tasks. Margot Lovett’s general argument about the gendered nature of class formation in colonial Eastern and Central Africa also holds true for Shambaai. She has argued that because the colonial capitalist system largely predicated on male migrant labor with subsistence wages, “production increasingly came to be gendered male, while reproduction conversely became gendered female.”74 In Shambaai, too, the burden of subsistence agriculture, which now additionally included the laborious scheme rules, weighedon female shoulders. Being “mere” reproducers, they found themselves left alone with the ungrateful task of subsidizing capitalist production, thereby underpinning the social relationships on which the state had based its rule, yet lacking sources of independent income.75
Secondly, the scheme threatened Shambaai’s moral economy. It was in fact a breach with local custom in two ways. Not only did the scheme rules harm old land tenure and cultivation patterns by requiring crop rotation as well as banning the burning of plant residues and cattle grazing on harvested fields, but it also threatened the Shambaa principle of guaranteed access to community land for the landless poor by closing down steep slopes of over 25° for cultivation and thus reducing the already scarce land resources further. There is a certain irony in the fact that the scheme was set up as a solution to land scarcity, but in fact it greatly increased the land pressure among the Shambaa. Moreover, only those cultivators who had finished their matuta were allowed to cultivate their other plots, if they had them.76 The scheme thus presented a very real threat of pauperization and hit the poorest segment of the population the hardest,77 especially households of single women or wives with absent husbands and the poorest faction of peasants in general. In 1967 Manfred Attems observed a “considerable pauperization”, which, he reasoned, “if allowed to continue, will result in one of the most impoverished
72 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 25. 73 Interview with the elders of Hemtoye, 09.11.2014. 74 Margot Lovett, “Gender Relations, Class Formation, and the Colonial State in Africa,” in Women and the state in Africa, ed. Jane L. Parpart and Kathleen A. Staudt (Boulder, Col.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1989), 23. 75 Ibid., 40. 76 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.04.1954, Executive Officer Usambara Scheme to all Zumbe, 109. 77 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 181; Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 350. 76 smallholder economies to be found in East Africa.”78 District officials were well aware of the destructive nature of the scheme with respect to local custom. As District Commissioner Macmillan put it, the Usambara Scheme “involve[d] much unwanted hard labour and considerable breaches with custom.”79 Again, wives whose husbands were absent were the major victims of the economic decline. Because land allocation for married women in Shambaai was administered by their husbands and only few had their own land, they were left vulnerable when their guardians were away. It therefore does not seem to have been a coincidence that women played a major role in the protests against the scheme. As I will show in the next chapter, in those insecure times, women attempted to legally enforce their right to inherit their fathers’ land in order to be less dependent on their husbands.
Thirdly, Shambaa peasants believed neither in the discourse on the pressing urgency of anti-soil erosion rules, nor in its proposed solution. Besides the fact that a blueprint solution for the entire area could not be used as Shambaai’s farming areas differed greatly, the proposed tie- ridges were not even adequate for Mlalo soil. Ridges actually accelerated erosion because they tended to wash away in heavy rains.80 Some agricultural officers were aware of the “vastly different character”81 of soil in Shambaai, but this insight was not implemented in the Usambara Scheme. By ignoring scientific advice by experts about the multitude of soil types and rainfall in one catchment area,82 by not listening to worries of experts as to how the native authorities would be able to afford the scheme or even the African scheme instructors,83 and by applying what was extrapolated from small-scale plots to an entire catchment area, false assumptions shaped the drafting of agricultural schemes in Shambaai and beyond.84 Thesefacts were understood by Shambaai’s cultivators. Awareness of the precarious situation of their home soil
78 Manfred Attems, “Permanent Cropping in the Usambara Mts.: the Relevancy of the Minimum Benefit Thesis”, 162. 79 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23. Sept. 1950, by DC W. Macmillan to J. Mitchell Hoedgers, Publicity Officer, 53, p.2. 80 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 146. Other colonial induced reasons for the loss of soil fertility were the ecological simplification of forests, increasing mono-cropping of maize (shallow root system facilitates the washing away of top soil) to meet cash needs and the draining of marshes, which had a long-term effect on the irrigation, see ibid., 10, 95, 99, 105, 115, 124, 135. 81 Quoted in ibid., 140. 82 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 23. 83 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 01.08.1950, Forester to PC, 47. 84 Leach and Mearns, The lie of the land, 15. 77 and the threat of hunger had guided them to a traditionally soil-protective cultivation, based on plots in different vegetation zones with varying altitudes in order to distribute the risk of a complete crop failure,85 long fallow periods86 and an irrigation technology dating back to pre- missionary times.87 This experience-based cultivation system was now threatened by the Usambara Scheme. Shambaa cultivators were probably aware that tie-ridging was not the solution, which further explains why the scheme was met with such vigorous resistance.
Finally, the scheme rules violated the Shambaa understanding of justice. Soil erosion measures were only applicable to land cultivated by Africans, even for those living and farming on European estates, while the huge sisal plantations and other European-held estates located at the foothills were exempted from the rules of the scheme. The double standard did not remain unnoticed by colonial officials and settlers. The Superintendent of Agriculture, Mr. Silcock, noted with respect to squatter cultivation on sisal estates that “it is important for psychological and other obvious reasons, quite apart from soil conservation, that the same rules should apply to both communities.”88 He meant that African squatters on European estates should also comply with the scheme rules, not only Africans living outside them. But the quotation also shows that it was difficult to implement this rule because it also openly underlined the fact that Europeans did not have to follow the soil conservation measures. In 1946 Malindi’s agricultural officer, Mr. Clegg, had already tried to justify a forceful resettlement of Shambaa families to the plains by arguing that it “would be manifestly unfair to force Africans to carry out soil conservation measures applicable to them only as a race.”89 Already in 1950, the Secretary of Lushoto’s conservative settler union, the Usambara Association, argued in a similar vein. He blamed the food insecurity on the colonial government’s insistence on cash cropping.90 The argument that lurked beyond was a different one, however. If the government wanted both, export cash crops and food security for Africans, then the scheme rules to fight soil erosion
85 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 142; Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 23. 86 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 133, 184. 87 Wohlrab, Usambara. Werden und Wachsen einer heidenchristlichen Gemeinde in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 6. 88 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.05.1954, Superintendent of Agriculture Silcock to DO Korogwe, 131. 89 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, 31.11.1949, Report of the Rehabilitation of the Mlalo Basin, 152, p.8. 90 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/5/III: Usambara Scheme, 18.09.1950, D. Green, Honorary Secretary Usambara Association to DC Lushoto, 72. 78 were a step in the wrong direction. The union’s sudden interest in food security was probably also influenced by their worry that successful cash cropping Africans might threaten their monopole. Furthermore, the settler union was concerned about the growing resistance towards the scheme because it highlighted their own privilege. It was thus more acceptable for the union to risk further deterioration of the soil than to further accentuate the Shambaa’s dwindling right to land. That possibility of resettling parts of the population to the plains was indeed discussed by the colonial administration and feared by the local population.91 Although a resettlement scheme must have appealed to the settler union, their secretary seemed to have been aware of the implausibility of this plan when he ironically advised the DC to ask the Shambaa “to pack up with their flocks and herds like Abraham of old and migrate to the land of promise which a benevolent Government is preparing for them.”92
Meanwhile, the dense population of the twentieth-century had stretched the ecological system beyond its limits.93 In fact, Mlalo’s population had roughly doubled between 1914 and 1928.94 I do not mean to imply that traditional regenerative Shambaa cultivation could have prevented soil erosion altogether. It would be reductive, however, to blame the scheme alone for bad conservation practices. Rather, I wish to stress that “received wisdom” in concert with economic interest and settler pressure were the reasons for the adoption of van Regensburg’s draft scheme. The failure of the scheme was thus an epistemological one only because the District Office in Shambaai refused to work with careful scientists, not because careful scientists did not exist. As Helen Tilley reminds us, many projects failed often because of political or economic reasons, especially as the tension between cash cropping for export and growing awareness of soil erosion grew, rather than because of scientific arrogance or false procedure.95
91 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 04.02.1950, Extension of the Usambara Schemes. Methods and requirements, 25, Appendix A, p.1+2; TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23.11.1949, Minutes of a meeting held at Lushoto, no number. 92 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2: Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 25.02.1951, Secretary to the Usambara Association to DC, 45, p.2 93 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 121. 94 Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 350. 95 Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory, 128-129. See also Anderson, “Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s”, 321-343; Beinart, “Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration, 1900-1960”, 52-83. 79 Generally, the Shambaa had a reputation of “lacking discipline and respect for authority” and of “complete indifference […] generally to orders,”96 as the DC already complained in 1923. This “lacking discipline” weighed on the scheme from the beginning. Only two years after its introduction, the Mlalo Scheme was “in danger of collapse owing to the impossibility of obtaining a sufficient turn out of labor.”97 The District Office blamed it on Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi who already had a terrible reputation as a tax collector, but who was adored by his people.98 He was known as one of the few famous rain-makers in Shambaai. According to all district officials, Hassani himself, head of the native authorities in Mlalo, led the resistance against the scheme. Although the results of the MBRS were not particularly encouraging and the Lushoto district office thought of the Shambaa men alternatively as “generally lazy,”99 “a conservative people who combine with a general apathy a strong dislike of physical work,”100 or political “extremists”101 and baptized the MBRS the “cancer of Mlalo”102, nothing could prevent them from extending the scheme rules to rest of Shambaai. Step by step, from October 1950 onwards, the scheme’s erosion control rules were introduced in the whole of the Western Usambaras. Furthermore, the Usambara Scheme was complemented by the Luengera Valley and Kitivu Irrigation Schemes in the plains. Agricultural experts tried to lure parts of the mountain population with freshly dug valley plots to move to the scarcely populated plains, but they remained almost unused, and if mountain people cultivated them, they returned to sleep in the hills.103 Compared to moving to the plains, the scheme rules for the hills were the lesser evil. As one Shambaa commentator presented in Maendeleo ya Shambalai, “the new cultivation
96 TNA\DSM, AB 25: Annual Report Lushoto 1923, p.11. 97 TNA\DSM, 31207 Tanganyika Secretariat. Local Government. Native Chiefs: Usambara District, Tanga Province, 28.08.1948, PC Tanga to the Hon the Secretary for African Affairs, Dar es Salaam, 39. 98 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 147. 99 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/5/III: Usambara Scheme, 25B Usambara Scheme, 254, p.2. 100 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2: Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 19.08.1953, The Usambara Development Scheme, 111, p.3. 101 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/5/III: Usambara Scheme, 25B Usambara Scheme, 256, p.4. 102 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2. Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 11th Oct 1950 : DC to Pc Tanga: comments on progress report of Scheme for Sept 1950, 3. 103 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/3 Vol.I: Land Usage Schemes, Usambara Scheme, Annual Report 1951, 71C, p.7. 80 rules in Shambaai are like touching excrements. [But] to be resettled in the plains is self- mutilation.”104
Outline of the Protest105 In August 1947, only one year after its introduction, thousands of peasants in Shambaai pressed for “Paramount Chief” Shebughe’s abdication. The leading figure of the early protest of the 1940s was Isaka Hoza, who was “perhaps the most radical politician of the 1940s.”106
Figure 2 Ancestral chart of the Kilindi royal lineage
Mbegha (first Mkilindi) I Bughe I Shebughe I Kimweri I I I Mkande Semboja (gave throne to Kimweri 3) I I I Shekulwavu (Kimweri II) (in a civil war Kimweri III Mputa Semboja Semboja usurped the throne from (died in German times (succeeded Kimweri III) I 1893) hanged by the Germans 1895) Shekulwavu I I I I Bila Shebughe Magogo Kinyassi David Mshumba (appointed 1929, died 1929) (appointed on Bila’s (appointed by Germans (brother to Kimweri III’s death in 1929) to succeed Mputa wife & maternal uncle I I I Semboja, then to Bila) I I Kimweri IV Mputa Magogo Akida system; appointed Daudi I (appointed 1947) again by the British, abdicated, I Bila selected to succeed Abraham Mputa Bila him)
Chart produced from Lushoto District Book, RHL Reel No.3 and TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara district, 594.
104 TNA\DSM, 41176 Tanganyika Secretariat, Swahili publications Vol.III: Maendeleo ya Shambalai, Vol. 2 No 10 September 1952, 537. 105 To make complex local politics a bit clearer, I have produced a timetable of the protest in Chapter Five, please refer to p.168. 106 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 12, 14. 81 Eventually, Shebughe Magogo had no other option but to step down. He vacated his office on the 22nd of November, 1947.107 Never before had a Paramount Chief resigned. Until that moment, abdication had only occurred through death.108 The unwelcome and labor-intensive scheme certainly contributed to the intense rejection that led to his abdication. Shebughe Magogo and his native authorities operated the ungrateful task of implementing the scheme. This, and Shebughe’s negative attitude towards his subjects’ desire for modernization regarding schooling, health care and political representation inflamed the protests. The new British- installed successor to paramountcy was Shebughe’s son, Kimweri Mputa Magogo.109 After his installation, protests calmed but did not fade away altogether. Mputa Magogo was not the people’s choice either, and many expressed that in their eyes the real successor was Shebughe’s brother Bila’s son, Abraham Mputa Bila.110 Many of Bila’s proponents were the mission- educated petitioners we already know from the previous chapter. However, the 1952 plan to overthrow Kimweri Mputa Magogo’s rule through a second march on Vugha failed, resulting in the ringleader trial of 1952, which I will discuss in Chapter Six.
The association that eventually centralized and directed the protests was the Usambara Citizens Union (UCU), locally referred to as chama, a Swahili term that loosely translates as “party” or “association.” The term chama was used synonymously for locally specific forms of political, trade and rain associations which also took part in the protests, and which had done so earlier than the UCU activists. Eventually, the UCU brought them all under one roof. The UCU had initially been founded to foster social and political development, but was soon entirely absorbed by the protest against the Usambara Scheme and the native authorities, siding with the local rain chamas of Lushoto and Mlalo and the traders’ chama of Mlalo.111 The latter, an association initially formed to circumvent government controlled prices for their produce, channeled much
107 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 151-153. 108 Ibid., 152. 109 Ibid., chapter 6. 110 TNA\DSM, 44/16 Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), 30.03.1952, brief summary of anonymous letter by Vuga citizens to DC Lushoto, forwarded to Governor by DC Lushoto, 97+97A. 111 It remains somewhat unclear from the sources whether the traders’ chama, the rain chama, the UCU, and the African Association were the same party from the beginning. In the sources the terms are used interchangeably. In any case, even if the Mlalo chama had nothing to do with nationalist politics in the beginning, they grew into one movement eventually. 82 of the resistance in Mlalo and later in other places. Under the centralized UCU leadership, together they formed a strong opposition movement, eventually growing into the predecessor of the Tanganyika African National Union, TANU; Julius Nyerere’s party that would eventually bring independence to the Tanganyika Territory. But aside from the nationalist claims, the Usambara Scheme always remained at the core of the protest. Many peasants delayed and disrespected the scheme rules or found other creative excuses for their non-compliance. Even some native authority officials sided with the people because they did not see the benefits of the scheme. As the court records of the time period abundantly show, there were various ways in which women and men chose to resist, as I will demonstrate in the following pages.
Practices of Resistance Because it was very quickly visible that the scheme was not well received, the colonial administration put a lot of energy into persuading the peasants. Gifts were given to efficient tax collectors, reliable communal labor recruiters or headmen who implemented the scheme rules diligently.112 Annual “bonuses for efficiency” that were supposed to “have the effect of ‘encourager les autres’”113 were given to the most supportive headmen. In addition to compulsory courses for African agricultural staff, each headman had to refresh his training after a year and bring another person of his choice from his neighborhood to the agricultural training school that was set up at the Boma close to Malindi.114 Financial rewards were supposed to stimulate the peasants both to finish their ridges first or best,115 and film and produce shows were supposed to stimulate local competition.116 Despite the enormous efforts, the peasants’ tenacious resistance towards the scheme could not be overcome.
Resistance was mostly targeted at the closure of arable land on slopes more than 25° and against the labor-intensive terracing system. Naturally, depriving a peasant society of the foundations of its existence, the Shambaa protested most intensely against their loss of land
112 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 15.12.1950, DC to all Subchiefs, 14. 113 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/18, Vol.I: Native Administration Village Headmen, 04.12.1950, DC to PC, 286. 114 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2: Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 04.01.1951, DC to all Subchiefs, 68. 115 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 04.11.1950, Shita Weekly Report, 13. 116 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.01.1951, Usambara Scheme, Origins, Principles and Progress, 20, p.4. 83 and labor. The additional work was an unbearable burden. There were various ways in which women and men chose to resist. The most common strategy of resistance was to delay beginning the work in the first place. Many cultivators simply ignored the orders to cultivate tie- ridges on their private fields and instead proceeded with flat cultivation, thus risking fines or imprisonment. Returning to flat cultivation on a field that was already under ridge cultivation ruined the work of the previous years at once. As soon as an agricultural official realized the return to flat cultivation, called sesa in Swahili, the cultivators were forced to uproot the saplings on flat fields and begin anew by building tie-ridges. But sometimes the cultivators did not follow the new instruction either. A case from Kigurunde in May 1951, a particularly notorious neighborhood in the Bumbuli chiefdom, shows that peasants could get away with ignoring the instruction to uproot. In a letter to Subchief Omari Lwambo of Vugha-Bazo, the DC complains that “those who ignored the order to uproot doubtlessly find themselves in an advantageous position whereas those who did the uprooting are the fools and have to bear with the fact that the cultivators who ignored the order were not punished in any way.”117 Kigurunde was historically one of the towns where no Kilindi was allowed to enter.118 The traditional hostility towards the Kilindi, who were now in charge of implementing the scheme, might have played a role in the decision of the Kigurunde headmen not to interfere with the people’s will. However, there were also unannounced visits on peasants’ fields by scheme officers, during which offenders who were caught on the spot had to endure beatings.119
Throughout the years and the neighborhoods, flat cultivation was a recurring offense, especially in the openly defiant chiefdoms of Mlalo,120 Bumbuli, but also elsewhere.121 Many others subscribed to making “sub-standard” ridges to save time and effort.122 In the neighborhoods of Kigurunde and Mbuzii, all tie-ridges were destroyed by February 1957 and 300 cultivators had
117 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 01.05.1951, DC to Subchief, 11. 118 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 112. 119 Interview with the elders of Hemtoye, 09.11.2014. 120 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo Malindi, 09.12.1950, Shita Weekly Report, 14. 121 In Mbwei in the Mlola chiefdom for instance, 133 cultivators defied ridging in early 1956 and were each fined 20 Shs, see TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report January 1956, 3, p.2; and Usambara Scheme Report November 1955, 83, p.2. 122 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report January 1955, 43, p.1. 84 returned to flat cultivation. Apparently the Mdoe of Soni was the ringleader, as the Simbamwene personally complained.123 African agricultural instructors and the colonial officers constantly complained about the cultivators’ work ethic (or lack thereof) in Kwemzule, Mawei and Soni, all of which were part of the Bumbuli chiefdom. Despite prosecutions and punishments, the peasants’ attitude remained hostile. Employing the typical “weapons of the weak” such as absenteeism, delaying the work, inventing “accidents” and excuses of all sorts, the peasants’ power lay in their perseverance.124
People had to plant rows of bananas as a demarcation strip at steep slopes to indicate at which point fields had to be left uncultivated to prevent further erosion. Often peasants responded by planting the bananas beyond the demarcated strip in an attempt to extend the plots that were designated to cultivate. Again in Bumbuli, an official reported that when he insisted on uprooting the wrongly indicated demarcation strip he received a letter stating that uprooting “would be the same as killing your own mother!”125 As the quotation shows, communication between officials and peasants was often characterized by disrespectful language. Mr. Clegg complained that Mdoe Hussein, Shita’s designated native agricultural instructor, used “ironic language in dismissing me.”126 The peasants were referred to as lazy and conservative and openly characterized as stubborn and thickheaded.127
Even more harmful to the scheme rules than flat cultivation was the breaking up of land that was closed for cultivation, which was mostly composed of steep slopes over 25°. In Tewe, the agricultural inspector Kornelios did not take any action against offenders128 who planted annual rather than perennial crops on steep slopes.129 A more subtle way to defy the scheme rules was
123 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/22A Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies Lushoto, 18.02.1957, Chief Kimweri to DC, 228. 124 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, Safari za kutembelea kazi za scheme 29.11.54 – 4.12.54, 62; TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 20.02.1956, Agricultural Instructor, Soni to DO Lushoto, 77. 125 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 2. 126 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, Shita Weekly Report August 1950, 2. 127 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9C: Reports. Mlalo Scheme – Native Authority Rules, 03.09.1949, Secretary to the Usambara NA to all Subchiefs, 11. 128 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2: Agriculture. Reports of Agricultural Officers, Tour Diary July 1953, 5, p.3. The same thing happened in Bumbuli in 1956, see TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 1956, 19. 129 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2: Agriculture. Reports of Agricultural Officers, Tour Diary September 1953, 7, p.2. 85 called “interplanting.” Because the deeper root system of perennial crops helped prevent soil erosion, only long-term crops were allowed on steep slopes under cultivation. After intense protest, the district team allowed the farmers to interplant perennial crops like bananas, fruit trees or sugar cane with annual crops, mostly beans, potatoes and other vegetables for subsistence consumption. However, interplanting maize was forbidden due to the plant’s shallow root system that fostered erosion.130 By focusing on interplanting rather than on the care of the perennial crops, many peasants found a way to keep up their old system of cultivation. Sometimes they neglected the perennial crops so heavily that they died off,131 while the interplanted vegetables flourished beside them on the same field.132 Despite the prohibition, cultivators held on to interplanting maize, which had become one of the most important staple foods of the Shambaa.133 Despite its potential, interplanting was generally considered by the colonial administration as a backward form of agriculture.134 Others planted perennials on land that was open for tie-riding. The uprooting of perennial crops was not allowed because their root systems were considered better for the soil as they extracted less minerals. Capitalizing on that rule, many cultivators claimed that the perennials prevented them from tie-ridging.135
Minor offenses were grazing of cattle on the harvested fields and burning plant residues after harvesting on the fields, especially in the Mlalo chiefdom.136 According to the new rules, crop refuse was to be used for reinforcing soil fertility. But it went against peasant experience, which had taught them that maize-borers and other rodents bred in plant residues and were likely to
130 TNA\DSM, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 04.02.1950, Extension of the Usambara Schemes. Methods and requirements, Appendix A, 25, p.5. 131 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 1956, handwritten note, 19, p.1. 132 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 18.8.53, Agricultural Officer to Subchief Hemedi Mbuguni, 36. 133 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.05.1954, DO Korogwe to Subchief Korogwe, Vugiri, 130. 134 Hydén, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania, 15. 135 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 30.09.1950, Kilimo cha Shita, 8; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report June 1955, 63. 136 With respect to grazing, see TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 23.09.1050, Shita Weekly Report, 7; TNA\DSM, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, Bumbuli 1956, 19, p.1. Burning happened mostly in the chiefdoms of the plains, see TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1955, 45, p.2. 86 damage the next crop.137 In December 1950 the colonial administration had to witness “heavy losses to Kitivo maize near Makuyuni from rats because trash had not been burnt.”138 This incident certainly did not persuade the people to refrain from burning.
Another major problem of the local administration was the reluctance of the people to join the communal work the agricultural officers had scheduled for them. Officials sometimes referred to communal labor as “ghunda.”139 Ghunda is the Shambaa word for tribute labor. In the late nineteenth-century, the inhabitants of Shambaai gave tribute in the form of labor or military service, and the chief offered protection in return. But the former practice of ghunda labor had almost completely disappeared in Shambaai. Tax payments were understood as its replacement. Only great chiefs and the paramount could still count on this kind of service. 140 In addition, ghunda used to be men’s labor only, and it also entailed the feeding of the workers by the Zumbe afterwards.141 Scheme work was to be performed by men and women alike, and there was no meat and sugar cane beer after a day’s work. In the context of the scheme, there was no way that headmen or chiefs could use the call for ghunda labor to increase the labor turn out. The double burden of taxation and communal labor issued by native authorities they no longer trusted did not make sense to the people. The files are bursting with complaints about the low labor turn-out. One of the reasons Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi of Mlalo was fired in 1948 was that the labor turn-out for the new Shita demonstration plots was devastatingly low. The DC complained: “In spite of the fact that the labour is paid and there are about 20,000 persons in the Mlalo basin it was not possible by any ordinary persuasion to get the rule labour force above an average of 250 turnout.”142 Seven years later, the agricultural instructor of Vugha reported that “not a single turn out to plant banana lines” had materialized.143
137 Ibid., 62. 138 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 29.12.1950, Safari Notes Usambara Scheme, 18b, p.3. 139 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 23.-25.12.54: Riport Gunda, 65 + 65B. 140 Winans, Shambala, 135. 141 Ibid., 134-135. 142 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports Shita Demonstration Area and the Sub-Chief of Mlalo. Resignation of Hassan Kinyassi 1948, 20A. 143 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1955, 45, p.2. 87 Many cultivators, including certain Zumbe, made up creative excuses. Some pretended to be physically too weak or ill to do the hard scheme work, as in the case of Nicholas Kisatu of Makuyuni. Kisatu claimed he was too sick to climb the steep hills of his homeland to build ridges,144 yet it turned out through a medical examination that he was fit and healthy as ever.145 The most imaginative protestor excused himself from the work because of a cut-off limb that prevented him from digging terraces. It later turned out that he had made up the story, backed by his Zumbe.146 Another Bumbuli headman simply stated that he had to run his hotel and could not afford to close it during the time it would take to cultivate the ridges.147 Another reaction to the scheme, though only possible for men, was leaving the district or staying away in cases in which they had already found work elsewhere. The absenteeism of males suitable for scheme work in the Mlalo chiefdom equaled 30%.148 In 1954 people from Mgwashi, which bordered the Tanga district, tried to register with the native authorities of Daluni, the neighboring village of the Tanga district. In doing so, they hoped to evade the scheme labor that only applied to residents of the Usambara district.149 Many people chose to squat and cultivate on European estates, because the implementation of the scheme rules on private property was difficult for the authorities to monitor.150 Those working for European settlers or the Vugha Mission sometimes enjoyed the protection of their employers151 or used the mission letterhead when they accused the native authorities of “slavery” and “misuse of office.”152 References to Kilindi slavery, already in use before, grew much more frequent after the introduction of the Mlalo
144 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 19.02.1952, Zumbe Mkuu Makuyuni to DO Korogwe, 31. 145 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 22.02.1952, DO Korogwe to Zumbe Mkuu Makuyuni, 32. 146 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/20, Vol.II, Native Administration, Report by Zumbes, Vol.II, 458. 147 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1955, 45, p.2. 148 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, Survey of 1946, 130, p.10. 149 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report April 1954, 17, p.1 150 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.05.1955, Karimjee Jivanjee Estates Ltd. To DO Korogwe, 112; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 25.02.55, Raphael Salim to Manager Lukongo Estate, 106. 151 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 09.01.1953, Manager Vuga Mission Press to DO Korogwe, 31. 152 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 07.05.1956, Nkanileka Gae to DC, 87; TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 10.04.1956, Nkanileka Gae; Y. Kgaigwa, Daudi Salim, Uzio Singano, Satieli [undecipherable surname], Petro Sliya to DC, 83. 88 Rehabilitation Scheme and later the Usambara Scheme. “Am I still a slave of the Kilindi?”153 asked Daniel Nehemia of Bugu in 1955. He complained that he had been punished for the offense of his father, who had violated the scheme rules by refusing to dig terraces. Like in the olden times of collective punishment under Kilindi rule, Daniel Nehemia complained he was punished for a kinsman’s offense. Two months later, the real offender, Nehemia’s father, Nehemia Ndago, was falsely accused of being a witch by Zumbe Asumani Mbago. Nehemia Ndago felt that the witchcraft accusation was a punishment for his non-compliance with the scheme rules. He sued the Zumbe on the charge of fabricating a false accusation.154 Both men sought outwardly directed reactions, the latter by courageously pressing charges against the Zumbe, and the former framing his grievance in the old slavery discourse. Again it was the slavery connection with which people chose to express that they felt unjustly treated.
The district officer grew frustrated with the excuses and attempts to allude to protection by either the mission or a European employer. One official complained that “every citizen in Mazinde is either mtu wa Mama [meaning employed by a European] or mtu wa Missioni. There is no mtu wa Hazina [treasury] au wa Serikali [government].”155 When it came to the Christian minority, chiefs had lost their power to summon their subjects’ labor because it rested upon a body of rights and obligations legitimated in “sacred” terms – but the chief had lost his spiritual capacities under colonial rule to the missionaries, as Karen Fields argues in the case of colonial Zambia.156 Missions could thus offer protection for peasants who were not willing to provide the traditional form of communal labor, ghunda labor in the case of Shambaai.
Letters of complaint were often sent by the absentees from Mombasa, Tanga and other places. It was easier to express oneself freely from a distance where one did not have to worry about false accusations or prison sentences. A Lushoto officer complained that they sent letters
153 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol. VIII: Complaints Lushoto, 02.05.1955, Daniel Nehemia to DO Korogwe, Maduda School, Manka c/o Dindira Tea Estate, 22. 154 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol. VIII: Complaints Lushoto, 06.07.1955, Nehemia Ndago to DO Korogwe, 40. 155 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 29.12.1950, Safari Notes Usambara Scheme, 18. 156 Karen E. Fields, Revival and rebellion in colonial Central Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 47. 89 “blaming Government for ‘destroying’ their country.”157 One of the most destructive ways to oppose the scheme rules happened at Mlalo in 1952, when people stole the wattle trees that were planted under scheme regulations and sold them on the black market.158 The agricultural officials used all sorts of language to describe the people’s attitude. It was aibu, a shame, that when one passed the road between Soni and Lushoto, the un-ridged fields of Mbuzii came into sight.159 The people of Korogwe were characterized by “uvivu” and “ulegevu”, laziness and incompetence.160 In 1955 in Mombo only five people out of 134 had begun the scheme work, the “minor” Zumbe and his deputy himself not being one of them.161
There was also active resistance. The British were convinced that active protest against the scheme was concerted and led by the chama. Until the end they believed that first the Mlalo Scheme, and later the Usambara Scheme were co-opted by chama activists because it was a convenient way to win over others for the chama’s cause.162 I argue that it was the other way around. While it is likely that the chama gained more supporters with the advent of the scheme, there were many cultivators who resisted the chama and still opposed the scheme. The Usambara Scheme had the potential to unite many people with different political opinions, not only chama supporters. The scheme did not fail because the chama manipulated everybody else into opposing it, but because the people genuinely felt threatened by it. While it is true that other issues the chama championed such as succession politics and people’s discontent with native authorities found their way into the discussion about the scheme, the main reasons for the unrest were the extraordinarily hard labor, the scheme work required, and the impoverishment it caused. The suspicion that the Mlalo scheme was only a prelude to land alienation and resettlement also played a major role – and probably prevented such a scenario.
157 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23.11.1949, Minutes of a meeting held at Lushoto, 20B, p.2. 158 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 13.03.1952, DO US to Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi, 28. 159 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 23.12.1955, Field Officer to Zumbe Mkuu, Vuga, 73. 160 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 16.09.1953, DO Korogwe, to all Zumbes, 97. 161 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 13.01.1955, Zumbe Mkuu Raphael to DO Korogwe, 100. 162 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, Annual report for the Year ending 31/12/1946, Appendix A, 129, p.9. 90 Described by Mr. Clegg as “very noisy,”163 the local African Association at Mlalo was at the forefront of the protest. It had initially been formed to “depose the previous Sub-Chief Ali Mashina and to put his predecessor Hassani Kinyassi back in as Sub-Chief at Mlalo.”164 According to DC Macmillan, the chama had a very local character and was driven by “mainly personal power intermixed with racial tribal and some purely local motives.”165 When the first cultivators were fined for violations of the new land usage rules in 1947, the Mlalo association did not pay their fines. It is very likely that the chama did not want to set a precedence to which future offenders could hold them. Nevertheless, the hostility in Mlalo remained so fierce that the British had to re-install Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi in 1946 to keep the scheme running. But the chiefdom of Mlalo still remained a hotbed of unrest. In 1949, a mob of furious women from Mwangoi went to see the agricultural officer at Malindi and told him straight away that they did not wish for terraces. They also hit the DC’s car and damaged it as a result.166
When the scheme work was extended to the rest of Shambaai, protests broke out in many places. Again, most of the audible opposition came from women and “showed definite indications of being inspired.”167 In the Mlola chiefdom Pare and Mbugu led an “ugly demonstration” and in one case a headman led a “whispering campaign” which aimed at promoting passive resistance to ridging.168 Bumbuli and Vugha were the two other chiefdoms in which the chama was particularly strong from the beginning.169 The DC complained about “a mass civil disobedience campaign [that] was possibly sponsored by political agitators who [had tried] constantly to make capital out of the scheme.”170 It is not surprising that in this situation native courts were swamped by scheme-related offences.
163 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, Quarterly Progress Report for the Quarter ending 30th Sept 1947, 64, p.4. 164 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, Quarterly Progress Report for the Quarter ending 30th Sept 1947, 90, p.9. 165 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.01.1951, Usambara Scheme, Origins, Principles and Progress, 20, p.11. 166 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/18, Vol.I: Native Administration Village Headmen, 01.11.1949, Zumbe ? to DC, 248. 167 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.01.1951, Usambara Scheme, Origins, Principles and Progress, 20, p.14. 168 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/3 Vol.I: Land Usage Schemes, Usambara Scheme, Annual Report 1951, 71C, p.3. 169 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 19.4.51, Baraza en route at Kigurunde, 12; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1957, 59, p.1. 170 TNA\DSM, 4, 269/3 Vol.I: Land Usage Schemes, Usambara Scheme, Annual Report 1951, 71C, p.3. 91 Rising Litigation Patterns British agricultural policy led to an enormous increase in litigation in the whole of Tanganyika as a result of the by-laws and ordinances for soil cultivation. Cranford Pratt notes that some 75,000 people were convicted of violating these rules in native courts in 1946 alone.171 Shambaai was no exception. As a consequence of the Usambara Scheme, the volume of litigation in the Lushoto division rose significantly, as court statistics show.172 Richard Roberts understands “trouble spots” in African society, meaning a significant increase in court cases of a specific nature, as “a lens into the most ordinary aspects of daily life.”173 He linked changes in social relations to institutional changes through the trouble spots he encountered in court records of native courts in French Soudan. Certainly, the wave of scheme-related litigation was such a trouble spot. It not only mirrored changes in land tenure custom, but also growing unease with changes in leadership culture, expressed through accusation of misconduct and corrupt behavior by officials (Chapter Four). In a comparison of all Tanganyikan divisions in 1955, the Lushoto division was ranked second in the category of “highest number of cases heard per court.” The Lushoto division was outnumbered only by the North Mara division, where there was a high number of court cases due to cross-border conflicts about land with the neighboring Kenya colony.174 Furthermore, Lushoto had the third highest “number of civil cases per court,” and the second highest “number of criminal cases per court,” again followed by North Mara.175 Administratively, Shambaai was divided into the Lushoto and the Korogwe division. Eleven of the sixteen chiefdoms of Shambaai were part of the Lushoto division; the remaining five belonged to the Korogwe division. The much higher number of litigated cases in the Lushoto division was owed to Shambaai’s geography. Most of the mountainous area was in the Lushoto division, and only there did the closure of steep slopes and most of the terracing apply. In addition, the chiefdoms of the plains in Korogwe were not as densely populated as the hill
171 Cranford Pratt, The critical phase in Tanzania, 1945-1968: Nyerere and the emergence of a socialist strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 25. 172 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.IV: Native Courts General, in: Court Statistics, 4.4.56, Saving Telegram from LocGov, Dar es Salaam, to All Provincers and Politicals, 394. 173 Roberts, Litigants and households, 231. 174 Jan B. Shetler, “Historical memory as a foundation for peace: Network formation and ethnic identity in North Mara, Tanzania,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 5 (2010), 639-650. 175 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.IV: Native Courts General, in: Court Statistics, 04.04.1956, Saving Telegram from LocGov, Dar es Salaam, to All Provincers and Politicals, 394. 92 chiefdoms of Lushoto. The high number of litigated cases in Lushoto as presented in the national court statistics must be associated with the Usambara Scheme. In general, making appeals had gathered pace in Tanganyika Territory. In a letter to Mr. Creech-Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Governor Battershill complained in 1947: “[T]he number of appeals now reaching the Governor […] rose in 1946 to sixty as compared with a former average of about six per annum. A large majority of these appeals are frivolous and without substance, and others are concerned with matters of such minor importance either intrinsically or legally as not to merit appeal to the heist source.”176
Already in 1947, some months after the Mlalo Rehabilitation Scheme was introduced, the PC of the Tanga Province, Mr. Hartnoll, mentioned in his annual report to Dar es Salaam that litigation in the Mlalo sub-chiefdom had increased and that most cases were land issues.177 A year later, his successor, PC Gill noted an increase of fifteen percent compared to the previous year in the number of cases heard by the native courts of Tanga Province. He also pointed out that the rise in the number of appeals to the native appeals courts and to the DC had risen by about 50%.178 The rise of appeal cases indicates that many litigants were unhappy with the judgments handed down by chiefs. Growing discontentment with the native courts was followed by the many instances in which litigants opted to try the chain of appeal. Clearly, the number of cases was increasing with the unsuccessful implementation of the Mlalo Rehabilitation Scheme and later with the Usambara Scheme. This becomes evident by examining the five divisions of Tanga Province more closely, of which only the Lushoto division was affected by the scheme work. In 1948 and 1949, after the introduction of the Mlalo Rehabilitation Scheme in June 1946 and the march on Vugha that forced Kimweri’s abdication, almost 50% of the cases heard in the native courts in the Tanga Province were in fact from the Lushoto division.179 The data clearly show that the Lushoto division was responsible for the general statistical rise of litigated cases in the
176 TNA\DSM, 36959 Tanganyika Secretariat. Local Courts Adviser, appointment of. 09.12.1947, Governor Battershill to Creech-Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1. 177 TNA\KEW, CO 736/27, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1947, 125. 178 TNA\KEW, CO 736/28, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1948, 123. 179 TNA\KEW, CO 736/29, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1949, 134. 93 Tanga Province. The numbers of court cases rose again in the early 1950s180 after political turmoil following the second failed march on Vugha caused the expansion of the Mlalo Scheme to the whole of the Western Usambaras in 1951, and again after Zemu Shemsanga’s move into opposition in 1954, as Chapter Five and Six will demonstrate.
Because so many court records went missing, it is impossible to give an entirely representative overview, as discussed in the introduction. But even if all court records and case files were preserved, they would not reveal the entirety of violations against the scheme. We know for instance that court holders were not supposed to prosecute all scheme-related cases. Instead they were encouraged to pick some cases at will, which should serve as a blueprint warning to the many others, who were given a time limit to finish their work.181 This statement also undergirds how overwhelmed the native courts really were as scheme-related cases flooded them. In September 1956, native courts in Shambaai heard and were supposed to hand down judgments on up to seven cases a day on average.182 This is a quite substantial number which shows how little time there was for each case. Assuming a generously calculated eight-hour work day, each case would be given less than one hour not including the time it would take for preparation and post-processing such as the keeping of court records, the writing of receipts, the signing or mostly finger-printing of certified copies of judgments or witness accounts.
The preserved court records substantiate the assumption that the Bumbuli chiefdom was one of the most defiant places in Shambaai. In January and February 1952, more than half of all offenses under the new land usage rules in the whole Korogwe division were committed in Bumbuli, and 51 out of 57 cases were matuta cases (including burning and grazing).183 In
180 TNA\KEW, CO 736/38, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1953, 136; TNA\KEW, CO 736/41, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1954, 156: cases and litigation increased a by a third in 1953, and were double the 1952 number. 181 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1957, 59, p.2. 182 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.IV: Native Courts General, in: Court Statistics, 04.04.1956, Saving Telegram from LocGov, Dar es Salaam, to All Provincers and Politicals, 401. 183 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.03.1952, Monthly return of court cases connected to the Usambara Scheme, 38; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 29.02.1952, DO to Zumbe Daudi Sozi, 36; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 27.02.1952, outstanding cases by name, 35. 94 September 1955, 327 defaulters came from the Bumbuli chiefdom alone.184 A year later there were still 119 offenders from Bumbuli in the months of February and March.185 In April 1952, Bumbuli’s neighboring chiefdom Bungu doubled Bumbuli’s offenders.186 The relative prominence of scheme-related offenses in the court records from 1951 and 1952 coincides with one of the peaks of protest shortly after the extension of scheme work to the whole of Shambaai. Burning turned out to be an offense that happened more often in the chiefdoms of the plains,187 whereas in Mlalo and Mlola burning was the least of the problems.188 Offenders usually had the choice between prison and paying heavy fines and most opted to pay. Generally, sentences were characterized by heavy fines. Offenders usually had the choice between prison and fines. Most of them opted for paying. Interestingly, the fines for the same offenses varied from court to court, even within the same chiefdom, as one of the scheme officers complained.189 These irregularities hint at the relative power of the judge (the Subchief) and his court elders to define the quality of an offense. It was up to the defendant to inform him- or herself about similar leading cases if they wished to compare the degrees of delinquency. Many defendants actually did, as the case of four employees at the government hospital in Korogwe shows. They appealed their sentence because they had been fined 20 Shillings more than other defendants for the same offense against the scheme rules.190 Still today, many residents of Shambaai are of the opinion that the scheme was not introduced to prevent soil erosion, but as a means to generate revenue through fines.191 Although the DC called for an adjustment of the
184 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Monthly Report September 1955, 76. 185 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 10.04.1956, DC to Zumbe Mkuu, 25; TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 10.04.1956, List of offenders, 23a+23b. 186 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.04.1952, Monthly return of Scheme cases, 42. 187 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 05.04.1952, Monthly return of Scheme cases, 42; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 07.06.1952, Return of Scheme case – May 1952, 45. 188 TNA\DSM, 72, US 22: Usambara Scheme Monthly Reports Agricultural Cases, 18.12.1951, Report ya mwezi wa December 1951 ya kilimo kipya, 75; TNA\DSM, 72, US 22: Usambara Scheme Monthly Reports Agricultural Cases, 29.11.1951, Mashauri yaliyohukumiwa mwezi huu 11/1951, 74. 189 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 26.05.1955, case files, 117. 190 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 17.05.1955, Ramadhani Muya, Stephano Kilango, Kilongoa Kisongela and Mohamedi Omari to DO Korogwe, 113. 191 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 44; Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 9; Interview with the elders of Hemtoye, 09.11.2014; Interview with the elders of Mbuzii, 07.11.2014. 95 fines for the whole district, it never materialized.192 Guaranteeing equal standards in his district’s native courts was apparently not at the top of his agenda, especially because it clashed with his desire to punish “political litigants.” This became apparent a few years later, when he urged Daudi Sozi, Zumbe of Bumbuli, to raise the fines at his court in Bumbuli, because the “defendants are rebels who destroy Shambaai.”193
Local court-holders held considerable powers. The Subchiefs or Zumbe, who were the court- holders in the native courts at the lowest level, could decide upon punishment and fines. They could allow or reject witnesses and, most importantly in the context of the scheme rules, they could delay hearing cases. In January and February 1956, instructors from Lushoto and Bumbuli reported an “uncalled for delay in the hearing of scheme prosecutions in the local courts”194 – a condition not unknown to the native courts of Mlalo195 and Bungu.196 In neighboring Kigurunde, during the protests of 1951, headman Omari Lwambo objected to surrender accused people in more than 100 prosecution cases under the new land usage Ordinance. He dared to do so although his Subchief had already personally reminded him to send the people to court twice.197 In the same year court staff at the native court of Mlola refused to register charges brought for offenses under scheme rules in the court books.198 The court staff’s position and that of Omari Lwambo demonstrates that they rejected the criminalization of scheme violations. In their books, the scheme rules were offensive, not the people who disobeyed them. By refusing to record the offenses, they did more than protecting the offenders. In fact, they rejected the notion of the offense itself. The pressure originating from scheme-related civil cases eventually
192 TNA\DSM, 72, US 2: Usambara Scheme Correspondence, 11.10.1950, Comments on progress report of Scheme for September 1950, 3, p.2. 193 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 13.03.1956, DC Lushoto to Zumbe Mkuu Bumbuli, 22. 194 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report January 1956, 3, p.2. 195 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 30.07.1953, Executive Officer Usambara Scheme to Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi, 43 196 NA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases 01.06.1955, DO Korogwe to Zumbe Mkuu Bungu, 122. 197 TNA\DSM, 72, US 5: Usambara Scheme. Vuga-Bazo Sub-Chiefdom, 07.02.1951, S.S Mkhan to Zumbe Mkuu Omari Lwambo, 9. 198 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report February 1955, 45, p.2. 96 grew so quickly in pace and number that by 1957 all scheme prosecutions had to be stopped.199 In the end, the overburdened native courts mirrored the changes that had occurred in Shambaai. Without official mentioning, the Usambara Scheme was abandoned in August 1957, worn down by the perseverance of the peasants.200 The perils of pauperization had been banned for the moment.
