Maji Maji African Social Studies Series

Editorial Board Martin R. Doornbos, Institute of Social Studies the Hague Carola Lentz, University of Mainz John Lonsdale, University of Cambridge

VOLUME 20 Maji Maji

Lift ing the Fog of War

Edited by James Giblin and Jamie Monson

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010 Cover: A postwar celebration of victory by the German military at Yakobi, Njombe, in 1907. By permission of Berlin Mission Society.

Th is book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maji Maji : lift ing the fog of war / edited by James Giblin and Jamie Monson. p. cm. — (African social studies series, ISSN 1568–1203 ; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18342-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Maji Maji Uprising, 1905–1907. 2. Maji Maji Uprising, 1905–1907—Social aspects. 3. Maji Maji Uprising, 1905– 1907—Sources. I. Giblin, James Leonard. II. Monson, Jamie. III. Title. IV. Series.

DT447.M34 2010 967.8’02—dc22

2010005507

ISSN 1568-1203 ISBN 978 90 04 18342 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Th e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS

Maps, Plates, Figures and Tables ...... vii Editors’ Acknowledgments ...... ix Contributors ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1 James Giblin and Jamie Monson

SECTION ONE CONTEXTS OF COMMUNICATION

Chapter One War of Words: Th e Narrative Effi cacy of Medicine in the Maji Maji War ...... 33 Jamie Monson

Chapter Two Th e Ngindo: Exploring the Center of the Maji Maji Rebellion ...... 71 Lorne Larson

SECTION TWO STRADDLING BOUNDARIES

Chapter Th ree Th e War of the Hunters: Maji Maji and the Decline of the Ivory Trade ...... 117 Th addeus Sunseri

Chapter Four “All People were Barbarians to the Askari . . .”: Askari Identity and Honor in the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907 ...... 149 Michelle Moyd vi contents

SECTION THREE AT THE APEX OF VIOLENCE: MAJI MAJI IN SONGEA

Chapter Five “Deadly Silence Predominates in this District” Th e Maji Maji War and Its Aft ermath in Ungoni ...... 183 Heike Schmidt

Chapter Six Reexamining the Maji Maji War in Ungoni With a Blend of Archaeology and Oral History ...... 221 Bertram B.B. Mapunda

SECTION FOUR REMEMBERING THE COMPLEXITY OF MAJI MAJI IN NJOMBE

Chapter Seven Were the Bena Traitors?: Maji Maji in Njombe and the Context of Local Alliances Made by the Germans ...... 241 Seth I. Nyagava

Chapter Eight Taking Oral Sources Beyond the Documentary Record of Maji Maji: Th e Example of the “War of Korosani” at Yakobi, Njombe ...... 259 James Giblin

SECTION FIVE THE AFTERMATH: MEMORY AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT

Chapter Nine Sudden Disaster and Slow Change: Maji Maji and the Long-Term History of Southeast Tanzania ...... 295 Felicitas Becker

Index ...... 323 MAPS, PLATES, FIGURES AND TABLES

Maps

1. German East Africa ...... 5 2. Th e Eastern Maji Maji Region ...... 7 3. Th e Western Maji Maji Region ...... 9 4. Game Reserves aft er 1908, with the Selous Reserve ...... 134 5. Songea and Ungoni ...... 189

Plates

2.1. Th e boma at Liwale, built with forced labor to replace the German headquarters destroyed during Maji Maji ...... 111 3.1. African Wall Painting at Time of Maji Maji War ...... 142 4.1. Prisoners in the Hands of Askari during Maji Maji ...... 160 4.2. A Site of Execution during Maji Maji ...... 161 5.1. Askari Machine-Gun Practice ...... 205 6.1. Th e Swamp (kitanda) from which the Name of the Village Comes ...... 225 6.2. Grass Growth at What had been Nkomanile’s Compound Before the Maji Maji War ...... 225 6.3. Date Palms at Kikole Evincing Arab Settlement ...... 236 6.4. Excavation Unit at Kikole ...... 237 7.1. Th e Bena leader Ngozingozi, with followers ...... 250 7.2. Punishment Labor at Kidugala, Ubena ...... 252 7.3. Postwar Celebration by Askari, probably at the Dedication of the Memorial to Dr. Wiehe at Yakobi ...... 254 8.1. Constructing the House of Paul Gröschel at Yakobi ...... 276 8.2. Th e Church of Paul Gröschel in the 1990s ...... 285 9.1. Th e German boma at Lindi in 2004 ...... 310 9.2. Th e Prison at Lindi where Maji Maji fi ghters were held ... 313 viii maps, plates, figure and table