The Role of Native Authorities Relations between native authorities and their subjects changed with the introduction of the scheme. Not surprisingly, considerable tensions arose because the burden of enforcement of unpopular measures fell on the shoulders of the local staff. Native authorities had already earned themselves a bad reputation because during the Second World War, they were also responsible for meeting conscript-quotas.201 As Nicholas Westcott put it, they were caught in between “the potential wrath of the local administrator for failing to deliver the goods, and the simmering resentment and sometimes violence of their subjects for the adoption of coercive methods.”202
As the example of Omari Lwambo demonstrates, headmen and Zumbe often took sides with their people. As a consequence, both the Simbamwene and the British attempted to exchange disloyal personnel,203 which was not always a guarantee of success, especially because Kimweri and the British officials did not necessarily agree on choices regarding the personnel.204 The most popular case was certainly that of Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi of the Mlalo chiefdom, whose removal from office was one of the reasons for the founding of the chama. His wide popularity was based on his fine reputation as a rain-maker, yet his poor performance when it came to tax
199 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report August 1957, 76, p.1. 200 In the monthly report of November, the “ridging” section was omitted, see 171, 3/8/III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Report of November 1957, 84. 201 In fact, one of the scribes of the Zigua chama, Mavindi Munju had been conscripted for service with forces, while the DC considered the other one, Menga Munju, not fit enough to join, see TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 26.02.1943, PC Bonavia to the Honorable The Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, Confidential, 261. 202 Nicholas Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 152. 203 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 23.03.1955, Simbamwene to DO Korogwe, 109; TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23.09.1950, DC to Publicity Officer, 53, p.3. 204 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases 29.12.1950, Safari Notes Usambara Scheme, 18, p.2. 97 collection led to his removal from office.205 Hassani Kinyassi’s indifference to tax collection can be read as his way of passive resistance. Since the introduction of taxation in Shambaai under the Germans, the rejection of tax payment has always been one of the means chosen by ordinary peasants and sometimes by sub-chiefs to display their discontent with political directions chosen in Vugha throughout the colonial period.206 The story about Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi has it that a furious group of women chased Hassani’s successor Ali Mashina out of his office in front of the startled DC. They then called for the re-installation of the previous Zumbe the British had dismissed for his bad reputation in tax collection and his compliance against scheme work. The women insisted that only Zumbe Hassani could govern the chiefdom. He was not only sympathetic to the protest, but also had the rain charms to terminate the current draught. Their protest was so adamant that there was no other way than to reinstall Hassani Kinyassi, and, as the story goes, the same night the rains began to fall.207 In one of the versions of the story I heard, the old man who told it to me said that only the women had the power to enforce Hassani’s reinstallation because they could be expected to be treated less violently than men.208 In yet another story about women’s resistance, this time the official version of TANU’s history in the Usambara Mountains, the women of Bugu forced Julius Nyerere’s welcome in Shambaai against Kimweri’s will. Nyerere, then TANU’s president, toured the Tanganyika Territory, passing through Shambaai in January 1956. Kimweri Mputa Magogo did not welcome him to the capital city of Vugha. The residents were worried that Kimweri might retaliate, so they kept quiet, and Nyerere left. As the story goes, the women announced their refusal to cook for their husbands unless they would bring Nyerere back. Had the women not announced their strike, the men would not have called Nyerere back, who had already reached Korogwe, and returned together with him.209 The story of TANU nationalism in Shambaai would have looked different.
205 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 168. 206 RHL Reel No.3, Lushoto District Book, in: System of Government, Native Administration in Practice, Note for District Records, 2; TNA\DSM, G 54/17: Gerichtsbarkeit für Farbige, 23.1.1901, Letter from Teichmann to Bezirksamtmann Meyer, 1; 16.3.1901 Letter from Teichmann to Kaiserliches Gouvernement Dar es Salaam, 1-2; TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.II, Lushoto, Native Affairs – Legal, Native Courts, 23.11.1941, Dobson Bwana Shauri (DC) to Shebuge Magogo Kimweri, 152. 207 Interview with Rashidi Nyangassa, Kwemaramba, 10.11.2014. 208 Interview with Rashidi Nyangassa, Kwemaramba, 10.11.2014. 209 TANU, TANU na wananchi Lushoto (1960), 1. 98 Once back in office, Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi continued to oppose the scheme. The archives are full of complaints about pending cases at the native court of Mlalo,210 and about the willful delay of administrative tasks such as announcing the date for the start of tie-ridging.211 Even assistance to scheme offenders was on the lists of Zumbe Hassani’s misdeeds.212 Zumbe Hassani could rely on his minor headmen. During the time of his removal, when Ali Mashina was Mlalo’s Subchief, the people of Mwangoi boycotted Mashina and refused to have the plots they were supposed to tie-ridge measured. The headman in charge could not be held responsible since he simply disappeared.213 In 1954, more than two thirds of Mlalo’s steep slopes were planted with the annual crop maize instead of the perennial bananas, as instructed.214
Zumbe Hassani of Mlalo was not the only local official who was removed from office because he sided with his people. In 1947, headman Danga of Kigurunde, another notorious neighborhood, suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Paramount’s son. Court elder Karatasi Hoza, loyal to the chief, “removed Danga at night” and later “that same night Karatasi Hoza ate mbuzi, goat meat.”215 Karatasi Hoza was an influential elder of the Vugha chiefdom. Being wealthy, as a member of the powerful Hoza family and being close to the Paramount Chief even in the turbulent 1950s had earned him a questionable reputation,216 as the next chapter will demonstrate. The image of Karatasi Hoza eating expensive goat meat, which is only eaten on special occasions such as festivities, is a metaphor symbolizing his victory. He had managed to get rid of another political troublemaker. In one 1951 petition, the writers even compared
210 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 27.03.1956, Agricultural Officer Usambara Scheme to Zumbe Mkuu, Mlalo, 59; TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 30.07.1953, Executive Officer Usambara Scheme to Subchief Mlalo, 43. 211 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 27.07.1955, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Mlalo, 54. 212 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 10.04.1956, Zumbe Mkuu Mlalo to DC, 62. 213 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2: Agriculture. Reports of Agricultural Officers, Tour Diary July 1953, 5. 214 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 06.03.1954, DC Lushoto to Zumbe Mkuu Hassani Kinyassi, 46. 215 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/18, Vol.I: Native Administration Village Headmen, 23.08.1947, Mdoe Mlikang’ombe and Sheshe Mashangama to DO Lushoto, 129. 216 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.02.1957, Athuman Mwakole to the Registrar, Resident Magistrate, Tanga, 127. 99 Kimweri to Hitler: “You are more powerful than Hitler, if you don’t like a Zumbe, you just kick him out of office.”217
A headman from Handei, in the mountain chiefdom of Mlalo, found another way to avoid responsibilities that inhibited the livelihood of his people. He simply spent most of his time in the plains. The result was that out of 2.585 terraces only 46 had been finished.218 In the neighborhood of Mazinde in the Mombo chiefdom, the native authorities experienced a “complete breakdown”219 due to a border dispute. The headmen used the opportunity to stop persecution of scheme offenders.220 In Mnyusi in the Lushoto chiefdom, a man was supposed to supervise work at Mnyusi, but he disappeared before arriving there and another suitable person could not be found.221 Headman Shelubwaza of Korogwe stopped working because he “was worried to be criticized by his people.”222 Like Hassani Kinyassi, Daudi Sozi of Bumbuli not only slowed down persecution considerably;223 he also defended his subjects in front of the district council.224 A headman of Mbwei in the Mlola chiefdom even backed his people using colorful fabrications, as Mlola’s Zumbe complained in a letter to the DC:
He [Athumani] has told him [the Agricultural Officer] that there is a man called Maiho Anshakara, who has not done the tie-ridges on his plot because he has cut off his fingers accidentally. The Agricultural Officer told him to bring Anshakara to the council of the Sub-chief. So he was brought to me on 27th November 1951. He had not cut off his fingers, not even a single one; it was all fabricated by the Zumbe. Furthermore there is a man called Tandiko Kaluhu. He has also not done the tie-ridges on his field. I was told he was sick so they could not bring him to my council. […] My opinion is that this Zumbe is
217 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration native, Usambara District, 1951, sisi wasambaa to Kimweri, 565. 218 TNA\DSM, 72, US/3: Usambara Scheme – Correspondence with Sub-Chiefs Mlalo, 28.10.1954, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Mlalo, 53. 219 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 29.12.1950, Safari Notes Usambara Scheme, 18. 220 TNA\DSM, 72, US 22: Usambara Scheme Monthly Reports Agricultural Cases, 26.06.1952, Raphael Salim to DO Usambara Scheme, 112. 221 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report October 1953, 1, p.1. 222 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 23.03.1955, Simbamwene to DO Korogwe, 109. 223 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 03.03.1954, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Daudi Sozi, 99. 224 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 14.03.52, Daudi Sozi to DC, 40. 100 not of use for his work. Therefore I explain to you, Mr. DC, so you can think of it yourself.225 African agricultural instructors, hired from Tanganyikan areas other than Shambaai, were responsible for explaining, guiding and leading the scheme work – but not to enforce it. Many of them defected and began supporting the people’s cause. Some of them wrote false reports based on false achievements.226 That way they could make sure that the authorities would not visit their area too often. The inspector at Tewe just stopped taking any action against offenders who opened up fresh land on slopes over 25°.227 Others agreed to take “bribes” and officially changed sides.228 In 1952, the citizens of Funta, Bumbuli saved up money in a chama to pay their native instructor to allow them to graze cattle on their fields.229 Three years later, the DO received a complaint about double-standards, again from Bumbuli, using the letterhead of the Soni mission station. The letter writer, Elasto Milala, asked in a seemingly innocent way how it could be that the citizens had to build ridges but some were excused from the work. He ended the letter by threatening that trouble was on its way.230 In Shambaa manner, his message was hidden. Yet his letter can be read as complaints against the double-standards of government. While the poor people were forced to build terraces, several officials simply neglected the rule, yet the officials’ default was covered up by their seniors. The DO of Korogwe received a similar letter in October 1954, signed by “the citizens of Korogwe.” This letter, too, contained serious complaints about the Usambara Scheme and alluded to future unrest. Extracts of the letter read:
Don’t say you’ve never heard of our complaints, because we have voiced them often, and we are tired of the problems. This year might pass but next year won’t, there will be riots, I give you the example of Kenya – what has to happen, happens. Tell us what’s the benefit of the terrace ridging? […] What does it prevent us from? We want you to reply to those questions and if you won’t, we will not dig terraces as it is time lost. You are suppressing us for no reason. Instead of tormenting us you could just order an atomic
225 TNA\DSM, 72/43/20, Vol.II, Native Administration, Report by Zumbes, Vol.II, 458. 226 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report November 1953, 3, p.1; TNA\DSM, 171, 3/8/II: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme Monthly and annual reports, Usambara Scheme Report December 1955, 1. 227 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2: Agriculture. Reports of Agricultural Officers, Tour Diary July 1953, 5, p.3. 228 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 16.08.1955, Muhamadi Shehondo, Mwana wa Kitalal Shikihiyo to PC Tanga, 15. 229 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 09.06.1952, Juma Kanyawana to DC, 6. 230 TNA\DSM, 72, US 25: Usambara Scheme. Bumbuli Sub-Chiefdom, 08.02.1955, Elasto Milala to DO Lushoto, 14. 101 bomb from Europe to get rid of the trash because this is what we are to you. You do not value us. If you did, you would not suppress us for no reason.231
The warning about future protest, alluding to the ongoing Mau Mau war in neighboring Kenya, implied a clear threat. It was a mutual fear. The British feared Mau Mau might spill over the Kenyan border into Tanganyika Territory, and Shambaa peasants were conscious of the land losses that had driven the Kikuyu into the Mau Mau war in the first place.232 The letter also expressed deep unease with both the scheme and the ways in which its implementation was communicated. By the time the district office received the letter, the Usambara Scheme had already been underway for four years and even longer in the Mlalo chiefdom, but the people could still not warm up to it. The reference to the cruelty of World War Two and the arrogance with which the allies had deployed a new weapon, more destructive than anything known to that date, had many connotations. First, the letter can be read as a comment on race relations in the British Empire at a time during which imperial tensions were unmistakable and independence was already looming on the horizon. The quotation was more than a simple demonstration that the letter-writers were knowledgeable about events that had a global political meaning or a promotion of South-Southern solidarity. The petitioners appear to have implied that, by viewing other races as inferior, the British had opened the door to the destructive arrogance of the Americans. As shown through the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Shambaa believed the British regarded them – like the Americans regarded the Japanese – with little value and they thus worried about becoming possible victims of racism. It is most likely that they used the image of the atomic bomb because they sought a stark expression for their dislike of colonial racism, not because they worried in earnest about becoming the victims of an atomic bomb. Secondly, by employing such stark rhetoric, the letter- writers underlined their distaste of the Usambara Scheme. In fact, they compared their desperate situation under the Land Usage Ordinance with the havoc of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They did so because the scheme was perceived as very destructive to ancient land tenure and cultivation patterns. Thirdly, the letter not only shows that ordinary Shambaa peasants were informed about world events, but also that they sensed the imperial tensions that had taken
231 TNA\DSM, 171/3/2, Vol.I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.10.1954, unsigned letter to DC Korogwe, 86. 232 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 177, 192. 102 hold of the British Empire. The fact that the British were involved in the brutal Mau Mau war in the first place was a sign of their damaged strength, and the Shambaa letter-writers capitalized on that. Being engaged in several conflicts at the same time, one could lose the general picture, they seemed to suggest. In other words, local responses to the British development efforts in Tanganyika were shaped by tensions elsewhere in the Empire. I will not discuss whether the Shambaa letter-writers overstretched the comparison. I rather aim at showing how very ordinary people made use of creative writing, coming up with catchy comparisons in order to make their claims heard.
Officials of the Department of Agriculture or other British officials did not take the blame, however. Instead, they put it entirely on the native authorities, whose “poor leadership” remained a source of criticism.233 British officials had not dared impose the scheme directly. Instead, as was so often done, they had relied on native authorities to implement the scheme rules. The PCs had agreed that the native authorities, not the servants of central government, had to enforce the legislation. Hence the latter were in charge of carrying out instruction and extension work rather than dirty “police work.”234 Because they knew that the survival of their local staff, from minor headmen to the Simbamwene himself, was closely linked with the success of the scheme, they did not want to be the ones to implement it: “Any attempt to impose changes of such heavy effect on the lives of all the people by a means independent of public opinion”, DC Macmillan reasoned, “would first dislocate and then crush the native authority system, and the Scheme would founder with it.”235 Ironically, the breakdown of scheme work in some areas happened precisely because the popular local leaders cared enough about public opinion to understand that their attempt to prevent people from protesting could cost them their posts.
The Inherent Contradiction of Indirect Rule The choice of some leaders to side with their people against the authority of Kimweri and the central government can only be interpreted as a way of maintaining their popularity with their
233 RHL, MSS. Afr. s. 1196, Kernahan, Usambara Scheme, Annual Report 1953, 8. 234 TNA\DSM, 171, 58/22: Provincial Administration. Conferences of DCs, Provincial Conference and minutes of meetings, 29.09.1955, Minutes of the Provincial Conference, 6. 235 TNA\DSM, 171, 3/2/I: Agriculture. Usambara Scheme – Policy and General including Scheme cases, 11.01.1951, Usambara Scheme, Origins, Principles and Progress, 1950, 20, p.3. 103 people. That is to say, the people’s hostility against scheme work seems to have been so intense and continuous that those Zumbe who backed it risked losing their integrity and support entirely. In weighing up the issue, they may have found the pretext of ruling over a hostile population – albeit with British backing – less appealing than being discharged by a British-loyal Kimweri, especially because there was a growing understanding among the ruling class that British backing was not as consistent and powerful as it used to be in first two decades under British rule. It might have occurred to some of the Zumbe that being popular with their people might in the long run be a better way of securing their authority as it was felt that Kimweri would not remain in power forever. The installation, re-installation, or removal of Zumbe and headmen against popular will had become a fragile empowerment that could give way to irreversible power loss. The task of local rulers to navigate between British expectations, the Simbamwene’s instructions from Vugha, and the sympathy of their own people often led to a certain ambiguity. Already in 1946, in his explanations on the Mlalo resistance, one British official unveiled the main contradiction inherent of indirect rule:
It is obvious that as a medium of contact with the people Government cannot and should not rely on them [Zumbe and headmen]. They have to please the people otherwise they become unpopular and the source of their “perks” would dry up; on the other hand they also must please the Government or risk being found ineffective and being dismissed.236 The system of indirect rule, once set up as an attempt to smoothly control an area through already established and respected local leadership, could either turn the “chiefs” into self- important agents of the British or into defiant insurgents. While Kimweri and his supporters were of the former category, of the latter were Hassani Kinyassi and the many others who drove home their victory as the scheme was abandoned. Most of the Kimweri-loyal ‘native authorities’ had lost their credibility. Because they were associated too closely with the scheme, they had alienated the core of resistance, the mission-educated elite. As a consequence many people opened up Shambaa politics to the stage of national policy. Many of the rebellious peasants redirected their political engagement towards the national goal as they joined TANU’s call for national independence.
236 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 11.10.1946, DO Lushoto to DC Korogwe, 4, p.3. 104 Conclusion The Usambara Scheme revealed the enormous challenges of the politics of indirect rule in Shambaai. In a country in which the British had always smoothly relied on the native authorities, they now faced the rapid breakdown of local authority. The colonial administration had always invested in the official form of local authority in Shambaai by keeping all the regalia and positions of local power in place. But they had overestimated form over content. Although representatives of the native authorities were empowered by the British colonial state and sometimes enjoyed remarkable privileges, they were not detached from their people. They still had to listen to their grievances, take unpopular decisions and collect taxes. For many local dignitaries it was impossible to enforce an agenda that was so utterly unwelcome. Virtually all headmen and Zumbe were cultivators themselves; they ended up breaking the very rules they had to enforce. Only the weak rulers, like Paramount Mputa Magogo, held on to the scheme rules, perhaps because he knew that he owed his position to the British. For many others, like Hassani Kinyassi of Mlalo and Daudi Sozi of Bumbuli, indirect rule allowed them to infringe upon the rules and side with their people, because it was their popularity that kept them in power.
One way for a Zumbe to express his defiance was through the conduct of his native courts. Contrary to the general rather conservative functioning of courts as reactive institutions, court holders like Hassani Kinyassi turned things upside down. By delaying hearing scheme cases, defending accused subjects in letters to administrative officials, and even closing his court he showed solidarity with his people. Many people like him, whether on the fields or in courtrooms, kept on fighting against the oppressive Land Usage Ordinance. The silent abolition of the scheme rules by the British symbolizes the slow and tenacious fight of many Shambaa. Their victory over land and cultivation rules was not colorful and loud, but immensely effective.
The sometimes coercive, sometimes desperate attempt of British officials to enforce the Usambara Scheme also contributed to eventually bringing Shebughe Magogo’s rule tumbling down. Resistance was informed by indignation and outrage against the unwelcome British interference in both local succession politics and old traditions of agriculture and land utilization. From the beginning, the British agricultural enterprise in Shambaai was met with fierce local resistance. In addition to the crisis caused by the agricultural scheme, a heated
105 debate on the succession of the kitara kikuu, the “royal chair” of Vugha, figured prominently in the debate. As shown above, the debate concerned not only political and economic life, but also the moral question of leadership culture and the general question of what entailed a good life. Not surprisingly, the debate spurred extraordinarily high participation and encouraged the politicization of women.
There was a close connection between the agricultural scheme and local acceptance of chiefs. Chiefs and sub-chiefs who supported the scheme were generally more positive towards of British rule since they often owed their position to the British. However, more often than not, they were men that had come to power although they either lacked rain charms, were not from the family who inherited chiefship in that particular area, or were unpopular. Naturally, the rain- making chiefs were popular and could afford dissent with the Paramount. In other words, chiefs backed by the British were often perceived as unsuccessful, illegitimate or unpopular. They were held responsible for the scheme rules they had to implement, while the scheme itself was perceived by a great majority of the population as harmful and dangerous. Resistance against the scheme and against royal succession politics accordingly sprang from the successful rain- making, rebellious sub-chiefdoms of Mlalo and Bumbuli. British requests to the Kimweri to improve efficiency in his office – it had finally been understood how unpopular he had become among his people – came too late.237 A march on Vugha, the royal capital, in 1947, organized by the chama, which led the anti-Kimweri opposition movement, finally pressed Kimweri Shebughe Magogo to abdicate.238 Tensions remained especially with respect to the Usambara Scheme. The 1950s turned out to be the most turbulent decade not only for new Kimweri Mputa Magogo, the former Paramount’s son, but also for the British. Obviously, the march on Vugha is closely linked to the introduction of the Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme. Likewise, the second protest wave of the early 1950s corresponds to the time when the Mlalo Scheme was extended to the whole of Shambaai. When protest finally reached that stage, it came with a rhetoric that not only questioned the chiefs, but British rule in general, as Chapter Five and Six demonstrate. The forced abandonment of the scheme exposed the ambiguity of colonialism even further. As elsewhere in African colonies, the failure of a meticulously planned large-scale project exposed
237 TNA\DSM 72/45/1, Vol.II Lushoto, Native Affairs – Legal, Native Courts, DC Dobson to Kimweri, 9.4.42, 177. 238 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 140. 106 the destructive nature of colonialism further and contributed strongly to the formation of the nationalist movement.
In hindsight it seems natural that the Shambaa, mostly a subsistence farmer population, did not enthusiastically welcome the additional load of scheme work, which severely intervened in ancient land tenure patterns, and neither filled their bellies nor their pockets.239 In fact, the unfree labor the scheme required can be understood as the disguised attempt of a labor recruitment program, a point that Peter Pels has made with regard to the Ulurugu Scheme in the neighboring Morogoro region.240 It is indeed tempting to read the development discourse as a simple relabeling of indirect rule as local government, with an extended number of headmen appointed as labor recruiters. The Usambara Scheme could not have been successful because it attempted to solve an environmental problem instead of rural poverty.241 Caught in the threating narrative of the dangers of soil erosion, most of the officials in Tanganyika and their superiors in the Colonial Office overlooked the consequences individuals would suffer from the mission to save the environment. The architects of the scheme had underestimated the political implications of the “technical” measures they proposed. As Schuknecht put it, in this context, it was hoped that developmentalism would tie the colonies closer to the center, but its failure proved the contrary.242 Both the ideological and financial costs proved in the end to be much too high. Governor Twining found the costs of the Usambara Scheme “certainly spectacular” for the “psychological blunder” he thought it to be.243
But abandoning the scheme did not solve all the problems. The largest remaining problem was pressure on the land. As shown above, the scheme rules, notably by closing steep slopes for cultivation, exacerbated tensions regarding customary land tenure and property rights. Even after the scheme’s abandonment, these tensions could not be reversed. Pressure on the land, accelerated since the introduction of the Mlalo in Scheme in 1946, remained one of the major
239 TNA\KEW, CO 736/ Department of Agriculture, Annual Report 1935, 42. 240 Peter Pels, “The Pidginization of Luguru Politics. Administrative Ethnography and the Paradoxes of Indirect Rule,” American Ethnologist 23, no. 4 (1996), 14. 241 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 144. 242 Schuknecht, British colonial development policy after the Second World War, 31. 243 Quoted in Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 149. 107 challenges in Shambaai. In the following chapter, I will examine land disputes and transactions in detail.
108 CHAPTER THREE – Land Disputes and Transactions in and beyond Colonial Courts
I have argued so far that Shambaa and other African cultivators in Shambaai were hostile to the Usambara Land Usage Scheme due to its impact on their reproductive labor capacities as well as on customary cultivation patterns. As a consequence, native courts and other colonial courts were swamped with cases deriving from the much-despised scheme rules. Besides the question of labor, another major consequence of the scheme was the growing pressure on the land. Certainly, the scheme was not the only reason. The growing commercialization of agriculture and the introduction of cash crops such as coffee (even if on a very small scale), the increased mono-cropping of maize, growing population, and pressure from settlers, though considerably small in comparison, rendered land the most valuable and important resource in the Usambara Mountains during the late colonial period. Given this situation, the Usambara Scheme was an additional strain on the already dramatically declining access to arable land.
In this chapter I examine land disputes in Shambaai’s native courts and the higher courts of appeal during the crucial period: from the 1940s to the 1960s. First, after a brief review of the seminal literature on land tenure and property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa, I will address the representativity issue of my sources. Secondly, I will situate land disputes within the general litigation patterns in Shambaai in the given period. Finally, I will highlight both trends in land disputes as well as exceptional cases before I draw some conclusions from the material regarding both the role of colonial courts and customary land tenure.
The literature on land tenure and customary law in Sub-Saharan Africa has long been linked to the larger question of status hierarchies. John Iliffe maintains that in a society in which land is ample, like in most pre-colonial African societies, the definition of a poor person is one who lacked access to the labor (of others) to work the plentiful land. According to Iliffe, an important shift happened when land became scarce. Like Shambaai since the 1940s, many colonial societies in Eastern and Central Africa were characterized by land scarcity. In these societies, the decisive factor in determining wealth was no longer solely wealth in terms of access to labor,
109 but also in terms of access to land or cash.1 The shift in the legal sphere from the famous concept of “wealth in people”2 to wealth in land or other resources bought with cash, however, did not happen as swiftly. The old nineteenth-century economy was based on status and usually represented through the gathering of followers.3 During this period, the legal aspect of “wealth in people” thus concerned rights over the labor of others such as the duties owed by youth to their elders, or subjects to their chief. In short, wealth in people meant “the rights to demand labour and goods, and reverse rights to gifts and subsistence.”4 In his case study of Lozi law dating from 1955, Max Gluckman, the “founder” of legal anthropology in African studies, contends that property in Lozi law did not “consist of rights over things themselves for use, but of claims on persons in respect of things; and things are links in institutionalized relationships between persons.”5
The problem with rights in the labor of other people arrived with colonialism. Martin Chanock has argued that because colonial regimes did not recognize status hierarchies and because officials were worried about unfree labor and slavery, “rights in people had to give way in the colonial period to a different legality” – the law of property.6 But, again, the old notions did not vanish entirely. “The rights claimed [by elders] over the labour of dependents transmuted in the new economy into rights over the money and goods this labour could earn.”7 Therefore, as Chaonck’s argument goes, parts of the old economy, of the “old property” – as opposed to the “new property”8 – was preserved in the new economy, in the form of a persisting notion of status.
1 John Iliffe, The African poor: A history (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4. 2 Guyer, Jane I. and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995), 91-120. 3 Ibid., 92. 4 Martin Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1991), 83. 5 Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955), 29. 6 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 68. 7 Ibid., 68. 8 According to Chanock, old property was food, cattle, land, and people, and new property consisted of things acquired with money through the market including older forms or property that were transformed by new contexts, such as bridewealth paid in cash instead of in livestock. 110 Despite the the fact that status remained important, especially for land transactions, there was a growing disconnect between older “customary” notions of communal obligations and the common law of property, yet the colonial power asymmetry forced African litigants to accept the new legal terms. In Chanock’s words, colonial courts “increasingly spoke the language of Contract and offered increasing legal protection to proprietary claims in defiance of the expectations of kin. […] In constructing ways of dealing with property relationships in the new economy, Africans were confined by the existence of the common law of property of the colonizing power and had to proceed in dialogue with it.”9 But a transition from status to contract could not be accomplished entirely because the material basis of life, access to land, still largely depended on status.10 The colonial state did not recognize individual land titles, but tied access to land to “customary land tenure”, based on the “myth” of egalitarian communal tenure11 it had invented it in the first place, as both Elisabeth Colson and Martin Chanock famously point out.12
While it is true that in the old economy land was generally available, not all people were equal. Social and economic differences between groups and individuals were often clearly defined – like in Shambaai where the difference between commoner lineages and the royal Kilindi, between large lineages and newcomers,13 men and women, determined an individual’s abilities to accumulate wealth. Access to land was available, but not regulated on equal terms. Those subtleties, however, could not be translated into the new legal reality, as Chanock argues. The state’s “bureaucratic logic tended to iron out local variations in conceptions of title. Customary conceptions, according to which different types of rights attached to different types of land, and to different genders, withered in the bureaucratic winds.”14 Consequence was a major
9 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 87. 10 Ibid., 87. 11 Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure,” in Law in colonial Africa, ed. Kristin Mann and Richard L. Roberts (Portsmouth, NH, London: Heinemann; James Currey, 1991), 80. 12 Elizabeth Colson, “The impact of the colonial period on the definition of land rights,” in Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule, ed. Victor W. Turner (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 196; Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 239. 13 Winans, Shambala, 21. 14 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 74. 111 contradiction: under “customary law”, land allocation was still determined by a person’s social status, kinship ties, and social and political allegiances.15
According to Chanock, the reason why British colonial officers and policymakers insisted on the communal character of land tenure was undergirded by the “highly politicized context [of] corporate and settler ambitions to limit African landholding.”16 While the colonial state successfully “defended” local custom by guaranteeing communal land tenure under customary law,17 this move also strengthened the status of male elders in general, and chiefs, headmen, and heads of patrilineages in particular, at the expense of a newly emerging class of potentially landless people: “The development of the concept of a leading customary role for chiefs with regard to the ownership and allocation of land was fundamental to the evolution of the paradigm of customary tenure.”18 Other scholars confirm the finding of male and senior privilege through customary law, such as Andreas Eckert in his case study on land ownership of the Doula of Cameroon19 and Barbara Cooper regarding women’s shrinking access to land in Niger.20
The fixation of communal land tenure in concert with the general politics of indirect rule not only accounted for keeping Africans in their “customary tribal realm”, but could also be used to make a case against individual land titles for Africans. Colonial governments only granted permanence of occupation and the right to bequeath land, thus giving Africans access to “usufructuary” rights instead of rights in title deeds.21 This did not necessarily keep Africans from selling their land for cash, as I will show below. According to Chanock, the legacy of this policy eventually resulted in “a form of legal rightlessness in land” in the postcolony as a “customary veil has been drawn over national confiscation of rights.”22
15 Ibid., 87. 16 Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure”, 66. 17 Ibid., 66 18 Ibid., 64. 19 Andreas Eckert, Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und kolonialer Wandel: Douala 1880 bis 1960 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 271. 20 Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and culture in a Hausa society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), 53. 21 Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure”, 70. 22 Ibid., 80. 112 Other scholars disagreed with Chanock and instead focused on the opportunities colonial courts presented to African litigants. Unlike Chanock’s emphasis on the collaboration between male senior Africans and British colonial officials, Richard Roberts has shown the opportunities that native courts offered female litigants in particular, in the early twentieth-century in French Sudan.23 Dunn and Robertson demonstrate that there is no necessary congruence between proprietary rights in land and political allegiance.24 Sara Berry contends that Chanock emphasizes the power of the underlying discourse among colonial officials and anthropologists (at the expense of studying records of actual land disputes in more detail) in his argument.25 She argues instead that land tenure rules have remained ambiguous and that rights in land are subject to ongoing reinterpretation, as it is “not clear that either colonial or independent African governments have been able effectively to control the conditions under which farmers gain access to land or the ways they use it.”26 Like Chanock, she also maintains that social identity and status remained linked under indirect rule, but “not in the sense that property rights were frozen into precolonial molds of communal ownership, but rather through unresolved debates over the interpretation of customary rules and the right to enforce them.”27 Her main line of argument is that membership in various social peer groups, lineage bodies and other collectivities as well as the necessary cash are the two key factors in securing access to land. 28 In a more general argument about the potential success of Chagga litigants Sally Falk Moore also highlights the importance of various group memberships and networks in order to exhaust all possible channels, many of which were, in fact, extra-legal.29 Thus, returning to Guyer and Belinga’s concept of “wealth in people”, access to land in post-colonial African contexts still depends on expanding the number of supporters one can gather. Being successful meant to master both, striving to “‘honour’ and to exploit the obligations of Status, as well as to use the tie-cutting logic of Contract.”30
23 Roberts, Litigants and households, 18, 125-126, 178, 224, 229. 24 John Dunn and A. F. Robertson, Dependence and opportunity: Political change in Ahafo (London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 224. 25 Berry, No condition is permanent, 103. 26 Ibid., 103. 27 Ibid., 132. 28 Ibid., 104. 29 Moore, Social facts and fabrications, 310-317. 30 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 84. 113 This leads to another important point, namely the finality of land transactions and of court decisions in general. Gluckman argues that altering property rights in fact redefines social relationships and vice versa: “in modern conditions, men have begun by their own efforts, independently of their fathers’ material help to acquire property. Hence a father’s rights in his son’s property change.”31 However, one could argue that while the changing of hands of plots during late colonial rule was common, practices of tenure did not necessarily change. Sometimes courts failed to enforce judgments, but more often tenancy relations did not cease with the court decision, and many cases were contested in courts over and again. Therefore, it seems to be inadequate, at least in the case of Shambaai, to argue that the owner of a piece of land exercised final control over its usage and cultivation. This will be shown in the following pages after a brief overview of the limited statistics from the remaining court records.
Statistics from Shambaai Native Courts, 1939-1959 Despite the limitations of the remaining court records regarding their representativity, the wealth of accessible land disputes still allows a more thorough examination. Even though we know that many cases were never recorded in the court books and even though it is unclear whether those that were preserved are accidents of history or calculation, the fact remains that almost 15 percent of all preserved cases from 1939 to 1959 heard in the native courts of Vugha- Bazo, Bumbuli, Mlalo, Mtae, and Lushoto, the Paramount Chief’s appeal court at Vugha, and the appeal courts under administrative officials, are land disputes. Furthermore, if taken together with disputes deriving from violations of the scheme rules, land disputes account for 72.6 percent of all recorded cases. In other words, more than 70 per cent of the 384 preserved cases are concerned either with cultivation or land tenure. The connection between these two types of cases is obvious. Agricultural (under)development and customary land tenure have long been linked. It has been argued that due to the late colonial developmentalist agenda, productivity of the land eventually overruled legal aspects of tenure.32 In his study of the agricultural development in Shambaai during the late 1960s, Manfred Attems argues that due to the absence of individual land titles, there was no incentive for the cultivator to invest in and
31 Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, 287. 32 Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 79. 114 improve his land because he always feared a possible customary eviction.33 Two decades earlier a similar argument was used to justify the introduction of the Usambara Land Usage Scheme, the same scheme that severely curtailed the access the people had to land at that time.
Before the introduction of the Usambara Scheme in 1946, the number of land-related cases was comparatively low. In the chiefdoms of both Mlalo and Lushoto, the land cases amounted to about 5 percent of all cases. No numbers are available for other native courts. Regardless of these low numbers, the number of appeal cases to administrative officials’ appeal courts before 1946 already amounted to 36 percent of all cases. This number not only demonstrates the relevance of land disputes in general, but also points to litigants’ mistrust of the chiefly court- holders, which was the reason so many litigants wanted their land cases reassessed by British officials who were not as intimately involved in the local social webs. The comparatively high number for administrative officials’ appeal courts is not surprising if we remember that chiefs did not only control native courts, but also administered and allocated land to their subjects.
After 1946, land cases rose dramatically to a previously unattained high of almost two thirds, more precisely 63.62 percent as the recorded number of appeal cases in the third or higher instance between 1955 and 1957 show. The very high number of land-related appeal cases does not seem to be a representation of general litigation patterns in native courts as a statement by the native courts adviser reveals. He observed that “the question of land disputes was raised in Lushoto in 1952 and 1953 they formed 12 percent of the total number of civil cases.”34 If only twelve percent of cases disputed in native courts concerned land, why did the number of land disputes in the appeal courts amount to more than 60 percent? This mismatch between litigation patters in lower and higher courts can also be understood in light of the representativity issue. Despite patchy record-keeping in native courts, it is possible to show that on average, approximately 40 cases per month were pending in the twelve inspected native courts of both the Lushoto and Korogwe division from April 1947 to June 194835 because the statistics of this time period (and only this!) survived. This documentation clashes with the
33 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 34. 34 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1 Vol. IV: Native Courts General, Report by the local courts adviser on the local courts of the Lush district to the PC Tanga by Member for Local Government, 18.08.1954, 350A, p.2. 35 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.III: Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 350a, 349, 348, 347, 346, no number, 338, 337, 336, 335, 334, 333, 330, 329A. 115 general picture I could get from the remaining court records. If the documents reveal what we lack for the uncovered periods, there is some luck in having the statistics for this very crucial period. The first trial plots of the Usambara Scheme in Mlalo were in 1948 well under way and the first march on Vugha had led to Shebughe Magogo’s abdication. The numbers mirror the unrest that had seized Shambaai. Throughout the fourteen months of documentation, the native court of Mlalo was always the court with the highest number of pending appeal cases as well as the highest number of new cases. For example, in March 1948, there were 12 pending appeal cases and 68 new cases, while at all other eleven native courts the number of new cases was lower than 15 (except for the native court of Lushoto with 61 and the native court of Bumbuli with 23 new cases, which is not surprising since both chiefdoms had a strong reputation of deviance.)36
In any case, even if we know about the high number of lost case files, the number of preserved appeals to higher courts litigating land disputes builds on cases originating from the native courts of the Paramount Chief’s appeal court of second instance. Again, this is a point in favor of the case that there was growing dissatisfaction of litigants in native courts when it came to land disputes. Litigants watched the ambiguous role of court-holders in both land allocation and adjudication of land cases with increasing suspicion. As a consequence, many more land disputes found their way into the higher chain of appeal compared to, for instance, disputes that were concerned with matrimonial issues. Another reason for the mismatch might be the fact that there was a more complete keeping of court records in the DC’s appeal court. District officials had to make sure to record their judgments properly in case one of the parties involved decided to appeal to a higher court. While in the 1940s, administrative officials did not always keep the records the way they were supposed to, this changed significantly in the 1950s with administrative officials under closer supervision. The general debate about the connection between record-keeping and impartiality that ensued in the early 1950s was also meant to discipline administrative officers.
On a conceptual note, it is worthwhile noting that record-keeping in native courts was simply not done on a regular basis. Many colonial administrators thought that the reason for poor
36 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.III: Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, Report ya mwezi wa March 1948 rufaa ambazo bado kusikilizwa, 347. 116 record-keeping was that the Shambaa had not yet reached a sufficient state of legal evolution. In British eyes, Shambaa and other Africans had to “catch up” in in order to reach the British ideal by making the progress-drive theory materialize in legal practice.37 But this view is short- sighted. Poor record-keeping is not synonymous with an inability to honor transparency in the name of the principles of natural justice. I would rather argue that the patchy keeping of court- records illuminates the apparent gap between Shambaa and British ideas about how courts should function and what to expect of courts in the first place.
In the view of many Shambaa and other African litigants, native courts, perhaps in contrast to other colonial courts, were not arenas at which individuals sought to enforce final decisions at any cost. Native courts, even if altered through colonial rule, were still firmly located in small- scale politics. Litigants were fully aware that they were not only judged according to the case they had decided to (or been forced to) litigate, but also according to their social standing, the number of supporters they could come up with and the number of networks they managed to access.
In the following section I will analyze patterns and trends of adjudication in land disputes as well as a few exceptional cases. This will finally allow me to draw some conclusions first, about the way litigants used colonial courts and about their rulings, and secondly, about the constraints of access to land in Shambaai from the 1940s to independence.
“There is no Father who Expels His Son and Lets him Die of Hunger” In February 1957, Athumani Mwakole of Kigurunde, who had lost in a land dispute against his paternal uncle, Isaka Hoza, in three instances,38 addressed the Resident Magistrate of Tanga in a letter of complaint.39 Athumani Mwakole accused his uncle of depriving him of his right to a portion of a plot of land owned by his late father. As Shambaa custom has it, after Mwakole’s father’s death, Isaka Hoza, being his father’s younger brother and thus his heir, took the children and wife of his deceased brother under his care, and administered the deceased’s
37 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 40-41. 38 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 11.02.1957, DC to Issak Hoza, Kigulunde c/o Local Court Vuga, Soni. DC’s Appeal Case no 36/56, 123A. 39 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.02.1957, by Mr. Athuman Mwakole c/o Local Court Bazo, to the Registrar, Resident Magistrate, Tanga, 127. 117 wealth until the children were old enough to take care of their inheritance.40 According to Athumani Mwakole, however, Isaka Hoza had abused his position as guardian and had deprived him of his inheritance, a plot of land that was part of the Hoza family land. He was convinced that Isaka Hoza’s claim to the land was illegitimate. The only reason Isaka succeeded with his “fabrication,” Mwakole contended, was that the judges, notorious Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni of Vugha-Bazo, the Paramount and DO Cooke were in fact involved in creating the fictitious charges.41 Mwakole claimed that before the case was heard for the first time, another one of his paternal uncles, Alli Hoza, had already divided and demarcated the plot in question and had allocated Mwakole his fair share. As Mwakole’s story goes, Isaka Hoza’s greed forced him to intervene at this point because he was not satisfied with his brother’s decision. Apparently, Isaka Hoza had promised Alli Hoza a part of the land in question if the latter agreed to testify against Mwakole before the court. The Hoza land dispute was a controversial one and Isaka Hoza was aware that his brothers Benjamin and Singano would support Mwakole’s case. Thus by “buying” Alli Hoza’s testimony, he secured his hegemony over the Hoza family land. Athumani Mwakole showed his exasperation in a letter to the Resident Magistrate:
I do not accept this, [to buy somebody’s] vote is not an instrument or the legal way to decide upon people’s rights to land. And even if this was the way it is done today, it is common knowledge that many rich people were already given the opportunity to bribe the chiefs. [This is the] rich man’s plot to succeed in court even if all he has to say are fabrications.42 Of the five Hoza brothers, three testified for Isaka, and two for Mwakole. Alli Hoza’s “vote” [kura] was bought, and the testimony of Karatasi Hoza, who was Isaka’s most prominent witness, was also questionable. As Athumani Mwakole writes:
Karatasi is the ruler and a great friend of Isaka the plaintiff. Time and again [his] power has been used to deprive the weak of their rights. […] Karatasi’s power would have substantiated the truth of Isaka’s version before the Chief’s appeal court because Karatasi has a voice that is heard louder than mine by the administration. It is not a new thing that Isaka receives Karatasi’s help to snatch away my rights.43 [My emphasis]
40 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.4. 41 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.02.1957, by Mr. Athuman Mwakole c/o Local Court Bazo, to the Registrar, Resident Magistrate, Tanga, 127, p.1. 42 Ibid., 127, p.1. 43 Ibid., 127, p.1. 118 And indeed court elder Karatasi Hoza had a questionable reputation. Some five years earlier, he had been accused of “being unable to dispense justice but for the one who bribes him even if he [the briber] is in the wrong.”44 A number of mission-educated Shambaa, who later became involved with TANU, had asked for his removal from office.45
Athumani Mwakole proved to be creatively provocative when he informed the Resident Magistrate of Tanga that Isaka Hoza in fact employed a very old tradition. In Mwakole’s view, Isaka Hoza was trying to enrich himself and in so doing divided a family. By playing one brother against the other, through taking advantage of old notions of obligation (as in Karatasi Hoza’s case) or through the promise to share the booty (as in Alli Hoza’s case), Isaka Hoza deprived him, the rightful heir, of his inheritance. “This is not a new thing anywhere in the world in this our twentieth-century,” Mwakole went on, “because there are many countries even today which use the [principle] of the old French monarchy that says “divide and rule.”46 His historical reference to the maxim of divide and rule as employed by Napoleon might not have been the best expression to describe Isaka Hoza’s strategy to secure access to the disputed plot. But Mwakole’s appropriation of colonial school curricula was a powerful way to underline his claim of having been treated unjustly. By equating Isaka Hoza and Napoleon, he accused Isaka of creating rivalry among Hoza’s sons and grandsons in order to benefit from their discord. Moreover, his mention of divide and rule politics must also be understood as a hidden criticism of the local and central colonial governments in Tanganyika.
Athumani Mwakole illustrated Isaka Hoza’a state-sanctioned victory by using the image of generational injustice.
From Europe to Asia and America, there is no father who expels his son and lets him die of hunger […] and eventually [forces him to become] a thief.” […] Perhaps even the [colonial] government and the local administration help to render the youngsters into thieves by agreeing that the fathers deprive their sons of their wealth and inheritance […] so they would eventually ruin the reputation of the nation.47
44 TNA/DSM, 72, 43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies Lushoto, 11.03.1952, Mohamedi Yusuf, Benjamin Shempemba, Andrea Shemndolwa, Hezekiel Saul to Kimweri, 106. 45 Ibid., 106. 46 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.02.1957, by Mr. Athuman Mwakole c/o Local Court Bazo, to the Registrar, Resident Magistrate, Tanga, 127, p.1. 47 Ibid., 127, p.1. 119 Mwakole ended his letter commenting on the role of the judges. He wrapped up by writing that the power of the administration had lent itself to serving the agenda of the rich to deprive the poor. Adjudicating a case according to the “votes” of the witnesses is not “legitimate […] when it comes to people’s rights in land, because the nature of this procedure gives the rich the opportunity to oppress the poor because they always bribe their witnesses.”48
Athumani Mwakole’s letter shows both extraordinary eloquence and an understanding of the larger historical context. Certainly the choice of language and his courage are the remarkable elements of his letter. His use of language either demonstrates Mwakole’s education or wits to access a lawyer’s services. I suspect the former because his formulations are not particularly legalistic, but rather show off his ability to use his acquired knowledge of world politics and history as an instrument to criticize the senior elders of his patrilineage, the chiefs and the colonial government. His style was a creative appropriation of the discourse about legitimate rule that occupied Tanganyika’s public sphere at the time by wedding it to historical accounts in order to highlight the generational tensions that characterized late colonial Shambaai. He surely attempted to undergird his claim by appropriating “colonial knowledge” in order to make his “voice heard louder” by the administration.
Mwakole’s concept of justice leant on both Shambaa customary ideas about access to land for everybody and the colonial discourse of corruption and bribery that had gained new currency with the advent of the legal reforms in the early 1950s (see Chapter Four). His testimony was the only one about land disputes that wedded the narrative of impoverishment to broader ideas beyond customary conceptions. We only know Athumani Mwakole from his letter and the case files. There was no direct connection to the chama, and his Muslim name signified that he was not a mission school graduate. His absence from chama-related documents demonstrates that “creative writing” and references to colonial knowledge and “world histories” were not unique to the radical wing of the chama, but a strategy that ordinary people such as Athumani Mwakole or Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo (see Chapter Four) made use of. It was a strategy that could apparently also be applied in cases of the “customary realm” such as land tenure. But we know that Athumani Mwakole’s paternal uncle, plaintiff Isaka Hoza, was one of the fiercest opposition
48 Ibid., 127, p.2. 120 politicians in Shambaai who led the march on Vugha in the 1940s.49 His vision was to abolish chieftaincy altogether and reduce the Kilindi to just another lineage among equals. Despite his politically radical outlook, he still insisted on his privilege as a senior member of his lineage. His egalitarian views only concerned hierarchies among lineages, not within them.
At the same time, Mwakole’s letter also mirrored very ordinary grievances of the time. There were three familiar threads in Mwakole’s letter. First, it demonstrated the growing tendency to litigate with kin. Mwakole’s case was a very typical one as it concerned “family land”. Family land, as opposed to individual land or community land, was the wealth of a family, of a lineage and was usually administered by the most senior male elder.50 Chiefs and headmen had no right whatsoever to determine the heir when it came to inheritance.51 Pressure on the land, cash cropping, the changing notion of property and sheer opportunity brought a wave of family land cases into the state’s courts.52 In the late nineteenth-century the opportunity to litigate with kin before an external body was almost non-existent. Although in cases of kin against kin, one could fall from grace within one’s lineage, there was also much to gain, such as access to land that had been appropriated by senior family members, as in Mwakole’s case.
Secondly, like other litigants who feared severe impoverishment as they lacked access to arable land, Mwakole employed the rhetoric of sharp class and generational distinctions. The sense of the crisis many young men and women of this generation must have felt is expressed in the antagonistic terms of “rich” and “poor”, “mtajiri” and “kibarua”, and in the opposition between a right- and landless son and his oppressive father. Mwakole went as far as denying Isaka Hoza’s role as father, although all of his paternal uncles who appeared as witnesses claimed that Isaka Hoza had treated him like his son as Shambaa custom dictated. Mwakole’s claim that Isaka Hoza had not treated him as a father should would function here as a more general expression of generational injustice. Mwakole probably felt that he had no other choice but to appeal to the Registrar’s sense of justice. He had to turn to external authorities since he had no kin network
49 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 14. 50 Winans, Shambala, 21. 51 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.3; see also Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 30- 32. 52 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 77. 121 on which to rely. Since his father had passed away long ago, he found himself in a very vulnerable position in which his uncles controlled his access to land.
Thirdly, Mwakole’s plea demonstrated the availability of “new tools” for a new generation. Although, as Chanock shows, status questions dominated land law throughout the colonial period,53 I would argue that as a consequence of the law reform of the late 1950s, it became possible to challenge status hierarchies in colonial courts. The new claims were most often expressed in the language of procedural deviations from what the British understood as the universal “principles of natural justice,”54 such as impartiality and “corruption.” Terms such as “buying votes” or “bribing” had found their way into the arguments of ordinary litigants not because litigants were persuaded by their “truth,” but because these terms offered success and official recognition in a situation characterized by the privilege of senior men at the expense of dwindling opportunities for young men and women. However, it is important to note that such expressions were probably only used as a last resort, when appeals to kinship and other possible “owers” of obligations failed. As Mwakole’s case demonstrated, the new rhetoric seemed to have been used by very ordinary people and was not necessarily associated with mission education or other kinds of exposure. On the contrary, it could be appropriated by anybody.
Pressure on the Land and Changing Customs The statistics of land disputes alone demonstrate that by the 1940s, land had become a scare resource in Shambaai. People took pains to create a new or underline an old claim to land. Cash hunger and real hunger permeated rural Shambaai. Another cultivator, Frances Msumari of Bumbuli who had lost his land case in the native court of Bumbuli complained in a letter to the DC, copied to the Agricultural Officer that he had lost his one single plot. “What will my children eat this year?”55 he asked. Msumari furthermore points out that he had followed the scheme rules by building ten bench terraces. He probably had to comply with the scheme rules because of his precarious position of only owning one field that had to feed his family of six, while the many cultivators who ignored or even violated the scheme rules were probably working from a less precarious position. It might be worth speculating that Msumari used the detailed list of his
53 Ibid., 87. 54 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 19, 13. 55 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/21 Native Affairs Legal. Local Court Bumbuli, 25.03.1956, Francis Msumari to DC, 140. 122 accomplishments regarding the scheme rules to win the DC’s sympathy so that he would be able to keep his only plot. In the general climate of hostility against the scheme, Msumari’s preemptive obedience might indeed have been a useful strategy.
The right to access water was an equally important matter. In 1946 the “citizens of Mtae” sued a person on the grounds that he had used the communal plot where there was an underground well source. By doing so he greatly reduced the well’s power and other cultivators’ access to water began to wither away. The citizens of Mtae won and the defendant accepted the verdict. Justifying his action, he explained “It is true I have cultivated the plot and planted fruit trees but the reason was sheer hunger.”56
In another case that received widespread attention, the tax clerk of the native treasury, Ali Mashina, the former Zumbe of Mlalo, sued his tenant, Paulo Sheamuzi, who was cultivating parts of Mashina’s large plot. Mashina had lost his appeal case in the third instance. The judgement of the first instance in the native court of Mlalo by Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi was upheld by both appellate courts. Zumbe Hassani had decided that Ali Mashina could not expect his field to remain unoccupied since he did not cultivate it himself. Although Ali Mashina was one of the district officials’ favorites – after the British had forcefully removed Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi they had installed Ali Mashina as his successor – the DC did not decide the dispute in Ali Mashina’s favor in this case. He argued that Mashina could not sustain his right to the land at a time characterized by land scarcity because he had moved away. Mashina worked as a tax clerk in Lushoto, a place at least a two hour drive from Mlalo, where the contested plot was located.57 We cannot know whether the DC’s judgment against Mashina was influenced by popular sentiment – as shown above, Mlalo’s female cultivators had forced the British to remove Ali Mashina from office – or by his own understanding of the precarious land situation. But what is clear is that it had become the official version of Shambaa customary land law that only people who remained in the area in which their plots were located had the right to keep them. This finding can be proven by many other judgments. Nonetheless it represents a major departure from Shambaa land tenure. Dobson’s survey of Shambaa land law from 1940 holds
56 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1G Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Mtae, 20.01.1946, Case Number 75, 60. 57 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 15.12.1955, Judgment Appeal court KK and DC, 17a. 123 that a man always has the right to claim land he has previously cultivated, even if he has moved away, if it has returned to bush land or if it has been given to somebody else.58 The new version of land ownership custom according to which Ali Mashina was judged is explained in a 1956 judgment: “If a person has the right to own a piece of land, his children have the right to inherit it from him. The owner of the plot cannot be deprived of it [by the native authorities] if he does not cultivate it unless he has moved away from his kitara for good in which case the land goes back under the authority of the headman of the neighborhood.”59 Clearly the pressing land scarcity triggered this change in land tenure.
Pasture land had become another bone of contention. As stall feeding was imposed on the Shambaa as part of the soil conservation rules, it became possible for tenants to sue their landlords for grazing their cattle on the fields the tenants cultivated. It was customary practice in Shambaai that in addition to land officially marked as pasture, herdsmen could use any uncultivated plot as well as cultivated plots after the harvesting period to graze their cattle. In one case a herdsman’s negligence was the cause for the damage of another person’s crops, the former had to pay damages. 60 As I showed in the previous chapter, despite the stall-feeding order, many cattle owners still allowed their cattle to graze on fields. This was an opportunity for poor, precarious or simply witty cultivators to give more formality to their claims in land as they sued herdsmen for damage through grazing, especially if their tenancy was not permanent. Even if the individuals that sued for grazing did not own the field and the plot in question was another person’s or the community’s property, many Shambaa plaintiffs considered a lawsuit about grazing as a potentially useful precondition for a subsequent lawsuit concerning the proprietary rights to the same plot. People whose economic activities depended on cattle rather than agricultural production found themselves increasingly under pressure, as a series of cases from the Mlalo chiefdom show.61
In general, disputes often erupted when one side was vulnerable, often due to severe illness or a death in the family. A case in point was a land dispute in Shashui in 1956 among three
58 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.4-5. 59 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 21.11.1956, Judgment, 107. 60 Attems, Bauernbetriebe in tropischen Höhenlagen Ostafrikas, 32. 61 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1E: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Mlalo. 23.10.1941, Ali Mashina to Asst. DO, 63. 124 brothers which arose when their “father” Shekimweri was on his deathbed. It turned out that Shekimweri was not their biological father, but their maternal uncle who had been acting as their legal custodian after their father’s death. A few years prior, Shekimweri had sold a piece of his own land to the three brothers so that they could build a future. With their father on his deathbed, one of three sons claimed that he had bought the land for himself alone and that he had paid for it alone, too. As the case file reveals, this happened at a time when Shekimweri was too sick to explain himself, but other witnesses expressed on his behalf that he had given the land equally to all three sons and all of them had paid their share.62 This example shows that the tendency to wait for possible vulnerable moments before attempting to re-open an old case determines an individual’s decision to litigate rather than considering the procedural rules. Waiting for the right moment to litigate, especially if it comes to litigating with kin, is one aspect of what Moore calls the “durability of claims in a delayed-exchange economy.”63 Precisely because family interests in land were multigenerational, it was so often impossible to render final judgments, let alone actually enforce court decisions.64
In the context of pressure on the land, of course, the trend to re-open disputes can also be observed when it comes to land transactions in which only parts of the payment have changed hands, even if the transaction happened two generations prior.65 If land cases were not witnessed by elders, they could be faked. In the case of Salimu Ali and Mohamed Kijazi, the latter contended that he had purchased land from the former for 30 Shillings, while the former pleaded that he had not entered into a land transaction but had only borrowed money from the latter.66 Because Salimu Ali had no witnesses for the alleged transaction, his appeal to the Central Court of Appeal was dismissed by the PC and the plot remained in Mohamed Kijazi’s possession.67
62 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.10.1956, Judgment, 91a. 63 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 44. 64 Berry, No condition is permanent, 119. 65 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 23.05.1956, 50a 66 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 08.08.1956, 70. 67 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 20.10.1956, PC to Ali Salimu, 86. 125 “Mzitui Havina Ghisa”: Community Land and the Role of Chiefs and Headmen Cases that involved headmen or chiefs were naturally sensitive. In Shambaai, too, headmen took advantage of their official role. As the opening case in this chapter demonstrated, the impartiality of court holders was in question. They were in charge of land allotments, and controlled the courts of first and second instance, the very sites at which cultivators tried to assert their right to land. The court reforms of the 1950s were an attempt to curtail the ability of chiefs to exert both executive and judicial functions, although the reforms did not completely eliminate that practice. Being aware of the powerful language of the reforms, litigants increasingly sought to bring this contradiction into the spotlight. Perhaps the greatest emerging tension was the one between community and private land.
There were three different types of land in Shambaa custom that were associated with different forms of land tenure: community, family and individual land. Community land could always be distributed to landless individuals or newcomers and it was administered by headmen and chiefs.68 It is clear that a certain tension resulted from the fact that chiefs occupied the double role of administering and allocating land on the one hand and adjudicating disputes in the native courts (many of which were concerned with land )on the other. The role of chiefs and headmen changed dramatically with the advent of colonial rule. In the late nineteenth-century chiefs were only involved in the adjudication of cases between different lineages, never among members of the same lineage.69 As mentioned above, the allocation of land by chiefs and headmen also had largely colonial origins; because land used to be ample in previous times, it was more freely available and was controlled by lineage heads. Taking into account that the judicial and administrative role of chiefs had become more inclusive under colonial rule, it is not difficult to imagine that court judgments that concerned inheritance cases with respect to land favored those litigants who were best prepared to reward the judge. This can be proven by a passage from Dobson’s survey on Shambaa land tenure from 1940 which says that “it is customary for a man inheriting land to make a present of a small shamba to the elders. This is
68 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.1. 69 Winans, Shambala, 51. 126 not considered necessary if the land is obviously only enough for himself, and he may make a present of a goat instead.”70
As a consequence, land that was formerly known as community land became contested under the pressure on the land. In a very early case in 1941, Salehe Shemalamba sued Sheshe Shemlughu in the native court of Mtae on the charge that the latter had taken away his land. Shemalamba won the case. Shemlughu then applied for leave to appeal to the Paramount’s Appeal Court at Vugha, which he won with ease. In the judgment Paramount Shebughe argued that tenants of community land who decide to leave their plot have no right to claim it back if another person in need is using it. Here Shebughe referred to the principle of community land, in Shambaa mzitui havina ghisa, which translates as “bush land does not know plot allotments.”71 However, the boundaries between community land and family land were fluid, of course. As cultivators passed on their right to their share of community land to their offspring, community land could slowly grow into family land.72 Accordingly, Salehe Shemalamba claimed his right to the plot in question on the grounds that his father had cleared the bush and had opened the plot for cultivation in the first place. Firmly grounded in the English common law tradition, Shebughe Magogo dismissed Shemalamba’s claim based on the judgment of another case in which apparently another person had attempted to sell community land for cash but the court had reversed the land sale.73 It was hardly a rare incident that somebody tried to initiate a cash sale of community land or claimed usufructuary rights to a community plot.74 Yet in Shebughe’s view, the Shemalamba case was more than that. As so often when the stakes were high, the chief framed the case as a “political case” and dubbed Salehe Shemalamba as a “bad
70 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.4. 71 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 17.01.1942, Judgment Shebughe, 200. 72 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.1. 73 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 17.01.1942, Judgment Shebughe, 200. 74 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga-Bazo, 27.08.1954, Hemedig Mbughuni to DC, 350; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 04.08.1956, DC to Juma Kanyawana, 69+69a; ibid., DC to Kibindo Shemdoe, 08.12.1956, 101. 127 citizen” [si mraia mwema]75 who threatened the social order. In a letter to the Assistant DO he wrote:
This Salehe Shemalamba is a man who does not want to live in the country respectfully in tranquility and order and to follow the ways of the country and its rules and principles that have been in place since the olden times. He is the one who wants to break the unity of the country that has been agreed upon by all people in order to avoid pollution.76 The reason Shebughe Magogo got so agitated probably was not because Shemalamba had claimed land that was reserved for the poorest section of society, but rather because he was less concerned with guaranteeing his poorest subjects access to community land, than with retaining control of the community land itself. If community land turned into family land, chiefs would no longer be able to control its allocation – and would lose their customary gifts and, worse, their political power. I contend that is the reason why the Shebughe opted to turn the case into a “political case.” The Paramount worried that Shemalamba’s case could work as a precedence, particularly because Shemalamba had stated that the original owners of the 30 surrounding plots were waiting for the decision of the courts: they were ready to claim back the land their fathers had carved out of the bush but which was now used by other tenants. Shebughe’s strategy of rendering the case “political” and turning Shemalamba into a threat for the social order demonstrates how closely the land question was associated with social order. Although Shemalamba’s plaint was one of the many land disputes that had swamped Shambaai’s native courts since the 1940s, it was one of the few cases in which litigants tried to challenge a chief’s power over land allocation directly. When a similar case appeared eight years later in 1950, the litigant was again cast as a threat to social order, only this time then Kimweri Mputa Magogo immediately associated the “political troublemaker” with the chama and the unrest that had befallen Shambaai in the few years prior. The case was first heard by the native court of Vugha-Bazo and then in the Paramount’s appeal court at Vugha, which, according to DC Macmillan “was awkward as its members [were] roughly the same as these of the Kitara who, although represented by an elder, are an obvious party to the case.”77 Although Macmillan
75 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 13.11.1941, Shebughe to Assistant DO, 186. 76 Ibid., 186. 77 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 07.10.1950, Judgment DC’s Appeal Court, DC to Juma Kalata, 38, p.1. 128 realized the unfortunate composition of the appeal court’s bench at Vugha, his own appeal court upheld the previous judgment. The DC had bought into the “political” aspect of the case. His judgement reads: “Usambara has lately been troubled with political disaffection. The political troublemakers are well known but, provided no overt act of subversion is proved against them, they are free to pursue their devious intrigues. Appellant is known to belong to the faction.”78 It is unclear from the case file whether the “troublemaker,” Juma Kalata whose name does not appear in other chama-related sources, is being made the scapegoat for his political leanings (or for any personal or other reasons), or, given he had alleged political leanings, if they were actually his motivation for initiating the lawsuit. Whatever the case, Juma Kalata protested the DC’s decision. In the same year, 1950, he contacted the British liberal parliamentarian, Fenner Brockway, who was known to be sympathetic to African petitioners and who had been contacted by Africans from all over the British African Empire.79 This was, however, not a case Brockway chose to support. Two years later, in October 1952, the Member for Local Government informed Juma Kalata that Brockway did not see legal procedure violated in his case and had decided not to interfere.80 Juma Kalata’s case did not have the potential to threaten British rule. It was simply one of the many land cases which were seen as tied to custom and outside British interest. So even Fenner Brockway dismissed it.
Shemalamba’s and Juma Kalata’s cases demonstrate the importance chiefs associated with their rather new right to control and allocate land. That they wanted to control land transactions was rarely due to altruistic reasons, even if the Shebughe had used the “landless poor” to support his argument. As many cases show, chiefs and headmen often misused their office and sold community land for cash. In one such case, which occurred as early as 1914, the headman of Mponde, Kimweri Kibanga, sold fourteen plots of community land. As a result of his misuse of office he was removed by the British, and was obliged to compensate the aggrieved parties. The land was returned to the native authorities. In a letter dating from 1955, chama activist Petro Shemndolwa from Mponde, using a Vugha Mission Press letter-head, reminds the DC of the events of 1914 because similar cases were mushrooming. He writes “the people of Mponde
78 Ibid., 38, p.1. 79 Derek R. Peterson, “Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa”, 2. 80 TNA\DMS, 72, 45/4 Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 17.10.1952, Member for Local Government to Juma Kalata, 386. 129 know that the community fields of Mponde were recovered by the treasury of Usambara. Why is there another big man today who eats this same wealth?”81
Smaller incidents of this kind occurred as the example of headman Shekimweri Shedafa shows. He refused to return the plot he was given for the duration of his tenure in office. Each headman, as well as other court councilors at the chief’s court, received a plot to use during the time in office. The plot would be given to their successor or be restored as community land after their tenure.82 After headman Shekimweri Shedafa had served his tenure in office, he attempted to claim that the plot he had received in office was his private land. But he lost in the DC’s appeal court.83 In a similar case in 1943 in Mlalo, 200 people watched the judge’s decision- making process as he visited the plot in question to get a clearer idea of the land demarcation process.84 Such cases were not rarities,85 especially not in the Shita neighborhood of Mlalo where major confusion prevailed over rights to land which had been part of the official trial plots after the abandonment of the scheme in 1957. Individuals tried to claim the former trial plots, but the court ruled in favor of community land.86 As the wealth of cases that concerned either the sale of community land by some representative of the native authorities or the tensions between family and community claims to land shows, the boundary between community and individual land had become increasingly contested.
Family, Generation and Women’s Rights to Inherit Pressure on the land and changing proprietary rights in land had consequences for the concept of the family. Fathers tried to bequeath their land on their sons and even challenged the rights of their nephews to family land as the opening dispute of this chapter showed. Because access to land had become scarce and possibilities for younger sons and young men in general shrank, people tried to narrow their obligations by concentrating property and inheritance within the
81 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 04.05.1955, Petro Shemndolwa to PC, 39. 82 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.3. 83 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 11.06.1941, DC to Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi, 166. 84 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1E: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Mlalo, 25.03.1943, Ali Mashina to Asst. DO, 82. 85 Ibid., 19.07.1943, DO to Ali Mashina, 97. 86 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts 01.03.1957, DC to Amiri Mdoe, 128A. 130 conjugal family.87 The prevailing concept of the family as a large patrilineage that was not necessarily tied by blood links came into question.
In an instructive 1956 case, two men disputed a family plot of the Dulazi family. The plaintiff challenged the defendant’s right to the land by attempting to show that the defendant was not a legitimate son of the Dulazi family. In the meticulously described case file, two full pedigrees of the Dulazi family over five generations appear. As the story goes, the plaintiff tried to cut the defendant out of his right to Dulazi family land on the grounds that the defendant was the grandson of a man that had been accepted as a member of the Dulazi family “out of mercy” (huruma) by the plaintiff’s grandfather.88 The records do not mention the reason for adopting the man who must have been a child at that point, but it is likely that he was either the son of deceased kin or the offspring of a family related through blood brotherhood. The defendant rejected the plaintiff’s view and stated that he and the plaintiff were in fact blood kin. The DC decided in favor of the defendant and based his judgment on the accounts of the three oldest surviving members of the Dulazi family. All of them rejected the plaintiff’s version, whose witnesses were all men of his generation. Despite the fact that the plaintiff lost his case and the defendant was accepted as a “real” member of the Dulazi family, the case reveals that it was the younger generation that was most affected by land scarcity. In the case of the Dulazi family, one of the young men was ready to ruin a cousin’s family reputation in order to get access to his land. Whether the plaintiff’s story was fabricated or based on facts is not important. The most important thing to learn is that the new urgency of proving one’s blood relation in conflicts about land could turn brothers and cousins into enemies. While the senior members of the Dulazi family who appeared as witnesses were ready to embrace the defendant as a full member of the Dulazi family – they had nothing to lose anyway – the younger generation tried desperately to refuse the defendant’s right to the Dulazi land.
Another land dispute in the same year supports this finding. In this case, the bone of contention was the child of a former union that a junior wife brought with her into her new marriage. Her husband had allocated her a plot for cultivation, and she had given it to her son from the
87 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 86. 88 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 06.09.1956, DC to Salehe Dulazi, 80, p.1. 131 previous union. At this point one of the husband’s children born to his senior wife disputed the right of the junior wife’s child to the land. The plaintiff argued that the defendant was not his brother in blood for he had another father. In this matter, the DC decided in favor of the plaintiff and the defendant lost his right to cultivate the land.89 Whereas members of previous generations could allow themselves to deal lightly with such matters since land was ample, the younger generation now jealously protected their rights in land from external intrusions. The old concept of the patrilineage slowly gave way to the concept of the nuclear family based on biological blood ties. Children from a previous union a wife brought into a marriage were no longer absorbed into the household economy when it came to rights in land and inheritance.
Another aspect that stirred families up in the context of pressure on the land was linked to the right of women to inherit the plots of their fathers. I argue that women’s absence in official land disputes meant that women probably did not think of courts as promising arenas for their land- related grievances (as opposed to matrimonial cases). It is plain in the court records that women only very rarely appeared in courts as plaintiffs in land disputes. Women’s rights to land were often contested in court by the sons of their brothers.90 Additionally, women were often sidelined in decisions about selling family land.91 Their dissatisfaction can be demonstrated by one of the rare examples in which a woman appeared as a plaintiff in a land dispute. In 1955, Makiduma Kiduma of Vugha-Bazo initiated a dispute over a piece of land with one of the functionaries of the native court of Lushoto, Mdoe Selemani Mbelwa. In his judgment, the court-holder of the native court of Vugha-Bazo divided the plot in two, and the Paramount upheld the ruling in his appeal court. The only remnant of Makiduma Kiduma’s case – court records are lost – is a letter by the Paramount to the DC in which the former warned the latter that Kiduma might address him personally about the issue. Kimweri also mentioned that Kiduma
89 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 08.12.1956, DC to Kibindo Shemdoe, 101. 90 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 13.01.1940, Judgment Appeal’s Court Vugha, 151. 91 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 05.02.1954, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Mussa Mzimbili, without number; Ibid., 24.02.1956, DC to Salehe Dulazi and Bibi Machambo Dulazi, 14a. 132 had refused to ask for leave to appeal to the DC’s court, but had called on him twice to express her dissatisfaction with the judgment.92
Although we do not know the details, Makiduma Kiduma’s case suggests that she did not have much trust in the colonial courts because she refused to make use of the appeal chain. (The only other reason would be that she was unable to pay the fees). Instead, she tried to convince Kimweri of the urgency of her case through two personal visits, perhaps appealing to his sense of obligation. Kimweri Mputa Magogo was apparently worried that Kiduma might extend her visit to the DC although she had refused to appeal at his court. At first glance, Makiduma Kiduma’s actions seem contradictory. Why would she first refuse to appeal at the DC’s appeal court, but then leave the impression with the Paramount Chief that she was ready to visit the DC’s office and personally convey her grievance? On second thought, however, Kiduma’s behavior appears quite rational. It is not surprising that she lost against one of the court elders in the native court of Lushoto, but it probably added to her mistrust of the procedure. By appealing to the older notion of the obligation a patron might feel towards a dependent, she chose to sort her case out on the old terms by paying informal visits, first to the Paramount Chief, and perhaps later to the DC. Kiduma’s case is indicative of female dissatisfaction with the decisions senior court elders arrived at when they adjudicated land cases between other court elders and less powerful litigants, such as women or landless junior men. Widows or women without children were most vulnerable as they most often lacked a male supporter.
The right of daughters to inheritance and to inherit land in particular was part of Shambaa customary law.93 This rule can be observed at work in the few inheritance cases in which women won their land disputes and reference was made to their customary rights to inheritance.94 However, as the pressure on the land grew, this very right began to be contested. When, in the mid-1940s, a woman called Elizeba attempted to “redeem” one of her father’s fields in the native court of Mombo, a debate about female inheritance ensued. The DC had
92 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Court Vuga-Bazo, 04.05.55, Simbamwene to DC, 437. 93 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.4. 94 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol. IV. Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions, Native Courts, 18.03.1953, DC to Julia Mkufya and Hamza Mwangalume, 409a + 409b; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 05.02.1954, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Mussa Mzimbili, without number; Ibid., 08.02.1957, PC to DC, 124; Ibid., 25.10.1956, DC to Mamdoe Ngeo, without number. 133 initiated the debate as Elizeba’s case arose in the native court by asking for the opinion of all the chiefs of the Lushoto and Korogwe division on the issue.95 In this case, the plaintiff, Elizeba, argued on the grounds of Shambaa custom that as a daughter, she had the right to redeem her father’s plot in case her male siblings wanted to sell it. In that specific case, Elizeba’s father, Shembago, had died ten years earlier in the mid-1930s, leaving behind five children, two daughters and three sons. Two of the sons had moved away to Vugha, and Elizeba’s sister had also left their home town of Mombo. The third brother, Ali, had remained in the vicinity of Mombo. Before the oldest son, Tobia, left for Vugha, he placed the plot in question in Ali’s hands so that Ali would take care of it in the absence of his older brothers. But since Ali refused to take care of the plot, it was given to their sister Elizeba. At that point, after a period of ten years, Ali tried to sell the plot to another person (not kin) without consulting his sister who had worked and maintained the plot for the previous ten years. Thus Elizeba sued him.
The DC was certain that Elizeba could not have inherited the field – a contradiction to Dobson’s notes in the district book quoted above – but pondered the question as to whether Elizeba had the right to redeem the plot. It was in these circumstances that he asked for the chiefs’ clarification on Elizeba’s case in particular and the customary law of inheritance in general. He sent the letter to all native courts in the Lushoto and Korogwe division, asked for comments and mentioned that the topic should be discussed during the next all-chiefs meeting. He also enclosed a letter by Zumbe Raphael of Mombo, in which the latter maintained the general right of women to inherit upon a father’s death according to Shambaa custom, and the right of a woman to bequeath her wealth upon her children or brothers (instead of “losing” it to her husband’s kin). In this particular case, however, Zumbe Raphael suggested that Elizeba “redeemed” her father’s plot for cash payment.96 In Shambaa inheritance law, however, there was the option for Elizeba to simply receive the plot she had cultivated for ten years without any payment as part of her inheritance from her father. But Zumbe Raphael chose to ignore this option.
95 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4 Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 29.05.1946, DC to all Zumbe, 311. 96 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4 Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 29.05.1946, Raphael Salim to DC, 311A. 134 As noted by Dobson five years earlier, inheritance in Shambaa society does not recognize sons and daughters equally, and neither are children of the same gender bequeathed upon equally. The father appoints one of his sons, usually the oldest, who is then in charge of dividing everything among the children. Daughters were also entitled to inherit land, although they usually got a much smaller portion. They lost their rights to inherited plots when they moved away through marriage, but those who married in the locality retained their share.97 Zumbe Raphael’s suggestion that Elizeba should get the right to “redeem” the plot was already a crippled version of her rights according to Dobson’s notes. Yet the only other response to the DC’s request to solve her case suggested an even more conservative ruling. Unfortunately, the sender did not sign the document, so the question as to his identity (surely a man!) is unclear. The letter challenges Zumbe Raphael’s interpretation by denying both Elizeba’s right to redeem and to inherit the plot (“the way we know Shambaa custom, a woman does not inherit a thing.”98 He tried to explain away Zumbe Raphael’s misinterpretation by stating that he might have confused Shambaa custom with Islamic law.99
The correspondence is instructive for several reasons. It not only highlights once more the pressure on the land, but that the means to gain access to land had become more aggressive. It also demonstrates that women were the losers of the new equation when it came to land disputes. In a situation in which men were privileged by the colonial state through migrant labor arrangements and rewards for cash cropping, senior men, and certainly not only Kilindi, were encouraged to pass a version of custom that clashed with older views. The existence of several competing versions of custom at the same time confirms Chanock’s thesis of the connection between the creation of customary law and male privilege.100 Clearly in Shambaai, the courts were a male space. As the example of Elizeba’s plaint demonstrates, district officials were ready to endorse new versions of custom if it suited their agenda. Although the DC must have been aware of Dobson’s survey of Shambaa land tenure and inheritance, he succumbed to the
97 RHL, Lushoto District Book, Extract from “Land Tenure of the Wasambaa” by E.B. Dobson in Tanganyika Notes and Records No.10, December, 1940, p.3-4. 98 The Swahili wording is “sisi tujuavyo sheria ya kisambaa, mwanamke hapati urathi wowote”, in: TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4 Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, undated, Juu ya barua ya Zumbe wa Mombo kufahamisha juu ya urathi wa kisambaa, 318, p.1. 99 Ibid., 318, p.2. 100 Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 239. 135 pressure male elders probably asserted and invited fresh opinions on women’s rights to inherit land. Zumbe Raphael’s suggestion, Dobson’s survey, and the anonymous version all co-existed. Nevertheless, as the court decisions in other cases of the time show, women’s rights to inherit land were in fact sometimes upheld in colonial courts.101 These, however, only appear from the early 1950s onwards. It might be worth speculating, however, that male pressure was the reason why so few women appeared in colonial courts when it came to the question of inheritance. It is very likely that they found other (extra-legal) ways to secure their access to land, such as converting their rights in land into their sons’ names.
Ethnic Tensions Not only had the concept of the family narrowed under the economic pressure, but land pressure also fostered emerging tensions between long-established immigrant groups and the literal “sons of the soil.” As Sara Berry has noted, increased demand for land sharpened distinctions between “locals” and “strangers.”102 In Shambaai, land disputes that involved claims to land by “immigrants” were cases that drew an enormous number of spectators. It was customary for the judge, a Zumbe or DC, and his assessors to inspect the disputed plot and demarcat its boundaries, thereby interviewing the neighboring cultivators as potential witnesses. These official visits to the plots, as opposed to an official court hearing, could produce a large number of interested bystanders who were keen on knowing the outcome of the case for a myriad of reasons. A 1956 land dispute between Amiri Shembula and Shelukindo in Mwangoi in the chiefdom of Mlalo was such a case. Plaintiff Shelukindo claimed a plot of land that was cultivated by defendant Amiri Shembula, the descendant of a Mbugu immigrant family who had cultivated the plot for about two generations. Amiri Shembula claimed that his family was given the plot by the local Shambaa lineage of Lwandai who were the first family to cultivate there. Shelukindo, on the other hand, claimed that his paternal Shambaa grandfather was the first person to cultivate the contested piece of land. Interestingly, both appeal courts, under the Paramount and under DO Cooke, decided in favor of Shembula the Mbugu immigrant,
101 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol. IV. Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions, Native Courts, 18.03.1953, DC to Julia Mkufya and Hamza Mwangalume, 409a + 409b; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 05.02.1954, DC to Zumbe Mkuu Mussa Mzimbili, without number; Ibid., 08.02.1957, PC to DC, 124; Ibid., 25.10.1956, DC to Mamdoe Ngeo, without number. 102 Berry, No condition is permanent, 111. 136 whose version of events was supported by the elders of the Lwandai family who prided themselves on being the first owners of the land.103 Small wonder the case had many spectators. In the contemporary context in which economic tensions were increasingly expressed along ethnic lines and had made the call by radical Shambaa commoners to end illegitimate Kilindi rule possible, the discussion about who was a “real” native of the soil and who was not was at the core of disputes about land allocation, customary tenure and political power. The most amazing finding is that in this particular case, the question of who came first overruled ethnicity. While the plaintiff Shelukindo was persuaded that his Shambaa origins would be enough to win the case, the elders decided in favor of Shembula, who was an immigrant alright, but whose claims to the land were at least one generation older than Shelukindo’s.
Conclusions In the case of Shambaai, land disputes can give insight into the changing concept of family as well as into generational, gender and ethnic tensions. As this chapter has shown, land cases reveal much more than the rather obvious fact of land shortage, if we look at what litigants had to lose and not only at what was or was not perceived as customary. Land disputes are a fruitful foundation from which one can attempt to understand class privileges and the tensions that stemmed from them. This conflict, which largely played out between privileged senior men such as headmen and chiefs and less privileged junior men and women, has been portrayed through the example of the increasingly contested notion of community land. Both access to community land and disputes arising from the specific tenure of community land – in contrast to the inheritance of community land that was associated with other forms of land tenure – were at the core of the conflict. Additionally, the role of chiefs and headmen had been dramatically altered with the advent of colonial rule and particularly with the British politics of indirect rule. The influence of chiefs grew enormously when it came to land tenure, allocation and adjudication. This frequently resulted in their taking advantage of their double function. The enormous peak of appeal cases to administrative officials’ appeal courts, which were concerned with land disputes, demonstrates the growing mistrust of ordinary litigants when it came to the decisions regarding land handed down in native courts.
103 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 21.08.1956, 79. 137 Due to the land scarcity and the cash hunger that had begun to permeate rural Shambaai, land came to be seen as capital that could easily be converted into cash, or whose produce could, if land was used for cash cropping. Although the Local Courts Adviser maintained in 1954 that “only in exceptional cases do the occupiers of land in any particular area have anything more than a usufructuary right,”104 the reality looked different. Land sales for cash were daily fare. In order to participate in the webs of cash flow, many cultivators found it advisable to concentrate property in the hands of the conjugal family instead of the patrilineage. The former was protected by the colonial state, and as generational jealousy began to take over, the family concept began to narrow along biological blood lines. Accordingly, litigation among kin became a common feature. The discussion about the rights of women to redeem their fathers’ inheritance must be understood in this light. Women had realized that the colonial state’s system, which was predicated on male migrant labor, had curtailed their economic independence significantly. As Margot Lovett argues, “women’s experiences of “peasantization” were categorized by their relegation to subsistence farming, the appropriation by men of their labor and their loss of control over the products thereof, and by their increasingly uncertain access to land.”105 In the case of Shambaai, however, women were able to press for their customary right to access land, although evidence of the court records shows that female claims to land were rare, and when they appeared they were often contested. Nevertheless, competing versions of custom, when it came to women’s inheritance, circulated at the same time, and a change in custom regarding rights to land for people who moved away also appeared as a consequence of the pressure on the land.
The case of Shambaai confirms Chanock’s finding about the growing role of chiefs at the expense of young men and women and the tendency to accumulate wealth in the conjugal family. However, the relegation of women when it came to inheriting land did not work as smoothly as in other places. Although most chiefs and headmen in Shambaai did in fact attempt to exclude women from land transactions, they never succeeded completely. Because Tanganyika’s public sphere was shaped by a number of Swahili speaking newspapers that were also accessible in rural areas and because of debates evolving around mission centers, litigants
104 TNA DSM, 72, 45/1 Vol. IV: Native Courts General, 18.08.1954, Report by the local courts adviser, 350A, p.2. 105 Margot Lovett, “Gender Relations, Class Formation, and the Colonial State in Africa”, 40. 138 could draw from languages they had learned there. Both the Mwakole case, in which a junior man pressed for access to land against his prestigious and wealthy paternal uncle, and Elizeba’s case, which brought the debate about inheritance of land by women into the spotlight, show that the discussion about access to land was one in which women and young men could and did interfere. The fact that litigants were ready to pay for court fees and travel arrangements to different localities to access higher appeal courts, sometimes climbing the appeal chain until they reached the final Governor’s Appeal Court or later the Central High Court, demonstrate the perseverance of the people making those claims. These appeals mostly came from young men who were conversant in the language of rights. Colonial courts were not places where only senior men could win. As the Mwakole case suggests, they were also used to contest the very privileges they tried to enforce. Although these attempts were not necessarily crowned with success, they nevertheless opened a new way of arguing. Both the native courts and the higher courts in Shambaai were busy places at which Shambaa and other African litigants made use of surprisingly creative language. Certainly they chose their language of use according to the forum they had opted for, using different registers and repertoires at different courts. Registers alluding to notions of obligation and honor were reserved for native authorities, although cases like that of Makiduma Kiduma, who attempted to absorb the DC into her local web of patronage, suggest that these lines could be blurred. In the next chapter I shall delve deeper into the narratives used by litigants when they tried to persuade their judges of the truth and worthiness of their plea. I will attempt to unravel narrative strategies and their intellectual roots which have informed Shambaa and other African litigants as well as so-called “bush-lawyers.”
139 CHAPTER FOUR The Language of Corruption in Shambaa Native Courts
So far I have argued that as a result of the Usambara Scheme both land and labor grew scarce, a fact that led to increased litigation, changes in customary land tenure and inheritance practices as well as generational, gender, class and ethnic tensions. Most often, frustrated cultivators sought judgments from native courts as a way to express their dissatisfaction, yet many of them were frustrated with the court rulings. Not all of their complaints had to do with the Usambara Scheme. On the contrary, it seemed that the unwelcome scheme had opened a Pandora’s box of complaints. Other grievances were being voiced, most notably regarding the dubious behavior of court and council personnel.
In a 1946 petition to the Governor of Tanganyika, Zumbe Raphael of Mombo was accused by his subjects of abusing his position as court-holder of the designated native court of Mombo. His removal from office remained one of the major disputes throughout the decade. The Paramount Chief Kimweri Mputa Magogo eventually, though very reluctantly, acquiesced. In a series of elaborate letters, the petition-writers compiled Zumbe Raphael’s alleged offences from 1945 to 1946 in detailed precision using a fairly moralistic tone. The bottom line was that Zumbe Raphael’s subjects perceived his general performance as court-holder as an abuse of office, and they thought of him as a person corrupted by favoritism. Appeals from his court lay technically with the Paramount Chief’s court at Vugha, but instead of accepting the regular appeal chain, the letter-writers complained that Zumbe Raphael simply incarcerated the most tenacious plaintiffs. His sentences were arbitrary, as were the degrees of penalty he imposed, especially the unjustified heavy court fines. “Are appeals no more granted under British King?”1 the petitioners asked. Furthermore, he and Zumbe Rajabu protected tax criminals, thus depriving the native authorities of their rightful tax revenue by exempting kin or political allies from annual tax payments. His protection of tax criminals and his disrespect towards the weak and elderly, the petitioners argued, signified his departure from Shambaa custom. Apparently he had arrested old respectable citizens and kept them in lock-up overnight because they had
1 TNA\DSM, 31207: Local Government. Native Chiefs: Usambara District, Tanga Province, 5B. 140 refused to join in the so-called “communal labor,” a euphemism for unpaid forced labor under the new scheme rules. He even neglected his duty to look after impoverished citizens without family, one of whom had died from his injuries caused by a fire. Curiously, Zumbe Raphael was also accused of mixing medicine as a protection from locust invasion. During the three special days of mixing, his subjects were forbidden to attend to their fields. This struck the petitioners not only as ignorant and backward, but also as very impractical in the month of January, a labor- intensive cultivation month. Lastly, Zumbe Raphael was accused of offering illegally tapped coconut liquor to the DC and other officials as a way of “obtaining” his vending license. The letters ended with a plea: “We beg you to look into this issue. Everybody says the government only loves money, not its citizens. Even about you, head of the government, people say that you do not care for the citizens.”2
As the list of the Zumbe’s alleged offenses shows, the petitioners tried by all means availabe to present their claims using language that would resonate with their colonial administrators. “Native superstitions” as in “backward” medicine-making as well the general uncompromising stance against corruption and abuse of office were chief concerns of British colonial policy- makers, especially after the German experiment with direct rule that had, according to Lushoto’s DC, led to “mal-administration of justice, bribery and corruption.”3 Yet despite the British efforts to improve the German-inherited practice, when it came to abuse of office, the role of British officers was ambiguous. The DC, instead of reporting Zumbe Raphael to the police for his illegal activities, had apparently accepted the “favor” and had become a beneficiary of Zumbe Raphael’s liquor business. By addressing the highest British official in Tanganyika, Governor Battershill, and accusing him directly of neglecting his subjects, the petitioners were not only courageous enough to complain about the DC’s association with Zumbe Raphael’s dubious actions, they actually transferred the accusation onto the British administration. The letters not only contained complaints about local staff and irregularities in the appeal chain, but can also be understood as criticism of British officials themselves, notably that administrative officers up to the Governor could be held responsible for the malpractice of “their” local staff.