Figures

6.1. Sketch of Nkomanile’s Compound as Seen in 2004 ...... 226

Tables

6.1. Materials Excavated in a 1x1 Meter Unit at Kikole: Frequency and Stratigraphy ...... 235 EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Th is volume is the fi nal product of a multi-year collaborative research project which began in 2001. Th e project benefi ted from generous fi nancial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carleton College, the University of Iowa, the Tanzania Culture Trust Fund and the Wissenschaft skolleg zu Berlin. Project activities were conducted at several institutions. Th ese were Carleton College, which hosted the workshop which initiated this project on November 8–11, 2001; the University of Dar es Salaam, which hosted a second workshop on the Maji Maji War in July 2003; and the Wissenschaft skolleg zu Berlin, which hosted a symposium entitled “Th e Maji Maji War, 1095–07: Colonial Confl ict, National History and Local Memory” from March 30 to April 1, 2005. At Carleton College Susan Hamerski, Susan De Malignon and Aleisha Mueller all made signifi cant contributions to the project’s success. At the Wissenschaft skolleg zu Berlin, we are grateful to Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus and Britta Cusack for their support for our workshop. Project activities included collaborative fi eld research in southern Tanzania during 2002 and 2004. In addition to several contributors to this volume, members of the 2002 msafara included three faculty members of the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam: Yusufu Q. Lawi, Eginald Mihanjo, the late Josiah Mlahagwa, and one faculty member from Tumaini University in Iringa, Seth Nyagava. Par- ticipants in 2002 also included undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Dar es Salaam and Tumaini University. Th ey were Nivas Kidunda, Erasto Malila, Oswald Masebo, John Mayengo, Irene Mkini, Stephen Ndemba, Tumpe Ndimbwa, and Gasiano Sum- bai. We remember well their eager search for “chair-fi re.” Participants in the second round of fi eld research in 2004 included, aside from several contributors to the present volume, Yusufu Lawi, Juhani Kopo- nen, George Ambindwile, Oswald Masebo and Gasiano Sumbai. During both of these trips, we found accommodating hosts everywhere. In particular we wish to acknowledge the hospitality of Rev. Michael Myamba and his family at Yakobi, and also the members of the Songea branch of the Historical Association of Tanzania. We and other non-Tanzanian members of our group engaged in research with x editors’ acknowlegments the permission of the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technol- ogy (COSTECH). We are grateful for the assistance of COSTECH’s clearance offi ce. We are also grateful to Blandina Kaduma Giblin for her organizational eff orts and many insights into the cultures of southern Tanzania during our 2002 research. Th e project was enriched by the collegiality, encouragement, knowledge and wisdom of a large number of scholars. Th ey included the two heads of the History Department, University of Dar es Salaam, Yusufu Lawi and Bertram Mapunda. Th ey provided unfl agging hospitality and also invited several contributors to this volume to participate in the Conference Marking the End of Centennial Celebrations of the Maji Maji War on August 4–5, 2007 at the University of Dar es Salaam. Indeed, both editors are grateful to all members of the UDSM Department of History for support over many years. Other scholars who were valued participants in the project’s workshops and conferences included Andreas Eckert, Paul Bjerk, James Brennan, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Jan-Bart Gewald, Patrick Krajewski, John Lamphear, Sonja Mezger, Achim van Oppen, Abdul Sheriff and Michelle Wagner. Dur- ing the project Lorne Larson generously shared his knowledge and primary documents related to histories of Mahenge and Liwale Districts with other participants. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the especially strong support of two additional colleagues, Th omas Spear and Juhani Koponen. Tom chaired the closing session of the Carleton workshop in 2001, and made comments which remained stimulating for years to come. He also contributed an important critique of some of our work during a panel on Maji Maji at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the African Stud- ies Association. Although Juhani Koponen could not be persuaded to contribute to this volume (his most recent thoughts on Maji Maji will be found in a forthcoming issue of Tanzania Zamani) he attended all of our conferences and also joined our 2004 research venture. We benefi tted immensely from both his occasional skepticism as well as his generosity in sharing his great knowledge of Tanzania and its history. Several individuals made contributions to the editing and production of this problem. We are especially grateful to Jerome Cookson for his meticulously craft ed maps. Franca de Kort at Brill Press shepherded the volume towards publication. CONTRIBUTORS

Felicitas Becker is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century social history of Tanzania and the history of Islam in East Africa. She has conducted oral and archival research in the area aff ected by the Maji Maji War, which has informed articles in Journal of African His- tory, Africa and African Aff airs. Having taught at Simon Fraser Uni- versity, Vancouver, she will take up a teaching position at Cambridge University in summer 2010.

James Giblin has taught African history at the University of Iowa since 1986. He has published two books on the history of Tanzania, Th e Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840– 1940 (Philadelphia, 1992) and A History of the Excluded: Making Fam- ily and Memory a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania (Oxford, 2005).

Lorne Larson was one of the fi rst doctoral graduates in history from the University of Dar es Salaam. He subsequently taught East African history in Tanzania and Nigeria. He specializes in the German colonial period and is most interested in the history of southern Tanzania.

Bertram B.B. Mapunda is a Professor of History and Archaeology and Principal of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Dar es Salaam. He was formerly chair of the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam. He is the author of many studies in Tanzanian archaeology, including Ufundichuma Asilia Afrika Mashariki: Chimbuko, Kukua na Kukoma Kwake (Peramiho, 2002) and recently co-edited Salvaging Tanzania’s Cultural Heritage (Dar es Salaam, 2005).

Jamie Monson is Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In addition to the history of German colonialism in Tanzania, her research interests include development and diplomatic relationships between Africa and China during the Cold War. She has published widely on the history of the TAZARA Railway in Tanzania xii contributors and is the author of Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Develop- ment Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (Blooming- ton, IN, 2009).

Michelle Moyd is an Assistant Professor of African History at Indiana University-Bloomington. She received her doctorate in history from Cornell University in 2008.

Professor Seth I. Nyagava is currently the Deputy Provost for Aca- demic Aff airs at Tumaini University, Iringa University College. He is the author of A History of the Bena to 1914 (Peramiho, 2000).