2 TNA\DSM, 31207: Local Government. Native Chiefs: Usambara District, Tanga Province, 5A, 5B. 3 TNA\DSM, AB 288, Administrative Officer, Lushoto to the Registrar, H.M.’s High Court, 04.04.1923, 2, p.2. 141 After all, the final appellate jurisdiction in the appeal chain of native courts lay with the Governor.
The letters point to a vast discrepancy between the colonial state’s rhetoric regarding corruption and its actual bureaucratic practice. The references to the Zumbe’s medicine-making as well as the pronounced distaste for corruption were probably meant to sound valid, particularly for British ears. On the one hand, British distaste for corruption and the ideal of a responsible and rule-abiding bureaucratic administration clashed with the lack of trained jurists, complicity with local rulers and personal greed and on the other, it clashed with hubris on the part of a number of British administrative officials. The letters also symbolize the appropriation of colonial discourse by local actors, a practice we are already aware of from the description of petitioners in Chapter One. The language the letter-writers used this time to validate their claims for a broader audience was the language of corruption they had learned from the British administrators. The choice of language can be read as the attempt of peasant litigants to find wording that would catch the attention of their officials.
In this chapter I hope to show that the performance of administrative officials in their appellate function was characterized by their ambiguous opinion about the Bench. Not being trained lawyers, they experienced considerable uncertainty about legal procedure and how to navigate it. In addition, their strong identification with the politics of indirect rule sometimes even gave way to contempt for jurists who stubbornly stuck to the rules at the expense of a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and customary context. I do not imply that administrative officials structurally ignored judicial procedure on purpose (although a few cases point in that direction), but that their lack of judicial training as well as their ideological emphasis on “tribal custom” influenced their decisions to a large extent. Although most administrative officials took their judicial responsibilities seriously, the risk of falling prey to the temptation inherent in their position, which combined judicial and executive functions, was real. Most of those “vices of form” were probably the result of officers feeling lost in the jurisdiction’s procedural jungle. I shall argue that the frequent procedural uncertainty and mistakes led African litigants to perceive judgments and decisions as arbitrary or unpredictable to say the least. As a consequence, this fostered already existing similar behavior by local court-holders. In due
142 course, dissatisfied litigants and appellants took advantage of the fact that they had the tools to point to the misbehavior of local staff. In a peculiar appropriation of the discourse on corruption, a legacy from German rule, and the new rhetoric that accompanied the court reforms of the late 1940s and 1950s, they attempted to hold court personnel to account.
In the following sections, I shall first conceptualize corruption, and then discuss the corruption discourse that emerged in Tanganyika Territory in the early 1920s. As I will show, it is precisely this discourse of corruption in the early years of British rule that litigants drew from some twenty years later when they came to challenge their native authorities. I will also examine different contexts of misconduct by both British and local judicial staff and finally show how in the 1950s the dysfunction of native courts led to the rise of an increasingly international language in the native courts which included references to the Cold War or the concept of Democracy.
Corruption in Colonial Institutions Colonial courts were institutions of the colonial state. Whether colonial courts ran smoothly, handed down just judgments and were perceived as successful by local litigants depended on the efficiency and assertiveness of the colonial state. In theory, the colonial state was meant to be a transplantation of the European bureaucratic state into colonial reality. The implementation in practice was, however, rather complicated, characterized by the discrepancy between the intended European administrative and bureaucratic ideal and the African reality.4 One reason for the discrepancy was the colonial state’s lack of the necessary financial resources, staff and knowledge of the local context. Therefore, the famous “thin white line”5 had to be supplemented by a vast number of African intermediaries. The result, however, was at large the departure from a bureaucratic ideal. Regarding the colonial judiciary, perhaps the most frequent problem was the lack of impartial adjudication and the emergence of corruption. But shortage of money and staff can never be the sole explanation for the departure from an ideal. It lies in the nature of ideals to be unattainable, be it in the colonies or elsewhere. This is, of course, also
4 Andreas Eckert and Michael Pesek, “Bürokratische Ordnung und koloniale Praxis. Herrschaft und Verwaltung in Preußen und Afrika,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 87–106. 5 A.H.M Kirk-Greene, “The Thin White Line: The Size of the British Colonial Service in Africa,” African Affairs 79, no. 314 (1980), 26, 41. 143 true for the ideal of the impartiality of the colonial judiciary in Tanganyika Territory. Frequent reminders of the role-model function of both subordinate local and British officials is belied by real practice, as Jonathan Saha has recently shown in his Burmese example, as Maurice Amutabi has shown in the case of colonial Kenya and as Christina Johnson has shown in the case of Nigeria and England.6 Yet the myth has proved persistent. The “legacy of justice bequeathed”, writes Martin Chanock, “is one of the most stubborn fantasies about British colonialism, partly because it derives from one of the most stubborn of fantasies about British life itself.”7 Even as the number of complaints like the one about Zumbe Raphael and the DC of Lushoto increased, the British colonial government pointed to the legal institutions of the late 1950s as the “foremost legacy of the 40 years of British rule in Tanganyika.”8
Much of what I will discuss in this chapter is expressed by contemporaries in the language of corruption. It is difficult not to use normative language when discussing corruption. I will therefore stick with Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz’s attempt to conceptualize corruption in a non-normative way. Chabal and Daloz suggest understanding corruption as a very rational phenomenon if seen as growing out of a “system of such profound uncertainty and disorder, if not opaqueness, which depends on subtle and constantly fluctuating ties of loyalty.” As a consequence, the upkeep of social relations in such a context requires “the instrumental use of properly cultivated social relations.”9 In such a reading, corruption is “one key aspect of the instrumentalization of disorder.”10 In a context in which the state is “nothing other than a relatively empty shell”11 and has little in common with the notion of the public good,12 corruption can be seen as a rational choice. Seen in this way, Africa works. Although corruption
6 Jonathan Saha, Law, disorder and the colonial state: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Maurice N. Amutabi, “Power and Influence of African Court Clerks and Translators in Colonial Kenya: The Case of Khwisero Native (African) Court, 1946-1956,” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 202–219; Christina Johnson, “Gentlemanly Values: Contesting Corruption Accusations in the Cities of London and Lagos in the mid-1950s,” in Understanding disputes: The politics of argument, ed. Patricia Caplan (Oxford, Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1995), 83–109. 7 Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 5. 8 Feingold, Decolonising justice: A history of the High Court of Tanganyika, c.1920-1971, 278. 9 Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa works: Disorder as political instrument (London, Bloomington: International African Institute in association with James Currey, Oxford; Indiana University Press, 1999), 103. 10 Ibid., 103. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Ibid., 100. 144 can be seen as a rational choice in a system based on disorder instead of a deeply immoral act, the normative language of corruption is deeply engrained in representations of corruption both by representatives of the colonial states and its subjects. I will demonstrate the use of the corruption discourse with the example of a discussion about the modification of the appeal chain and the abolition of so-called Akidat Courts.
Colonial Jurisdiction in Tanganyika under the British As under German rule, the highest judicial court in the whole of the territory under the British was the High Court of Tanganyika. Beneath the High Court were subordinate courts, either under professional magistrates, or under administrative officers. Beneath them were the native courts, which functioned according to the philosophy of indirect rule under the designated native authorities. In Shambaai alone there were seventeen native courts in the various sub- chiefdoms.13 From there, appeal lay to the Paramount Chief’s appeal court at Vugha, before appeals could reach British officers.
In the early British years, the decisions of native courts had been, at least theoretically, accountable to scrutiny from the High Court.14 This road was closed in 1929 when the “Governor of indirect rule”, Donald Cameron decided to alter the procedure of appellate jurisdiction in crucial ways. From the adoption of the Court Ordinance of 1929 until independence, the chain of appeals from designated native courts lay with administrative officers instead of with trained jurists. The High Court of Tanganyika was no longer the highest appellate court. Instead, the final appellate option lay with the Governor himself. The Court Ordinance of 1929 thus gave colonial administrators the unique right to hear appeals from native courts in both civil and criminal matters.15 This curtailed the power of judges significantly as it transferred judicial responsibility away from them into the hands of administrators.16 DCs and PCs were now armed with a combination of executive and judicial powers. The lines of an independent judiciary were blurred.
13 TNA\DSM, 12954 Tanganyika Secretary. Native Courts Tanga Province, 19.03.1929, the Courts Ordinance 1920, 7. 14 Moffett, Handbook of Tanganyika, 103. 15 TNA\DSM, AB 288 Early Secretariat. Native Courts Lushoto Usambara District, Administrative Officer, Lushoto to the Registrar, H.M.’s High Court, 04.04.1923, 2, p.3-4. 16 TNA\Kew, CO 691/189: Native Courts Legislation, in: Administration of Justice in Tanganyika, 8; TNA\DSM, 13638: Court Ordinance 1929, Tanga Province, 6C. 145 The ordinance was very much a product of Cameron’s politics of indirect rule, and it was controversial. Cameron argued that the ordinance provided “native litigants” with a judge who lived and worked close to the litigants, an expert in “native custom” indeed. Cameron’s opposition to trained jurists became apparent in the argumentation: their detachment from the customary, “tribal”, social and political context of the lawsuit was in his view a major disadvantage. Because technicalities of procedure were not easily understood by Tanganyikans, Cameron reasoned that civil and minor criminal cases among Africans should be tried by magistrates according to native procedures.17 Chief Justice Alison Russell objected passionately to the pretense that the English procedure was difficult to grasp. He argued that administrative officials did not possess the judicial training for appellate jurisdiction, and that their executive function clashed with the idea of an independent judiciary. But Cameron overruled the Chief Justice.18 The Court Ordinance of 1929 certainly must be read as another step towards the attempt to keep Africans in their “tribal realm.”
With the court reforms of the early 1950s came the Local Courts Ordinance of 1950. Its main objective was the modification of the appeal chain. Instead of the Appeal Court of the Governor, the final appellate court for cases emanating from the native courts, which had been renamed local courts in the course of the reforms, was now the High Court of Tanganyika.19 However, the DC and the PC remained the in-between appellate instances.
As I argued earlier, Tanganyikans’ prospects for success in court were not necessarily curtailed by the separation of native courts from the colonial Bench. They quickly transferred their energies into petitioning and even used the opportunity to address officials not in charge of appellate jurisdiction or overseas. However, the detachment of native courts from the judiciary had severe impacts in another field, the development of legal procedure in Tanganyika. The line
17 TNA\DSM, AB 305 Early Secretariat: Subordinate Courts, Disputes between Natives, Governor Cameron to Chief Justice, 04.1926, 40. 18 TNA\DSM, AB 305 Early Secretariat: Subordinate Courts, Disputes between Natives, Correspondence between the Governor and Chief Justice of 1926, 24-30, 40; see also Moffett, “Native Courts in Tanganyika. A History of the Development of Native Courts from German Times”, 19-21. Chief Justice Russell retired after the Court Ordinance. Ralph A. Austen, “The Official Mind of Indirect Rule: British Policy in Tanganyika, 1916-1939,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford, William R. Louis and Alison Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 589. 19 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4 Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 20.06.1951, Local Courts Ordinance, 377. 146 between a vice of form and abuse of office was very thin, and the local population was already fine-tuned to detect such mistakes. The corruption discourse was one of the more prevalent discourses the British had employed to base their authority in Tanganyika on higher moral ground than that of their predecessors. Because the British had invited their subjects to report headmen and Akida who were guilty of “malpractice”, they had created an environment in which ordinary subjects scrutinized the authorities’ performance.
The Early British Discourse on Corruption When the British took over from the Germans, one of the main goals they set out regarding the judiciary was to eradicate corruption and bribery. “We inherited a native administrative system steeped in corruption and mal-practices generally,”20 the PC complained in 1924. To end this misrule, the British quickly abolished the Akidat courts,21 a German “invention,” and resurrected the “native” paramount chief. One of their reasons for doing so was to keep corruption in check and to “purge the Courts of all noxious elements.”22 They wanted to reduce the loss of native treasury funds which they associated with the Akida’s mobile office and his sole ability to adjudicate without the advice of assessors. After several corruption cases in 1923, during which three Akidas were convicted for embezzlement of funds, the DC of the Lushoto division noted that
It has been necessary to put an end to that system and each Akida now holds his court on specially appointed days of each week and is assisted by five Jumbes [headmen, assessors], at least three of whom must be present at every sitting of the Court. Akidas have been forbidden to hear cases while on tour. The object of this has been to ensure all Court fees and fines are properly accounted for and paid into the District Treasury.23 The building construction of native courts and the subsequent creation of a fixed schedule for hearings in each sub-chiefdom was one of the first actions under the British administration. It was easier to control the Akidas, who were soon replaced by “native” Zumbe, when they had their own court building where hearings could be supervised, receipts produced and fines collected in an orderly way. Adjudication was returned to local authorities. In order to keep a Zumbe’s power in check, he had to work with a council of assessors, the famous court elders.
20 TNA\DSM, AB 28 Early Secretariat: Annual Report Tanga District 1924, p.2. 21 Akidat courts were presided by the Akida, who was a non-local official from other Tanganyikan areas, most often from the Muslim coast. 22 TNA\DSM, AB 28 Early Secretariat: Annual Report Tanga District 1924, p.2. 23 TNA\DSM, AB 25 Early Secretariat: Annual Report Lushoto 1923, p.6-9, quotation p.9. 147 Court clerks were also introduced.24 Wishing to end tribute payments and to prevent chiefs from using their courts as a means of enlarging their wealth, the British began to pay the chiefs salaries in 1926. The court fees went to the treasury, not in the chief’s pocket. Be redefining payments as “voluntary gifts”, many chiefs found ways to secure wealth, as Sally Moore has shown in the Chagga case.25
Figure 3 The Local Court of Mlalo
Until today, court is held in the building the British constructed in the early 1920s. Today, this is the Local Court of Mlalo, built in 1926. (Photo: Stephanie Lämmert, 2014) Certainly, criticizing German rule was a strategic instrument of the British administration to legitimize and strengthen its own position. But the vehemence of the rhetoric also allows for the conclusion that the British administration felt the need to control its subjects in a more efficient way, and that their desire to organize and administer sprang from a more diffuse fear of losing
24 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 17. 25 Sally F. Moore, “Past in the Present: Tradition, Land and 'Customary' Law on Kiilimanjaro 1880-1980”, 67. 148 control not only over the treasury, but over local actors’ discipline and obedience in general. Lushoto’s DC explains in a somewhat self-congratulatory and lengthy, but insightful way how he managed to bring an end to lawlessness. It is worth quoting the passage at length:
[I]t was first very necessary to gain the confidence of the raw native to get in close personal touch with him, to make him feel that the Government Official took a personal interest in this welfare and existed to see that justice was done, that courts existed for the purpose of administering justice and that all sundry, irrespective of rank, colour, or creed, were equal in the sight of the law. This could not be done by sending out circulars. It could not be done by just touring the district and coming in touch with the comparatively few natives who had their “shauris” to be settled, usually of a domestic nature. It was necessary to talk to the native population in mass and fully explain to them just what powers the local Jumbes and Akidas had, and to appeal to them to report all abuse of power by either Jumbe or Akida. Therefore mass meetings of the population of all Akidats were arranged and the dates of my visits to the respective Akidats well advertised. These meetings were well attended and fully representative gatherings assembled. I usually devoted three hours to explanations and advise. I wanted to detect abuse of power and could only do so by enlisting the assistance of the natives themselves. It was difficult at first for Akidas and Jumbes were feared to such a degree that the native was scared to come forward and report.26 The quotation shows that the British administration initiated a campaign against “abuse of power”, which rested on the cooperation of local residents to report such abuses. Seen in this context, the grievances of Zumbe Raphael’s subjects appear as the continuation of a tradition that had been insisted upon by the British in the early 1920s.
Despite the campaign, “abuse of power,” and corruption did not go away. As elsewhere in the British African Empire,27 misuse of office remained one of the major trouble spots in Shambaai throughout the period of British rule. Initially, the introduction of court elders or assessors was meant as a safeguard to keep corruption in check, but in fact it strengthened bribery. As Brett Shadle shows in the case of Gusiiland in Kenya, the presence of court elders did not prevent court-holders from taking bribes. In fact it broadened the audience to which bribes were offered, since court elders, too, accepted bribes in private – contrary to the customary gifts litigants presented to precolonial councils of elders in public.28 The early discourse on corruption never touched upon the double function that both chiefs and British administrative officers
26 TNA\DSM, AB 28 Early Secretariat, Annual Report Lushoto District 1924, p.6-7. 27 Brett L. Shadle, “African Court Elders in Nyanza Province, Kenya, ca. 1930-1960: From "Traditional" to "Modern"”, 191-196. 28 Ibid., 191-192. 149 held. Chiefs were not only the heads of the native authorities, thus organizing the labor recruitment and endorsing new rules among other things, but also the judges in the native courts. District officers had all sort of tasks, and only one of them was convening appellate courts. Cameron’s victory over Chief Justice Russell in 1929 probably foreclosed the sheer possibility of discussing an independent judiciary at the lowest level of the native courts as well. District officers were persuaded that their good judgment was not impaired by their additional executive function. On the contrary, they believed that their knowledge of non-judiciary aspects of litigants’ lives, such as their involvement in politics or their position towards the royal clan would help them come to the best judgment. Naturally, the consideration to separate a chief’s judicial functions from his executive functions was then also out of the question.
Lost in the Procedural Jungle Under these circumstances, simple rules like the keeping of court records, or adhering to the official and consistent degree of penalty were not necessarily perceived as obligatory by administrative officials. With the eventual but inevitable local government reforms and the modernization of Tanganyika’s judiciary, both the British and the local administrative staff felt overburdened. The call for closer supervision of the judiciary shed light on the administrative officers’ difficulties in reinforcing old but long-neglected rules and in keeping track of the changes in procedure so as to comply to the reforms.29
Suddenly, the increased supervision of subordinate court decisions produced a much higher failure rate than before. A wave of criminal cases adjudicated by Shambaai’s administrative officials were reversed or varied on second hearing by the High Court revisional jurisdiction.30 This happened especially with “political” offences like tax evasion or offences against the agricultural scheme rules. “Grossly excessive sentences”31 by administrative officials, as Judge Love put it, were quashed by the higher appellate court. When it came to the examination of the evidence, the boundaries between a simple procedural mistake and a politically motivated sentence could easily be blurred. Many sentences were upheld, and it is likely that many were
29 TNA\DSM, 481, A2/40: Native Authorities, The Member of Local Government to all PCs, 20.02.1951, 50; TNA\DSM, 481, A2/15 Vol.II: Territorial Chiefs’ Meeting Correspondence, 20.12.1958, 82, p.1-2. 30 TNA\DSM, 72, 32/6: Correspondence with High Court (1942-1952), 1, 17, 44, 46, 50 E-G, 93, 239. 31 Quote in TNA\DSM, 72, 32/24: Legal High Court Revisional Jurisdiction (1954), 24A. For similar cases see ibid., 20- 23, 25, 37, 74, 127, 108A, 155. 150 not even identified as possibly prone to bias. In any case, the procedural amendments and closer supervision of native courts and administrative appellate jurisdiction to native courts during the early 1950s highlighted how deep the discrepancy really was between the ideal of correct procedure and its practice exercised by administrative officials.
The continuing growth in the number of appeals in Shambaai from the late 1940s onwards were both a pretext and a trigger for the modernization of the judiciary. There was a similar trend in other Tanganyikan provinces as well as in neighboring Kenya, where “appeals were so common because bribery in the courts of first instance was so rife.”32 Again in Tanganyika Territory, 50 percent of the civil appeals coming from native courts of the Nyanza Province had to be reversed or varied in 1945.33 As early as 1940, a man by the name of Mr. Morrison had argued in the daily paper The Tanganyika Standard that injustices apparently happening in native courts were deliberately hidden from the public. He argued that because advocates were not allowed to appear in native courts, abuse of office and procedural ignorance remained the secret of the adjudicating officers.34 Yet the official position of the colonial administration, patronizing as it was, maintained that the absence of advocates in native courts was a protective gesture towards illiterate Africans who otherwise were prone to fall victim to Indian “cut-throat advocates.”35 As Martin Chanock has noted, colonial governments “treated Africans as children in the ways of commerce” as they protected Africans from “Asian exploitation.”36
“Impartiality” and “Corruption” in Native Courts Not surprisingly, procedural mistakes seeped from subordinate courts into native courts, where the “learned mistakes” in concert with pre-colonial practices occurred at an even higher rate. The tour report of the year 1950 for the Tanga Province, crafted by the freshly appointed native court adviser Mr. Moffett, shows that native courts were facing various problems. Mr. Moffett complained that arbitrary arrests without listing prisoners on remand in the lock-up records,
32 Brett L. Shadle, “African Court Elders in Nyanza Province, Kenya, ca. 1930-1960: From "Traditional" to "Modern"”, 193. 33 TNA\DSM, 38727: Panel of Experts on Local Government, Extract of Report of 1945, without page number and date. 34 TNA\DSM, 25686: Legal Aid in Native Court Cases, Cutting from the Tanganyika Standard, dated 16th Nov, 1940, 5. 35 Ibid., Chief Secretary to all PCs and DCs, 23.12.1944, 47. 36 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 82. 151 partial judgments, the double function of clerks, elders or chiefs as both judicial staff and witnesses, as well as the wave of false accusation cases were common practice in many of Shambaai’s native courts.37 His findings imply that Shambaa native courts were characterized by high partiality and a politicization of the courts. The problems of insufficiently kept court records, impartial judgments and the violation of the principle of res judicata recurred most often in the various letters, circulars, dispatches and sometimes threats in which British officials tried to remind local court-holders of their duties according to English procedure.38 British court advisers and district officers did see that some of the new rules clashed with older ideas. But since they dismissed customary ideas as “a collection of childish and unworkable irrationalities such as collective responsibility for debt or the inheritability of liabilities,”39 they did not understand their value in the context of a small-scale society. To them it looked as if litigants typically did not keep their promises, and disputes never ended.40
According to the principle of res judicata, full adjudication terminates a legal case once and for all at the court that has issued the judgment. As Sally Moore has shown, this was an important rule in the Tanganyikan context. Due to a “delayed-exchange economy,” litigants tended to have different ideas about how long a claim could last.41 In other words, a closed case would be re-opened at a time which suited the plaintiff. As we have seen in the land disputes discussed above, litigants often waited for a point in time during which the defendant was in a weak position in terms of health or economic status until they chose to litigate.
The deeply personal quality of Shambaa society was channeled and sometimes exacerbated by the colonial administration. Sensing the imperial tensions in a situation characterized by peasant protest and land scarcity, a number of Zumbe who backed the protests were
37 TNA\DSM, 39120: Safari Reports by N.C.A., Vol.I: 17.02.-11.03.1950, Safari notes by Native Courts Adviser on visit to the Tanga Province, 29A, p.1-18. 38 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga-Bazo, 30.07.1954, DC to Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni, 340; Ibid., 23.08.1954, DC to Zumbe Mbughuni and Clerk Laban Mbaruku, 346; Ibid., 12.03.1952, Secretary of the NA to Zumbe Barua, 256; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal. Native Courts Lushoto, 09.04.1942, DC to Zumbe Magogo Kimweri, 177; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1A, Vol.I: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Lushoto 31.10.1952, DC to Zumbe Kimweri Kibanga, 367. 39 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 82. 40 Ibid., 82. 41 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 44. 152 replaced.42 Because the British no longer tried to find the best candidate according to local custom and opinion, but supported the most loyal one, several extremely unpopular or corrupt court-holders came into office – most notably Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni of Vugha-Bazo.43 Evidence for such a reading is not only given by the 25 percent quota of “false accusation” cases at the native court of Bumbuli that I will analyze in the next chapter. In addition, there is ample evidence in the form of complaints and petitions by defendants as well as warnings by the District Office that encourage Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni to be more law-abiding.44 Just as administrative officials, who were aware of the political opposition of certain defendants, judged the cases accordingly, Shambaa court-holders preferred to sit with kin or other confidants as assessors when the cases were of political nature. Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni was in fact Paramount Kimweri’s son-in-law.45 He was Zumbe of one of the most important sub- chiefdoms, Vugha-Bazo, and he was the only sub-chief in the whole of Shambaai who was granted the assistance of two Mdoe instead of one in order to help him with the court work,46 another indication of his special position and the favoritism that was at play in Shambaai’s native courts. Many of the cases that were reported because of procedural shortcomings were cases in which Hemedi Mbughuni’s court was involved.47 The following quotation, again cited from the Native Court Adviser’s safari report, highlights the indifference in Shambaa courts towards impartiality:
Kimweri Mputa, Chief of the Wasambaa and one of the better educated court-holders, saw nothing objectionable in himself taking a case against one of his subjects who was charged with the offence of “practicing witchcraft against Kimweri Mputa”. Similarly, the Zumbe of Mlola saw nothing wrong in imposing a heavy fine on a shop-keeper who was impertinent to him when he entered the shop to buy cigarettes. Elders and clerks often
42 For the story of Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi of Mlalo who was replaced because he opposed the agricultural scheme, see TNA\DSM, 44/16: Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations, Letter by citizens of Vuga to DC Lushoto, 24.10.1952, 137; TNA\DSM, 4, 269/6: Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme, 1947-49, Quarterly Progress Report for the Quarter ending 30th Sept 1947, 90, p.9. 43 TNA\DSM, 44/16: Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations, 137; 604. 44 45 1B Vol.III Native Court Vuga-Bazo, 01.03.1955, DC to Zumbe Mbughuni, 397. 45 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans Lushoto, Mzee Choodo to District Magistrate, District Court Lushoto, 11.12.1959, 11; see also in the same file 12, 95. 46 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies, Lushoto, Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni to DC, 27.05.1955. 47 Regarding various warnings to Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni to stop abuse of office see TNA\DSM, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal, NC Vuga, 340, 346, 256, 296, 306, 324; see also TNA\DSM,45/1B, Vol.IV: Native Affairs Legal, NC Vuga, 218, 1-6, 204, 204A, 191, 156. 153 appear (in their private capacity) as complainants, defendants, accused, or as witnesses, in their own courts. A chief who has taken a case at first instance often remains in court, on the bench, when that case is taken before his fellow-chiefs on appeal.48 The number of procedural mistakes in Shambaa native courts was generally high, and it is very likely that only a small percentage of them were reported.49 I argue that in the face of the above-mentioned changes in the judicial realm, it had become impossible for Shambaa native authorities, let alone ordinary citizens, to obtain guidance on legal procedures. People could not predict the decision patterns of British officials, who themselves were lost in the procedural jungle of local government reforms. Therefore, many litigants and local court-holders interpreted the “being lost” of British administrative officers as a tendency towards arbitrary judgments and used the arbitrary practice in their own realm of power to their advantage. The overwhelming vagueness in the legal sphere opened the door to all sorts of misconduct and abuse of office. Accepting “favors” in exchange for false witness accounts, false accusations, procedural shortcomings and disrespect of Shambaa custom became regular practice in Shambaa native courts in the early 1950s.
Owing, and Accepting Favors Despite involvement in regional trading and migration patterns, the world of Shambaai was still a small one. The inhabitants of each of Shambaai’s chiefdoms often knew one another, were related to each other, or had heard stories about those they did not know. It is simply impossible to ignore the existing personal (power) relations not only between plaintiffs and defendants, but also among litigants and court personnel. As Richard Roberts reminds us, for judicial personnel, knowing a disputant’s social background was highly predictive of the legal outcome, especially for closely-knit communities like Shambaai. Native court decisions can thus often illuminate power asymmetries.50 Martin Chanock suggests that if information about the
48 TNA\DSM, 39120: Safari Reports by N.C.A., Vol.I: 17.02.-11.03.1950, Safari notes by Native Courts Adviser on visit to the Tanga Province, 29A, p.3. 49 The number of reported cases is still relatively high, see TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, Hamisi Tekelo to National Assembly, Prime Minister, Government House, Dar, 01.05.1961; Ibid., Salehe Punyanga to PC Tanga, 21.01.1960; TNA\DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, Hasani Sembe to the Member for Local Government, Dar, 28.06.1956; ibid., Samuel George Myanagh to Sultan Kimweri, 27.08.1956; TNA\DSM, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 22, 24, 39; TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans Lushoto, Bakari Kusaga to the Forest Department, 28.01.1959, 11, 14, 15, 17, 43, 56; ibid., 103, 106, 109,111;T NA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.II: Native Affairs Legal, Native courts Vuga, 216-17. 50 Roberts, Litigants and households, 7. 154 social background of litigants and court personnel is available, it should be contextualized with the knowledge about (pre)-colonial hierarchies – hirer and hired, master and slave, husband and wife.51 Seen in this light, the legal spheres created by the colonial state offered opportunities to challenge and change the conceptions of hierarchies and inequalities. For instance, quarrels among kin that had previously been settled could be brought before colonial courts. This meant for instance, that a son could litigate with his father and challenge the generational hierarchy.
In December 1947, amidst political disturbances in Shambaai, the Superintendent of Police who was in charge of criminal investigations received a long type-written letter signed by “all citizens of Usambara.” The letter also contained one individual signature, notably Isaka Hoza’s, who we know from previous chapters as one of the most outspoken critics of chiefly rule and the Usambara Scheme. The letter-writers had compiled a long list of accusations against 22 Zumbe of Southern Shambaai, which included, most significantly, tax-dodging for time periods of between two to five years. Most of the other listed offences were also concerned with bureaucratic malpractice or corruption. The letter-writers were deeply troubled by the perceived double-standards of court judgments and a court culture based on favoritism. They felt rulers could get away with the very offences ordinary people were sentenced for: “We want you to let us know if only citizens are prosecuted and sentenced by courts, while the rulers’ offences are not even prosecuted?”52 they demanded to know. Why did Zumbe and officials not get prosecuted, while their political opponents were sentenced for the very same or even (more) minor offences? Isaka Hoza’s famous signature hints at just how deeply politics, protests against the agricultural scheme and everyday peasant life were enmeshed. Ordinary people were annoyed by officials’ abuse of office, and the rebels lent their names to the people’s cause. The letters also show that whereas officials could even place the blame for offences they had committed on others in order to rid themselves of enemies, be they private or political, those who had fallen into disfavor with the rulers were often prosecuted precisely because they committed the very same offences as their superiors. Most often the offense was tax evasion.
51 Chanock, Law, custom, and social order, 7, 13. 52 TNA\DSM 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration Native, Usambara district, 01.12.1947, Citizens of Usambara to Superintendent of Police, Tanga, 391. 155 By the late 1940s, double-standards had become a common practice in the native courts of Shambaai.
One of the examples of the long list of petty crimes committed by local officials was the story of headman Asmani Mahanyu’s immoral behavior. Mahanyu had married a freshly divorced pregnant woman. Her child’s father was a man called Hussein Seleman. There had been a court judgment about the woman’s remarriage that, according to Shambaa custom, ruled that Mahanyu could marry the divorcee (whose name is never mentioned), but that upon birth the child would have to be returned to the biological father, Hussein Seleman, who held the right to raise his child. Apparently Asmani Mahanyu was not satisfied with the judgment. He decided to involve his new father-in-law, the father of his new wife, by presenting the in-law as his witness. To achieve this goal, Mahanyu abused his influential position as a headman and offered a “gift.” He informed his in-law that if he agreed to testify in court that his daughter’s pregnancy was Mahanyu’s, he would be exempted from the burden of tax payment. The father-in-law agreed. Exemption from head tax was not an offence in itself. Shambaa custom has it that, after a hard working life, senior men were excused from paying head tax. But the problem in Mahanyu’s case was that his father-in-law was quite a vigorous man, who was much too young and industrious to receive the privilege. Traditionally the names of the old men who qualified were listed in the District Office by the Zumbe. Generally, when the tax collector came, he would read out the names on the lists and the called-upon man would step forward so that the tax collector could estimate whether his appearance justified the exemption. But since Mahanyu’s father-in- law’s looks would not justify exemption, Mahanyu had to develop another strategy. Therefore, he asked a very old man he knew well to testify before the tax collectors that he held the name of Mahanyu’s father-in-law. Naturally, it was impossible for the tax collector to know each face, so when the old man stepped forward and claimed to be Asmani Mahanyu’s father-in-law, the official believed the old man. Apparently Kimweri himself rubber-stamped the deal.53
Exemption from tax payment was a common “gift” that could be presented to a selected person by a Zumbe for a variety of reasons. It is unclear whether the “fake” father-in-law “owed” a favor to his Zumbe or simply gratefully took the gift. Similarly we do not know if Mahanyu’s real
53 Ibid., 390-391. 156 father-in-law approved of Mahanyu’s move to deprive the biological father of his right to raise his child. It is more likely in the latter case, however, that the father-in-law approved of the deal as he lent his name to the transfer and produced a false witness account in court to assure Mahanyu’s right to the child. Reasons for accepting such gifts were not always connected to pure thirst for power or shrewdness. Sometimes individuals found themselves in the position of owing favors to court elders, chiefs or other influential authorities because they had helped them previously when they were in trouble, economic or otherwise. The headman Asmani Mahanyu had nothing to lose when he decided to “buy” his father-in-law’s acknowledgment of his right to Hussein Seleman’s child because Kimweri himself knew and approved of the situation. The Mahanyu example highlights the partiality of court decisions in a closely-knit society like Shambaai, which were reinforced by a dependent judiciary. The importance of an independent judiciary had been precisely one of the major arguments on the side of the Chief Justice against the Governor in the early 1920s when Governor Cameron had reasoned precisely for the need of having a local judge. Yet as Isaka Hoza’s and the other petitions show, people were about to lose confidence in native courts. In the ordinary peasant’s eyes, headman Asmani Mahanyu and many others like him, had lost their credibility. Again, the petition-writers attempted to arouse British interest by referencing colonial discourse. They revived the British ideal of correct bureaucratic and jurisdictional procedure, thus using language that is reminiscent of the early campaign against German-inherited corruption of the 1920s:
Can a rightful administration do things like that? Clever people know that development cannot be reached without tax revenue, and those who are trusted by their people are those who hinder government’s growth because they indulge in fraud. And when the Shambaa cries out because neither does this administration follow the laws, nor does it consider any development for its people, they call him rebel [muasi]. Is this a rightful administration and how the world would want it to be? These are only a few things but we know much more of oppression and dishonesty, and if we were asked we would say it all.54 Again, the “tribal” language of indirect rule lent itself well to challenging any ill-conceived authority, and, like in many other places, produced ethnic tensions where previously people had felt little need to identify in ethnic terms. Likewise, the issue of unfair appeals was expressed in
54 TNA\DSM 4/6/2, Vol.II: Administration Native, Usambara district, 01.12.1947, Citizens of Usambara to the Superintendent of Police, Tanga, 391. 157 tribal language. Zigua, Shambaa and many others grew noticeably dissatisfied with Kilindi courts. The burning question was about how to get justice if the judge of the first sentence and the appellate judge were both equally biased Kilindi? In one letter written by Zigua the Kilindi court system was compared with the different limbs of one human body:
A person has feet and hands. If he kicks you with his foot without touching you with the hand, can you say, if you take into account the entirety of the body, that the hands of this person love you because they have not hit you? And that you only detest the feet that have kicked you? If you understand that the human body does everything in unity, this shows that even the hand that does not hit you is in accordance with [the foot] kicking you.55 This plea to allow appeals heard at a Kilindi court go to a Shambaa appeal court is telling. Similar pleas reoccrred in other letters by Shambaai residents of different origins.56 They always condemned the decisions of native authorities as arbitrary and associated the arbitrariness with Kilindi overrule and the lack of appeal courts for each ethnic group. In the early 1940s, even Kimweri, the son of Paramount Shebughe, was accused of fitina, of “eating the people’s wealth.”57 Although letters and petitions containing accusations of abuse of office by officials were getting more and more common,58 the claims were made in reference to the bureaucratic ideal rather than to specific rights. This would change in the 1950s, when references to the UDHR had become a frequent occurrence in Shambaai’s native courts.
Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo, so-called “Bush-Lawyers” and the Rise of Cold War Discourse Advocates were not allowed in native courts. But often litigants found other strategies to seek legal advice. Martin Klein reminds us of the existence of intermediaries outside the formal
55 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 06.10.1943, Usambara Committee (the elder of Zigua, Mombo) to PC Tanga, 273. 56 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 09.09.1942, Abdallah Jaha, Msenga Munju, Mmbago Mwamvumo to PC Tanga, 243; TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B, Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vugha, 19.8.55, Shemsanga to DC, 14. 57 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 20.07.1942, Mavindi Munju, Abdallah Jaha, Msenga Munju and others to PC, 245. 58 TNA\DSM 304/168, Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.06.1956, Hasani Sembe to the Member for local Government, 152; TNA\DSM 31207: Local Government. Native Chiefs. Usambara district, Tanga, 17.07.1947, Citizens of Usambara to the Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 19; TNA\DSM, 44/16: Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), Citizens of Kwamdolwa to DO, 07.01.1953, without number; TNA\DSM, 72, 43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies. Lushoto, to Simbamwene by Mohamedi Yusufu (Vuga Press), Mwalimu Benjamin Shempemba (Mission School Vuga), Andrea Shemndolwa (Mission Press Vuga), Hezekiel Saul (Mission Press Vuga), 11.03.1952, 106. 158 structure of the colonial state, namely letter writers or so-called “bush-lawyers.”59 Their service was not only confined to the simple activity of writing down what their illiterate clients dictated to them. In fact, the service of people like the Senegalese Johnson’s Mody M’Baye, “a kind of rural notary, an embryonic lawyer,”60 did not only find the best legalistic language to frame their clients’ grievances, but also advised them as to where to address those grievances. In Western Nigeria, letter-writers were referred to as “fathers of battle” and were often asked by litigants to intercede for them in courts where English-trained lawyers were prohibited.61
Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo, a commoner of the sub-chiefdom of Bumbuli who was most active in the last two decades of British rule, shared some features with them. Much like Johnson’s Mody M’Baye, Tekelo was a leader without political organization.62 His knowledge sprang from private study of the legal codes and textbooks available in Shambaai. Contrary to M’Baye, he was not connected to human rights associations. Tekelo appears to have been an unconventional and colorful personality. He was also a hobby historian who had written a book on Shambaa history and tradition called “uthabiti wa Usambara,” the Truth of Usambara.63 Tekelo was not one of the most radical supporters of the chama.64 In fact, in one of his letters, he even reported clandestine meetings of the chama to his headman. But Tekelo had a specific sense of justice and was well aware of the ongoing misconduct in Shambaai’s native courts. His was a peculiar mixing of the language of rights with older expressions of status, most often demonstrated through allusions to the sophisticated coastal culture. For instance, the letterhead of his more official letters read “Beit-el-Amani” and he sometimes signed them in Arabic script. In parts of Eastern Africa, the use of Arabic script was understood as a subversive activity.65 In the various
59 Martin Klein, “African Participation in Colonial Rule: The Role of Clerks, Interpreters, and Other Intermediaries,” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 280. See also Lawrance’s article on bush-lawyers and petition-writing in Togo, Benjamin N. Lawrance, “Petitioners, "Bush Lawyers," and Letter Writers: Court Access in British-Occupied Lomé, 1914-1920” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks, 94-114. 60 G. W. Johnson, The emergence of Black politics in Senegal: The struggle for power in the four communes, 1900- 1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), 133. 61 Berry, No condition is permanent, 118. 62 Johnson, The emergence of Black politics in Senegal, 148. 63 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.I: Administration native, Usambara District, 25.03.1940, Tekelo to PC Tanga, 152. It is very unfortunate that there is no copy of the book in the files. 64 Interview with Mzee Kanyawana, Bumbuli, 22.09.2015. 65 Ridder H. Samsom, “Why write in the abandoned Arabo-Swahili script?,” (accessed February 29, 2016). 159 petitions he wrote on his and other people’s behalf, he quoted extensively from legal code. Because advocates were not allowed in native courts, Tekelo simply attended the public proceedings of his clients as a regular spectator. It is said that he guided his clients through a previously agreed upon sign language. When the Zumbe realized what was going on, Tekelo was expelled and not allowed to approach the court let alone enter it.66 We do not know how much his legal advice cost, but his earnings must have been a substantial addition to his income. In 1959 Lushoto’s DC notes that Tekelo “seems to have a profitable business as a ‘writer’.”67 I will use one of his petitions as an example to demonstrate Tekelo’s peculiar usage of international discourse, which I have referred to earlier as “international languages of litigation” , but there is a wealth of other petitions that show how popular and in-demand his services were.68 His appearances in the courtroom on behalf of his clients, however, can unfortunately not be recovered.
In another case, a man by the name of Bakari Kusaga of Vugha made use of Tekelo’s services as a “bush-lawyer” in February 1959. Bakari Kusaga had lost a civil case in the local court of Bumbuli. As so often in the 1950s in Shambaai, it was a land dispute. Bakari Kusaga felt severely mistreated. Apparently, on the day of the hearing, the court personnel had threatened him and told him he should not have brought the case forward in the first place and neither should he have brought his grievance to a wider audience. It is my guess that several letters of complaint had already circulated before the first hearing. According to the petition, copied to both the PC and an officer in Forestry Department, the case was then dismissed and Kusaga was even slapped in the face. Kusaga’s eleven witnesses were denied the opportunity to speak. In the letter Tekelo wrote for Kusaga, he asked “is this the law? […] Is it the English law or is it the Russian law?” Furthermore, Kusaga stated in the letter that he wanted to sue the chief for humiliating him before the court. He also reported of another case of physical violence in the court. Then he made a threat: “If you do not reply I will contact the Chief Secretary and the UNO”. He asked for another judge to hear his case because for obvious reasons, the chief was
66 Interview with Mzee Kanyawana, Bumbuli, 22.09.2015. 67 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 21.05.1959, DC to PC, 56, p.2. 68 The material about Tekelo is in TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District, 72; TNA DSM, 72, 44/16: Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), 634; TNADSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 15, 17, 43, 62, 149A, 150, 256. Bakari Kusaga: TNADSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans, 11, 15, 17, 43. 160 biased. He ended the letter with “Our Lord in heaven is watching those who rule in opposition to Democracy.”69
I chose this petition because it is exemplary of Tekelo’s writing style. In the short letter, he referred to two of the new languages that influenced Tanganyika Territory’s public sphere, the Cold War Discourse and the language of democracy. The letter implies that the British were unable to keep their local personnel in check, so that a court-holder could even behave like the Russians, who were, according to the prevailing Cold War discourse, not the ones to trust when it came to legal questions. It is noteworthy how Tekelo played with British fears and stereotypes in the context of Cold War competition. Tekelo had probably drawn from government newspapers such as Mambo Leo, whose contributions tied the concept of freedom, uhuru, to an international discourse of anti-communism.70 Furthermore, by threatening to send another series of petitions to even higher officials – he explicitly mentions the Trusteeship Council of the UN and the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam – he masterfully built up pressure on the local and colonial authorities. Given the many other petitions and letters that reached their offices on a regular basis, it is safe to conclude that petitions like Tekelo’s contributed to better supervision of the colonial courts. The sources are silent as to whether Bakari Kusaga was granted a second hearing of his case, but given the increasing pressure, it is very likely that he was.