Heike Schmidt teaches African history at Florida State University. She has performed extensive research in Zimbabwe, where she investigated violence and memory, as well as in Tanzania. She has co-edited two books, including African Modernities (Portsmouth, NH and Oxford, 2002), and has published in History and Environment, History in Africa, International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal of History of Sexuality, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Sociologus.

Th addeus Sunseri is Professor of History at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO. He is author of Wielding the Ax: Scientifi c Forestry and Social Confl ict in Tanzania, c. 1820–2000 (Athens, OH, 2009) and Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanza- nia, 1884–1915 (Portsmouth, NH, 2002). INTRODUCTION

James Giblin and Jamie Monson

Th e Maji Maji war of 1905–7 is one of the most familiar stories in Afri- can history. Students of African history learn that societies scattered across a large portion of southern Tanzania took up arms against Ger- man colonizers; that they did so despite many diff erences of language and culture; that a prophet named Kinjikitile Ngwale inspired the fi ghters; that aggrieved villagers uprooted cotton plants to mark the beginning of their struggle against a regime of forced labor; that their belief in the ability of the maji medicine to turn bullets into water proved tragically wrong; and that the result was famine and cruel repression at German hands. Tanzanian citizens as well as historians have regarded Maji Maji as an event of long-term consequence. John Iliff e described it as mainland Tanzania’s “fi rst collective political experience.”1 For Iliff e and other historians, its end marked a turning away from violent resistance against colonialism to resistance through education and politics. For nationalists of later generations it served as demonstration of the need for African unity. Many students of Maji Maji would agree with the author of the most recent book-length account of the war that Maji Maji “stands—in contrast to all other rebellions—as the fi rst organized—quasi national—rising of multiple African societies against white rule in Africa.”2 Not only have historians regarded Maji Maji as a story of pan-continental importance for all of Africa,3 but they have found it a fruitful source of comparison with other episodes of resistance against imperialism.4

1 John Iliff e, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 191. 2 Walter Nuhn, Flammen über Deutschost: Der Maji-Maji-Aufstand in Deutsch- Ostafrika, 1905–1906: die erste gemeinsame Erhebung schwarzafrikanischer Völker gegen weisse Kolonialherrschaft : ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1998), p. 9. 3 Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy and Historiography,” in David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (eds.), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in East African History, pp. 124–42 (London and Athens, OH: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1995), p. 127. 4 Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); 2 introduction

Considering the prominence of Maji Maji, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to it since several gift ed historians wrote compelling narratives of the confl ict in the fi rst dozen years aft er Tanganyika’s independence in 1961.5 One reason for this neglect is that southern Tanzania attracted very little historical research from the early 1970s until recently, particularly because wars in Mozambique made access to the region diffi cult.6 In more recent years, younger historians of Tanzania have shift ed their attention away from rural regions such as the south to the cities. Yet, it is the sheer power of the narratives written in the late 1960s and early 1970s which, probably more than any other factor, has diverted historians from Maji Maji. Th ese accounts proved so persuasive and satisfying, particularly for Tanzanian readers, that scholars oft en saw little point in revisiting Maji Maji. Historians who knew the German period in East Africa well were never entirely comfortable, however, with the state of Maji Maji studies. One of them, Marcia Wright, expressed her disquiet by saying that the study

Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism: the North American Ghost Dance and East African Maji-Maji Rebellions,” Th e Historian 52,4 (1990): 584–601. 5 Th ese foundational accounts include John Iliff e, “Th e Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,” Journal of African History 8 (1967):495–512; John Iliff e, “Th e Eff ects of the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–1906 on German Occupation Policy in East Africa,” in Prosser Giff ord and William Roger Louis (eds.), Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 557–75; John Iliff e, Tangan- yika under German Rule, 1905–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 9–29; John Iliff e, A Modern History, pp. 168–202; G.C.K. Gwassa and John Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, Part One (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1967); G.C.K. Gwassa, “Th e German Intervention and African Resistance in Tanzania,” in I.N. Kimambo and A.J. Temu (eds.), A History of Tanzania (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), pp. 85–122; G.C.K. Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji,” in T.O. Ranger and I.N. Kimambo (eds.), Th e Historical Study of African Religion (London: XXX, 1972), pp. 202–217; G.C.K. Gwassa, “African Methods of Warfare During the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907,” in Bethwell A. Ogot (ed.), War and Society in Africa: Ten Studies (London: Frank Cass, 1972), pp. 123–48, G.C.K. Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak and Development of the Majimaji War: 1905–1907” (Ph.D. Th esis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1973). An additional infl uential text was the opening pages of A.J. Temu, “Th e Rise and Triumph of Nationalism,” in I.N. Kimambo and A.J. Temu (eds.), A History of Tanzania (Nairobi: East African Publish- ing House, 1969), pp. 189–213. Th e forerunner of all these studies was a remarkable essay by Margaret Bates, “Historical Introduction,” East African Swahili Committee Journal, Supplement no. 27 (June, 1957), pp. 7–18. A useful bibliographic resource is the Maji Maji Bibliography Project, organized by Jan-Georg Deutsch and others, at http://www.mhudi.de/maji/. 6 On the region’s isolation, see Pekka Seppälä and Bertha Koda (eds.) Th e Making of a Periphery: Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 1998). introduction 3 of Maji Maji had achieved “precocious clarity.”7 Th e persuasiveness of the established Maji Maji story may have initially led readers to miss her irony, but by the mid-1990s other historians were beginning to join Professor Wright in asking if perhaps the book had been closed a little too soon on Maji Maji.8 Th is volume represents the eff orts of Tanzanian, European and American scholars to reopen the history of Maji Maji. It follows conferences in the United States, Tanzania and Germany, and draws upon brief periods of collaborative fi eld research in 2002 and 2004. We knew, of course, that the fi eldwork portion of our project would be aff ected by the greater distance from the events of 1905–7 than was the case when the Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP), based at the Univer- sity of Dar es Salaam and directed by John Iliff e and Gilbert Gwassa, collected oral testimony in 1968. While the MMRP researchers found eyewitness testimony, by the early twenty-fi rst century we could come no closer to Maji Maji than the accounts of elderly people who had heard stories from parents and grandparents. Yet, we believe that the perspective granted by our distance from the immediate post-independence period when the foundational Maji Maji texts were written is in some respects advantageous. One advantage is that we have benefi ted from important developments in the study of anti-colonial resistance. Since the 1980s scholars have reconsidered a relationship which, as we point out below, exerted a large infl uence on Maji Maji historiography: the relationship between history and the nation state. Scholars of India have played a particularly important role in identifying a “deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s)” of citizenship and nation.9 Historians of India such as Shahid Amin and Ranajit Guha, as well as scholars of the Boxer Rebellion in China such as Paul Cohen and numerous historians of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, have inspired our renewed interest in Maji Maji.10 Another development in this same