Administrative officials did not like “bush-lawyers” such as Tekelo. It was difficult, if not impossible, to ban them from native courts as the example of Tekelo shows. Furthermore, their perseverance, creative language and broad audience threatened to lay bare the failures of British rule. Tekelo in particular was perceived as a nuisance by the district office. His frequent petitioning began to eat up too much of the officers’ time. Tekelo kept the district officers busy by asking for leave to appeal even in cases in which the sum of the injury was under five Shillings, which the rule said was too little to be prosecuted.71 In petitions copied to all sorts of officials, Tekelo complained about the “utawala wa hofu”, the rule of fear, which allegedly prevented people from reporting violations of legal procedure. In the same letter, copied to the
69 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 13.02.1959, Bakari Kusaga to Bwana Deputy Chief Ali Ngoma, 14. 70 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 144. 71 TNA\DSM, 72; 45/4, Vol. VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 28.11.1956, DC to Tekelo, 99+99a. 161 Member of Local Government in Dar es Salaam, he added that a certain judgment would not even suit a blind person confined to a hospital bed.72 In another petition titled “down trodden” from 1961, he complained that the Paramount had refused him leave to appeal throughout the past five years. Tekelo suspected this was due to political reasons, and he protested against being deprived of his right to appeal and asked the National Assembly for the government’s assistance unless “this country should become another South Africa when it comes to discrimination.”73 Unnerved, in 1961, Lushoto’s DC complained that Tekelo’s petitioning “contains so much unintelligible nonsense. The writer who considers himself a bit of a “bush lawyer” frequently writes this type of letter in which the facts are garbled and in many instances the statements made quite untrue. […] [H]e has written to everybody he can think of […] Tekelo also seems to consider that he is above the law and has on more than one occasion refused to accept Kuitwa Shaurini [a summons] and even resisted the consequent arrest.”74 I argue that above all, it was Tekelo’s use of language that threatened the British, and not so much his claims, which were indeed sometimes groundless. Tekelo’s practice of copying as many officials on his letters as possible was a commonly used strategy, and it was a successful one. Gradually, his accusations about abuse of office in the Lushoto district became an embarrassment for the British.
By Way of Conclusion Appeal procedures and legal culture in general grew more arbitrary towards the end of the 1940s in Shambaai. The system of indirect rule had lost momentum, international “rights talk” had reached Tanganyika and the colonial administration had made the mistake of backing corrupt candidates for Zumbeships. The more important reason for the growing arbitrariness was, however, that British officials did not live up to their expected function as role models for administration and dispensation of justice. Instead, administrative officers had sometimes been prone to follow judicial protocol in detail, at other times they had been too impatient or had not followed the rules at all. Yet for observers, it was unclear when it was legitimate to bypass procedure. As a consequence, Zumbe and headmen, who represented the colonial state at the
72 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 09.06.1959, Tekelo to Zumbe Mkuu Bumbuli, 62. 73 TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, 01.05.1961, Tekelo to National Assembly, 774. 74 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 09.01.1961, DC to PC, 149A. 162 lowest level of jurisdiction in native courts, used the British example to their advantage. Neglecting procedure or the open abuse of office were easy opportunities, and they could even be rendered official through signatures on official documents. This is not to say that impartiality was a rule in nineteenth-century courts in Shambaai and was disrupted by administrative officers under colonial rule. But the argument goes that the combination of “learned mistakes” handed down from administrative officers – sometimes for lack of better knowledge, other times because a “political” case called for a legal solution – and older practices that contradicted new rules such as res judicata, led colonial jurists to perceive native courts as impartial and corrupt. This understanding, again, was appropriated by local litigants and turned against their local court-holders by making use of the language of corruption, and later references to other international languages such as the language of democray or the Cold War discourse. The moment at which native courts grew dysfunctional was certainly not coincidental. It was the moment of a deep agricultural and socio-political crisis in Shambaa society. This, in concert with the rise of the language of corruption and the broad audience petitioners and “bush-lawyers” addressed, threatened the British. As we will see in the next chapter, Tekelo’s use of language became widely popular in nationalist circles as well. It is likely that individuals like Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo contributed to the popular demand that chiefs should lose control over the courts. This policy became the law over the next decade, and “everywhere the former chief’s courts became primary courts, presided over in every ex- chiefdom by an appointed magistrate who sat in the very court building on the very platform where the chiefs had sat in earlier decades.”75
But the legacy of the corruption discourse in Tanganyika casts a long shadow even after the chiefs’ removal from office. Discussions about the reasons for abuse of office and corruption often highlight continuities between the late colonial and the early postcolonial period.76 Until today, accepting “gifts” is one of the most common problems that the country’s judiciary faces. On my last visit of the Local Court of Mlalo in 2014, the walls of the court building were plastered with posters issued by the government to raise awareness about corruption. One said
75 Sally F. Moore, “Past in the Present: Tradition, Land and 'Customary' Law on Kiilimanjaro 1880-1980”, 67. 76 Burton and Jennings, “Introduction: The Emperor's New Clothes? Continuities in Governance in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial East Africa”, 1-25. 163 “Kupata hudama ni haki yako usitoe rushwa”, which translates as “You have the right to be served, do not give bribes.” Another one says “Get yourself an official receipt for each payment. In case you see any signs for a service given and received as a result of bribery, send a short message to the following number.” The language used on the posters is almost identical to that employed by British officials in the early 1920s as they set out to eradicate German-inherited corruption.
164 Figure 4 Anti-corruption poster
This poster was one of the many addressing the topic of corruption which was plastered to the walls of Mlalo’s Local Court in 2015. (Photo: Stephanie Lämmert, 2015) 165 CHAPTER FIVE The Politics of Nationalism in Native Courts: The Chama and False Accusations
As I have argued in the previous pages, the Usambara Scheme absorbed non-scheme related grievances into its orbit and grew into a protest movement against senior privilege. The previous chapter demonstrated how the court reforms of the early 1950s changed the way litigants phrased their grievances. As they were challenging the dubious behavior of court and council personnel, they increasingly drew on the procedural or legalistic repertoire of the legal reform, mainly through reporting abuse of office by local court staff.
In this chapter I shall portray how the nationalist cause entered the colonial courts. On the one hand, the protest in Shambaai had already exhausted the government’s sympathy towards local politics. As a consequence, TANU’s Lushoto branch was immediately associated with the protest and was quickly banned. But on the other hand, TANU could make use of the significant infrastructure provided by the chama. TANU activists took advantage of this and successfully surfed on the protest wave. I will use a biographical approach to show one major activist’s encounter with the colonial legal system. Biography can reveal a lot about an unconventional individuals’ intentions and motives.1 In addition, biographies help us to see how individuals were shaped by their historical context. As Silke Strickrodt and Achim von Oppen very recently suggested, biographies can, especially in the imperial context of the British African Empire, “alert us to how ‘ordinary’ individuals and groups commuted between the different spaces, jurisdictions, milieus, identities and even temporalities.”2 The brief segment of Zemu Simon Shemsanga’s biography that I highlight in this chapter is just that, the portrayal of one man’s ability to move etween different spaces, local and national, as well as between different jurisdictions. Furthermore, Shemsanga’s biography shows both his strong commitment to partake in and shape decision processes about Shambaai’s and Tanganyika’s near future and his personal ambitions for political success. Because Shemsanga was a vocal and well-known man,
1 Barbara Caine, Biography and history (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25. 2 Achim von Oppen and Silke Strickrodt, “Introduction: Biographies between Spheres of Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, no. 5 (2016), 718. 166 it was possible to collect oral materials about him from almost everybody I spoke to.3 I could thus supplement party and archival records about Shemsanga with oral accounts. By portraying Zemu Simon Shemsanga’s journey through Shambaai’s courts, I demonstrate how TANU litigants introduced new methods such as petitions to the UN and made use of new personal networks, which included access to lawfirms, into Shambaai’s colonial courts. This happened mainly as they tried to fight back against false accusations. An enormous spike in false accusation cases emerged in the early 1950s, which, I argue, was an attempt by the chiefly rulers to silence political activists surrounding Shemsanga. In this chapter, I will first examine the spike in false accusations and how it was linked to Shemsanga. Secondly, I will discuss the so- called “Tea Shop Case.” This specific case, in which Shemsanga was not directly involved but frequently evoked, will be interpreted not only as the “political case” it clearly represents, but also as a window into the growing generational tensions at a time that was characterized by institutional reform and rapid economic change. I will conclude the chapter with a detailed analysis of the Shemsanga trial and will connect it to the ongoing healing discourse in Shambaai.
“Our Mwambashi” Shemsanga and the Chama When a faction of the protesters against the scheme started a more general criticism of chiefly rule and called for a more powerful role for commoners and a reform of native courts towards more accountability, Zemu Shemsanga was one of the leading figures. He and other radical activists sent petitions to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. In them, he and the other radicals advocated for the de-personalization of courts and criticized the chiefly amalgamation of executive and judicial powers in what they perceived as a court system ruled by local politics instead of the rule of law. The activists built on a tradition of fierce resistance that had been in use since the 1940s. But the protest had a new quality. Shemsanga’s networks included urban lawyers and links to postwar nationalists of the Tanganyika African National Union, TANU, which would soon bring independence under Nyerere.
Zemu Simon Shemsanga was a colorful person. Being a commoner of Vugha, he had served the chiefly council of Vugha for several years under both Shebughe Magogo and Kimweri Mputa
3 For a discussion about the methodological challenges of oral histories for a biographical approach in African history see Charles van Onselen, “Peasants speak. The reconstruction of a rural life from oral testimony: Critical notes on the methodology employed in the study of a black South African sharecropper,” Journal of Peasant Studies 20, no. 3 (1993), 494-514. 167 Magogo. By 1954, in the context of the protests in Shambaai, he had rescinded his support for the Simbamwene and had aligned himself with the local TANU branch whose provincial chairman he would become in due time – certainly at a crucial historical junction. Shemsanga was portrayed as a bold and a brilliant speaker, an educated and politically experienced man: he began his career as a mission teacher at the Bumbuli Bethel mission station.
Figure 5 Timetable of Political Events in Shambaai 1946-1961 Since the 1930s Existence of a Tanganyika African Association (TAA) branch in Shambaai Existence of various chamas (for traders, rainmaking, politics) 1946 Introduction of the Mlalo Basin Rehabilitation Scheme (MBRS) 1947 August: first March on Vugha organized by TAA and chamas November: Abdication of Shebughe Magogo Shebughe’s son Mputa Magogo installed as the new Kimweri 1949 TAA Usambara branch under Isaka Hoza’s leadership banned by colonial government 1950 Expansion of the MBRS to the whole of Shambaai (now referred to as Usambara Scheme) Local Courts Ordinance Early 1950s Founding of the Usambara Citizens Unions (UCU) 1952 Failed second March on Vugha Ringleader Trial 1954 TAA becomes the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and grows into a mass movement in Tanganyika “Prime Minister” Mlughu Shemsanga leaves the Chief’s Council and joins the opposition The UCU merges with TANU Usambara branch 1955 Ban of public meetings Shemsanga wins waylaying case Tea Shop Case 1956 Ban of TANU branch (Usambara) Nyerere visits Shambaai Osale and Paulo shot dead 1957 Ban of TANU branch Korogwe Shemsanga Trial Usambara Scheme abandoned Late 1950s gradual replacement of chiefs with magistrates begins 1961 Tanganyika becomes independent
Later he served as Mlughu (“prime minister”) to Shebughe Magogo’s council and to his successor and son Kimweri Mputa Magogo after Shebughe’s abdication in 1947. Shemsanga was
168 also to become the new Kimweri’s English tutor.4 It is worthwhile noting that Shemsanga was closely associated with the Chief’s council during the first waves of protest in 1947 and 1952, which were triggered by the Usambara Scheme and Shebuge’s contested succession. Instead, Shemsanga firmly stood at Shebughe Magogo’s side at the time of the march on Vugha in 1947 and the failed second march in 1952.
Furthermore, he was involved in the conservative organization Tumaini la Ushambaa (The Hope of Usambara) founded in 1948 by Kimweri Mputa Magogo to consolidate his rule in those difficult times.5 Shemsanga’s intimate connection with the ruling family makes his late but extraordinary powerful move into opposition curious, and might explain the sometimes toxic verbal exchanges between him and Kimweri. Although mostly speculation, it is worth considering personal quarrels between the Simbamwene and his Mlughu over Shemsanga’s high ambitions at a time of rapid changes. In a political climate in which the system of chieftaincy and the Kilindi lineage had come increasingly under pressure and at a time when some commoners were even calling for its abolition (in fact, some as early as 1947),6 the Chief might have worried about his Mlughu’s political ambitions, especially given that Shemsanga was a commoner.7 The split between the two men occurred in 1954, when Shemsanga resigned from his position as Mlughu; whether he did so deliberately or by force is controversial.8 Whatever the case, he was immediately associated with the chama and rose quickly to be one of its major spokespersons. His opposition was probably a significant sign of change to the majority of discontent peasants.
4 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 177. 5 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 14; Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 157. 6 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 12. 7 For more on the speculation that Shemsanga might have been perceived as a threat, see a document he wrote to Kimweri in 1952. It concerns Shemsanga’s suggestions as to how to rearrange the chiefly council. When he came to describing the responsibilities of the Mlughu, that is his own position, he basically insisted that all significant responsibilities were his (being the Chief Minister), namely: a) overseeing the problems with respect to schools, health and dispensaries. b) investigating the constitution of associations/political parties and controversies among the religious associations c) taking care of the peace of the country through overseeing disputes among the Sub-Chiefs and headmen d) receiving every report [written by any official of the native authorities], to examine them and to pass them on to the Sultan, see TNA\DSM, 72/43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies. Lushoto, 03.03.1952, Shemsanga to Simbamwene, 108. 8 An article in Maendeleo ya Shambalai states that Shemsanga resigned deliberately, see TNA\DSM, 72, US/21, Vol.II: Mendeleo ya Shambalai and District Newspapers, 30. Copy of Maendeleo ya Shambalai, June 1954, Vol.IV, No.6, 118, p.1; however, Daniel Magogo, Mputa Magogo’s younger brother, said that Kimweri Mputa Magogo decided to let Shemsanga go, see Interview with Daniel Magogo, 07.11.2014. 169 At the same time the “new” chama under Shemsanga’s lead was perceived as a greater threat by the Lushoto district office than previous political agitation. To be sure, Shemsanga’s views were not more radical. In fact, other men such as Isaka Hoza imagined a radically egalitarian society that Shemsanga did not necessarily envisage.9 The Tanganyika African Association (TAA), Usambara branch, which eventually absorbed the various chamas of the 1940s under Isaka Hoza’s presidency,10 was banned by the colonial administration in 1949.11 J.J. Hozza, Isaka Hoza’s nephew, argued that the radically egalitarian political vision of the TAA branch in Shambaai of the 1940s remained unmatched by the moderate TANU predecessor of the 1950s. The title of Hozza’s thesis alone evokes the political mobilization in the 1940s, culminating in the march on Vugha in 1947, which was referred to as the “Hozza rebellion” – a rebellion against the Kilindi led by members of the large and prestigious Hoza family led by Isaka Hoza’s who was “perhaps the most radical politician of the 1940s.”12 The 1950s, however, saw the foundation of the Usambara Citizens Union (UCU) under Shemsanga’s leadership and its quick merger with TANU in 1954.13 Under the label UCU, the chama ceased to be a “militant organization.”14 There is no evidence of the chama being militant, but the recurring comparisons with Mau Mau across the Kenyan border indicates that the unrest in Shambaai was perceived as a militant threat. When TANU reached Shambaai shortly after the foundation of the UCU, the nationalist party had more to offer to Usambara’s inhabitants than the UCU, Hozza argues. Only due to its merger with TANU did it grow into a popular movement.15
Why then did the colonial administration perceive the UCU as a major threat if the association had cut its links to radical activists? The UCU was perceived as a risk not because it pursued the egalitarian vision of the 1940s that threatened chiefly rule – it did not in fact – but because of the larger scale under which it operated. While the activism of the 1940s “had drained away in the sands of particularism,”16 the UCU, under Shemsanga, was part of an all-encompassing
9 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 14. 10 Ibid., 12-13. 11 Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 526. 12 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 14, 12. 13 TANU, TANU na wananchi Lushoto, 6. 14 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 19. 15 Ibid., 20-21; Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 526. 16 Ibid., 520. 170 nationalist movement, and even included the liberation struggle in Africa in general. Isaka Hoza’s specific anti-Kilindi brand had given way to the larger nationalistic narrative under Nyerere, and to the vision of an independent nation state. I argue that the enlargement of scale in Shambaa politics only became visible with Shemsanga’s new leadership style. It was the larger vision and the new instruments used which threatened the British. Because Shemsanga had access to previously underused networks and knowledge and because he firmly anchored his political vision in Shambaa politics, the British feared an unstoppable spread of chama politics.
Shemsanga joined the opposition to Kimweri in 1954 and in the same year the nationalist movement in Tanganyika picked up pace. By 1954, The Tanganyika African Association (TAA) had been renamed the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and after some initial setbacks it became a mass movement in rural Tanganyika as of 1955 under Julius Nyerere’s charismatic leadership.17 Small wonder that the colonial government was worried about the peculiar bricolage in Shambaai that consisted of TANU’s power and networks and the chama’s specific brand of anti-chief agitation. It was easier for the British to agree with other more moderate nationalist leaders of the day, such as Petro Njau of Kilimanjaro, the leader of the Kilimanjaro Citizens Union (KCU). Njau’s vision was to extend his KCU to neighboring ethnic groups in a union of “mountain people” secured under a council of chiefs.18 Probably because the leaders of the chama knew that Njau’s form of nationalism was more acceptable to the colonial government they saw more opportunity for cooperation.
In March 1954, Theodore Isaka and Zemu Shemsanga invited Petro Njau to the Bawanjama, the local council.19 Theodore Isaka, a former “tribal dresser” also known as Mzee Choodo,20 had been a fierce opponent of Kimweri from the get-go in 1947. Mzee Choodo was one of the UCU’s leading figures. It appears that Shemsanga, playing a leading role in the UCU, either replaced Isaka Hoza as the first spokesperson, or that Hoza was not interested in the UCU’s politics. In the 1950s, Mzee Choodo and Shemsanga were the dominant oppositional figures. Theodore Isaka thought that forming an ethnic union similar to the KCU would win government approval,
17 Ibid., 513, 518-519. 18 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 211. 19 TNA\DSM, 304, A6/29: Associations and Communities Usambara Citizens Union, 04.04.1956, Mkutano NO. 2, “Shambaa Citizens Union,” 4, p.1. 20 Interview with elders of Mbuzii, 07.11.2014. 171 especially since Petro Njau was on good terms with the colonial administration.21 But soon the district newspaper, Maendeleo ya Shambalai (the Development of Shambaai), run by the native authorities, warned its readers that Shemsanga wanted the KCU’S leader “to do bad things that even Njau rejected doing.”22 In addition, Maendeleo ya Shambalai fueled the rumor that Shemsanga and the chama had the “intention to overthrow our Simbamwene Kimweri Mputa Magogo.”23 The local broadsheet, whose production had risen by 50 percent since 1951, was a well-read local paper also in Shambaa communities outside the district and province.24 The government did what it could to add to Shemsanga’s bad reputation. When, after Nyerere’s visit in January 1956, TANU asked the administration if it could open a branch in Shambaai, the administration denied the request a second time, but instead allowed the UCU, the “lesser evil”, to open an office.25 The central government and the native authorities feared an overthrow not only of the native authorities, but of colonial rule. Not many TANU branches in late colonial Tanganyika were prohibited. Other closed branches were Kondoa-Iringa and Dodoma, where land issues, too, were at the heart of the matter.26 Apparently many people went to the city of Tanga to receive Tanga branch membership instead of membership cards for the Usambara branch.27 Meanwhile, Lushoto’s DC had prohibited public meetings as well as the collection of money.28 Collecting money was a euphemism used for selling membership cards to potential TANU supporters. Of course meetings still took place and money was collected. Bits and pieces of information trickled into the offices of native authorities and of the British. Helpers of the Chief reported the money collection activities and secret correspondence between TANU headquarters in Dar es Salaam and Vugha. Apparently Petro Njau had received 3,900 Shillings prior to his visit to Shambaai.29
21 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 177. 22 TNA\DSM, 72, US/21, Vol.II: Maendeleo ya Shambalai and District Newspapers, without date, Chama cha Umoja wa Raia. 23 TNA\DSM, 72, US/21, Vol.II: Maendeleo ya Shambalai and District Newspapers, 30. Copy of Maendeleo ya Shambalai, June 1954, Vol.IV, No.6, 118, p.1. 24 Hozza, The Hoza Rebellion and After: A Study in Innovation, 14. 25 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 177-179. 26 Abubakar U. Ulotu, Historia ya TANU (Dar es Salaam: Kilimanjaro Publications, 1971), 62. 27 Archives of Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), THQ/A 25/18: Historia ya TANU, p.4. 28 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 159. 29 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 06.03.1956, Simbamwene to DC Lushoto, 60. 172 Again, it was Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni of Vugha-Bazo who lent his full support in order to uncover secret meetings or to find potential witnesses. In September 1956 he sent informers to a secret meeting of the usual suspects: Shemsanga, Mzee Choodo, Athumani Hoza and others at Shashui. There, his “helpers” learned that any person who had a dispute was asked to have their cases adjudicated in their neighborhood. If that failed, “we should bring it to our Mwambashi Shemsanga, and if he fails to solve the issue he will bring it to the DC. We should not report our cases at the native courts because the native authorities oppress us and they make us pay fines.”30 According to a 1975 TANU publication, “Mwambashi” is the local Shambaa title for the chief or president (as he was later called), not the term “Simbamwene” which was associated with Kilindi rule.31 Curiously, the people involved in the clandestine meeting, notably supporters of the UCU, referred to Shemsanga as “our Mwambashi”, our president. Moreover, the quotation demonstrates that chama supporters and probably many ordinary citizens had begun to mistrust the native courts so thoroughly that they advocated for informal dispute settlements instead of trusting the native courts. If informal dispute settlements under Shemsanga failed, the adjudication by British officials was preferred to the chiefly courts.
After Njau’s visit, Shemsanga was called before the Bawanjama and had to explain himself. He refused to respond to the question as to whether he believed that the Simbamwene was the legitimate ruler. He also said that he preferred the “wakili kuliko hakimu,”32 that is he preferred the delegate from KCU over the judge. This statement was very controversial. It was difficult to say aloud that one favored an external person over the Chief who was supposed to understand his people’s affairs better than anybody else. But what was even cheekier was that Shemsanga referred the Chief in his function as court-holder in this particular context, before the Bawanjama and with the knowledge that his word would spread. The Swahili word hakimu means judge. Usually, others would refer to the Simbamwene as Zumbe Mkuu, Chief or Kimweri, even when referring to his judicial function. But Shemsanga chose not to. By using the term hakimu to characterize the Chief, he deliberately placed his judicial function at the forefront. But it was precisely the chief’s judicial function that was controversial. I suggest that
30 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1 Vol.IV: Native Courts General, 24.09.1956, Hemedi Mbughuni to DC Lushoto, 406. 31 TANU, TANU na wananchi Lushoto, 12. 32 TNA\DSM, 72, US/21, Vol.II: Mendeleo ya Shambalai and District Newspapers, 30. Copy of Maendeleo ya Shambalai, June 1954, Vol.IV, No.6, 118, p.2. 173 Shemsanga, in old Shambaa manner, chose his language deliberately. A court-holder who is unfair as a judge, is an impossible chief. If one cannot trust the judge, be it because he betrays one’s understanding of the separation of powers, or from a Shambaa perspective, because he does not fulfill the required obligations regarding his subjects, it is safer to trust an external person, a stranger. It is precisely the chief’s failure in the judicial realm, Shemsanga appears to suggest, that will bring him down. His statement should thus be read as criticism of the colonial judiciary in general. Contrary to the older squad of activists of the 1940s, Shemsanga was always eager to refer to the universal “principles of natural justice” that were so dear to the British. It was his way of shedding light on the controversial events that happened in colonial courts even after the reforms. More importantly, it was his strategy to highlight the contradiction that lay at the heart of the colonial legal system, notably the introduction of allegedly universal rights that were only protected when the British or their local court-holders saw fit. The court cases I examine in the following section are examples of Shemsanga’s strategy. They fall precisely in the period between 1954 and 1957, the decisive years during which Shemsanga joined the opposition, and both Njau and Nyerere paid their visits to Shambaai, the latter in January 1956.33 The abolition of the Usambara Scheme and the replacement of Njau’s tribalism by TANU’s nationalism also fell in this time period.
False Accusation as a Tool of Political Repression There was a long history of false accusations in Shambaai. They were already in use before Shemsanga became the political enemy, but they became more frequent as the colonial government felt increasingly threatened by Shemsanga and his circle. As early as 1950, when the native courts advisor Mr. Moffett toured Shambaai, he noticed the “astonishing number of “false accusation” cases, no less than 25 out of the last 100 cases examined being of this nature.”34 Two years later, the colonial administration of Shambaai enacted a new rule and published it in Maendeleo ya Shambalai. It was concerned with the duty of court assessors to prosecute people who had given false evidence before a court.35 It is exemplary that the administration passed a rule that was concerned with the symptoms, not with the root of the
33 TANU, TANU na wananchi Lushoto, 1. 34 TNA\DSM, 39120: Safari Reports by N.C.A., Vol.I: 17.02.-11.03.1950, Safari notes by Native Courts Adviser on visit to the Tanga Province, 29A, 29A, 15. 35 TNA\DSM, 41176: Swahili Publications Vol.III, Maendeleo ya Shambalai, Vol 2 No.9, August 1952, 524, p.2. 174 problem. False evidence could be given by all sorts of witnesses on all sort of occasions. But a false accusation has a more intricate nature. It embodies the intention of a court-holder to rid himself of a political or private enemy or to punish him or her by accusing, convicting and sentencing the accused for an offense they never committed. False accusations are supposed to ruin others, false evidence is meant to save the self. Had the rule specified the court-holder’s position in false accusation cases, the risk of further eroding the already questionable reputation of the colonial judiciary would have increased. By the early 1950s, making false accusations was the most frequent practice in Shambaai, especially in the sub-chiefdoms of Bumbuli and Vugha which were closest to the center of power.
The vast majority of the false accusation cases I came across were in some way related to the chama, Shemsanga, or the violation of the Usambara scheme rules.36 What a letter-writer had pondered in 1948 had become reality in the early 1950s: The “kabila la wanachama”37 [“tribe” of chama members] had become a new and powerful unit of identification. The new division was now between “watu wa chama na wengine wasio wa chama”, between chama members and those who were not.38 Often people were accused of having incited others to participate at a chama meeting or having ignored a call for communal labor turn-out or the like.39
36 I came across a wealth of false accusation cases, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, see: TNA\DSM, 44/16: Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), 604, 611, 613; TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans Lushoto, 11, 12, 95; TNA\DSM, 45/1B, Vol.IV: Native Affairs Legal, NC Vuga, 7,58, 60, 61, 63, 66A; TNA\DSM,72, 45/4A: Native Affairs Legal. Appeals to the Boma, 93, 97, 93; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.VI: Native Affairs Legal. Appeal and revisions Native courts, 119. 37 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 04.06.1948, raia yako wenye taabu [your troubled citizens of Vuga] to the PC, 463. 38 TNA\DSM, 4/6/2, Vol.II, Administration native, Usambara District, 29.03.1948, Citizen F. Shangalawei to PC, 436. 39 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 05.04.1955, Matia Singano, Mission Press Vuga, to DC Lushoto, 408; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.IV: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 16.10.1955, Judgment Kitara Kikuu Appeal Court, 66A, p.1+2. 175 Figure 6 Judgment of the Native Court of Vugha-Bazo
In: TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 13.04.1955, Native Court Vugha Bazo Appeal Case 155/1955, 415+, Judgment. 176 Often those who fought back against false accusations were already known as “litigious souls.” They had experience using colonial courts. Often they were experts of the chain of appeal and as a general rule, they were prone to using the language of rights.40 Out of the wealth of false accusation cases I came across, I chose two. One of them was that of Mbiru Kiberiti of Mbuzii, a village close to Vugha in which the opposition was strongest and which boasted the first official TANU office in the entire district. In 1955, at the peak of the anti-chama campaign, Mbiru Kiberiti was accused of inciting and inviting others to a chama meeting without the permission of his headman at Mponde.41 It appears that Mbiru Kiberiti went to Mponde on that day in March 1955 and attended the meeting, but there is no sound evidence that he invited others to the event. Judge Hemedi Mbughuni, who also adjudicated the case on second hearing, sentenced Mbiru Kiberiti to four months in prison with hard labor, because, “You want to teach the other residents of Mponde to be waasi, “rebels”, and to break the administration’s rules.”42 There were three issues with Mbiru Kiberiti’s case. When Kiberiti asked for an appeal, he was not granted the appeal, but instead subjected to a second hearing by the same judge. Again, this was a violation of the principle of res judicata as discussed in the previous chapter. But Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni did not care much about res judicata, and neither did DC Thorne, who read the judgment and mandated that Mbughuni re-hear the case for the third time.43 Secondly, the prosecution’s witnesses appear to have been “false” as well – one was a school boy, the other one simply repeated the plaint word for word, but did not account for how he witnessed it. Thirdly, as a confidential letter from the DC to Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni reveals, the plaint was based entirely on a fictional claim. The DC “confessed” that it had come to his knowledge that other people had in fact instigated the chama meeting so he asked for Kibiriti’s
40 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.IV: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 29.02.1956, Wasili Shemkole to DC, 58; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.V: Lushoto Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 03.06.1954, DC Lushoto to PC Tanga, Appeal Case no.26 of 1954 Wasili Shemkole versus Jumbe Musa Shengoto, 100; TNA\DSM, 72, 45/4, Vol.V: Lushoto Native Affairs Legal. Appeals and Revisions Native Courts, 04.07.1955, PC Tanga to DC Lushoto, 125A. 41 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 13.04.1955, Native Court Vugha Bazo Appeal Case 155/1955, 415+. 42 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 13.04.1955, Native Court Vugha Bazo Appeal Case 155/1955, 415+, Judgment. 43 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 13.04.1955, Native Court Vugha Bazo Appeal Case 155/1955, 415+, Judgment, handwritten notice pinned on top. 177 acquittal.44 The case is a good illustration of how native courts functioned when it came to “political” cases such as the one in which Mbiru Kiberiti was involved. It shows that British district officials were aware of and ready to accept that their local personnel sued people on shaky grounds and made use of fabricated witness accounts when they perceived the people involved as a political threat. Clearly Kibiriti’s case was a political one. In the mid-1950s, silencing radical political agitators was more important than legal procedure.
In addition, Mbiru Kiberiti’s case has one of the lengthiest court records I got hold of. As a general rule, case files of Shambaai native courts were very brief. In contrast, the dutiful record- keeping in Kiberiti’s case can be read as another sign of the fabricated nature of the case. Apparently Hemedi Mbughuni put extra effort in making sure that the records of this case and other similar ones were kept in the required fashion. As mentioned in the previous chapter, keeping court records was often “forgotten.” In the respective false accusation cases, however, Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni aimed to satisfy the DC’s guidelines. He knew that it was most likely that the records would be inspected, in which case his “forgetting” to keep them would make his judgment look even more suspicious.
The second case I chose concerns the famous Theodore Isaka aka Mzee Choodo, Shemsanga’s above-mentioned colleague. In a letter to the District Magistrate of Lushoto in 1959, Theodore Isaka complained about the notorious Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni. He claimed that the court- holder had falsely accused him of attempted murder twice already. According to the letter, Mbughuni had succeeded in persuading others to present false evidence before the court. Furthermore, on a number of occasions Mbughuni had tried to recruit others to sue him on the grounds that he, Mzee Choodo, had incited others to break the scheme rules.45 As we saw above, accusing others of breaking the scheme rules was one of the tools used by government to punish opposition activists. This tool was even mentioned in a petition to the United National Trusteeship Council: “Since the scheme is new in the country, everyone regarded as the enemy of the Chief or any Sub-Chief is falsely accused that he is against the said scheme – and false
44 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1B, Vol.III: Native Affairs Legal. Native Court Vuga Bazo, 07.05.1955, DC to Hemedi Mbughuni, 439. 45 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3 Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 11.12.1959, Theodore Isaka, Lutheran Mission Vuga, to the District Magistrate, Lushoto, 88. 178 witnesses are arranged to give false evidences [sic].”46 Mzee Choodo found the clearest words to describe Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni’s oppressive rule: “I must inform you that false accusations are this Zumbe’s habit, and he has ruined many people’s lives with prison sentences based on false evidence or by teaching them to lie in court. […] This person [Hemedi Mbughuni] is using the [authority of the] government as his instrument to oppress the citizens.”47 Therefore, Theodore Isaka declared that he intended to press charges against Mbughuni before the Chief Justice himself so that “we would be judged according to the law.” [tuamuliwe haki]. This was a most necessary proceeding, Mzee Choodo argued, for otherwise one day he would be sentenced for a crime he never committed, and he did not want to end up in prison or with the death penalty, he remarked. He ended his letter with the plea that the government should allow him to open the lawsuit against Mbughuni so that “I and my fellows who are oppressed to no avail can be salvaged.”48 The Magistrate simply replied that if Theodore Isaka had proof, he should press his charges at the Paramount’s court at Vugha.49 Mzee Choodo objected on the grounds of conflict of interest, since it was common knowledge that the Chief and Hemedi Mbughuni were in-laws,50 but he received no further reply. Throughout the 1950s, many different people pleaded with or threatened the government about the issue of Zumbe Mbughuni’s critical judgments, but to no avail. At the time Theodore Isaka wrote his letter, his fellow comrade Shemsanga was no longer interested in the minor happenings in native courts. He had already set his eyes on the higher price of national politics. By 1958 Shemsanga was the representative of the Tanga Province in the national TANU committee, side by side with the influential post-colonial politician Rashidi Kawawa.51
46 TNA/DSM, 304/A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, 20.12.1954, Petition to the United Nations Trusteeship Council, 670A, p.10. 47 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3 Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 11.12.1959, Theodore Isaka, Lutheran Mission Vuga, to the District Magistrate, Lushoto, 88. 48 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3 Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 11.12.1959, Theodore Isaka, Lutheran Mission Vuga, to the District Magistrate, Lushoto, 88. 49 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3 Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 04.01.1960, District Magistrate to Theodore Isaka, 12. 50 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3 Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 19.01.1960, Theodore Isaka to District Magistrate, 95. 51 CCM, HK/ May-Nov 1958 Mkutano Mkuu wa mwaka 1958, p.5. 179 The Perfect Intermediary The time period in which Shemsanga devoted his attention purely towards local politics in Shambaai was brief. Before 1954 he had been on the Chief’s team, and after 1958 he was absorbed in the national TANU web. But between 1954 and 1958, he was extraordinarily efficient and he achieved considerable successes. Naturally Shemsanga was equipped with detailed knowledge of Kimweri’s appeal court, and court politics in general, and he was acquainted with and connected to many influential people around the royal court. As the former Mlughu, he was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson of the new elite and certainly the perfect intermediary when it came to using the language of rights: mission-educated, Christian, exposed enough to use the networks of modern lawyers, but also “traditional” enough to fully grasp the micro-politics that were at play at the chiefly court.
In this section, I portray one exemplary confrontation between Shemsanga and the Chief in the legal realm. It also involved British district, provincial and secretarial officials. In August 1955, roughly a year after Petro Njau’s visit, Shemsanga contacted DC J. Glennie. The reason was that he felt wronged by the judgments of the native court of Vugha-Bazo and the Chief’s appeal court at Vugha. Shemsanga did so in his name and that of the two fellow accused, one of them the above-mentioned Theodore Isaka aka Mzee Choodo, another one, Siliwano Shekalaghe – one of the fourteen ring leaders in the 1952 conspiracy trial (see Chapter Six). Shemsanga initiated the dispute with the district office because, he claimed, they had been sentenced for a crime they had never committed. In the letter, the four men maintained that they wished to question the legitimacy of the judgment through the letter in addition to applying for leave to appeal. Furthermore, they wished to press the charges of false accusation against the court elders who had sentenced them in the previous courts. Shemsanga pointed out that he and the three other accused were ready to appear as the prosecution witnesses in order to testify against the elders’ false accusations, which they referred to as uzushi, fabrications. The court elders in question had accused the four men of waylaying and confronting one the headman of Vugha, and of attempting to free a remanded (chama) prisoner from lawful custody.52 Shemsanga maintained that both charges were freely fabricated. He also pointed out that the
52 TNA\DSM, 304, C8/3: Complaints by Africans. Lushoto District, 11.12.1959, Theodore Isaka, Lutheran Mission Vuga, to the District Magistrate, Lushoto, 88. 180 four men had to spend four days in remand custody before they were released with a fine. As Shambaa letter-writers liked to do, he ended the letter with a question. Was it not his right as a citizen, Shemsanga enquired, to press charges against government officials if need be?53
In the tense situation between the UCU and Kimweri, the DC attempted to remain neutral. He agreed to return the fine, and promised the four men that he himself would investigate the matter and would even search for witnesses who could prove their claim. Yet Shemsanga seemed to doubt Mr. Glennie’s commitment to sue the court elders and told him so in a second letter.54 Not surprisingly, Shemsanga’s second letter to the DC appeared to have aggravated him. It could not have been an amusing incident for a DC when his own court staff were accused of strategic fabrications to rid themselves of political enemies, even if it was a well-known phenomenon at the time. The alleged offense was, according to a memorandum concerning Tanganyika’s native courts a sensitive one, because one of the “major weaknesses” of Tanganyika’s native courts were at the heart of the issue, notably the “failure to observe the principles of natural justice.”55 The memorandum reads, “a man may not be judge in his own cause; decisions should be on purely judicial grounds and should not be liable to be influenced by motives of self-interest, political opinions or other extraneous consideration.”56 Sally Moore, who has written extensively about Kilimanjaro native courts, points out that such memoranda, because they functioned to establish rules for the native courts, can be understood as “self- serving discourses on power, as justificatory representations of the ideology of control.”57 Keeping Moore’s reading in mind, DC Glennie’s anger could have been the result of his frustrated effort to make use of his margin in legal evolution. He wanted to control Shemsanga, a political enemy, but the latter had in turn incorporated the British law reform into his reasoning. It is likely that the DC’s anger derived at least partially from the fact that Shemsanga and his colleagues challenged his ability to see to just jurisdiction in “his” native courts. Defendants who “uncovered” false accusations, of which this was the most prominent case,
53 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 19.08.1955, Shemsanga to DC, 8. 54 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 05.10.1955, Sam Shemsanga, Samuel Mbalakele, Siliwano Shekalaghe, Theodore Isaka to DC, 14. 55 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 35. 56 Ibid., 36. 57 Ibid., 13. 181 certainly surfed on the wave of the recently rediscovered campaign to eradicate German- inherited corruption. The growing awareness that little had changed despite serious efforts in the years must have been frustrating for Glennie.
Glennie’s dilemma in the Shemsanga case was a tricky one. If he succumbed to Shemsanga’s plaint, he placed the court elders in an uncomfortable position and risked a scandal, or perhaps worse, a precedent, in his own house. On the other hand, if he denied Shemsanga’s legitimate claim, he might have to deal with more publicity and accusations. If he refused to allow Shemsanga, who was known all over town and, more importantly, beyond its borders, to charge the court elders with false accusation, more political turmoil might surface. Eventually Glennie informed Shemsanga that the matter was closed since he had won his appeal before the Simbamwene, whose ruling acquitted them on both charges, waylaying58 the headman of Vugha, and freeing a remand prisoner. But Glennie was not ready to allow the activists to press charges against the court elders who had wrongfully testified against them. He even claimed that the false accusations had been in order since the defendants had had the “goal to attempt to overthrow the government.” He ended with simple advice: “If you stop this activism you will never again find yourself in such a dangerous situation.”59
But for Shemsanga the case was not closed. They had won their appeal and gotten their money back, but what they had on their mind was a victory of a larger scope. Shemsanga wanted to pressure the DC into acknowledging that in the courts he supervised, nobody could be accused of a crime they had not committed and to act accordingly. If his objective was based on a strong sense of justice, or if he wanted to secure a political triumph we cannot know. “Your letter did not satisfy me at all,”60 read his reply. Shemsanga, clearly frustrated, asked the DC three weeks later “utawala huu utajao ni mali ya nani?”61 – To whom does the government you are referring to really belong? The quotation demonstrates that Shemsanga and his colleagues did not feel represented neither by the native authorities, who had initiated the false accusation, nor the British district officials, whose stance towards their own rules was ambiguous to say the least.
58 Waylaying is a legal terms and refers to the action of lying in wait for another person, to ambush another person. 59 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 13.10.1955, DC to Shemsanga, 15. 60 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 17.10.1955, Shemsanga to DC, 16. 61 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 07.11.1955, Shemsanga to DC, 20. 182 Shemsanga’s letter also marks the starting point of his “new strategy.” The recently appropriated rhetoric of human rights came to be his new major weapon in the confrontation with Kimweri and the colonial state.
Apparently in late December 1955 the freshly appointed DC, Mr. Sword, called Shemsanga for a talk in his office, but to no avail. Instead Shemsanga sent a formal English letter rife with references to human rights, in which he stated that he had been accused of being an “unwanted person” and of having the intent to “overthrow the government.” He pointed out that he “was on one occasion subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, and fine, contrary to Article 9 of the U.D. of H. Rights.” He was referring to unlawful acts of “disregard and contempt for human rights”, however unspecific, and argued that those acts, “which the nation [of Shambaai] now abhor[s]”, were not based on the principles of the United Nations Charter.62
Two days later, Shemsanga and his colleagues sent another official two-page type-written letter, only this time to the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam. Again, the language of this second letter was well chosen. Besides the usual references to human rights, the three authors also employed Cold War discourse which by the 1950s was permeating Tanganyika’s public sphere. Small publications issued directly from London insisted on the dangers of communism.63 In Tanganyika, British research officers were not only concerned with scientific methods of agricultural husbandry, but also with politics. At a conference of agricultural officers employed to work on development schemes in 1952, it was pointed out that “exceptional Africans steadily amassing wealth are one of our defences against Communism, and should get all possible support.”64 As the quotation shows, Cold War rhetoric had penetrated all aspects of life in the colonies. It was important to encourage the Africans who appeared to have chosen a “capitalist” way of life, and to persuade those who had not to do the same. Emma Hunter explains that those living in Eastern Europe were frequently portrayed as the “slaves of Communism” by local
62 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 22.12.55, Shemsanga to DC, 28. 63 Strong anti-communist rhetoric found expression in small publications throughout the British colonies, see TNA\KEW, FO 1110/249, Africa: Anti-communist propaganda in East and Central African territories; paper on Communism in Africa. 64 TNA\DSM, 42221: Tanganyika Secretariat. Minutes of Conference of Officers engaged on Agriculture development schemes, 16.05.1952. 183 authors of government newspapers.65 The importance of the Cold War was certainly not lost on Tanganyikans. But how they chose to interpret the discourse and how they positioned themselves within it could not be controlled by British officials. As the following example shows, the Cold War discourse was often used by chama activists to meet their own ends. Shemsanga and his colleagues appropriated the language of the Cold War in a peculiar way. By portraying Kimweri as a proponent of communism, they attempted to force the British to take sides against an alleged mutual enemy. The letter reads:
Kimweri is so powerful that from District Commissioners downward, there is none that can utter a word even if Kimweri has unlawfully persecuted wrongfully. It seems that Kimweri is above the British Government at home. What he does is more or less of an autocratic power and is very similar to what the Communist Dictators do in Russia and her satellite countries. I personally take this to mean that the DC not only encouraged Kimweri’s despotic rule, but also he saw to it that false charges are manifestly instituted against the people in this contemporary Usambara. [sic]66 Equating Kimweri with a “Communist Dictator” was, of course, also meant as a provocation to the British. How could they allow a defector to communism rule their subjects, especially as the British had the right to remove politically suspect chiefs and had made common use of it in the past? The reference to Kimweri’s dubious stance towards communism was hardly based on facts. It was meant to catch the Chief Secretary’s attention. Yet the real objective of the letter had nothing do with the Cold War. Instead, the accusation that the DC put up with the chief’s despotism can be read as an open hint to British double standards. Apparently, the perception had grown among Tanganyikans that the British were ready to accept certain things – such as a chief falsely prosecuting private or political enemies – when it served their cause, while they punished others less favored for the similar offenses. In addition, the quotation suggests that the British would rather ignore a dear principle of natural justice than allow political enemies the right to a fair trial. While the DC had simply wished to back the “political” prosecutions of his Paramount Chief to secure the social order, he found himself in major trouble. By challenging the Chief’s decision on judicial grounds, Shemsanga and his colleagues tried to beat the DC at his own game. Accusations of double standards were increasing at a threatening rate.