7 Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy and Historiography,” p. 125. 8 An important moment in the revival of interest in Maji Maji was the panel at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association at Orlando, Florida in 1995. 9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifi ce of History? Who speaks for the Indian Past? Representations, 37: 1–25. 10 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paul A. Cohen, History in Th ree Keys: the Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial 4 introduction period—the crises of legitimacy sustained by many postcolonial Afri- can states—led many historians of Africa to ask fresh questions about the relationship between institutionalized national histories and the divergent memories of communities and individuals that make up the “plural consciousness of history” in postcolonial contexts.11 Th ese new questions have encouraged us to seek better ways of utilizing the insights of recent studies of oral narrative and archaeology, particularly those done in Tanzania.12 Th is scholarship has helped us to see several dimensions of Maji Maji which historians of the 1960s and 1970s put aside during that period of urgent postcolonial state- building. By contrast with the foundational studies from this period which concentrated on the problem of achieving anti-colonial unity, we have been more concerned with tensions and divisions within Afri- can societies. We have asked how they aff ected the memory as well as the experience of war. We have been concerned less with the need to explain the development of a mass movement, and more with local and regional experiences of war. We have been particularly interested

India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); among the most important of the many outstanding works on Mau Mau are Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (London: James Currey, 1992) and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Th e Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005). 11 Mamadou Diouf, “African History Writing: Between Nations and Communi- ties,” Paper presented at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, July 13, 2006. 12 Th e contribution of Bertram Mapunda to this volume is an example of the new interest among historians in utilizing archaeological methods. Th e Archaeology Unit of the University of Dar es Salaam has been at the forefront of new methods and interpretation in Eastern African historical studies. See, for example, Felix Chami, G. Pwiti and C. Radimilahy, (eds.), People, Contact and the Environment in the African Past (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 2001) and Climate Change, Trade and Modes of Production in Sub-Saharan Africa (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 2003) and Felix Chami and Gilbert Pwiti (eds.), Southern Africa and the Swahili World (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 2003). Th e stream of important work on oral narrative in Tanzania can be traced back to Isaria N. Kimambo, A Political History of the Pare of Tanzania, c. 1500–1900 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), T.O. Beidelman, “Myth, Legend and Oral His- tory: A Kaguru Traditional Text,” Anthropos LXV (1970): 74–97 and Steven Feierman, Th e Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). Recent contributions include Patricia Caplan, African Voices, African Lives: Personal Narratives from a Swahili Village (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), Jamie Monson, “Memory, Migration and the Authority of History in Southern Tanzania, 1860–1960,” Journal of African History 41,3 (2000), 347–72 and Jan Bender Shetler, Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003). introduction 5 in the groups and individuals whose stories were neglected by accounts of unity-building and heroic leadership. Th ey include women, the people who lived in socially marginal spaces, and Christians and others who have sometimes been dismissed as loyalists or collaborators. By resisting the tendency to see Maji Maji as a confl ict between clearly separated African and German communities, we have gained greater appreciation for the intermediary spaces occupied by traders (including Indian and Arab merchants), Africans soldiers in the German military, African Christians and others. Our shift in focus has made us much more aware of the fascinating ways in which information fl owed among these diverse groups during the war. As we point out below, these forms of communication became our central theme.

A Brief Chronology of Warfare

Th e events which became known as the Maji Maji war began in late July 1905 in the region of southeastern German East Africa between the port of Kilwa and the Rufi ji River.