65 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 144. 66 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 24.12.1955, Shemsanga, Isaka, Shekalaghe to Chief Secretary of the Tanganyika Government, 30. 184 Just as the rebels of the march on Vugha in 1947 had done, the letter rejected Kimweri’s legitimacy and demanded the installation of the “true heir” of the Kilindi royal clan, Billa’s son. Curiously, back then Shemsanga had passionately defended Kimweri Mputa Magogo’s right to the throne. Kimweri’s alleged despotism was illustrated by examples of the rights violations Billa’s supporters had to suffer from, such as torture and imprisonment without trial. But the basic issue of the letter to Dar es Salaam remained the lament of double standards. It appears to have been one of the major goals of Shemsanga’s group to underline the unlawful events that haunted Shambaai and to underline their own commitment to human rights and the principles of democracy. In doing so, the letter-writers not only challenged Kimweri’s rule, but also reprimanded the British failure to follow the laws and rules they themselves had set up:
The Shambala community is held down by bad laws which it detests and only obeys because it must. […] Threat is more or less respected by the Shambalas as they have seen people imprisoned without prior causes or mistakes et al. Many sub-chiefs and headmen are a nominated minority in the Usambara, probably [only] one or three of them are loved and respected by their people as stated above, in the Bawanjama the sub-chiefs and the friends of the chief dominate the seats whereas Bawanjama was set up to represent the views of the people in conjunction with democratic principles.67 Clearly, Shemsanga, Isaka and Shekalaghe claimed to speak in the name of the people and not only for themselves. Their claims were not new. But a shift in scope had occurred. It was not so much the content, but the language in which claims were phrased, that opened the discussion beyond Shambaai and even Tanganyika, which signified a much larger scope. The international language of human rights and the Cold War discourse were global narratives, not local ones. But they could be used by local actors nonetheless. It was hoped that the strategic shift to the universally acclaimed language of rights would give their case both more publicity and more credibility. In a concentrated effort of strategic letter-writing, activists began to record violations of rights, unjust or illegitimate court judgments and the unsatisfactory work of highly personalized native courts. The idea behind this move was to discredit the native authorities. The increased judicial powers of chiefs in the colonial legal system had led to a personalization of the courts. False accusations could be, as in Shemsanga’s case, an efficient way of disposing
67 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 24.12.1955, Shemsanga, Isaka, Shekalaghe to Chief Secretary of the Tanganyika Government, 30a. 185 of political or private opponents.68 By highlighting the procedural inconsistencies and the impartiality of local court-holders under British overall control, the activists hoped to de- legitimize Kimweri’s position. A second goal was to criticize the role the British played. References to human rights and to the Cold War discourse lent themselves smoothly to uncover British hypocrisy and double standards.
Going back to the specific case, Shemsanga’s strategy worked at least partially. Indeed, the initial objective to sue the court elders of Vugha-Bazo on the charge of false accusation was not granted. But apparently Shemsanga, now appearing as the sole plaintiff, had succeeded at creating enough pressure to be allowed to press charges against the two witnesses who had brought false evidence against him and his group in the previous year’s court case at Vugha- Bazo. Shemsanga won the case hands down. In February of 1956, Judge Mwantembo and his assessor Mzee Mbwana, decided in his favor. The two accused, Selemani Shechambo und Abedi Shemaeze, admitted straight away that they had given false evidence in the previous year’s case and were sentenced to pay 80 Shillings in compensation to Shemsanga and a 20 Shilling fine to the court.69 Shemsanga had not gotten hold of the court elders who had payed or forced Selemani Shechambo and Abedi Shemaeze to give false evidence in court. But after the sentencing of the two false witnesses it might not have appeared promising anymore to others to act as a false witness in the future. The court judgment was certainly meant to be understood as a precedent.
The turn of events can be associated with the new strategy to employ a legal aid lawyer. As early as August 1954 he and Mzee Choodo had begun to collect money in order to hire a lawyer who would write petitions to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations.70 In a petition from December 24, 1954, Shemsanga and other petitioners highlighted the recurring practice of false accusations in Shambaai’s native courts. On behalf of the other petitioners, Shemsanga
68 Sally Moore makes a similar point in her account on Chagga Customary Law in North-Eastern Tanganyika, see Moore, Social facts and fabrications, 104-152. 69 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 27.02.1956, shauri no. 90 and shauri no. 92, no number. 70 TNA/DSM, 304/A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, 20.12.1954, 640-686. 186 eventually withdrew the petition in mid-January,71 but the threat of petitioning had built up enough pressure to drive home a major triumph. Through the threat of petitioning, Shemsanga and his colleagues had ensured that the two false witnesses were officially sued and sentenced two months later. As welcome as Shemsanga’s victory in the court was for the nationalist cause, it came with difficulties. The Paramount, his elders and the DC were offended. A couple of months later, in a letter to Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni, the DC openly announced his desire to find independent witnesses that would help him checkmate Shemsanga.72 He would eventually succeed at bringing Shemsanga to court for a criminal delict that justified a harsher sentence.
The Tea Shop Case Under these circumstances it does not come as a surprise that Kimweri Mputa Magogo and Shemsanga’s successor as “prime minister”, Ali Beleko, tried their best to silence the troublemaker, Shemsanga. It took them several attempts to reach their goal. This section is concerned with their first attempt. In it, the chief and his entourage tried to persuade and later force two tea shop owners to sue Shemsanga for allegedly “planting” a bottle of poison in their tea shop, claiming that it was Shemsanga’s intention to poison relatives of Kimweri Mputa Magogo. Their plan failed, however, because the two shop owners refused to sue Shemsanga throughout the disputes which lasted for almost two years. In the following pages, I will present a detailed analysis of this case, which had created a stir. The case was locally referred to as the “Tea Shop Case” because in its course, the accused’s tea shop was shut down by the chief in person. It stretched over more than 18 months. It included the tenure of three different district commissioners, signifying an extraordinarily high rate of staff rotation, and involved two courts in the appeal chain and various other forms of formal and informal communication.
I will now sketch out the case. It is important to know that the Tea Shop Case began with a very different injury than the poison issue. Because the story is complicated but the details matter, I will explain it at length. On May 27, 1955, two young men, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku were tried in the native court of Vugha-Bazo. Zahabu Sheshe led the prosecution. Mohamed and Mbaruku were fined 100 Shillings or two-month imprisonment. As it turned out, their
71 TNA/DSM, 72/45/1B, Vol.IV: Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, 16.01.1956, Shemsanga to Chief Secretary, 37; the petition including all appendices is in TNA/DSM, 304/A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, 09.09.1955, 708A. 72 TNA\DSM, 72, 45/1 Vol.IV: Native Courts General, October 1956, DC Lushoto to Hemedi Mbughuni, no number. 187 offense had been to invite Zemu Shemsanga, an unwanted person, to Vugha, the royal capital.73 The court translated the offense into “contempt of the chief” – after all, Shemsanga was known to advocate for the deposition of the chief. Although Shemsanga was an unwanted person politically, he was free to enter the city of Vugha just like everybody else. What Chief Kimweri really meant was that he would not accept chama activities in his capital. The defendants took leave to appeal at the DC’s appeal court, where their sentence was reduced to 25 Shillings or one-month imprisonment, but not quashed altogether. Because then DC, Mr. Cooke, asked them not to, Mohamed and Mbaruku relinquished their right to appeal at the PC’s appeal court.74 Mr. Cooke ordered that the case also be informally settled by Kimweri and the court elders, the appellants and their fathers.75 Cooke understood that despite the fact that the defendants had officially accepted his suggestion not to appeal to the PC’s court,76 the matter was not settled. He hoped for an “informal settlement.” And indeed, the case was still very much in progress. The important facts only surfaced long after the official court decisions. Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku did not consider the case as closed, nor did they agree to settle the case with their fathers and the other elders or the Muslim authority Shekh Salimu who had also been asked to intervene at some point.77 Instead they contacted a law firm and they wanted their case be tried at a magistrate’s court, where a trained jurist, not an administrative official, was the judge.78
In the Tea Shop Case, Chief Kimweri Mputa Magogo had not only associated the two tea shop owners Mohamed and Mbaruku with the chama and Shemsanga, he also alleged that they collected money from chama members in their tea house and passed it on to Shemsanga in
73 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 16.04.1955, Ali Beleko to DC, 17. 74 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 30.01.1967, Mashtaka ya kusingiziwa sumu kama yanavyoelezwa na wenye sahihi, 93. 75 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, without date, Notes on Tea Shop Case by DC Lushoto, 72, p.4. 76 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 30.01.1967, Mashtaka ya kusingiziwa sumu kama yanavyoelezwa na wenye sahihi, 93. 77 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to District Registrar, 38. 78 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to District Registrar, 38. 188 clandestine nightly meetings.79 The chief worried that the tea house was a meeting place for political opposition, and that chama activism would take root in the center of power. In fact, the tea house was located opposite the kitara kikuu, the royal court of Vugha, and it was a place that was regularly visited by chiefly messengers, drivers, and sometimes also by court staff. At the time the case started, in 1955, the chama was not yet part of the national TANU web, TANU registration was denied and unannounced public meetings banned. In this tense political situation, the chief perceived Mohamed and Mbaruku’s tea house as a yet another threat to his rule. Under pressure, he did not base his decision to close the shop on legal or official grounds, a fact of which he was frequently reminded by the two accused. By closing the tea shop, he deprived the two young men of their income of seven months.
The most interesting fact is that Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku were not sentenced because of having Shemsanga visit their tea house. In fact, what appeared to be at the heart of the matter – contempt of the chief or contempt of the court – was the consequence of an injury that had not been disputed at court. As I could reconstruct from letters and petitions, the tea shop owners were tried because they refused Kimweri Mputa Magogo’s request to sue Shemsanga on a fabricated charge. According to the flood of letters and petitions by the two accused, court assessors and the chief had tried to force the two tea shop owners to sue Shemsanga for “planting” poison in their tea shop. Shemsanga had allegedly intended to murder certain relatives of Kimweri with the poison.80 On the pretext of this false accusation, the chief had produced one “independent witness” in addition to his court elders’ questionable testimony.81 It turned out, however, that the independent witness was not so independent; he had been forced by the chief in person to account for an event he had never witnessed.82
The case is of interest for two reasons. First, its pre- and post-history is crucial to understanding the nature and dimension of the case and its implications for the social life of the litigants. It is a
79 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, without date, Notes on Tea Shop Case by DC Lushoto, 72, p.1. 80 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, without date, Statement of Fact Complaints by Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku, 39, p.1. 81 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, without date, Statement of Fact Complaints by Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku, 39, p.1. 82 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 30.01.1967, Mashtaka ya kusingiziwa sumu kama yanavyoelezwa na wenye sahihi, 93. 189 fascinating example that undergirds my argument of the limited scope of court records. Not only does the representativity issue hamper the use of court records as sources, but another limitation, and perhaps a more important one, is the insight that without supplementing documents, court records could sometimes even obscure the precise nature of the inflicted injury which had led to litigation in the first place. Secondly, the case is an example that highlights how generational tensions could play out for chama supporters who were less famous than Shemsanga. I use it as a window to investigate the growing generational tensions at a time that was characterized by institutional reform and rapid economic change.
The tea shop owners Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku refused to play their part in the anti- Shemsanga plot. Chief Kimweri repeatedly offered to re-open their shop if they agreed to testify against Shemsanga. The Paramount probably attempted to win over two chama supporters by turning them into false accomplice witnesses, rewarding them by returning their source of income. But the two men did not give in. Instead they hired an advocate and planned to sue for compensation. It is worth speculating that the advocate might have been paid for by chama funds. As the case dragged on for months, the British district officials grew more and more concerned. Generally, district officials tried to interfere as little as possible with the decisions of native courts. As we saw in the Kibiriti case, they often turned a blind eye to the informal solutions found by local court holders. Close supervision of the courts was out of the question for the busy district officers because the task was time-consuming. But in this case, probably because of its political dimension, the district office had to take sides. Again, the DC found himself in a double bind. In order to silence the growing political opposition, the district commissioner would have to back the informal arrangements of his local court staff even if they violated legal procedure. But since the judicial function of chiefs was the bone of contention anyway, district officials were beginning to feel the pressure of the colonial Bench, which strongly advocated for a more thorough implementation of the court reforms. In the end, the DC persuaded the chief to allow the re-opening of the shop, but no compensation for the seven months of lost income was granted. Whether the tea shop owners were allowed to file a case at the magistrate’s court is not documented in the sources, but I doubt it.
190 In March 1955, Mlughu Ali Beleko ordered the vijana, the youngsters as he preferred to call them, to close their shop. First Mohamed and Mbaruku had the DC on their side. He pleaded with Ali Beleko to allow them to re-open,83 but the Mlughu refused on the grounds that their fathers had not agreed and he could not undermine the fathers’ verdict.84 By the beginning of April, Ali Beleko added “fresh evidence” that they had spent a night at Mbuzii, the opposition stronghold to the list of offenses. Therefore, Beleko writes, if possible their shop should remain closed “until Shemsanga and his chama will enter Vugha just as they still think they would.”85 Ali Beleko’s strategy was to announce that under his tenure, the chama would never enter Vugha. In a second letter a few days later, Beleko accused the two tea shop owners of having the intention to overthrow Chief Kimweri. Ali Beleko complained “hawasikii maneno ya wazee,” they do not listen to the words of the elders.86 Eventually the tensions between the two young men and the council elders erupted. In May 1955, they re-opened their shop without permission because they had to “build their life for their children.”87 In addition, they argued that the shop had not been closed by a warrant or in any other legal manner in the first place.88 It is said that the Chief was so aggravated that he personally paid a visit, insulted the owners, in a symbolic gesture doused the fire stove permanently by pouring the huge pot of boiling milked tea onto it, destroyed the dishes and closed the shop for good.89 Forever after, Kimweri refused to speak to Mohamed and Mbaruku. Instead he sent the religious authority, Shekh Daud Salimu to discuss the matter with them on his behalf. Shekh Salimu conveyed the message that they would only be allowed to re-open their shop if they agreed to the poison deal.90
Consequently, the shop owners turned to an advocate. Like Shemsanga, they too chose the services of Donaldson and Wood, a law firm located in the coastal city of Tanga. They complained about the double standards in Shambaai: “native authorities and state employees
83 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 19.03.1955, DC to Ali Beleko, 10. 84 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 20.03.1955, Ali Beleko to DC, 11. 85 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 04.04.1955, Ali Beleko to DC, 13. 86 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 16.04.1955, Ali Beleko to DC, 17. 87 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 22.05.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to Simbamwene, 40C. 88 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, without date, Statement of Fact Complaints by Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku, 39, p.1. 89 Ibid., p.1. 90 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to District Registrar, 38. 191 who oppress the citizens never get prosecuted for their offenses,”91 they lamented. Because the presence of advocates in native courts was not allowed, the advocate, although being supportive of the cause of the chama, could not really help much. But he offered the hint that the “Court of Appeal is composed of people who have an interest in the case.”92 The advocate’s suggestion finally convinced Mohamed and Mbaruku to press charges against the court elders – the same court elders who had been in charge in Shemsanga’s waylaying case referred to above.93 Under pressure at this point, the DO allowed Mohamed and Mbaruku to re-open their shop.94 But the case was still not closed as the issue of compensation had not been settled. In a letter to the DC the shop owners complained:
From our previous communication with government it appears that these days it is legitimate to press false accusations, and that it is possible that one becomes an offender for refusing to press fabricated charges. […] To be forced by the ruler to prosecute our fellow citizen with false allegations, it that the truth? And is it legitimate that, when the ruler misses out on prosecuting his enemy, he just issues a judgment that authorizes him to find other people who would then accuse him [the enemy] on the ground of mere fabrications just to get him sentenced? And if those [other persons] refuse to do so, the ruler issues another judgment so that they would lose the foundation to build their lives? The way we see it is: this is not only cruelty, it is also murder.95 In an interesting move to flatter the DC they went on “we know things about the law but you are the most knowledgeable one. You came to take care of us, of our lives and of our wealth and property.”96 Mbaruku and Mohamed argued that the ongoing events reminded them of the period of pre-colonial rule, where one could be deprived of one’s property at any time without a reason. But, they went on, since the British had granted them uhuru, independence, from those pre-colonial cruelties, they could now resort to the law that safely ruled over them. And because they knew the DC was a just advocate, who did not discriminate on any grounds, be it
91 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 07.10.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to Donaldson & Wood Advocates, 55. 92 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 27.09.1955, Donaldson & Wood Advocates to Shemsanga, 54. 93 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1B Vol.IV, Native Affairs Legal, Native Court Vuga, Shemsanga, Isaka, Shekalaghe to Chief Secretary of the Tanganyika Government, 30. 94 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, without date, Notes on Tea Shop Case by DC Lushoto, 72, p.4. 95 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, 08.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Said Mbaruku to DC, 66, p.1. 96 Ibid., 66, p.2. 192 class, respect, wealth or race, they were confident that he would help them to get impartial justice. Apart from the compensation for their shattered dishes, the lost income fom seven months of the shop’s closure, and the costs for the advocate, they also claimed compensation for the “attacks made upon our honour and reputation – articles 12 and 17 sections 1 and 2 of the UDHR refer.”97
In yet another informal attempt to solve the issue, their fathers asked the tea shop owners to offer a male stock of cattle to the elders so that the case could be reexamined. The offering of gifts by disputants is, according to Winans, customary in Shambaai, though he does not specify what kind of gifts.98 But, as Mohamed and Mbaruku informed the DC, they did not intend to give the cattle they referred to as MLUNGULA (in capital letters), which translates as “corruption.” Neither would they agree to the plot against Shemsanga. They ended their letter by pointing out that the elders had no legal grounds to prosecute them. Why then, were they not allowed to reopen their tea house?99 By arguing with legal procedure, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku probably tried to convince the DC of the righteousness of their claim. In addition, they attempted to please him by addressing him as the arbiter of this generational struggle.
Despite the creative appropriation of the language of human rights and corruption discourse as well as their impressive forum shopping – they used the native court, the DC’s appeal court, and several informal channels including an advocate and the public prosecutor of the Tanga Province – the two men were never compensated for their loss. Chief Kimweri announced through Ali Beleko that he would not accept compensation for damages as a settlement. Ali Beleko reasoned that if they agreed to compensate Mohamed and Mbaruku “many more things would hit the administration in the future.” He further argued that even in ancient times if somebody was a “destructive person who did not get along with the rulers he would be expelled.”100 Apparently DC Thorne, too, had contemplated the possibility of expelling the tea shop owners. But, after an investigation with Lushoto elders, he had to abandon the idea. The
97 Ibid., 39, p.2. 98 Winans, Shambala, 123. 99 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to District Registrar, 38. 100 TNA DSM, 304, 168/Vol.V: Complaints by Africans, 28.12.1955, Omari Mohamed and Saidi Mbaruku to District Registrar, 39, p.2. 193 Lushoto elders had advised him that a possible expulsion of the tea shop owners was not customary, yet their compensation was indisputable.101 This, too, was then only one version of custom that was circulating at the time, and it was not the one the DC chose to stick with. Thorne only took the first part of the advice. Mohamed and Mbaruku were not expelled, but neither were they compensated. What had begun in the DC’s eyes as “very much a storm in a teacup” that could be solved by giving them “a good verbal drubbing,”102 had turned out to be a long-lasting and exhausting case for everybody involved.
There is no further correspondence about the case, and so I believe it ended there. It is convincing (and it was not the first time) that British administrative officers took a pragmatic approach when it came to the definition of customary law, or to the observation of legal procedure. In this case, too, upholding the colonial order and backing the staff of native authorities overruled the need for correct legal procedure. Another conclusion to take from it is that the DC’s suggestion to find an informal settlement was proof of his own awareness of the limited power of court rulings and the indefinite nature of verdicts. Furthermore, the Tea Shop Case is an example of the complex situation of post-war nationalism in Shambaai in the 1950s. More often than not district officials found themselves in the position of arbitrating disputes between the native authorities and the chama. These were also mostly cases between respected elders and a younger generation pressing for power. Not surprisingly, both camps not only presented entirely different accounts of the same story, but also did so in completely different ways using very different linguistic registers. Mlughu Ali Beleko, who bore the burden of communication on behalf of Chief Kimweri Mputa Magogo, tended to speak down to the vijana, the youngsters. For him, the basic problem was that they lacked respect for their elders. In his view, they were stirring up Shambaai, they were offending the wakubwa – which can be translated as either “big persons” or “elders.” Ali Beleko was convinced that Omari Mohamed, Saidi Mbaruku, Shemsanga and everybody associated with the chama were “destroying Shambaa traditions and custom.”103 In short, they lacked customary humility before their elders.
101 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General. Complaints, without date, Notes on Tea Shop Case by DC Lushoto, 72, p.2. 102 TNA\DSM, 72, 44/8, Vol.VIII: Native Affairs General, 07.10.1955, Mohamed and Mbaruku to DC, 55. 103 TNA\DSM, 72, US/21, Vol.II: Mendeleo ya Shambalai and District Newspapers, 30. Copy of Maendeleo ya Shambalai, June 1954, Vol.IV, No.6, 118. 194 Mohamed and Mbaruku, on the other hand, grew up in a very different economic and social situation than their fathers. In the context of growing land scarcity, young men suffered most as land allocation became more and more difficult. As the tea shop case clearly shows, their income depended on their tea house business, not on agriculture. Their claim-making strategies were different, too. Similar to Athumani Mwakole’s land case in Chapter Two, they tried to use as much of the “new” language as they could. Their letters, much like Shemsanga’s, bristled with references to the international language of human rights. By referring to the customary gift of cattle as corruption, they also employed the corruption discourse. As many litigants in the turbulent 1950s did, the two young men highlighted the failure of local staff on procedural grounds. In a climate in which it became increasingly difficult for local court-holders to justify certain sanctions that were formerly simply accepted as byproducts of status hierarchies, many less privileged litigants now benefited from the British concept of equality before the law. Reporting another person’s alleged bribery was a commonly used instrument for many Shambaa letter-writers and litigants who tried to discredit native authorities. They were well aware that thanks to the court reforms, legal procedure as handed down by both local and British officials, too, increasingly became the subject of scrutiny by the colonial Bench.
The Shemsanga Trial The Tea Shop Case was a failed attempt by the Chief to rid himself of Shemsanga. But eventually he succeeded. In January 1957, Shemsanga was sentenced to six months imprisonment for illegal medical treatment of several people; illegal because he lacked a license as a medical doctor.104 One of the chief witnesses of the prosecution was Ramadhani Mbughuni, the younger brother of Kimweri’s son-in-law, the notorious Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni of Vugha-Bazo. As I will show below, Ramadhani Mbughuni’s personal history was deeply affected by the Shemsanga trial.
The Shemsanga trial is remembered as a case closely associated to the nationalist cause. A pre- Independence TANU publication from 1960 reads “Comrade Shemsanga was put in prison on groundless charges. The colonialists and their thugs [vibaka] produced false evidence to sue him and eventually the colonialists who had set up the law only to their own advantage, decided to
104 TNA\DSM, 72/32/11, Vol.II: Legal Appeals, 28.01.1957, Judgment Zemu Shemsanga Trial, 188, p.9. 195 imprison comrade Shemsanga for six months.”105 On the other hand, the elders of Mbuzii were all of the opinion that Shemsanga had in fact practiced as a medical doctor. One of them even claimed to have been treated by him. None of them mentioned that the accusations could have been fabricated.106
Unfortunately, the only preserved document is the appeal court’s judgment by Resident Magistrate L.D. Jefferies. There is no trace of the original criminal case No. 11 of 1957, Regina vs. Sam Simon Shemsanga, in the court records of that year. Neither could Shemsanga’s appeal to the High Court be recovered, the existence of which is nevertheless proven as it is mentioned in correspondence between Shemsanga’s advocate and Lushoto’s Magistrate.107 Although Shemsanga’s trial highlights the incomplete preservation of court records and thus embodies a major methodological challenge, there are still many things to learn from the judgment.
Again, this trial was haunted by allegations of false evidence and false accusation. The defense argued unanimously that the prosecution relied on one witness who “was kidnapped from his house by Chief Kimweri and forced to make a statement implicating the accused, [a statement] which […] he has now retracted.” There was another witness whose statement was contested on the grounds that he was the younger brother of Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni, the same Zumbe who had been in charge of lining up the prosecution witnesses in the first place. Furthermore, the defense accused Mbughuni not only of incorrectly translating from Shambaa to Swahili, thus making witness accounts fit his own agenda before the court, but also of fabricating evidence against the accused for both personal and political reasons.108 Magistrate Jefferies disbelieved two of the four witnesses, and one of the defense witnesses was disbelieved by both the prosecution and the defense as well as by the judge: “The odd thing about Benjamin Hoza is that both the prosecution and the defence agree that he is a liar. […] It is indeed a fact that Benjamin’s story is inconvincing in the extreme.”109 It is worthwhile here to note that Benjamin Hoza had been and probably still was deeply involved with the chama. In Jefferies’ view neither
105 TANU, TANU na wananchi Lushoto, 12. 106 Interview with the elders of Mbuzii, 07.11.2014. 107 TNA\DSM, 72/32/11, Vol.II: Legal Appeals, 05.02.1958, A.P. Fabian, Magistrate District Court Lushoto to Messrs. Donaldson & Wood, 231. 108 TNA\DSM, 72/32/11, Vol.II: Legal Appeals, 28.01.1957, Judgment Zemu Shemsanga Trial, 188, p.6. 109 Ibid., 188, p.3. 196 side appeared to be committed to the truth. The defense for instance, his judgement reads, “have put forward a most obvious tissue of lies.” One of the defense witnesses in particular topped everything Jefferies had ever experienced in his career: “While I have listened to many unconvincing explanations, I find it difficult to recall a more unconvincing story than this. I have not the slightest hesitation in rejecting it in toto.”110
After decades of research on Kilimanjaro, the legal anthropologist Sally Falk Moore demonstrates the colonial (native) court was not a forum where one had to say the truth, but a forum where one had to pledge allegiances. Therefore, she suggests paying closer attention to the “connection between the obligatory public demonstration of partisanship outside the courtroom and performances inside the court.”111 In social settings where obligatory partisanship is a general rule of public behavior, as it was the case on Kilimanjaro and in Shambaai, the “primacy of the person” is, in Moore’s words, the “structural requirement.”112 Neutrality is not an option. Moore’s research shows that there is no such a thing as a “general refusal” of African litigants to speak the truth before a court, contrary to a discussion that dates back to the German colonial period.113 Neither is it a question that legal evolution can solve, as the British insisted on since the early 1950s. “Obligatory partisanship” says a lot about the local perception of native courts and the law. Contrary to that, it is culturally engrained in Western legal thinking that the court is precisely the site at which lies must not be told. The principle of “obligatory partisanship” then exemplifies one of the great tensions of indirect rule for the legal sphere as well. The British legal tradition, implemented through centralized bureaucratic authority, clashed with efforts for local autonomy114 and perhaps incommensurable local principles. I argue that as British magistrates in Tanganyika tried to assert their authority, they departed from the legal realm and began reasoning with their civilizational or developmental superiority.
110 Ibid., 188, p.4-5. 111 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 44. 112 Ibid., 37. 113 BArch R 1001/5544, Vereidigung von Eingeborenen, Der schwörende Neger, Hamburger Nachrichten, 30; Der Negereid, Windhuker Nachrichten, 32. 114 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 44. 197 In a situation like this, the most pressing question for a judge was certainly how to distinguish false from correct evidence. Once the assumption was accepted that there was a strong possibility of encountering fabricated evidence by witnesses, that even court-holders could manufacture false accusations, it became an extremely difficult enterprise for the British-trained judge to know whether somebody was actually speaking the truth. In fact, the logical conclusion might even have been to accept that in such a context it was impossible to reach sound decisions according to British standards because of the incommensurable conceptions of what should happen in a court. This conclusion was, of course, out of the question.
The Resident Magistrate in Shemsanga’s trial resolved the tension between the awareness that fabricated accounts were likely to be a daily occurence, and the impossibility of dispensing justice according to British standards at a non-legal level. By assuming his “civilizational” margin, he allowed himself to detach the dispute from the legal context. If the question was no longer a legal one, it could be solved in a non-legal way. I suggest that the line of thought that directed his verdict paralleled developmentalist ideas. If the African was capable of progress and development and once their legal evolution had matured, the assumption went spurious behavior such as giving false evidence in court would likely disappear. I argue that this construction allowed magistrates to square contradictory challenges with one another, even if they had to depart from legal reasoning to arrive at this conclusion.
It is difficult to prove this argument because it rests on the magistrate’s beliefs, and those are hard to detect. I suggest that the only remedy is to work with the textual reasoning in Jefferies’s judgment as a source to understand how and why his judgment evolved. In the following analysis I restrict myself to the magistrate’s dealing with the strongest point of the defense, namely that Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni had manufactured the evidence. Jefferies accepted the premise that Zumbe Mbughuni was biased towards Shemsanga, but it led him to an interesting conclusion:
It does also appear to me that Hamedi Mbuguni [sic] would be very pleased if the accused was imprisoned and it does also appear to me that Hamedi probably played quite an energetic part in obtaining the evidence of alleged patients of the accused as indeed was his duty. It also appears to me that he is not altogether frank about the part he played. This however may well be due to a not uncommon feeling that if he admits he has some animosity and played an active part against the accused any evidence which he 198 gives will be disbelieved. It is however one thing to say thankfully “the Lord hath delivered mine enemy unto mine hands”, and take steps to obtain the necessary evidence and quite another thing to manufacture false evidence, and it is a fact that on one occasion he was fair enough to dismiss a false charge, of way laying against the accused.115 The quotation demonstrates that he put a slant on his understanding of obligatory partisanship as it suited him. While he portrayed some individuals as entirely incapable of speaking the truth, he thought others, such as of Zumbe Mbughuni, had the necessary fairness of judgment. Ramadhani Mbughuni, Hemedi’s younger brother, was of the former category. “There is no doubt in my mind that he is not being frank in his evidence,” Jefferies writes. But there is a contradiction here. The very reason that led Jefferies to disbelieve Ramadhani Mbughuni made the magistrate buy into Hemedi Mbughuni’s story. Ramadhani Mbughuni stated that he had neither heard of the chama, nor of Chief Kimweri before – a sheer impossibility for a person living in Vugha, and a silly thing to say. Because of Ramadhani’s alleged unawareness of politics in Shambaai, Jefferies did not believe him when he said he was medically treated and injected by Shemsanga. He writes: “It may well be that he [Ramadhani Mbughuni] has lied with regard to these matters in fear lest his otherwise true evidence would be disbelieved. However I do not think it is safe to convict on such evidence.”116 In fact, I agree that Ramadhani Mbughuni’s account was not ironclad. But in what way did it differ from Hemedi Mbughuni’s? It is obvious that Ramadhani tried hard not become involved in the political dimension of the case and as a consequence his testimony was dismissed, while Hemedi was praised for it: “Hemedi’s evidence is contradictory, i.e. that he told the witness at a Baraza at Vuga but this may very well be due to a desire on his part to minimize the part he played in the investigation as a whole.”117 As Jefferies correctly realized, litigants did not leave politics at the doorstep of the court.118 In fact, political alliances played a major role in this and many other, if not all, disputes. However, the magistrate argued that “the accused cannot expect it to be automatically held that because he is unpopular in certain quarters all evidence against him must be disbelieved. Were that so all
115 TNA\DSM, 72/32/11, Vol.II: Legal Appeals, 28.01.1957, Judgment Zemu Shemsanga Trial, 188, p.7. 116 Ibid., 188, p.7. 117 Ibid., 188, p.8. 118 Ibid., 188, p.1-2. 199 that any professional criminal need do to ensure a pleasant life and a comfortable old age would be to become politically active.”119
Fabrication appeared to have become a contagious disease. The judge, too, allowed himself a rather wide scope of speculation, and in one case even an incorrect conclusion. Jeffries mentioned that Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni was fair enough to dismiss a false charge of waylaying against Shemsanga. This reference is about the case discussed above, in which Shemsanga, by threatening to send the UN a petition, managed to reverse a court decision. Therefore, we know that Jeffries’s remark is incorrect. As shown above, it was not Hemedi Mbughuni who generously dismissed the false charge of waylaying a headman. Instead, it was the appellate decision in Kimweri’s appeal court which quashed Hemedi Mbughuni’s verdict of the court on first instance. Hemedi Mbughuni had even kept Shemsanga and his fellow accused in remand custody. It is impossible that Judge Jefferies was unaware of the particulars of that case. Thus, his judgment was not based on sound ground. I suggest that because he believed he was seeing through the “game” of giving false testimony, he reached his judgment not through the evidence produced, but through his ability to read a witness’s intention. By lifting himself to a superior level from which to judge, he avoided the theoretical implications of the “game” – the inadequacy to judge local matters by resting on British legal conceptions. Because he perceived himself as standing on a different stage of development above the “natives”, he did not risk losing his legal integrity by admitting the impossibility of dispensing justice in native courts. In other words, since legal evolution was the juristic analogy to the development discourse in the legal realm, the idea would be that one merely had to wait until the Africans had reached the next stage of legal development.
Other examples of British judges who had a similar attitude towards Africans’ “truthfulness” are plentiful. Therefore, my argument does not seem to be too far-fetched. I will give one more example because the respective case is of double interest here. First, it is the Ramadhani Mbughuni trial that arose out of the Shemsanga case, and secondly, the reasoning of the judgment further strengthens my argument. The pretext to the case is the following: Ramadhani Mbughuni stated a year after the Shemsanga trial that back then he had been forced into giving
119 Ibid., 188, p.8. 200 false evidence by his brother Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni, Kimweri’s son-in-law. Because he was in desperate need of money at the time, Ramadhani contended that he had agreed to act as a prosecution witness against Shemsanga.120 Ramadhani had apparently received money as a “favor” for his witness account against Shemsanga. He did not think of it as a loan and was startled when the Chief called in his loan. It is worthwhile speculating that the Chief might have been inclined to reduce the “favor” into a loan because Ramadhani’s testimony against Shemsanga had been disbelieved before the court back then. Ramadhani, unable to pay, was remanded. At this point, he decided to take the offensive and file a complaint. The police officer in charge, however, did not comply in filing Ramadhani’s complaint. On the contrary, he pressed charges against him. Curiously, Ramadhani’s confession of having given false testimony in the Shemsanga trial only materialized because he was remanded in lock-up upon the charge of being unable to repay the debts he apparently owed to the Paramount. In other words, had the Chief not downgraded the “favor” into a loan, Ramadhani would have never confessed. Eventually, Ramadhani was sentenced to one year and six months imprisonment on the two counts of giving false information to a person employed in public service and making a false affirmation, a conspicuously harsh sentence.121
There is a certain irony in the fact that Ramadhani’ prosecution evolved from his attempt to reveal Kimweri’s politics of calling in compensation for favors he had once done and which could easily be converted into false testimony if the circumstances called for it. Yet Ramadhani ended up being charged for an almost similar offence, namely lying to the police officer who recorded the statement he gave against Kimweri. Here again the Resident Magistrate was very uncertain as to whose account to believe, although it was very clear to him that the defendant’s account was incorrect. Nine witnesses, among them Ramadhani Mbughuni’s two wives and Kimweri himself, but only one independent witness – the others being either court elders or court holders, Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni included – gave nine different accounts. Despite this difficult situation, the judge arrived at a bold decision, albeit on shaky grounds. Resident Magistrate E.G Wrintmore’s baseline was that he “knew” Ramadhani Mbughuni was a liar. Extracts of the judgment read:
120 TNA/DSM, 72, 32/11 Vol.II: Legal Appeals, Criminal Appeal no.48 of 1958, 24.10.1958, 248, p.14-19. 121 Ibid., 248, Judgment, p.2. 201 You have been described by your own advocate as an unmitigated liar, although he strove hard to mention that you were telling the truth on this occasion. You are far more than a liar. You have brought faul and false charges against men in the highest authority and in particular against Chief Kimweri, a man held in High respect and esteem by his people. It has been suggested that you acted as you did at the instigation of Sam Shemsanga – the man against whom you say you gave false evidence, but no proof of this has been given. All that can be said is that in order to wriggle out of your obligation of repaying the money you borrowed when in difficulty, you turned against your benefactor and brought these false charges. […] I am not in any doubt that the accused has told a pack of lies throughout. […] It is obvious that this whole story is a complete fabrication and this interview with Chief Kimweri never took place. […] A pathological case, incapable of telling the truth. [sic]122 Ramadhani Mbughuni had hoped to win his case. He was probably inspired by Zemu Shemsanga’s successful plaint against the two court elders who had given false evidence in his waylaying case. But unlike Shemsanga, Ramadhani Mbughuni lost his case crushingly. Politically more influential people who had access to external support networks, especially those within the circle around Zemu Shemsanga who regularly consulted with advocates, could lead the fight against false accusations to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations, as shown above. Shemsanga had exhausted all possible channels of communication in order to achieve his goal. He could drive home his victory because he had officially named the misuse of office taking place in native courts under British sovereignty, thus shaming the latter before an international audience. The British had turned a blind eye towards Kimweri’s unorthodox interpretation of prosecution and court culture because they, too, wanted to get rid of certain political activists. But the pressure that built in the Trusteeship Council forced Kimweri and the British to grant Shemsanga and his colleagues their victory. They did not want to be embarrassed on the international stage. Although Shemsanga’s overall victory was impaired by his later trial, the judgment he received was much more lenient than Ramadhani Mbughuni’s. For Ramadhani Mbughuni there were no such possibilities. Mbughuni’s cause was not only hampered by his relationship among unequals with the Chief, but also by what Conley and O’Barr would call his “relational”, not “procedural” approach to the law. A relational approach is not based on legal language and procedure, but on one’s ability to relate to the judge or plaintiff. A relational approach is characteristic for less privileged individuals with little access to resources and
122 TNA\DSM, 72/32/11, Vol.II: Legal Appeals, 03.09.1958, Judgment Ramadhani Mbughuni Trial, 247A, p.2. 202 networks helpful in such a setting. Remedies offered by the law are thus often unresponsive to the needs of relational defendants who in turn are forced to rely much more heavily on the “listing skills” of their judges than procedural litigants.123 Therefore, Ramadhani Mbughuni found himself in a double bind. First, he lacked support from his local system. Being at the bottom of the status hierarchy, he was perceived as having failed as a prosecution witness in the Shemsanga trial. As a consequence, he was forced to return the “loan” to the Chief, his brother’s father in-law, although the transfer of money had been understood by Ramadhani as a non-repayable gift in the first place. Secondly, he lacked what has been referred to as “legal consciousness,” that is, the capacity to phrase his complaints in the best way to guarantee his success within the logic of the law.124 Ramadhani Mbughuni’s case shows that under the new as under the old legal regime, people who lacked networks and resources could lose a similar case that others, who were better connected, had won thanks to international or micro-political backing.
Excursus – How the Shemsanga Trial links to the Healing Discourse Leaving aside the question as to whether Shemsanga actually committed the crime he was sentenced for, it is still worthwhile examining why this, of all crimes, lent itself so well to a political showcase. Shemsanga was convicted because he treated sick people illegally, that is without a medical license. Lacking the license means lacking the expertise and knowledge to guarantee the quality of treatment, at least in the conventional British view. On a general note, the image of the medical doctor carries manifold connotations in Eastern and Central African history. Societal tensions tend to be expressed by the narrative of ill-health. Cure for such public ill-health, be it a selfish ruler, famine or cattle raids, was understood to come in the form of medicine, distributed to the people by a wise person referred to as “healer”, or, under mission influence, often falsely referred to as “prophet.” The healer’s identity changed throughout colonial rule as colonial biomedicine provided new elements that were to be absorbed into the healing narrative. As Megan Vaughan noted, “African healing systems showed themselves to be remarkably resilient and adaptive. Far from being destroyed by the joint assault of colonialism
123 John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr, Rules versus relationships: The ethnography of legal discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 172-177. 124 Susan S. Silbey, “After Legal Consciousness,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1 (2005), 323-368. 203 and biomedicine, they tended instead to absorb and internalize, to ‘indigenize’, the elements of biomedical practice which seemed most effective and most impressive – the most obvious being the injection.”125 The image of the injection plays a large role in rumors that circulated in Eastern and Central Africa, as Luise White has shown.126 It carries both negative and positive connotations. An injection can be perceived as the cure for infertility or even the only remedy from a curse, a special “anti-witchcraft injection”, but there is also the fear that evil can be pressed into one’s blood through the injection.127
It is curious that the injection was the grounds on which Shemsanga was convicted, and the most important means of evidence produced, as well as a most prominent feature in the oral interviews. Given the curious history of the syringe in East and Central Africa and its striking presence in the Shemsanga trial, I suggest that the prominence of the healing discourse was no coincidence. It might have pointed to a perceived status of ill-health of the Shambaa society, a society that had lost the healthy balance between ruler and ruled. It is clear that Kimweri worried about Shemsanga’s political ambitions. Could it be that he felt threatened by Shemsanga’s agenda to “heal the land” in political terms? I suggest here, although it is mostly speculation, that Kimweri might have found it effective to cast Shemsanga as a healer who did not succeed, as a failed medical doctor. In such a rationale, Judge Jefferies’s judgment rendered it official that Shemsanga did not possess the power to heal. The sentence might have been Kimweri’s way of underlining his own claim to power. After all, it was not the successful and ambitious Shemsanga, but the Paramount Chief himself, who had the power to heal the land. It might be more important to contextualize Shemsanga’s offense and to acknowledge the resulting implications than to prove whether or not the Shemsanga trial lay on false accusations.
Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that Richard Roberts’ observation that colonial native courts were not stable institutions but subject to political and ideological pressures also holds true for
125 Megan Vaughan, Curing their ills: Colonial power and African illness (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991), 24. 126 Luise White, Speaking with vampires: Rumor and history in colonial Africa (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2000), 113-119. 127 Barbara Hall, ed., Tell me, Josephine (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 106, 107. 204 the native courts of Shambaai.128 Just as the enthusiastic wave of TANU nationalism and the language of human rights changed the argumentative strategies of Shambaa litigants, these arguments in turn changed court culture. The universalistic references led to an enlargement of scale. Although native courts were still officially refrained to “customary law,” the reality looked different. Litigants borrowed their reasoning strategies from the international language of rights, they often sought the advice of advocates despite their ban from native courts, and they attempted to depart from “customary” informal practices. Legal procedure itself became increasingly the subject of scrutiny, not only by litigants, but also by the colonial Bench. Both native authorities and British colonial officers felt the pressure to conform to the call for a modernization of the native court. The court reform had laid bare the fact that not only were local court-holders prone to violating legal procedure, but so too were British administrative. Furthermore, the process of reaching a verdict in native courts (and sometimes also in higher courts) was much more influenced by Moore’s “obligatory partisanship” than it was by the “principles of natural justice.” Sometimes British magistrates could only solve this double bind by departing from legal reasoning. In a context where they suspected little legal maturity from African litigants, their judgments mirrored the developmentalist agenda of the late colonial state in the curious juristic analogy of “legal evolution.”
If we want to understand native courts during colonial rule, we always have to ask, as Martin Chanock did, what was at stake for the litigants, what they could lose, and what the conflicts of interest were.129 Native courts have always mirrored political conditions. They were used for the enforcement of political decisions as they privileged senior male people with high statuses. This function grew more important over the course of colonial rule, and especially in the late 1940s. But not only did old and prestigious men such as court elders used native courts to their own ends. There was also the possibility to achieve decisive rulings through strategic litigation, as Shemsanga’s waylaying case demonstrates. For somebody like Zemu Simon Shemsanga, who was well educated, had access to external networks and who was driven by political ambitions on a national level (he was already the Deputy Chairman of TANU Tanga in 1956),130 it was a
128 Roberts, Litigants and households, 237. 129 Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure”, 71. 130 CCM, 183: Mkutano mkuu wa mwaka 1956 wa Tanganyika African National Union, Minutes, p.21. 205 logical step to realign himself with the “principles of natural justice.” This strategy played out especially at the higher courts under jurists trained in the tradition of English Law. The attempt of less well-connected people like Ramadhani Mbughuni to operate within the same realm and using the same instruments was not crowned with success. His was the small world of kinship obligations and owing favors. As he tried to follow in Shemsanga’s footsteps, he had to realize that his social position did not allow him the same favors. Not only was his sentence much heavier than Shemsanga’s, but he also had most probably lost the little kinship support he might have had retained.
As the Tea Shop Case showns, Elisabeth Colson’s argument about the Plateau Tonga, that old and new ways of dispute settlement can co-exist at the same time holds true in Shambaai, too.131 The two attempts of informal settlement in the Tea Shop Case, one with a religious authority and another with the fathers of the accused, are clear proof. The tea shop owners refused both alternative routes to an informal settlement. I argue that this was the exception, not the rule. The refusal of the two young men was probably only a viable alternative in cases which had the potential to become public scandals, perhaps even on an international level. When it came to other injuries such as in the matrimonial realm, I suggest that the potential for them to grow into cases that threatened the reputation of the British, was for the most part very little. As a consequence, they did not interest district officers in the same way and thus reporting violations of legal procedure in matrimonial cases did not help the litigants in the same way as it did in “political cases”. In matrimonial and other disputes, contrary to land disputes and the “political” cases analyzed in this chapter, native courts probably still had the interpretational sovereignty without much British interference. It is very likely that litigants who felt wronged in such cases nonetheless opted for informal settlements when they were dissatisfied with the court decisions.
However, criticizing court holders’ performance was not simply strategy, but also the genuine expression that the litigants’ sense of justice was being violated. In particular, the native court of Vugha-Bazo, where the tea shop case had started off, was the bone of contention in the whole district. Here, the chief had installed his son-in-law as court-holder, the notorious Zumbe
131 Colson, “Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tonga Society”, 209. 206 Hemedi Mbughuni who was known for both his loyalty to the chief, and his lack of formality when it came to legal procedure. Because Vugha-Bazo was one of the most important neighborhoods, being the heartland of the Kilindi royal clan and so close to the center of power, but also close to the opposition stronghold, the chief was in need of a particularly loyal court- holder. He had decided that only kin could be trusted. However, the price of loyalty was the constant violation of procedure, which in turn made the chief even more vulnerable.
The Tea Shop case, like Shemsanga’s earlier waylaying case, also shows that new networks could substitute older networks. Although the tea shop owners lacked prominent status and prominent kinship webs, the chama offered access to its new networks such as urban lawyers and national politicians. In the end, Shambaa litigants beat the British with their own weapons. By sending petitions to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations, in which they complained about the spike in false accusations, they successfully forced reversions of certain judgments. In the tea shop case, Mohamed and Mbaruku only drove home a partial victory. They were allowed to re-open their shop, but did not receive damage compensation for damages. Others were less fortunate. Although the rise of false accusations must be contextualized as tied to the protest movement, it is important to note that the outcomes of such cases were linked to the social status of the plaintiffs. Political activists of the chama who were less well-connected than Shemsanga and other core activists, or who were not part of the protest movement yet sought to surf on the same litigation wave, had the opposite experience, as the Ramadhani Mbughuni case drastically shows.
In the broader picture, false accusations were just one example of derivations from the British ideal of justice that began to be contested by the mid-40s in Tanganyika’s native courts, under the eyes of both local and British staff. As we saw earlier, other examples for derivations from procedure would be the ever-present debate about the principle of res judicata or the keeping of court records. The mixed heritage of native courts – being run by local chiefs and their elders, but subjected to British procedure – had led to a blurring of the lines of both procedure and custom for local court-holders and British administrative officers alike. Finally, court records in the case of Tanganyika are neither representative, nor do they necessarily reveal the real nature of the dispute at stake.
207 Obviously, people like Ramadhani Mbughuni were not satisfied with the little opportunity they had in colonial courts, lacking both local and national networks. For that reasons, unsatisfied individuals like him often chose to phrase their dissatisfaction in expressions of popular culture such as rumors, targeting a British audience. But Shambaa and other Africans’ expressions of popular culture were not always understood by district officers. In the next chapter I will turn to these locally specific expressions of dissatisfaction through popular culture. The chapter points to the importance of the rich world of extra-legal dispute settlement, an inevitable phenomenon in a society in which the native courts were not always known to deliver justice.
208 CHAPTER SIX Closed-down Pathways of Communication and Incommensurabilities of Thought in the Extra-Legal Sphere
This chapter turns to some of the very specific local expressions of dissent which we encounter in petitions or rumors beyond the courtroom. They are, nonetheless, concerned with local perceptions of justice and thus also concern the legal realm. These references hardly appeared in documents produced by the Shambaa elite. This is not to say that they are remnants of a “primordial past” that elites had left in the dust, but rather that the elites were aware that certain references would not help them make their cases before audiences such as the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam or the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. TANU activists and other elites chose their language according to their audience, as the previous chapter showed. But others clung to local symbols and narratives when they spoke about their grievances. They did so in vibrant expressions of popular culture such as rumors or letters. Theirs were the accounts of individuals who had not been educated at mission or government schools and were less acquainted with the language of bureaucracy, a language which the colonial state had imposed. For British recipients, the petitions or circulating rumors might have provided a good read or even a good laugh. But they mostly dismissed such expressions without attempting to understand the deeper meaning, perhaps because they doubted that there was a deeper meaning to local references about rainmaking or other “superstitions.” I argue that the rumors or petitions nonetheless carried a message that was precisely targeted at the British, even if the message might have been lost on the British. I suggest that such expressions can be read as closed pathways of communication, by which I mean utterances expressed in a language incommensurable with the thought and reasoning patterns of colonial officials. In part, this incommensurability contributed to the litigants’ search for extra-legal forms of dispute settlement. On the level of political imagination, however, the future Shambaa and other Africans envisioned could never come into being because its existence was denied by the British.
In the following pages, I will begin with a brief discussion of the links between resistance and its expressions vis-à-vis public and collective ill-health in Eastern and Central Africa. Secondly, I will
209 describe the second failed march on Vugha in 1952 through the prism of letters relying heavily on locally specific elements. In the third section of the chapter I will turn to the widely popular rumor about the two invisible “gangsters” Osale and Paulo who stirred up Shambaai between 1955 and 1956. In addition, I will touch upon the methodological discussion around the usage of rumors as historical sources in African history. This chapter argues that we should embrace the previously ignored connection between magic and resistance in Shambaai, which undergirded the protest against the Usambara Scheme as it was presented in popular culture.
Peasant Resistance and Public Ill-Health I discussed peasant resistance in Eastern Africa in the introduction. In this chapter, I wish to add a new dimension to the forms of resistance discussed, notably the association between political fertility and the economic aspect of subsistence societies, a feature many Eastern and Central African societies had in common. When the equilibrium was disturbed, the crises were most often expressed in terms of public ill-health and there was need for a remedy such as rain or better leadership. The popular belief in medicine and the warm reception of prophet movements is probably most figuratively expressed in the water that functioned as medicine in the Maji Maji war from 1905-1907.1 This shared conceptualization of public healing has been referred to as a possible master-narrative in Eastern and Central African history. Other scholars have built on Feierman’s “history of healing institutions in the great lakes region.”2 Consideration of public health or rather ill-health dimensions is also an important key to understanding the many hidden meanings of Shambaa petitions and rumors. When the principles of healthy relationships between peasants, their rulers and their labor in Shambaai were seriously harmed by British and local agricultural and administrative officials, the protest rhetoric linked the lack of rain and fertility with the ill-health of political institutions.
1 Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez, eds., Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905-1907 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2005); Gwassa, Record of the Maji Maji rising; Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy & Historiography,” in Revealing prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African history, ed. David Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (London: J. Currey, 1995), 124-142. 2 Steven Feierman started the discussion about the master narrative of healing, see Steven Feierman, “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories,” in Beyond the cultural turn: New directions in the study of society and culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Hunt and Richard Biernacki (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1999), 206. For further conceptualization see Neil Kodesh, “Networks of Knowledge: Clanship and Collective Well- Being in Buganda,” Journal of African History 49, no. 2 (2008), 197-216; David Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006), 1403–1439. 210 “The Normal Peasant Wants Justice and Rain rather than a Say in Running His Own Affairs” In the early 1950s, many of the development schemes in Tanganyika Territory were well underway, but they were not well received at all. In Shambaai, too, after the march on Vugha in 1947, political turmoil kept seething underneath. The 1940s had seen considerable political activity in Shambaai, yet the 1950s turned out to be even worse for the British as much of the agitation was now centrally organized under TANU. But when the new wave of protest hit Shambaai in the early 1950s, the British appeared to have been unprepared. A quotation from the Member for Local Government, Mr. de Z. Hall, is a window into the view many administrative officers still held dear. “The normal peasant wants justice and rain rather than a say in running his own affairs,”3 he wrote in a report to all PCs in the territory in 1950. But Shambaai’s local history, as well as the history of many other parts of the territory, show that the early 1950s were in fact a period of political imagination and activism not only in urban but also very much in the rural parts of Tanganyika.4 The perception that Tanganyika was a sleepy place, having been acquired late, and the population less developed and sharp than in other parts of the British African Empire, had long influenced the way colonial officers thought of Tanganyika Territory.5 The quotation by Hall suggests that the image of Tanganyika as a classic “backwater” of Empire, was one the administrative officers’ clung to, even as reality suggested otherwise. Moreover, it mirrors the attitude many colonial officers and later nationalists and many scholars maintained towards “the peasant” as apolitical, as detached from anything beyond his small world of subsistence farming and familial networks.6 Whether this “peasant essentialism” took the form of denying them the possibility of having political identifications other than very local ones, or later of romanticizing peasant resistance, would change over time.7 For all his “peasant essentialism”, the quotation shows that Hall had managed to link two questions that were certainly intertwined in Shambaa thought: justice and rain, yet without really seeing the specific Shambaa correlation between the two. The connection between rain and justice, between the fertility of the land and the fertility of political structure, is emphasized
3 TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.III, Native Affairs Legal, Native Affairs General, 24.6.1950, Report of Development of African local Government in Tanganyika Report, 8. 4 Spear, Mountain farmers, 209-235; Hydén, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania, 50-60; Pels, “Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania”, 1-28. 5 Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept”, 79. 6 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 5. 7 Bernstein and Byres, “From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change”, 6-7. 211 in many Eastern and Central African societies, and is very much the case in Shambaai.8 Hall and many other British officers were aware of the local importance of rain and rain-makers, but they did not necessarily realize the political link.
There is a lot of evidence that the British dismissed much of the rain discourse as “superstition” For example, in early 1934 during the time when everybody was waiting for the long rains to come, a rumor circulated “of uncertain origin, but suspected as emanating from Moshi – to the effect that a bearded native child had been born […] [who] spoke at birth. It was said to not plant at the first or second rain but at the third; and having spoken it died.”9 While the PC dismissed the incidence in his report as “native superstitions,”10 there might have been much more to the rumor than the obvious link to rain. It is not easy to unravel what the image of a bearded baby might have signified in Shambaai. In the case of French West Africa in the 1930s, a number of the few African teachers who had been educated in French schools complained that their countrymen thought them to be “a bearded baby.”11 Perhaps in Shambaai, too, the bearded baby was a metaphor for a person who was perceived as intrusive and a know-it-all in the agricultural context, a person that introduced new knowledge when the old knowledge was still appreciated. Could it be that the bearded baby was used symbolically to ridicule agricultural officers who advised on the right time to plant, yet as the example shows, emphasized the wrong moment for planting in the cultivation cycle? I suggest that agricultural officers might have been perceived as immature and lacking knowledge or disrupting traditional forms of knowledge-based cultivation. Given that the agricultural sector was the one sector that received the most attention by the colonial government from the 1930s onwards, such an interpretation does not seem entirely unlikely. The rumor might also have had to do with the way development politics were communicated and how people felt about it. It is clear that most British agricultural officers had a negative attitude towards the “lazy peasant,” a stance that could not have been lost on the cultivators. The rumor has it that the baby died right after
8 Feierman, Concepts of Sovereignty among the Shambaa and their Relation to Political Action, 364-417. 9 TNA\KEW, CO 736/14, Tanganyika Territory Administration Reports, 1934, PC Report Tanga Region, p.58. 10 Ibid., p.58. 11 Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, “"Collecting Customary Law": Educated Africans, Ethnographical Writings, and Colonial Justice in French West Africa,” in Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 152. 212 passing on his wisdom. This might suggest that the new knowledge itself may not have had a long life either. The rumor about the bearded baby shows just how intrinsically linked the rain discourse was with politics. Yet Hall’s statement about peasants who were not interested in having a say in their own affairs as long as rain and justice were available, rather obscured this link as he used the right terms – rain and justice – but without understanding the local meaning attached to it. Like him, many of Lushoto’s administrative officers must have been surprised when the letters following the trial of the ringleaders of the second march on Vugha reached the district office.
In September 1952, a handwritten letter signed with the pseudonym of Mahanyu Kibanga threatened to serve Kimweri Mputa Magogo’s head on a silver plate to the PC.12 Needless to say, the most obvious message the letter displays is that the “normal peasant” in fact did want to have a say in running his own affairs. I contend that Mahanyu Kibanga’s letter to the PC, copied to the DC and the Governor, was another example for a miscommunication between administration and local residents, which was so common in Shambaai in the 1940s and 1950s. Above all it shows how little many of the officers understood about the real grievances of their rural subjects. The Agricultural Department and the Lushoto District Office had spared no expenses in employing scholars to produce various reports on Shambaa culture, agriculture and custom, to have experts conduct scientific soil evaluations and to cultivate demonstration plots in Shita. But they had not realized that Shambaa protest was not only concerned with the scheme, but also with the sharply growing inequalities within Shambaa society, as represented by wealthy but unpopular chiefs. They had witnessed open resistance in Mlalo towards Zumbe Ali Mashina, and they had had to concede and reinstate Zumbe Hassani.13 The administration had also seen the dramatic rise of pending cases in native courts due to offenses against scheme-work. It had experienced passive resistance and open defiance from the Shambaa. But they still believed in the possibility of implementing the Usambara Scheme and in the legitimacy of the system of chiefly rule. Naturally, many peasants grew more and more impatient and the pressure on the native authorities grew steadily.
12 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), 10.09.1952, Pseudonym to PC, 6B. 13 TNA\DSM, 31207 Tanganyika Secretariat. Local Government. Native Chiefs: Usambara District, Tanga Province, Report: The Agitation against Zumbe Ali of Mlalo, 4, 9. 213 As mentioned above, many individuals chose to appropriate knowledge from mission and governmental schools or drew from the language of human rights when they addressed British officials. The peculiar mix of the language of Christianity, slavery and the civilizing mission was one of the frequently used tropes in such letters. It appears that the individual hiding behind the pseudonym Mahanyu Kibanga, too, was well versed in the scripture. He also must have had lessons in English history. His letter to the PC of Tanga reads:
We are asking only one thing for advice: what has been done to King Charles by the English citizens? I am speaking very open about this letter, namely that you will receive a phone call from Lushoto by the DC when we bring the head of Kimweri of Vugha the way you wish it and we do not wish it, but we will do what you have been doing to your king in England. Our promise will be fulfilled by the red wine as a sign of Kimweri’s blood which will flow then. Reply to me before we have not yet fulfilled this promise. Amen. Thank you, Mahanyu Kibanga.”14 There are two fascinating tropes in this very short letter that I have cited fully. First, Mahanyu Kibanga used the famous seventeenth-century struggle for democracy of English commoners against the Stuarts to evoke the discontent of the Shambaa that he felt was similar. The reference does not only shed light on the history curricula of colonial schools in Tanganyika Territory, but also gives insight into creative writing strategies as employed by “colonial subjects,” a phenomenon recently explored by Derek Peterson in the Gikuyu case.15 Similar issues were to be discussed in Shambaai in the form of a document called the “Green Paper,” a draft constitution produced by the district’s TANU branch in 1960.16 Mahanyu Kibanga’s 1952 letter already points in this direction.
Secondly, the “red wine” as “a sign of Kimweri’s blood” is an obvious, yet interestingly transformed reference to transubstantiation as the central story of the Christian religion. The image of Kimweri’s royal blood is here equated with the blood shed by Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself so that believers would have access to eternal life. It is curious that in Mahanyu Kibanga’s account Kimweri is equated with Jesus Christ. Kimweri was certainly not seen as the Savior by his subjects, but the language of Christian altruism and sacrifice lent itself to Mahanyu Kibanga’s creative if unorthodox appropriation. His amalgamation of worldly and
14 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), 10.09.1952, Pseudonym to PC, 6B. 15 Peterson, Creative Writing, 245. 16 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 215. 214 Christian doctrine is striking. It was certainly not what missionaries had hoped for, and neither what the history lessons in colonial schools targeted. Both the reference to the Stuart King and to Jesus Christ should be understood as invitations by Mahanyu Kibanga to his readers to ponder the role of Kimweri Mputa Magogo, not as a real warning that he was to suffer the same fate as English Stuart King or Jesus Christ, both of whom paid with their lives. But there were commonalities between the way Kimweri’s subjects felt towards him and the discontent English commoners had felt about their King, the letter suggests. Just like the English commoners of the seventeenth-century, the letter implies that the Shambaa felt betrayed by their leader. Both equations might lack substance, but they are elaborate proof of the ability of letter-writers to draw from discourses they encountered through the British and to creatively make the discourses serve their own ends.
Jesus Christ had sacrificed himself for the common good, or what the Shambaa would call “public health.” I think that Mahanyu Kibanga invoked the image of Christ’s sufferings for humankind not simply because he wanted another stark example from a British repertoire that showed off his knowledge and threatened Kimweri. He also did it because, unlike Kimweri, Jesus Christ, by accepting his fate, acted upon the reciprocity principle. As mentioned earlier, the basis of the old contract between the Shambaa and their king was reciprocity. The people gave tribute in form of labor or military service, and in turn, the chief offered protection. The superiority of the king was understood by everyone. He might even be referred to as savior – against wild animals, draughts, famine, locust plagues, wars and slave raids. As conceptualized in Shambaa thought, public health meant plentiful rainfall, a general peaceful and healthy relationship between Kimweri and his people, fair tribute collections and the possibility to appeal court decisions.17 But Kimweri’s position towards his subjects had departed significantly from the old ideal. The former practice of ghunda, tribute labor, had been replaced with tax payments, yet cultivators had the additional burden of scheme work. On top of the double burden, the Simbamwene also neglected his responsibilities when it came to fair appeal trials. Mahanyu Kibanga and many others felt that he no longer protected his people. The chief had
17 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 7-8. 215 lost his credibility. It was impossible to conceive of him as a just king or savior, the way his ancestor Mbegha had been seen.
I suggest that Mahanyu Kibanga’s letters should not only be read as him showing off his unconventional knowledge, but as an attempt to turn British repertoires on its head. His letter was an open challenge of Kimweri, the native authorities, and the British. Although the subject matter of the letter was concerned with Kimweri, Mahanyu Kibanga did not address him directly, but sent his letter to the highest British representative in the whole of Tanga Province as a possible witness to Kimweri’s fate. By enlarging his audience, a strategic tool very frequently used by Shambaa letter-writers, Mahanyu Kibanga did not only display his dissatisfaction with the Paramount. He also attempted to hold the British to account for the unrest in Shambaai as his letter implied that the colonial administration was expected to remove Kimweri from office. Through the mentioned references, Mahanyu Kibanga turned the lessons of history and Christianity back on the British. If their long and glorious history was so concerned with justice and participation of the people, he seemed to suggest, how could they then justify defiling their reputation by keeping Kimweri in power? As shown above, it was an extremely popular strategy of the Shambaa and other African petitioners to draw from lessons they had learned from the British. These appropriations might have been taken from different sources, be it war propaganda, catechism lessons or the teachings of English history, but they all had one thing in common. They transformed the previous meaning, and sent the transformed message back to the British in a vernacular that was adapted to local circumstance and needs.
I think that Mahanyu Kibanga chose his words well. He, whose identity I could not reveal, most likely wrote the letters himself instead of employing a scribe. All of them are handwritten by a rather unpracticed hand. Due to the secretive nature of the letters, he could not easily trust scribes to do the writing for him. I suggest that because he chose to write the letter himself and because it took his unpracticed hand careful concentration to do so, it is likely that he also chose his pseudonym with care. The use of pseudonyms and onomastic symbols is a common Swahili way of conveying meaning.18 The Shambaa meaning of Mahanyu can be translated as “the one
18 Kyallo W. Wamitila, “What's in a Name: Towards Literary Onomastics in Kiswahili Literature,” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 60 (1999), 35-44. 216 who has ordered meat.”19 It is a central part in the Shambaa founding myth that Mbegha, the chosen king, was a famous hunter, and it was precisely because his hunting skills had impressed the Shambaa so thoroughly that they made him king. While in Shambaa myth, Mbegha is portrayed as the “provider of meat,” the Shambaa are the ones who were introduced to meat by him. In other words, the provider of meat is powerful, the receivers of meat welcome and accommodate him, but are less powerful and in need of his protection.20 In this context, the chosen pseudonym could have been meant as a challenge to the one who hunts game and provides meat. Instead of waiting until the hunter-king chooses to offer the gift of meat, the meat is being called in, not passively waited for and humbly accepted. The name Mahanyu signifies an inversion of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled.
Mahanyu Kibanga’s letter was preceded by a number of other letters he wrote in late August and early September 1952. All of them addressed the PC, with copies sent to the DC in Lushoto and the Governor in Dar es Salaam. In them, Mahanyu referred much more concretely to the events of 1952, which lie at the heart of his claims. In August 1952, a group of radical activists around Isaka Hoza, who we know from previous chapters, were prosecuted by the British in a conspiracy trial as the “ring leaders” of the most recent upheavals in Shambaai.21 They were accused of “undermining the lawful power and authority of the Chief […] in an attempt to cause dissatisfaction against the Usambaa Land Usage Rules.”22 In a letter from DC Shelton to the PC of Tanga, H.S.C. Gill, Shelton explains that the accused individuals were members of the chama cha raia, the party of citizens,23 and that they held conspiratorial organizational meetings in Mlalo and Soni, in which they called for the beating of war drums and the distribution of small
19 Informal conversation with Bakari Ally Saidi, Moa, Mlalo, 10.11.2014. Mahanyu is also the name of a clan that migrated from Pare to Shambaai. Their ancestor was given the land on top of a mountain and the name Mahanyu. In this story, Mahanyu was given his name because both activities, hunting game and climbing the high mountain to reach the land he was given, involved effort. The Shambaa verb -hanyahanya means to make an effort, to fight. See informal conversation with Ramadhani Mahanyu, Lushoto, 05.11.2014. 20 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 54. 21 In the 1952 Report of Provincial Commissioner of Tanga the then PC H.S.C. Gill mentions in a half sentence that sixteen people were awaiting trial on conspiracy charges under the Native Authority Ordinance, see TNA\KEW, CO 736/36, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1952, 158. However, I could not find the original court cases of the trial in the Tanzania National Archives. 22 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), unnumbered envelope, 1. 23 TNA\KEW, CO 736/36, Annual Report of the Tanga Province for the Year 1952, 158. With respect to the party being founded in Mlalo, see Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika., 497. 217 handwritten notes throughout the country in order to mobilize the people for a march on Vugha. The main reason for the unrest was the extension of the Usambara Scheme to the whole of Shambaai. Since the Chief had passed these rules, they demanded his removal from office. This removal was planned as a mass march to the Chief’s Headquarters, Shelton went on. The march never materialized, however, as Kimweri’s henchmen had managed to dissolve the meetings in time. The district office was shocked. DC Shelton described the threat of beating war drums: “The tattoo used on the drums was that which is only used in times of emergency such as fire and invasion. Essence of the tattoo is to call persons together in all haste so that a force may be available to combat any eventuality.”24
DC Shelton suggested that the sixteen people remanded in custody be prosecuted and at the same time that the maximum punishment for their offense be raised, which still seemed too small to him in relationship to the offense. He argued that the case ought to become a precedent so that others would be warned. After all, he complained, “these persons have caused the administration of the N[ative] A[uthorities] to come to a virtual stand-still in certain areas.”25 Shelton went on that the discrediting of the Usambara Scheme had very unsettling effects on the people. Furthermore, he pointed out that there existed a procedure for Kimweri’s removal from office, “but this procedure is not vested in a collection of persons who take such action upon themselves. If there is a body for people who wish him to be removed from office the correct procedure would be to approach those who appointed him, i.e. the Government.” This, in fact, already implied that the chances of Kimweri’s removal in front of this body would be very low. Shelton argued that “using unconstitutional means to depose the Chief is tantamount to conspiring against him, and that a conspiracy against him is tantamount to undermining his lawful power and authority.”26
Shelton’s letter shows the alarm the British felt. He even mentioned that he hoped the Governor himself would intervene. Against the backdrop of the never-ending protest against
24 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), unnumbered envelope, 1-2. 25 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), unnumbered envelope, 2. 26 TNA\DSM, 72/44/16, Native Affairs General Usambara Native Associations (chama undermining the Native Authorities including anonymous letters), unnumbered envelope, 3. 218 the Usambara Scheme and the troubles of 1947 when Shebughe Magogo had to abdicate under the pressure from the people, Shelton’s worry was certainly justified. However, British officials neither anticipated that the scheme would soon have to be abandoned, nor is it likely that the district office understood the full implications of Mahanyu Kibanga’s references. By phrasing his protest in a language spiked with references to English history and values, Mahanyu Kibanga showed his fluency in English culture and ideas, like the Zigua petition-writers did when they evoked Shakespearian language. What all the petitions and letters discussed in earlier chapters have in common is that their writers chose to express their grievances partially through borrowed discourse and language. This turned out to be a particularly powerful tool when it came to criticizing double standards. By appropriating the historical English fight for democracy against the Stuarts as well as the language of Christian brotherly love and compassion, Mahanyu Kibanga tried to claim equal rights in the name of democracy and Christianity.
In general, petitioners did not simply borrow, they rather vernacularized “received wisdom” to make it fit local circumstance. Moreover, they made use of specific Shambaa cultural images or employed fictitious names which carried a local meaning. Shambaa letter- and petition-writers appropriated historical figures, contemporary politicians and metaphors from religious texts to creatively underline their claims and make them meaningful not only to the people they wished to represent, but also to British officials. They certainly did not worry whether they blurred the line between fact and fiction. Much like in Derek Peterson’s work, the rhetoric in the Usambara petitions shows that their writers used plots, characters and ideas described in texts they knew acted in their own world. As Peterson has put it, characters did not stay on the page.27 In the next section I will illuminate a similar process in which the Shambaa rearranged narrative elements, only this time the elements stemmed from local sources alone.
27 Peterson, Creative writing, 245. 219 Remembering Resistance in Popular Culture: The Story of Osale and Paulo28 The rumors about Osale and Paulo are only remembered through popular culture.29 Osale and Paulo were two former prison inmates, the latter Kenyan, the former a native of Shambaai. After serving their prison sentence together, they moved to Shambaai and, being fierce opponents of colonial rule and acquainted with rough prison life, devoted their time to trying to scare white settlers and white colonial officials out of the country. Osale and Paulo were a peculiar pair of criminals: they never used violence and their motivation was never stealing in the first place, although in one version of the story they would sometimes deprive settlers of their money and clothes.30 Osale and Paulo’s major offense was sharing the dinner table with white settlers in the homes of the settlers without having been invited. After the meal they would escape from the scene without being discovered. Osale and Paulo were believed to command magical powers that allowed them to be rendered invisible.31 They would leave a written note behind that said “We were here and we have eaten with you, but you did not see us. Thank you for supper. Osale and Paulo.” As the story goes, the settlers were terrified. They organized watchmen during the night, kept their houses locked at all times, and gathered every night at one person’s home so nobody would have to spend the night alone, but to no avail. Osale and Paulo kept visiting and sharing meals with them. It was impossible to stop Osale and Paulo because they were believed to be vested with magical power. Yet their power came with a condition: They were not allowed to spend the night with a woman while they were on duty. Otherwise they would lose their invisibility.32 As the story goes, one day Paulo was unable to live
28 My special thanks goes to my friend Susanne Erhardt who first mentioned the story of Osale and Paulo to me, and generously allowed me to use her research notes, see Susanne Erhardt, “Erinnerungen an lokale Kolonialgeschichte in Usambara – Die Geschichte von Osale und Paulo,” in Forschungsjournal 2014: Studentische Feldforschungen am Institut für Ethnolgie, ed. Martin Sökefeld and Lisa Burger, Institut für Ethnologie (München: Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, 2015), 37-47. 29 I collected several versions of the story that varied at different points. I will indicate interesting variations throughout the chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, references to the story are shared features of all stories collected. Generally, I am relying on interviews with Ali Mtui Daffa, 27.08.2014; Mr. Haruna, Lushoto, 27.08.2014; The elders of Hemtoye, 28.08.2014; The elders of Mwangoi, 28.08.2014; Daniel Magogo, 07.11.2014; Hashimu Shekilindi, Lushoto, 06.11.2014; Zaniali Rajabu, Mwangoi, 14.09.2015; and Alihaji Kaoneka, Mlalo, 21.09.2015. 30 Interview with Mr. Haruna, 27.08.2014. 31 According to Erhardt’s version, Osale and Paulo were visible to Africans, but never to whites, see Erhardt, “Erinnerungen an lokale Kolonialgeschichte in Usambara – Die Geschichte von Osale und Paulo”, 39. In the other versions, however, they seem to be invisible to everybody. 32 Haruna’s version of the story is the only one in which it is specified that they were not allowed to sleep with a white woman. The other stories insisted on the taboo itself, but not on a specific race. 220 up to his promise. He spent the night with a white girl, the daughter of settlers he had come to “visit.” It is said that Osale, although being far from Paulo that night, immediately felt a physical sensation when the breach happened. As an immediate consequence, both lost their magical powers and thus their invisibility. The same evening, Osale was discovered and shot by police at Mtae. Paulo was injured at Irente and transferred to the hospital. People pressed for the secret of his magical power, but he insisted he would only tell his father. In the end, Paulo only referred his father to the hiding place of the money collected throughout his nightly “visits” before taking his own life. After Paulo’s suicide, the settlers and colonial officials tried to force Paulo’s father to disclose Paulo’s secret to invisibility. But as the story has it, Paulo had taken it with him.33 His tombstone in Irente can still be visited today.34 In some versions, Osale fled and only Paulo died.35 One of my informants even claimed that in the 1980s he had accidentally met Osale in Mombasa in a laundromat. When my informant picked up his clothes at the laundromat, he recognized Osale as the dhobi who handed him his cleaned and pressed clothes.36
This view clashes with the archival documentation of the shooting of the two “gangsters.” Osale and Paulo’s violent death is one of the only two references about the curious pair that found its way into the colonial archive. The Usambara scheme report of July 1956 reads: “The activities of the two gangsters, Osale Otango and Paulo Hamisi in the district created a wide spread unsettled atmosphere until they were shot on the 20th [July, 1956] at Mtae. Scheme work particularly at Mtae and Mlalo has definitely lapsed, and valuable time was lost in the commencement of ridging. In these areas, it is still taking the populace a little time to settle down again.”37 It is not my goal to point out whether the archival or the oral account was “true”, but rather to understand why the rumor could take up such a dynamic life in a particular locality. And yet it is clear that two people called Osale and Paulo existed. They were perceived as “gangsters” by the colonial administration and were eventually shot, but their reputation was not as clear-cut negative from the point of view of Shambaai’s residents.
33 Interview with Mr. Haruna, Lushoto, 27.08.2014. 34 Interview with Mzee Hashimu Shekilindi, Lushoto, 06.11.2014. 35 Interview with Zaniali Rajabu, Mwangoi, 14.09.2015. 36 Interview with AliHaji Kaoneka, Mlalo, 21.09.2015. 37 TNA\DSM 171/3, Vol.III: Usambara Scheme, monthly and annual reports, Report of the month of July 1956, 25, p.1. 221 Following Luise White’s famous methodological approach to rumors in African history, I will not explain the rumor, but attempt to explain how it was locally credible.38 According to White, those who share rumors often view individuals about whom rumors circulate as ambiguous.39 This was true for Osale and Paulo, as I will show below. Moreover, White argues, rumors are not created on the spot. Instead, they draw from “a store of historical allusions that have been kept alive and given new and renewed meanings by the gossip and arguments of diverse social groups.”40 The metaphor of invisibility, the major feature of Osale and Paulo’s power, is one such element from a store of historical allusions. Against this backdrop, rumors about something or somebody are not really about the something or the somebody. Luise White maintains that rumors are instead “narratives, explanations, and theories” to which the something or somebody is a subject. Hence, rumors may “reveal an intellectual world of fears and fantasies, ideas and claims.”41 What are the fears and fantasies, ideas and claims attached to the rumor of Osale and Paulo, and who indulged in them?
The aspect of invisibility is at the core of the story about Osale and Paulo. It was common knowledge that the British did not appreciate any kind of talk or practice that was related to what they referred to as “superstition.” The story of Osale and Paulo falls under such a heading. Because the British did not believe in magic, they immediately associated anything expressed in the idiom of magic with backwardness, conservatism or a primordial past, which they hoped would be overcome as progress solidified. For the British, as for the Germans before them, because there was no scientific proof for the existence of magic, it did not exist. While many Shambaa continued to express dissent and perceive danger in the idiom of witchcraft or magic, they were careful not to do so when they interacted with the colonial administration. Local actors understood that such expressions were incommensurable with the British and a Western audience in general. Therefore, the aspect of Paulo and Osale’s invisibility is firmly anchored in oral popular culture, but not in the colonial archive. Yet because Africans were aware of British distaste for the invisibility metaphor, it lent itself well to expressions of discontentment with British rule. So even if the British tried to ban the spirit world from official discourse for there
38 White, Speaking with vampires, 83. 39 Ibid., 81. 40 Ibid., 82. 41 Ibid., 82, 86. 222 was no scientific proof of its existence, they never succeeded. In addition, according to David Gordon, the question as to whether spirits really exist becomes obsolete once we understand that spirits can mobilize action precisely because people believe in them. People mobilize around their spiritual discourse and the consequences are very real.42 As the popular culture narratives demonstrate, people did believe in the invisibility of Osale and Paulo and in their fight against white settlers, and this belief did have an effect on their stance towards settler colonialism in the area.
The old association between magic or witchcraft and backwardness has been thoroughly challenged in the literature of the past two decades. Since the Comaroffs’ seminal study Modernity and its Malcontents, witchcraft has been linked with modernity instead of being understood as a primordial relic of an irrational African past. Witchcraft has come to be seen as the product of the same modernity it seemed to oppose, as being conditioned by modernity, a response to modernity and an integral part of modernity itself.43 Many studies highlight that in nineteenth-century Eastern and Central Africa, resistance to unwelcome intrusions was often expressed in the idiom of magic and its destructive side, violence.44 The fact that spirit mediums and crisis cults thrived was often connected to the vacuum left by the decline of divine kings and traditional chiefs,45 to war,46 or to other processes of social change that threatened the general equilibrium of healing and fertility.47
Criticism of growing economic inequality, too, was often expressed by the idiom of witchcraft. In his study of the Maka of Cameroon, Peter Geschiere interprets the rise of witchcraft accusations as a way of expressing unease with the rising material differences between members of a
42 David M. Gordon, Invisible agents: Spirits in a Central African history (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 8. 43 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents: Ritual and power in postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 44 Nicole Eggers, “Mukombozi and the monganga: The Violence of Healing in the Kitawalist Uprising of 1944,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 85, no. 3 (2015), 417-436; Schoenbrun, “A Mask of Calm: Emotion and Founding the Kingdom of Bunyoro in the Sixteenth Century”, 634-664. 45 Abbink, Bruijn and van Walraven, Rethinking resistance, 31-32, 37. 46 Heike Behrend, “Power to Heal Power to Kill,” in Spirit possession, modernity & power in Africa, ed. Heike Behrend and Ute Luig (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 20-33; Becker and Beez, Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch- Ostafrika, 1905-1907; Gwassa, Record of the Maji Maji rising. 47 Iris Berger, “Fertility as Power. Spirit Mediums, Priestesses and the Precolonial State in Interlacustrine East Africa,” in Revealing prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African history, ed. David Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (London: J. Currey, 1995), 65-82; Gordon, Invisible agents, 3-4. 223 society that used to be shaped by an egalitarian political discourse.48 While pre-colonial Shambaai certainly was not an egalitarian society, it is nevertheless true that the enormous inequalities of colonial capitalism introduced a new set of differences and resulted in the slow impoverishment of Shambaai as a district,49 and in the sometimes really fast and relentless pauperization of individuals.50 The creation of new inequalities and the possibility for individuals to experience swift and unstoppable economic decline serves as my background for analyzing the story of Osale and Paulo. The figure of the cultivator who had to face a series of interventions in his production cycle is thus central to my understanding of the trope of invisibility as employed in the rumors about Osale and Paulo.
Outlaws or Freedom Fighters? A settler family sharing the dinner table with Africans was as unthinkable in Shambaai as it was in other settler colonial contexts. Colonial rule and particularly settler societies were predicated on the strict separation between “native subjects” and “European citizens.”51 A shared dinner was entirely out of question. Other forms of separation undergirded daily life. For instance, there was a certain neighborhood in Lushoto called Dochi, where Africans were prohibited from entering. According to the rumors, Osale and Paulo still did.52 The image of Osale and Paulo, two African criminals, sharing the dinner table with white settlers, or trespassing private property, was ultimately the biggest nightmare of any settler.
The contestation of an exclusive table, reserved only for the rich and powerful, is well known in other contexts such as the French Revolution. The grand couvert, the royal supper made public to observers, was mocked by contemporary revolutionaries. Many Parisians appropriated the court spectacle and invited observers to their own dinners, thus implying “that everybody had
48 Peter Geschiere, Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust: Africa in comparison (London, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 34. 49 Iliffe, A modern history of Tanganyika, 350. 50 One of the new rules under the Usambara Scheme was that people who did not cultivate their fields as the scheme rules prescribed could be deprived of their fields which would be given to a person willing to follow scheme rules. In other words: the poorest peasant farmers who had little or no land were most vulnerable, as they would need the harvest of their one single field the most and could thus afford tie-ridging the least, see TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9C: Reports. Mlalo Scheme – Native Authority Rules, 31.05.1948, Sheria ya maendeleo ya ustawi wa bonde wa Mlalo, 7-8. 51 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996). 52 Interview with Mzee Zaniali Rajabu, Mwangoi, 20.09.2015. 224 the right to eat in grand couvert, that anybody’s dinner was worth observing, that all could be king.”53 One of the noble revolutionary Charles de Villette’s propositions on how to achieve fraternity was the utopian picture that the people of Paris all dined together in the streets like one immense family. He was describing the moment in which “the rich and the poor would be united, and all ranks would mix.”54
The story of how Osale and Paulo enjoy their dinner in the midst of white settlers is similar. It certainly also challenged the existing hierarchy in which Africans were at the bottom. In fact, the rumor symbolized an immense threat to the settler community as it symbolically intruded in the private sphere of settler households. The two most intimate aspects of settler life, the table and the bed, were at the core of the story. Sharing the dinner table with settlers implies not only uncalled-for intimacy, but can also be read as a claim to participate in the settlers’ exuberance. This, in concert with trespassing on state property, and sleeping with their daughters – the intermarriage debate and its eventual prohibition that had ensued in German South West Africa comes to mind55 – were the three scenarios a settler dreaded most.
The wide circulation of the rumor suggests that colonial boundaries were increasingly being challenged by African actors. Settlers were aware of and worried about the increasing contestation. As early as 1924, the district office was anxious to keep “loose women and male idlers” away from settler plantations in order “to keep our Highlands clean.”56 In 1955, a Lushoto settler wished to open a case against three Africans on the charge “of illegal trespass with intent annoy.” In his letter to the Inspector of Police, he wrote: “As you are aware, being so far distant from forces of law and order, this area is in a state of indiscipline and petty thefts are the order of the day.”57 Despite the fact that Lushoto was not a remote town, but the former capital of German East Africa and closely connected to the coastal cities of Tanga and Dar es Salaam and despite the fact that it relied on a relatively strong infrastructure, the settler still felt “distant from forces of law and order.” He, like many others, Europeans and Africans alike, felt
53 Rebecca L. Spang, The invention of the restaurant: Paris and modern gastronomic culture (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 89. 54 Ibid., 96 55 Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 219-280. 56 TNA\DSM, AB 28, Annual Report Lushoto District 1924, p.17-18. 57 TNA\DSM, 72, 32/9, Vol.II: Legal District Court, 13.05.1955, ? (indecipherable) to the Inspector of Police, Lushoto, 347. 225 the tensions of the 1950s, and felt threatened by them. What is more, Osale was said to be Kenyan. His name alone implied the dread of Mau Mau.
I think it is important to understand the ambiguity of the figures Osale and Paulo according to the rumor. I expected first that they would be portrayed as welcome freedom fighters, celebrated as two individuals who did their utmost to rid the region of colonial rule. But as I came to understand, the rumor contains not only the most dreadful elements of a settler’s point of view, but also from a specific Shambaa perspective. Osale and Paulo were not welcomed as anti-colonial heroes by the Shambaa. Although they had similar goals of those of the radical core of protesters, they were viewed as ambiguous allies, if not outright as dangerous and unwelcome intruders.
Historically, the image of invisibility in Shambaai, as elsewhere in the region, was often connected to danger, or to hiding from danger. It is said that during the time of slave raids in Shambaai, some people had special powers available that saved them from the fate of being enslaved. This special power was the ability to be rendered invisible. The story is told in the town of Mazinde near the plains where slave caravans used to pass.58 A similar trope is known throughout Central Africa, sometimes connected to the possibility to escape danger, or to the opportunity to steal with immunity.59 Mbegha, the first king of the Shambaa, could command the raising of a thick fog in order to make people or entire villages invisible to their enemies. He would employ this ruse during war times and it impressed the originally suspicious folks of Vugha, the Kinatui, thoroughly enough to make him their king.60 Invisibility is thus a known element in Shambaa thought as well as in the wider region. It is connected to danger and Osale and Paulo, too, were involved in dangerous activities and thus in need of the protection of invisibility. However, their invisibility did not last, and eventually they could not escape the danger.