Lake 0 200 mi Victoria 0 200 km RWANDA BRITISH EAST AFRICA Mwanza BURUNDI Mbulu

Kondoa INDIAN 5˚S Tabora OCEAN GERMAN EAST AFRICA Zanzibar Lake Tanganyika CONGO Kilosa Dar es Salaam FREE STATE Morogoro (BELGIAN Iringa CONGO) Ru fiji R. Kilwa Kivinje Mbeya Kilwa Masoko Njombe AFRICA Lindi Mtwara AREA Songea Masasi ENLARGED Tunduru . a R Lake Nyasa Ruvum PORTUGUESE 35 ˚E EAST AFRICA

Map 1. German East Africa 6 introduction

Th e confl ict may have been precipitated by the impetuosity of a German offi cial in Mohoro, a small port and administrative post in the Rufi ji Delta. Sensing unrest in mid-July 1905, he arrested two well- known healers. Aft er an administrative outpost and settler farm were attacked in the Matumbi Hills, just northeast of Kilwa, on July 28–29, and aft er the houses of Arab, Indian and German traders were attacked in the port town of Somanga on July 31–August 1, the panicky offi cial in Mohoro executed the two imprisoned healers. One of them, Kin- jikitile Ngwale, was famously reported to have said on the gallows that his maji war medicine had already reached the distant inland trading centers of Mahenge and Kilosa. Despite the simultaneous occurrence of violence in both the Matumbi hinterland of Kilwa and two port towns well to the north near the Rufi ji, German offi cials did not immediately take seriously the prospect of war. Th e commander in charge of military operations in the area reported on August 10–11 that the unrest was entirely localized and already dying out. Th us German observers following events from Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa, were entirely unprepared for the ever-worsening news which would reach them over the following days. Th ey soon learned that on August 14, the Catholic Bishop Cas- pian Spiss had been killed together with several companions while journeying inland from Kilwa. Th e very next day, rebels captured an administrative post (the only successful assault on a German post during the war) at Liwale, more than one hundred miles southwest of Kilwa. In succeeding days, the Germans in Dar es Salaam would learn that the fi ghting in Matumbi had turned into diffi cult guerrilla warfare; that aft er a government translator and Indian trader were murdered near Maneromango, about two days’ journey southwest from Dar es Salaam, the military had dispatched a force to punish the insurgents; and that the military had sent a force up the Rufi ji River to prevent rebel forces north and south of the river from uniting. Th e Germans in Dar es Salaam would have had little appreciation of the violence exercised by German forces in reprisal for the attacks on Somanga, Matumbi and Maneromango. Th ey quickly found, however, that, as if in confi rmation of the warning attributed to Kinjikitile Ngwale, the uprising had indeed spread far to the west. During the last days of August, attackers destroyed a caravan belonging to the German East Africa Company between Ifakara and Mahenge in the Kilombero Valley. Ifakara itself sustained a major attack, and the German post at Mahenge fell under siege. To the south, the uprising appeared to introduction 7

0 60 mi U Z Dar es Salaam 0 60 km Morogoro A R Kilosa A M O R u U Maneromango ah K a U R. T Behobeho U Iringa UVIDUNDA Mpanga Utete M Ifakara Shuguli A INDIAN . H Mohoro ) R Falls Ngarambe T OCEAN ga I U n L Somanga la U L M S U Madaba B ( N o Mahenge I r Kilwa Kivinje e G UTETE b Kilwa Masoko 9˚S m I o l i N

K . D UNDONDE egu R w u O L Barikiwa UMWERA Liwale R. ru KITANDA ku Lindi em MGENDE bw Mtwara M LUKULEDI VALLEY Mikindani MAKONDE Songea Masasi PLATEAU Tunduru a R. um v u PORTUGUESE R 38 ˚E EAST AFRICA

Map 2. Th e Eastern Maji Maji Region stretch to the border with Portuguese East Africa by the early days of September. Th e coastal town of Lindi appeared under threat and Bene- dictine missionaries abandoned their stations at Masasi and Nyangao in the Lukuledi Valley in the wake of the murder of Bishop Spiss. Further west, in late August and early September Songea witnessed in sequence an attack on a German detachment, a German counter- attack on the chiefl y capital of Uwereka on September 3, and a renewed off ensive by rebels involving an unsuccessful attack on a trading center at Kikole and the destruction of the Catholic missions at Peramiho and Kisongera. For German observers the news would grow worse throughout the fi rst half of September. Kilosa came under attack on September 6, and by September 19 the Lutheran mission at Milo in Ludewa, west of Son- gea, had fallen to its enemies, while in Njombe several tax collectors were killed and the Lutheran mission at Yakobi sacked. Most accounts of Maji Maji state that the war lasted for two years, and some say that it did not reach its end until the last rebel leaders were hunted down 8 introduction in mid-1908. Yet, it is this astonishingly rapid sequence of events in the brief period between the last days of July and the third week of September which both created the fame of Maji Maji as a great anti- colonial uprising, and oriented its subsequent study towards the problem of explaining the spread of rebellion. Astonished German observers wondered how such a movement could have spread in apparently coordinated fashion across a region whose populations appeared deeply divided by language and culture.13 War indeed spread through a vast area. Across a territory larger than the United Kingdom and three-quarters the size of modern Germany it engulfed societies which spoke more than twenty-fi ve languages. Nev- ertheless, by late September 1905 the Germans had begun to roll back the insurgency. Although guerrilla war and savage German repression would continue for months in Matumbi, in the Lukuledi Valley and around Maneromango in Uzaramo, in the eastern Maji Maji theater it was already clear by mid-September that German control was not under serious threat. To the northwest, the Germans infl icted major defeats on their enemies in Kilosa and the Vidunda Mountains during October and early November. Aft er a column from Iringa reinforced Mahenge on September 20, the Germans began the repression of rebellion in the Kilombero region. In mid-November they fought what John Iliff e called the “greatest pitched battle of the war”14 at the Ruipa River. While the siege of their fort at Mahenge was not lift ed until March 1906, aft er the defeat at Ruipa the anti-colonial forces never again threatened to capture Mahenge. In Songea, the Germans infl icted a severe defeat on the forces of Chabruma, nkosi of the Mshope kingdom, at Namabengo on October 21. Rebels managed a renewed attack on the Peramiho mission in early November, but later in the month a major German column reinforced Songea and began the decisive counter-off ensive in the southwest. Th is campaign would continue with steady fi ghting through June 1906, for Songea suff ered more than other regions from protracted warfare. In this region the Germans developed a tactic of surrounding sizable areas, then closing on their enemy from all sides, while destroying

13 Graf G.A. von Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, 1905–6 (Berlin:, Dietrich Reimer, 1909), p. 47. 14 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 197. introduction 9

0 60 mi Iringa 0 60 km Ifakara

RO BE M O EY MUFINDI L L USANGU I L K A V Mahenge

SOUTHERN .

) Mbeya a

ULANGA n a Kidugala l Lupembe (U U o Njombe BEN er A mb ilo u R. K eg Ikombe Yakobi w u L

Milo HIGHLANDS U P 10˚S A NG WA

Songea U N G O NI

Ru vum NYASALAND a R Lake . Nyasa PORTUGUESE 35 ˚E EAST AFRICA

Map 3. Th e Western Maji Maji Region crops and food stocks to infl ict famine on their opponents. Th ey used this tactic to suppress intransigent enemy forces in thinly-populated regions to the north and east of Songea, particularly in Kitanda and Mgende, during the fi rst half of 1906. Further west, they employed the same tactic in southern Njombe and the Upangwa Mountains of Ludewa in April 1906. Even so, major rebel leaders eluded capture. Th e sons of Chabruma did not surrender until July, while their father escaped to Mozambique. In the southern Njombe-Ludewa region, it would be another two years before the Germans hunted down Ngoz- ingozi and Mpangile, their major opponents in this area. 10 introduction

Breaking the Conventional Boundaries of the Maji Maji Story

Th e “precocious clarity” which Marcia Wright attributed to the foundational Maji Maji studies of the 1960s and 1970s stemmed from the way in which they were framed. Th e story was clearly bounded in space and time, and was easily integrated into two kinds of metanarrative. One of these grand narratives was the story of Africa’s “development” as a “modern” society. Th e second was the story of the state in Africa, including the nationalist struggle for control of the state. While none of these qualities are necessarily misplaced or erroneous, they have obscured important questions about Maji Maji. Th e purpose of this volume is to address some of the neglected questions. No aspect of the Maji Maji story was more fundamental in providing coherence and persuasiveness than its geographical and temporal boundaries. Contemporary German observers considered Maji Maji as the war which occurred from mid-1905 into 1907 in a contiguous region. It was not merely geographical contiguity which produced coherence, but also the assumption that the spread of the maji medicine defi ned the Maji Maji region. Th e maji played a crucial role in all accounts of the war despite diff erences among observers over why it had spread. Th e German Left and even some members of colonial government believed that it had done so in reaction to the excessive brutality of colonial administration.15 Others believed that it had been spread by the atavistic recalcitrance of primitive people who refused to accept colonial authority. Despite the variety of views about the causes of Maji Maji, however, from the early days of the war it was the maji which gave the story unity.

Th ese boundaries in time and space were neither self-evident nor uncontested. As contributions to this volume show, we have only a very rough idea of the area through which the maji medicine spread. In some places, moreover, witnesses to the war and their descendents claimed that fi ghting which broke out in their areas during 1905–07 was not part of Maji Maji. By contrast, anti-colonial violence which

15 Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Helsinki and Hamburg: Finnish Historical Society, Studia Historica no. 49 and Lit Verlag, Studien zur Afrikanischen Geschichte, no. 10, 1995), p. 232. introduction 11 occurred in German East Africa in 1905–07 outside the conventional Maji Maji region has been excluded from the Maji Maji story because the maji does not appear to have been involved in it. Th us Mwanza saw signifi cant fi ghting in October-November 1905, while Mbulu witnessed confl ict against the Germans in June 1906 during the so-called “Iraqw war,” yet these episodes have never been incorporated into the Maji Maji story. Other instances of fi ghting before 1905 were also not included, even though they appear closely related to Maji Maji. One was the “war of the pumpkins,” resistance to German taxation during 1898 in Matumbi, the very region inland from Kilwa where Maji Maji began.16 Another pre-1905 confl ict took place west of Songea at Litembo in 1902. As our collaborative research team learned in 2002, however, residents of Litembo claim that this outbreak was part of Maji Maji. Th ey argue that it should be recognized as such during annual com- memorations of Maji Maji in Songea.17 In seeing the events of 1905–07 in the context of a more protracted confl ict, the people of Litembo take a position similar to that found in Njombe, where oral accounts oft en speak of Maji Maji as a phase in almost-continual regional warfare from the 1870s through the First World War.18 Th e Kilwa hinterland, where warfare can be traced not only back to the resistance of Hassan Omari Makunganya in 1894–5, but to the coastal resistance of 1888–9, can be seen in similar terms.19 Th e coherence given the Maji Maji story by its clear boundaries was deceptive. Th e conventional story of Maji Maji also gained persuasiveness from the ease with which it was integrated into the metanarratives of state and development. In a rare examination of the interpretative assumptions which lie behind historians’ accounts of Maji Maji, a contributor to this volume, Th addeus Sunseri, has addressed this problem.