The ambiguity with which Osale and Paulo were perceived by the tellers of the rumor, figuring somewhere between harming and helping, found its way into the colonial archive by accident. There is a letter by Saidi Doekulu of Vugha from June 1956, a month before Osale and Paulo’s
58 Informal conversation with Augstino Mhando, Lushoto, 28.09.2015. 59 Gordon, Invisible agents, 77. 60 Liajjemi, Habari ya Wakilindi, 42. 226 violent death, in which the pair was mentioned. The main subject matter of the letter was not Osale and Paulo’s activism, but an expression of anger about politics in Shambaai. Saidi Doekulu argued that since the 1947 march on Vugha, when an illegitimate candidate inherited the kingship, Shambaai had been out of control despite the protest of “hundreds and thousands of Shambaa.”61 Doekulu blamed “one official of the Department of Agriculture”62 for it – the same department that did its best to enforce the much despised scheme rules. Doekulu went on that the central government had installed Kimweri Mputa Magogo against the will of his subjects in an act he referred to as “matengano ya nchi”, which translates as the breaking apart of the country. Although the new ruler had no sound political agenda, Doekulu complained he was “carried by the [central] government” and he “used his citizens the way he liked.” He even “installed new illegitimate Zumbe with a similar character (…) who, like him, only want to fill their bellies.”63 Then he mentioned Osale (but not Paulo). According to Doekulu, many Shambaa were exasperated by Osale’s presence. He explained:
When in the past somebody acted unrelenting or criminal towards the government, such as breaking the law, the ruler of the land would collect his people and together they would figure out how to react to the danger until they eventually would find a way to get hold of the law-breaker. But this [current] ruler cannot do such a thing because he is not in agreement with his sub-chiefs and citizens. This is the reason why Osale can live in Shambaai and trouble the government. It is why he can rob white settlers and why he wants to kill them. […] If there was an agreement between the ruler and the citizens as it is the tradition here in Shambaai, that law-breaker could not trouble the government.64 Doekulu further argues that the responsibilities of a Shambaa ruler were very similar to those of the British king. Two things in particular were his responsibility: First, he had to be chosen by his citizens and had to take an oath to respect the law; and only then, secondly, would he be allowed to wear the “taji la kifalme”, the kingly crown.65 Because Kimweri Mputa Magogo did the former but not the latter – taking the oath without being chosen – “he [Osale] has no fears,
61 TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, June 1956, Saidi Doekulu to PC Tanga, 714, p.1. 62 Ibid., 714, p.1. 63 Ibid., 714, p.1. 64 TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, June 1956, Saidi Doekulu to PC Tanga, 713, p.2. 65 Ibid., 713, p.2. 227 there is not a thing that frightens him”, and therefore, Doekulu predicted, worse things will happen.66
It is not clear whether the letter writer used a pseudonym. He asked the PC not to reveal his identity to the Simbamwene. Because the matter was so urgent, Saidi Doekulu wrote, he felt he did not have a choice but to share the story, but he was aware that he would certainly face problems if the Simbamwene got hold of him. However, nobody would really expect that the PC would grant his wish for discretion. Saidi Doekulu must have known that, too. Hence I assume that Doekulu signed with a pseudonym in the first place. In Shambaa court culture, the Doekulu is one of the Simbamwene’s senior councilors.67 Some sources say that the Doekulu’s responsibilities were to keep the country clean and to look after the woods and gardens of the hazina, the treasury, and that the titles Doekulu and Mdoe could be used interchangeably.68 According to Feierman, the Mdoe was the tutor in “affairs of state” to a future Zumbe. The young Zumbe was raised by the Mdoe, who always originated from a specific lineage of commoners and was traditionally his mother’s brother.69 Whether Saidi Doekulu understood his letter as advice to the Zumbe in terms of affairs of the state, or as a symbolic warning to “keep the country clean” of pollution such as criminal elements, we cannot know. Whatever the case, because of the symbolic meaning of the title Doekulu and the letter-writers’ wish for discretion, I think it is safe to conclude that his choice of pseudonym was a sign that whoever the letter- writer really was, he coopted the official authority of Doekulu title.
Doekulu’s letter remained unanswered. Yet it is a window into Shambaa conceptions of just rule, and of good governance. First, Doekulu rejected Kimweri’s legitimate rule, a legitimacy he linked directly to the Simbamwene’s defense of the Usambara Scheme (expressed by mentioning the “Department of Agriculture”). Because of Kimweri Mputa Magogo’s illegitimate rule and his politics of installing loyal but corrupt Zumbe, he had not only lost his subjects’ confidence, but also the power over his country. He even found himself in a position in which he
66 TNA\DSM, 304, A2/2: African Administration and Affairs. Usambara District including Korogwe Division, June 1956, Saidi Doekulu to PC Tanga, 712, p.3. 67 Winans, Shambala, 124. 68 TNA\DSM, 72/43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies. Lushoto, 03.03.1952, Shemsanga to Simbamwene, 108. 69 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 114, 119. 228 was unable to prevent Shambaai from being terrified by “law-breakers” like Osale and Paulo, Doekulu explained. Curiously, Saidi Doekulu’s portrayal of Osale was not entirely negative. Doekulu seemed to use the figure of Osale and his unmentioned colleague Paulo to underline the king’s loss of power. Yet the ones threatened by Osale and Paulo were not the king or his Zumbe, but European settlers. Even the more radical chama activists mostly expressed their dissent with the Usambara Scheme and the native authorities, but only very rarely with the British. Given the immense impact of the ideology of indirect rule, this does not come as a surprise. People shied away from openly accusing white settlers for taking Shambaa land or criticizing colonial officials for enforcing scheme rules that meant nothing less than a breach with local custom. Even the most persistent rumor that had accompanied the Usambara Scheme from its beginning, that the Shambaa would be driven out of their country and resettled on the plains, was only used in confrontations with the native authorities.70 The one person who eventually had the courage to criticize the British openly was Julius Nyerere. He had visited Shambaai in January 1956, and “local people were deeply impressed that he was touring the country openly, not in prison, even though he openly said the words which peasant intellectuals sometimes thought but feared to say.”71 Only Nyerere could utter the dangerous message that the British ought to leave as could the ambiguous figures Osale and Paulo.
The Danger of Power: Duality in Shambaa Thought The following account is based on Steven Feierman’s detailed analysis of the Mbegha myth. This exploration is important because I suggest similarities between the first king, Mbegha, and the Osale and Paulo. According to the rumor, Osale and Paulo are remembered for having masterfully accomplished dangerous things. They were active at night. They practically ate alone because, although they sat with the settlers, they were invisible to them. It is said that they lived in caves in the wilderness.72 In Shambaa thought, eating alone and travelling at night are understood as dangerous. Eating alone brings death. It is the refusal of the idea of social
70 TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 04.02.1950, Extension of the Usambara Schemes. Methods and requirements, 25, Appendix A, p.1+2; TNA\DSM, 72, 62/9E: Reports Mlalo scheme Instructions and Policy Reports, 23.11.1949, Minutes of a meeting held at Lushoto, no number. 71 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 179. 72 Interview with Ali Mtui Daffa, 27.08.2014. 229 solidarity created through exchange,73 symbolized by the above-mentioned ritual exchange of meat and starches between Mbegha, Shambaai’s first king, and the Shambaa.74 Osale and Paulo refused exchange and they only took during their meals with the settlers, rather than offering something, which was the custom. Although the settlers and Osale and Paulo shared the same table and the same food, only the settlers contributed by offering food – albeit without even knowing. Therefore, Osale and Paulo do not engage in social solidarity with them, and their invisibility is the obvious symbol of this.
Another ritual of social solidarity in Shambaai is marriage. Yet what is normally at the heart of marriage – fertility and reproduction, the gift of exchange – was precisely what was taboo for Osale and Paulo. The one condition for the pair’s guaranteed invisibility was to reject exchange and reproduction. They neither engaged in exchanging food nor blood. In Shambaa thought, refusing exchange was understood as a sin – only witches do it.75 In many African societies witchcraft is related to intimacy. The intimacy of a shared meal also represents the dangerous possibility of falling victim to the cook’s magic ingredients; and sometimes witches are said to devour their victims.76 Achille Mbembe’s image of the postcolonial subject’s defiant incorporation of the state through the metaphors of the mouth, the belly, or the phallus comes to mind.77
Travelling at night was dangerous, too. Wild animals roamed at night, and only witches moved after nightfall.78 Only the homestead was safe. The one human being who would not sleep at night was the king because he ruled at night as during the day.79 As the Mbegha myth has it, Mbegha was a “domesticated witch” who had turned from harming to healing – for only those who had the power to harm, had the power to heal: “That magical power is ambivalent, that it can be used to help or to harm, is axiomatic in Shambaa medicine. In order to cure illnesses caused by sorcery one must know the sorcerer’s art. Mbegha had the power to destroy and the
73 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 50. 74 Ibid., 54. 75 Ibid., 51. 76 Geschiere, Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust, 4. 77 Achille Mbembe, On the postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 128. 78 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 47. 79 Ibid., 59. 230 power to bring fertility.”80 According to Abdallah Hemed Ali Liajjemi’s Habari ya Wakilindi from 1895, Mbegha, too, had the power to render people and even whole villages invisible in the eyes of their foes in order to save them from destruction or war.81 It is precisely Mbegha’s magical power, the power to kill, which derived from his wildness before his domestication by the Shambaa that also enabled him to bring fertility to Shambaai. Only he who can harm can prevent harm through healing.82 The idea that a magical power can always be split into good and evil, and can be creative and destructive, heal and harm, is a common assumption in many African societies.83
Osale and Paulo shared several powerful features with both dangerous witches and the king. They are said to have lived in the wilderness. Although they did not kill, they had the power over deadly weapons. In one version of the story, they collected the settlers’ weapons whenever they reached one of their homes. Then they left a letter on the table saying “We took all your weapons. We left them at a particular place.” And the place mentioned would indeed be the place where the settlers would discover their weapons. Hiding the weapons can be read as a symbol of Osale and Paulo’s power to kill the settlers, a power they did not exercise. In Shambaa thought, a king is a strong and good ruler when he, in Feierman’s words, “covers over” the whole land, a state in which tribute flowed to the royal capital, when commoners could appeal the judgments of their chiefs at the king’s court in Vugha, and when only the king could impose the death penalty.84 I argue that Osale and Paulo’s – even unexercised – power to kill was meant to underline the piteous state of Shambaai: the king had lost his sole right to kill to the Germans long ago, tribute labor had lost its meaning through the introduction of taxation and was, furthermore, closely linked to the extremely unpopular scheme work, and, although appeal cases were heard at the court of Vugha and by administrational officials, the recurring call for just appeals was expressed in an avalanche of complaints and letters. This interpretation is strengthened by Saidi Doekulu’s letter. Thus, although Osale and Paulo were outlaws of sorts, they were not perceived by the Shambaa as entirely negative figures. While they were feared by
80 Ibid., 61-61. For further elaboration, see the chapters “The Humanization of Mbegha” and “Mbegha and the Shambaa”, 45-64. 81 Liajjemi, Habari ya Wakilindi, 36, 42. 82 Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom, 61. 83 Geschiere, Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust, 164. 84 Feierman, Peasant intellectuals, 85. 231 many, they were also admired by many. Possessing the magical power of witches was both good and bad. It was good only as long as they would use it to heal, not to harm.
Order and Disorder in Ritual In his seminal study of the process of ritual in African societies, Victor Turner develops the idea of the stage of liminality as an essential part of ritual. According to Turner, “liminal personae” are either “persons that fall in the interstices of social structure, are on its margins, or occupy its lowest rung”85 – all of which hold true for Osale and Paulo. A number of the attributes he lists as “liminal entities” in the ritual process apply to Osale and Paulo. We already know that they are criminals, but Osale is also a stranger in Shambaai, cut off of his familial ties and kin protection; furthermore, neither Osale nor Paulo has a homestead, but rather live in the wilderness like loners. Thus, several of the attributes of liminality that Turner observed in performed rituals or symbolic language apply to Osale and Paulo: sexlessness and anonymity,86 sexual continence,87 invisibility and darkness.88 These are analogous to the portrayals of Osale and Paulo, whose invisibility lends them anonymity; who are sexless because of the conditional taboo of sexual contact; and who operate in the dark, which is known to be a dangerous time to be on the move. It is part of Shambaa purification rites that a man who returns from war has to observe sexual continence to change from war mode back into normal life.89 This even points to a possible perception of Osale and Paulo as “warriors.”
Turner explains why strong symbolic language and performativity of rituals is tied to the elusiveness of liminal personae. It is because “this condition and these persons […] slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”90 This elusiveness, the inability to pin down their statuses, then gives rise to danger. Because “in liminality, the underling comes uppermost,”91 he is a threat to the existing order. Turner’s viewpoint is that in ritual, the idea of
85 Victor W. Turner, The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter 1969), 125. 86 Ibid., 102. 87 Ibid., 104. 88 Ibid., 95. 89 Winans, Shambala, 84. 90 Turner, The ritual process, 95. 91 Ibid., 95, 102. 232 society is turned on its head, the weak, the crazy, or the criminals symbolize disorder and thus threaten the “maintenance of structure.”92 In a similar vein, Mary Douglas has argued that in many African societies, the elusive that defies classification is regarded as dangerous, as polluting purity, as dirt indeed. Because “uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained,”93 the elusive is analogous to disorder. Thus, reactions to dirt are “continuous with other reactions to ambiguity or anomaly.”94 In other words, what is feared is what cannot be classified, and what cannot be classified is portrayed in the language of dirt, a symbol of disorder. The symbolic language of dirt and uncleanliness thus give insight into fears of disorder, formlessness and death in contrast to order, structure, and life.95
The ambiguity of ritual, “that which is rejected is ploughed back for a renewal of life,”96 can be exemplified through the rumor about the personae of Osale and Paulo. Osale and Paulo, who were displaying a number of attributes that are associated with danger in Shambaa thought, use precisely those dangerous elements in their attempt to drive out the colonial power. Thus, that which is rejected (eating alone, travelling at night, living in the wilderness) is “ploughed back” for a “renewal of life,” composted if you will. The dialectic here between order and disorder, chaos and structure, danger and security, resonates with Shambaa thought. Comparison is inherent to Shambaa thought, for only through comparison does meaning emerge. Feierman exemplified this duality in Shambaa thought in the story of Mbegha’s transformation from a wild and dangerous hunter-witch to a benevolent king. For only if we know the safety of the homestead, can we grasp the danger of the wilderness; and only because Mbegha the hunter commanded elements of disorder and danger, could he grow into the protective king of the Shambaa. Without danger there is no safety.
Now what does that have to do with history? It is again Turner who helps create a link between ritual language, liminality, and history. He describes the specific point in time at which, for instance, millennial movements such as the watchtower movement in Central and Southern
92 Ibid., 109. 93 Ibid., 40. 94 Mary Douglas, Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 5. 95 Ibid., 5. 96 Ibid., 167. 233 Africa emerged (with several of the characteristics of liminality) as historical junctures: “mostly such movements occur during phases of history that are in many aspects “homologous” to the liminal periods of important rituals in stable and repetitive societies, when major groups of social categories in those societies are passing from one cultural state to another. They are essentially phenomena of transitions.”97 Far from seeing ritual and ritual language simply as symbolic activities, it is indeed very fruitful to establish the link between ritual and politics. It is here, of course, that the rumor about Osale and Paulo links to the work on danger and liminality.
Being a Criminal in Late-Colonial Shambaai Ralph Austen noted that the vocabulary of deviance in Africa is different from Western expressions such as “the heroic criminal” or “the social bandit.”98 Instead, the relationship of marginal figures to changes in authority and property rights is phrased in the idiom of witchcraft, usually expressed in terms of sexual reproduction and the control of food into individual, political, and material power.99 He further argues that the witchcraft idiom, here the symbol of invisibility, may be employed as a general attack on property accumulation, as opposed to communal values of sharing and reproduction.100 Moreover, Austen noted that the witchcraft idiom is often intimately associated with the state and its ruler. No matter how “legitimate” the ruler is, he also represents an essentially life-threating force.101 As mentioned above, in Shambaai only the king hunts and offers meat, and only he has the right to kill. While Osale and Paulo are not acting like a fair and just king would – in particular Paulo’s weak character is underlined by breaking the single taboo on which their power rested – it is also not possible to characterize them only as evil. The ambiguity is still further underlined by their social context and personal history: they are both former convicts and met each other in prison. We do not know the offense they were sentenced for, but the fact that they were imprisoned indicates an offense under penal law. This was certainly not particularly helpful in creating trust.
97 Ibid., 112. 98 Ralph A. Austen, “Social bandits and other heroic criminals: Western models of resistance and their relevance for Africa,” in Banditry, rebellion, and social protest in Africa, ed. Donald Crummey (London, Portsmouth, N.H: J. Currey; Heinemann, 1986), 95-96. 99 Ibid., 102. 100 Ibid., 102. 101 Ibid., 102. 234 As Filip DeBoeck has shown, changes in the identity of the witch can point to social transformations. According to DeBoeck, the recent phenomenon of the “child witch” in Kinshasa and Lagos is linked to the changing role of children in society. It signifies a deep transformation of kinship structures, generational strife and a very real shift in relations of authority and dependency between generations. It highlights the loss of control over younger family members and shows the capacity of children as crucial actors in urban society.102 Now, what does it mean when the witch is a former prison inmate, a potentially criminal person? At first glance the “criminal” identity of witches looks like a destructive turn. If criminals, like DeBoeck’s children, play an important role, this should be nothing to yearn for. Yet it is possible to understand the potential of the image by examining the stereotypical identity of criminals in late colonial Shambaai.
Shambaai in the 1940s and 1950s was a conflicted country. Native authorities had lost both their former strength as well as their former integrity. The Shambaa were no longer protected by Kimweri, who had lost his authority with the advent of German rule, and they no longer payed him tribute through ghunda labor. The Paramount was no longer in charge of questions of life and death; it was the British judges who decided all criminal matters, guided not by Shambaa procedure, but by the English penal code. And since the installation of Kimweri Mputa Magogo in 1947, many people felt that succession politics were corrupted. Most of the crimes committed were either violations of the laborious scheme rules or tax evasion.
The offenders were struggling with the decline of two important aspects of Shambaa economy and life: land tenure custom and the crucial question of controlling labor. As argued above, the Usambara Scheme made land an even scarcer resource than it already was. Controlling the labor of women and young men, which was long the chief asset of wealth, also became a difficult task due to the growing drift of young men either to the cities or other contexts of migrant labor. John Iliffe argues that in a society in in which land is ample, the definition of a poor person is one who lacks access to the labor (of others) to work the plentiful land.103 In a place like Shambaai, where land was becoming scarcer day by day, the decisive factor was no
102 Geschiere, Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust, 195. 103 Iliffe, The African poor, 4. 235 longer solely wealth in access to people’s labor, but access to land or cash.104 While the new capitalist cash economy presented advantages such as focusing on maize mono-cropping to meet the sisal workers’ food demands105 for those rich in land and cash, the majority of Shambaai’s inhabitants only had subsistence farms and very little money; and it was difficult for them to find the money to pay their taxes. The transformation from ghunda (tribute) labor to tax payments lay at the heart of the matter. Thus, throughout the colonial period the refusal to pay tax was always one of the means chosen by ordinary people and sometimes even by sub- chiefs to display their unease with political directions chosen in Vugha.106 In other words, criminals, as designated by the local and central governments, might not necessarily have been perceived as criminals in terms of local custom. As the 1952 ringleader case and the Shemsanga trial show, the colonial state, in concert with highly personalized native authorities, shaped the definition of criminals and criminality itself. In an interview Daniel Magogo, the younger brother of Kimweri Mputa Magogo, referred to Osale and Paulo as “majambazi” and “vibaka”, thugs and criminals.107 Others, like Haruna Mbwana, described them as freedom fighters that had not lost touch with their people – contrary to Shemsanga or other Shambaa politicians of that time, who traded their local agenda for TANU’s nationalist politics. And again others, like the elders of Hemtoye and probably the majority of Shambaa, understood Osale and Paulo as being driven by a powerful agenda, but also as untrustworthy because they overstepped their boundaries. The elders of Hemtoye recalled that after Osale and Paulo lost their magical power and died, the one who really brought independence, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere arrived.108 Once again in Shambaa history, the Shambaa were too weak – after all, it was Paulo, native of Shambaai, who breached the taboo – and invited a stranger to rule them. Almost two centuries ago, the foreign hunter Mbegha was installed as king of the Shambaa because he was able to protect them with
104 Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa”, 66. 105 Conte, Highland sanctuary, 135; Westcott, “The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939-49”, 147- 150. 106 RHL Reel No.3, Lushoto District Book, in: System of Government, Native Administration in Practice, Note for District Records, 2; TNA\DSM, G 54/17: Gerichtsbarkeit für Farbige, 23.1.1901, Letter from Teichmann to Bezirksamtmann Meyer, 1; 16.3.1901 Letter from Teichmann to Kaiserliches Gouvernement Dar es Salaam, 1-2; TNA\DSM, 72/45/1, Vol.II, Lushoto, Native Affairs – Legal, Native Courts, 23.11.1941, Dobson Bwana Shauri (DC) to Shebuge Magogo Kimweri, 152. 107 Interview with Mzee Daniel Magogo, 07.11.2014. 108 Interview with the elders of Hemtoye, 09.11.2014. 236 his power and bring fertility. Similarly, the one who defeated the colonial state in the late 1950s was a stranger to Shambaai, the popular nationalist politician Julius Nyerere.
Conclusion The rumor about Osale and Paulo as well as the use of pseudonyms in the letters by Mahanyu Kibanga and Saidi Doekulu are proof of a vivid world of political imagination, albeit one that most likely remained undiscovered by the British. It shows that contestations of authority were phrased using very local references well into the mid-1950s. I have highlighted that the duality of Shambaa thought. The awareness that what is good could always turn into danger, and that only those who had the power to harm could even be considered to have the power to heal, was deeply rooted in the rumor about Osale and Paulo. While they were not perceived as freedom fighters by those who told and those who listened to the rumor, they were more than simple outlaws. The portrayal of “criminals” as “witches” signified the stark changes in Shambaai’s economic and leadership culture, in which criminalizing others was a way of ridding oneself of enemies. One of the consequences of the economic decline of Shambaai was the persistence of rumors, a consequence most starkly represented by the Usambara Scheme. The Scheme not only added to the workload of the people of Shambaai, but violations of the scheme were punished by fines, which residents not only remember as being extremely high, but also as a way for the native authorities to line their pockets.
Eventually, Ralph Austen’s explanation as to why the concept of the social bandits or other heroic criminals does not work for Africa holds for Shambaai, too. Austen argues that pre- colonial African societies, always offered possible segmentation as an alternative to criminalization, even if they were highly stratified.109 A different vocabulary of deviance was developed for the emergence of economic inequalities, one that did not evoke the noble bandit, but that rather highlighted the ambiguity of power itself.
We do not know if the rumor circulating in the 1950s entailed the same elements that I have recorded here sixty years later, or if it the image of invisibility was tailored later to fit the death of the two “gangsters.” The rumor says much more about how people conceived of their late
109 Ralph A. Austen, “Social bandits and other heroic criminals: Western models of resistance and their relevance for Africa”, 95-96. 237 colonial history than about the two individuals Osale and Paulo. I suggest that employing the rumor is a way for Shambaai’s residents to make sense of the connection between colonial rule, corrupted native authorities, the Usambara Scheme and danger. I argue that it is important to contextualize the rumor of Osale and Paulo within the previously unstudied link between magic and resistance in Shambaai. The rumor, however, was not a seamless and straightforward expression of resistance against settler colonialism. The ambiguity with which the personae Osale and Paulo were portrayed signifies that they not only challenged foul native authorities and cruel settlers, but that they, too, overstepped some boundaries. They could do so because the power of the king, which used to lie in the reciprocal relationship he engaged in with his subjects, had been irretrievably destroyed.
British administrative officers did not understand this dimension of the rumor and similar petitions, and if they did, they did not react to them. Whether these expressions were ignored by officials because they, like some nationalists, perceived a certain incommensurability between Shambaa thought and the road to independence they had on mind for their subjects, we do not know. But closed-down pathways of communication became apparent in the dismissal of expressions of political imaginations the British perceived as less important due to misspellings or scrawled handwriting, or in the dismissal of rumors as “native superstitions.” In addition, the practice of indirect rule made the British lean heavily on their native authorities’ version of events, which led to the dismissal of other claims at the hands of chiefs and headmen who jealously protected their privileges. But even if claims went unheard or remained incommensurable, the existence of those petitions and rumors are evidence another form of disagreement and political imagination besides those forms that played out in colonial courts or on cultivators’ plots.
238 CONCLUDING REMARKS
“These days are difficult,” complained the court elders of the native court of Vugha-Bazo in a letter to the DC in 1952. The letter-writers were all judicial assessors in Shambaai’s most notorious native court-the same court that was presided over by Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni, the Paramount Chief’s son-in-law, whose false accusations and other violations of legal procedure caused so much resentment and uproar among residents of Shambaai. In their letter, the elders continued “the people of these days are people who create much noise through writing.”1 I hope that my research has demonstrated how thoroughly the art of wording and narrating and the “noise through writing” shaped the nature of litigation in Shambaai’s native courts under colonial rule. I have argued that the opening of the courts to all sorts of non-legal language was an unintended consequence of Governor Cameron’s Court Ordinance of 1929. Because Cameron had disconnected the designated native courts from the rest of the judiciary, African litigants had begun to address the judges – mostly administrative officers, and only very rarely trained jurists – in different forms such as in letters and petitions, and well as in non-legal language. What is more, they would extend their communications connected to law-suits to high-ranking administrative personnel not concerned with the dispensation of justice in the first place, or to individuals abroad, such as British parliamentarians or delegates of the UN. Governor Cameron must have had another outcome in mind when he issued the ordinance. He wanted to bind Africans to their customary and tribal realm by severing their ties to the judiciary, not to empower them to invite high-ranking officials abroad to settle local disputes. Yet native courts were far from merely being sites of custom. Many different languages and laws were at play, both linguistic and conceptual, and local, regional and international actors were involved. Litigants in Shambaai’s native courts did not stop short at the line drawn by colonial administrators. They addressed their grievances in the language they found most suitable, not in the language the British thought should be reserved for native courts.
Mission centers and newspapers turned out to be the sites where the lessons of colonial education and colonial knowledge were re-worked. Christian symbolic language in concert
1 TNA\DSM, 72, 43/22A: Native Administration Sub-Chiefs Deputies. Lushoto, 02.01.1952, Ali Beleko and other elders of Kitara Kikuu, Vuga to DC, 25.
239 with the “secular” lessons of British democracy and history were two sources many litigants and petitioners happily united with one another. In this curious process of assemblage, Shambaa actors claimed historical figures and Christian symbols and made them their own by suggesting comparisons with individuals from their own world. In short, they created new stories with a toolbox of old elements, thus grafting new meanings onto old forms. While the access to mission and especially government schooling remained limited, many people used newspapers to follow up on the latest developments. Those unable to read benefitted from small public readings and debates that ensued among the readers of the papers. British war propaganda and the anti-corruption campaign of the early 1920s were other sources from which Shambaa petitioners drew.
My research has portrayed the different languages at play in courts. These languages were not equally successful. I have proposed that the various repertoires can be associated with different social and educational milieus. Often the choice of language indicates the educational and social background of the author. Athumani Mwakole, who evoked Napoleon Bonaparte’s ruling strategies, or the Zigua petitioners, who conjured up Shakespeare’s poetic language, were probably individuals who enjoyed a high social status analogous to their education. Many of them were mission graduates or at the very least in some way connected to the larger web of people benefiting from mission centers. For individuals like them, it was easier to surf between different narrative registers and to address administrative officers in a language they believed to be most suitable to advance their claims. Theirs was a peculiar mix of showing off colonial knowledge, yet transforming it to meet new ends.
Less educated people did not command the same variety of repertoires. This turned out to be a double disadvantage. When local court-holders handed down unfavorable judgments to people who phrased their claims in local idiom, these litigants had no other repertoire to fall back on. The most localized idioms ran the risk of being incommensurable with languages in which the British were conversant. Grievances expressed in them were either not taken serious by the British and dismissed as “native superstitions,” or they were literally not understood, as the example of Mahanyu’s chosen pseudonym shows. In cases that challenged the privileges of chiefs, litigants mainly conversant in local idiom saw their chances to win at native courts diminish. They lacked the language to express their anger at
240 native authorities in a way commensurable with British district officials, so their appeals remained unsuccessful. It was obvious to contemporaries that it would make no sense to involve British authorities in grievances expressed in a language they so clearly rejected. Therefore, the idiom of invisibility was restricted to the local world outside the courtroom. This even led to a change in the popular conceptualization of “the criminal,” which at that point tended to be expressed through the idiom of magic. The portrayal of “criminals” as “witches” symbolizes the unease felt by Shambaai’s residents regarding land shortage and a political climate in which criminalizing others had become a common strategy to silence adversaries. Seen in this context, it is no surprise that the vivid rumor about Osale and Paulo, which was outside the courtroom, represented a major challenge not only to colonial rule, but most importantly to local leadership culture.
Other narratives were more successful litigation strategies. One of them was the slavery discourse, a regional discourse in which the British were conversant. The reason why the British were conversant in the slavery discourse was so because, despite its local and regional links and roots, the version of the discourse of slavery employed in Eastern Africa borrowed heavily from abolitionist rhetoric and had become entangled with the civilizing mission.2 It served as a justification for colonial rule, law, and order as it marked a distinction from alleged pre-colonial lawlessness and slavery. But it also proved to be a potent instrument for African petitioners and litigants. The language of slavery was evoked so widely and in situations that were off-topic that it ceased to signify little more than being a mere vessel for political claims. As I have shown, grievances phrased in the language of slavery ranged from ethnic tensions and succession conflicts, to accusations of corruption and abuse of office to claims for independent appeal courts and eventually freedom from Kilindi or British rule. In a world of constantly changing political realities and claims, the language of slavery, emptied of its initial meaning, turned out to be the one stable absolute term. As I have argued, the power of the slavery narrative, referred to by Derek Peterson as “an arena of moral discourse”3 lay in its capacity “to shame a slaver.”
Apart from local idioms and the regionally-employed slavery narrative, there were a number of international languages in Shambaai’s colonial courts that co-existed. The international
2 Jonathan Glassman, “Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar”, 175-206. 3 Derek R. Peterson, “Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa”, 5.
241 languages that were most likely to translate into de facto success in court were the language of human rights and references to the Western discourse of anti-Communism. Small wonder – they had become increasingly popular international narratives since the late 1940s. Both claimed to express all-encompassing global aspirations and were meant to address a global audience. They had a lot to offer the nationalist or anticolonial cause of many contemporaries.4 In Tanganyika Territory’s public sphere, the two narratives constituted each other to a certain extent. The “Communist threat” was more often than not portrayed as a violation of a person’s civil and political rights which had been powerfully proclaimed in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet in the view of the Colonial Office, human rights were incompatible with communism. But if communism and human rights were incompatible, yet Shambaa and other Africans took pride in confirming their anti- communist leanings, were they then not also entitled to these very rights? And why could British allies such as Shambaai’s native authorities disrespect the law without being cast as communists? This was precisely the contradiction Shambaa litigants exploited. By casting Paramount Kimweri as a threating “communist dictator,” Shemsanga attempted to force British action in his favor. The indication that the British not only tolerated the “Communist threat,” but were in fact employing dictators as court-holders was a well-calculated thorn in the flesh of the British administration. As were the vexatious questions of Bumbuli’s notorious “bush-lawyer” Abdallah Hamisi Tekelo, who compared Shambaai’s courts to Soviet courts when he asked whether the laws at play were of English or Russian origin. In concert with references to the international language of rights, often through direct petitions to UN delegates, references to communism were a successful strategy, as Shemsanga’s triumph in the waylaying case demonstrates.
Using the language of corruption in court was a double-edged choice. Reporting abuse of office was a tricky issue because it was also the bone of contention between the colonial Bench and the administration. British officers were at times reprimanded by the colonial Bench for violations of procedure mostly due to lack of better knowledge, although it appears that sometimes colonial administrators bent the law for political reasons. Administrative officers tended to react defensively when African actors exposed their double standards. Neither the choice of language nor British defensiveness is surprising.
4 Roland Burke, Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Moyn, The last utopia, 84-119.
242 Previous British administrative officers had cultivated the language of corruption in the early 1920s in a campaign against “German-inherited malpractice.” It certainly did not give a positive impression that they were now the ones who were denounced for misuse of office. The majority of the accusations of corruption were directed against local court-holders. The persistence and frequency of claims based on the corruption narrative eventually resulted in removing the chiefs from their judicial function, which happened in the late 1950s. New court-holders, even if trained as magistrates, did not necessarily let go of the old practice and abuse of office continued.
Corruption talk could also be expressed in local idiom, not only in the language of the court reforms of the early 1950s or the discourse about German abuse. One of the common images was the symbol of illegitimately “eating” somebody’s wealth – a well-known metaphor in many African places.5 The example of the son of Paramount Shebughe, who was accused as early as 1942 of “eating his subjects’ wealth” is obvious proof of just one of the many fitina cases. Another one was the story about headman Asmani Mahanyu who deprived a father of his right to child custody by “buying” another man’s testimony. He did so by offering his false witness the “favor” of tax exemption in exchange for his false account before the court, an offer the false witness probably could not spurn for economic or social support reasons. Since cases in which British officers were involved were few, and “local” cases of petty corruption were unlikely to draw enough attention to become embarrassing on an international level, the language of corruption did not prove to be the most successful choice for Tanganyikan litigants.
Did native courts fulfill their promise of dispensing justice, and how did local litigants view their chances to win in native courts? Generally speaking, native courts were sites where well-connected individuals who either had access to local or external support networks were best served. Both individuals associated with old and new webs of power were successful. Die-hard “traditionalists” always found a sympathetic court-holder in Zumbe Hemedi Mbughuni of Vugha-Bazo if they wanted to silence ambitious youngsters, be it in land disputes or “political” cases. On the other hand, people who had access to the new networks of TANU or who had enough cash to pay for the professional advice of an
5 Jean-François Bayart, The state in Africa: The politics of the belly (Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity, 2009); Mbembe, On the postcolony.
243 advocate (even though advocates had been banned from native courts, their advice when it came to phrasing letters and petitions to higher authorities was much appreciated), also drove home victories in native courts, as Shemsanga’s waylaying case, and to a lesser degree the Tea Shop Case suggest. For people stripped of supportive networks of whichever nature, such as Ramadhani Mbughuni, colonial courts provided little remedy.
Old and new forms of dispute settlement co-existed at the same time, and sometimes merged. Lauren Benton has argued that colonial powers did not enter a legal vacuum. Instead they had to “insert themselves within local power structures.”6 Shambaai is a case in point. An easy transplantation of European legal institutions was impossible in the existing context already rich with prevailing forms of dispute settlement. A gradual “maturing” towards legal evolution did not take place, even though late-colonial British legal advisors hoped for it. Instead, old forms of dispute settlement continued and continue to persist alongside new forms. The reason for this lay in the different expectations Shambaa litigants had of what precisely the nature of a court was, of precisely what kind of forum a court provided. I have followed Sally Moore who has highlighted the “primacy of the person” and who has argued that in small-scale societies neutrality was not on option.7 During British colonial rule, Shambaai was a society in which the demonstration of loyalty, a notion that shaped everyday life relationships considerably, could not simply be shaken off at the doorstop of the courtroom. Only rarely did local court-holders translate their power in the legal realm into protecting their subjects from unpleasant choices made in Vugha or Dar es Salaam. Zumbe Hassani Kinyassi of Mlalo is one of the rare examples of a court-holder who did so. He effectively delayed hearing scheme-related cases and he refused to send certain subjects on summons to Lushoto. However, more common than Hassani Kinyassi’s behavior were public encounters in courts that were characterized by the lining up of supporters and the calling in of favors, a practice that often materialized in false witness accounts and fabricated stories. As the Ramadhani Mbughuni case and the Shemsanga trial show, these notions even penetrated into the higher courts of the appeal chain presided over by British administrative officers or, in criminal matters, trained jurists. This resulted in violations of legal procedure. But British officers also proved to be susceptible to violations of that kind,
6 Benton, Law and colonial cultures, 9. 7 Moore, “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers what to say to Africans about running "their own" Native Courts”, 37.
244 albeit for different reasons. Some of their procedural mistakes were simply another consequence of having administrative staff holding appeal courts. But it would be naïve to ignore the political stakes British officers held. This leads me to the next point.
Native courts in colonial Shambaai were thoroughly politicized. They certainly did not “shine as beacons of western civilization.”8 The ideal of an impartial court, elusive as it is in any given context, was certainly not met in Shambaai. If native courts were personalized and local court-holders were powerful enough to neglect keeping court records in order, apply consistent degrees of penalty or use court elders as both witnesses and assessors at the same time, so too were their British superiors. British administrative officers, too, used the courts to their own ends. At times colonial officers willingly “overlooked” the violation of procedure by their local staff if it suited their own agenda. They let their Zumbe do the “dirty work” of prosecuting political enemies on fabricated charges. Only rarely did British administrative officers allow themselves to sully their hands by actively interfering. But as the DC’s call to find witnesses in order to thwart Shemsanga as well as the DC’s and other officers’ “approval” of certain false accusation cases show, they did not only partake, but also invite others to bend the law for political reasons.
As the nationalist cause entered Shambaai and its courts, the courts grew increasingly unpopular. As one of Kimweri’s spies reported, chama activists preferred to settle their cases among themselves with Shemsanga as their arbiter instead of bringing them to the court. The many others who felt wronged by judgments or false accusations took leave to appeal. The extraordinarily high rate of appeals demonstrates the dissatisfaction of many litigants with the decisions of native courts. From a perspective of post-war anti-chiefly agitation, the court records of the 1940s and 1950s mirror the contestation of local authorities in a variety of languages, and eventually bear witness to their loss of power as chiefs were replaced by magistrates in the late 1950s. Yet the “political” cases, connected as they were to the nationalist cause, were still more than just about TANU. They were also intricately linked to generational, gender and sometimes ethnic tensions that played out powerfully in post-war Shambaai and culminated in the protest against the Usambara Scheme.
8 Mamdani, Citizen and subject, 109.
245 Generally the grip of the colonial state in native courts was far from being all-encompassing. The enforcement of court decisions was not very strong. Many cases were re-heard several times although according to the principle of res judicata they were supposed to remain closed. Other disputes were closed and remained so for the court books, yet they were very much alive outside the courtroom, as the Tea Shop Case clearly demonstrates. However, in the rare cases in which the colonial state took hold of certain individuals such as in the ringleader trial, its grip was firm.
From the mid-1940s onward, native courts became increasingly distrusted by litigants. This can be seen most clearly in the enormous amount of both appeals and petitions. Particularly when it came to land disputes, many litigants preferred a hearing in the higher courts by British staff to a trial in the native courts. Sending copies of letter and petitions to as many dignitaries as possible, including individuals living abroad and entirely disconnected from the appeal chain, was a common strategy of Tanganyikan litigants to broaden their audience. This can be read as a continuation of older forms of dispute settlement that were not necessarily tied to courts and which drew from external resources. But the evocation of external networks also shows a thorough distrust of colonial courts, a distrust which is understandable given the context portrayed above. Since the 1940s the context had been one of low enforcement rates of court decisions and one in which the courts of Shambaai had a personalized and politicized nature. The involvement of independent networks in legal matters is still widely practiced by Africans.9
The desire to call on external networks in order to win before the court is only partially a reverberation of older forms of dispute settlement. To a larger extent, it is proof of the distrust of courts which were supposed to be independent, but proved to be otherwise. This tendency certainly hardened in the bumpy post-independence decades. It appears, however, that in cases considered “non-political” and about which administrative officers cared little, such as matrimonial disputes, the native courts still had interpretational sovereignty. By and large, the colonial administration remained in the dark about these kinds of cases. A much lower appeal rate in matrimonial cases did not necessarily suggest that litigants were satisfied with court decisions in matrimonial cases. Instead it suggests that litigants’ realistic assessment of appeal prospects when it came to cases that
9 Berry, No condition is permanent, 104; Moore, Social facts and fabrications, 310-317.
246 challenged the privilege of senior men meant little to British administrative officers in the sense that these cases were not important enough to cause embarrassment on an international stage.
Finally, what do the narratives the Shambaa used in native and higher courts tell us about specific cultural expressions and local subjectivities? Their use of largely non-legal language is proof of Shambaa love for word play, letter-writing and the elegant art of concealing messages through pseudonyms or allusions only people knowledgeable in Shambaa language, culture, and history could possibly unravel. The literacy campaigns at mission centers and more generally the narratives of the gospel struck a chord with the specific Shambaa attitude towards story-telling and love for details. Shambaai under British colonial rule was, in fact, a very creative society, one in which stories abounded and the word, in spoken and increasingly in written form, played a major role in everyday life. Contrary to the depiction of peasant societies as stuck in the small world of familial ties and subsistence economy, of “backwardness” and apolitical attitude, creativity, wit and political strategy were always present in Shambaai. The fact that ways distinctly different from the use of most localized idiom were strategically more successful for expressing one’s grievances in the particular setting of the courtroom is another question.
Interestingly, of all the languages Shambaa and other Tanganyikan litigants drew from, they did not invoke the most obvious of narratives one would expect to be at play in courts, and that is the language of justice. I have argued that chiefs’ courts in Shambaai were historically not sites for the dispensation of justice, but places where one had to display loyalties. But this is not to say that Shambaa litigants had no interest in the question of justice. It is curious that we can find the language of justice in the rumor about Osale and Paulo rather than in the colonial courts. As I have demonstrated, at the heart of the rumor lay a challenge to Chief Kimweri Mputa Magogo who had turned from a fair and just king who “covered over” the land into one who had lost control over his land, labor, his appeal courts, and his subjects. This made Shambaai’s residents vulnerable to harm, be it from the “criminals” Osale and Paulo, unfair court decisions of greedy chiefs or British arbitrariness. The reciprocal relationship between the king and his subjects had previously guaranteed structural justice, in other words healthy relationships between a ruler, his subjects and the land. Now the reciprocal relationship was disturbed. When Shemsanga or the tea shop
247 owners argued in the language of human rights, they evoked specific rights – articles 1, 2, 9, 12 and 17 of the UDHR were referred to in the material presented – but none of these carried the notion of collective rights and obligations that were at the heart of a Shambaa concept of justice. While the UDHR proved to be a powerful instrument for Shambaa litigants to triumph in court by phrasing grievances in terms of individual rights, it did not necessarily represent the underlying reciprocal nature of an older version of a Shambaa concept of justice which was still alive. As Emma Hunter has pointed out, the specific Swahili definition of freedom, influenced as it was by the history of slavery and warfare in the nineteenth-century, relied on an understanding of the term uhuru, freedom, in relation to other people, not as defined in terms of personal autonomy. Only in a secure network of duties and obligations with others could one protect oneself from harm and thus be free.10 A similar dynamic seems to have been at play in the conceptualization of justice in Shambaai. Then the question about speaking the truth in court that so occupied Magistrate Jeffries and that is indeed central to a Western approach to the law, cannot be answered in the court, but only as we look beyond the courtroom.
10 Hunter, Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania, 13. Marcia Wright’s collection of life stories of former slaves in East Central Africa is also a case in point, see Marcia Wright, Women in Peril: Life Stories of Four Captives (Lusaka: NECZAM, 1984).
248 Primary Sources
Unpublished Materials
Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde (BArch)
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