16 Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak and Development of the Majimaji War: 1905–1907,” p. 127. 17 Interviews with elders at Litembo who were constructing their own memorial of anti-German resistance in 2004. 18 James L. Giblin, A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania (Oxford, Dar es Salaam and Athens, OH: James Currey, Mkuki na Nyota, Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 28–42 and Jamie Monson, “Relo- cating Maji Maji: the Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918” Journal of African History 39 (1998): 95–120. 19 Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak and Development of the Majimaji War: 1905–1907,” pp. 121–7. 12 introduction

Arguing that the study of Maji Maji has been dominated by “statist history,” he asserts that, all the permutations of the history of the Maji Maji war, from German times onward, have had the goal of legitimating policies and the very existence of the colonial and post-colonial states . . . historians . . . have until recently written within the framework of paradigms that sought to legitimate state power or nationalist goals. In so doing they have downplayed or ignored historical events that did not fi t neatly into their frameworks. He goes on to argue that, “statist narratives . . . thwart criticism, opposition, or divergent political perspectives. Th ey . . . tend to erase the stories and aspirations of common people, marginal ethnic and social groups, and women.”20 Professor Sunseri’s intervention led us to consider how the somewhat broader formulation of the problem by Ran- ajit Guha, a historian of India’s Subaltern studies movement, might help us to think about the infl uence of “statist” history on the study of Maji Maji. Guha argues that “statist narratives” are persuasive not because everyone who writes them wishes to legitimize state authority, but because their basic premise is shared by historians who have very diff erent views of the state. Th e fundamental premise of the “statist narrative,” Guha argues, is that social change must involve the use of state resources and transformation of state power. Th is shared conviction, suggests Guha, leads critics of colonial and postcolonial states, no less than the friends of state authority, to place the state and political movements which aim to transform it at the center of their stories.21 Th is shared premise about the centrality of the state in social change helps to explain some surprising convergences. For example, German colonial offi cials, whose purpose in examining Maji Maji was to ensure that no such challenge to the colonial state would arise again,22 anticipated the most fundamental insight of the nationalist historians. Th e governor of German East African during Maji Maji, Graf G.A. Götzen,

20 Th addeus Sunseri, “Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Ellipses,” International Jour- nal of African Historical Studies 33,3 (200): 567–84. 21 Ranajit Guha, “Th e Small Voice of History,” in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrab- arty (eds.), Subaltern Studies: 9 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997): 1–12. 22 As Inka Chall and Sonja Mezger argue in their study of contemporary debates about the confl ict in German newspapers: Inka Chall and Sonja Mezger, “Die Pers- pektive der Sieger: Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in der Kolonialen Presse,” in Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905–1907 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2005), pp. 143–53. introduction 13 understood it as “a kind of nationalist war against foreign rule.”23 Th e foundational accounts of Maji Maji also took the colonial state as their implicit center of gravity. Th e interest of John Iliff e in using Maji Maji to understand how an “ideology of revolt” could thrive in a climate of unfavorable economic and cultural realities, of Gilbert Gwassa in discovering how Kinjikitile had found in a fabric of cultural diversity the common threads which could draw together a mass movement, and of Marcia Wright in learning how the “ideological synthesis” created in a particular moment of prophetic leadership might be linked to the regional political economy,24 were all driven by what might be called anti-state “prioritizing.” Th ey refl ected the view that the most urgent historical questions concern the conditions which permit the mobilization of opposition to the state. We do not doubt that this form of prioritizing was necessary in creating historical knowledge in a nation such as Tanzania, which has long resisted imperialist infl uence. Indeed, a number of the scholars who participated in the workshops and fi eld research which led to this volume continue to embrace these priorities. Our purpose here, however, is to suggest that important questions about Maji Maji which were necessarily set aside in the process of prioritizing now deserve the attention of historians. As we have already noted, one of these questions concerns the relationship between Maji Maji and earlier events. Fascinated by the attempt of rebels to build unity across a vast region, historians devoted little attention to earlier confl icts such as the “war of the pumpkins” and the Litembo confl ict. For historians who were concerned to trace the building of broad regional unity, the highly localized nature of these episodes may have made then uninteresting. Similarly, the overriding concern with the achievement of anti-colonial unity also shaped the way in which Maji Maji was situated in relation to later events. In Tanzania, parallels which historians found between Maji Maji and the campaign of the nationalist party, TANU, for independence in the 1950s made a lasting impact. Although historians of the 1960s and 1970s were usually cautious in drawing such parallels, the idea that

23 Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 63, quoted in Kurt Büttner and Hein- rich Loth (eds.), Philosophie der Eroberer und Koloniale Wirklichkeit: Ostafrika, 1884– 1918 (Berlin: Academie-Verlag, 1981), p. 274. 24 Iliff e, “Th e Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion;” Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji;” Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak and Development of the Majimaji War: 1905–1907.” Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy.” 14 introduction

Maji Maji stood as a precursor to the nationalist movement surely exercised a heavy infl uence upon them. Here again, the interpretation of Maji Mai was infl uenced by a broader interest in the transformation of the colonial regime into a sovereign national state. A third area where the priority of the state overshadowed other questions concerned ethnicity. Like all stories, Maji Maji narratives needed protagonists. In some instances, key individuals, such as Kinjikitile Ngwale or Omari Kinjala, who is credited with having brought the maji to the Ngoni kingdoms of Songea, could be identifi ed. More oft en, however, Maji Maji stories have relied upon collective protagonists. Th ese include the clans whose role was stressed by Gilbert Gwassa. Usually the collective actors have been whole ethnic groups. Th e prominence of “tribes” in accounts of Maji Maji is particularly striking when one recalls that, during the period in the 1960s and 1970s when the foundational accounts were composed, both government and scholarship in Tanzania discouraged emphasis upon ethnicity. Paradoxically, telling Maji Maji as a story of transcending ethnic particularity licensed historians to make “tribes” their collective protagonists. A fourth neglected area concerns individuals and groups who did not appear in accounts which emphasized the eff orts of mostly male leaders to build unity. Just as with accounts of the later nationalist movement,25 histories of Maji Maji have given little attention to those who stood outside male leadership. Th ese neglected groups included women, the majority of men who lacked political power, so-called “loyalists” such as Christians, askari in the German military and their rugaruga auxiliaries, and the many uncommitted villagers who knew only terror and victimization during the war. Th e neglected also included individuals who, by virtue of their parentage, occupations, mobility and multi-cultural fl uency occupied social spaces between the collective ethnic protagonists. While we contend that prioritizing caused the neglect of important issues, we do not wish to imply that studies of Maji Maji failed to be self-critical or to take account of new evidence. To the contrary, the authors of the major Maji Maji studies changed their views, and did so in ways which guided us. When John Iliff e published his Modern

25 Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), pp. 1–13. introduction 15

History of Tanganyika in 1979, for example, he thoroughly revised the view of Maji Maji which he had presented in 1967.26 He abandoned the contrast between “peasant” openness to ideological innovation and “tribal” commitment to older ideas and loyalties. By placing greater emphasis on the distinction between stateless societies and precolonial states, and by stressing that prophets and medicine men did not act as leaders in war, his 1979 account responded both to oral evidence generated by the Maji Maji Research Project, and also to the careful study of Ulanga District, an area at the heart of the Maji Maji region, by a contributor to this volume, Lorne Larson. Iliff e also acknowledged in 1979 that Maji Maji did not grow out of a “common religious tradition” of witchcraft eradication, but instead refl ected “local circumstances and beliefs,”27 When Marcia Wright later wrote an essay about prophecy in Maji Maji, she too urged more attention to such circumstances, saying that, “the challenge remaining for historians of the movement is to convincingly link prophetic leadership with the disaff ected groups who joined the rebellion.”28 In his Development for Exploitation, published in 1994, Juhani Koponen made a similar point. He echoed Iliff e in 1979 by saying that crucial local “triggering” factors remained poorly understood.29 In several respects Koponen brought a fresh perspective to the study of Maji Maji, particularly by arguing that it grew out of a combination of extractive colonial economy and the political marginalization of southern Tanzania. He also cautioned against exaggerating the importance of Maji Maji as the stimulus to reform of German colonial administration.30 Another critical voice in Maji Maji studies was raised by Patrick Redmond, who in the 1970s argued directly across the grain of the foundational studies. Rather than stressing unity and taking ethnic communities as collective protagonists, he argued that the Ngoni kingdoms of Songea were deeply divided during Maji Maji, and that the war aff ected the various strata of Ngoni society in quite diff erent ways.31

26 John Iliff e, “Th e Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,” and A Modern His- tory, pp. 168–202. 27 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 193. 28 Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy.” P. 129. 29 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, p. 238. 30 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, pp. 241–43; see also Iliff e, Tanganyika under German Rule, pp. 1–8. 31 Patrick M. Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiog- raphy,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975): 407–24. 16 introduction

Th is volume takes heed of this guidance. It emphasizes local experience, conditions and continuities with earlier periods. It also explores divisions and tensions within African communities. In addition, it attempts to problematize the relationship between Maji Maji and subsequent events. Although our contributors do not dwell on this issue, they avoid seeing Maji Maji teleologically as “a procession with an origin, a course and a destination.”32 Th ey know that the historicization of Maji Maji within cultural, political, religious and environmental contexts must not stop short of historicizing the process of memory formation aft er 1907. While stressing the neglected dimensions of Maji Maji, however, we are aware that many historians remain committed to the priorities which guided the foundational studies. Consequently, throughout both the project which led to this book and in this volume itself, we have striven to accommodate a diversity of opinion about priorities. While this volume refl ects the interest of some contributors in exploring neglected dimensions of Maji Maji, it also includes contributions which focus upon colonial authority and mass mobilization against it.

Communication as Cause: A New Direction in the Study of Maji Maji

Maji Maji remains not only a staple of history teaching, but also a cultural icon in Tanzania. It once inspired a serialized drama on Radio Tanzania and provided the name of Songea’s football team. More recently it has been a reference of rebellious young musicians and the subject of Nkhomanile, a play by the prominent writer, Amandina Lihamba. Th e best-known literary work about Maji Maji is another play, Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile.33 Kinjeketile is a refl ection on communication. It likens inter-regional communication to the “sun”

32 Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, “Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa,” in Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (eds.), Negotiating the Past: Th e Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 92–3. 33 Ebrahim N. Hussein, Kinjeketile (Dar es Salaam and Nairobi Oxford University Press, 1969). Our appreciation of the creative writing which addresses Maji Maji was greatly enhanced by several papers presented at the “Conference Marking the End of Centennial Celebrations of the Maji Maji War” at the University of Dar es Salaam, August 4–5, 2007. Th ese were M.M. Mulokozi and Shani A. Kitogo, “Depiction and Impact of the Maji Maji Uprising on Literature (Oral and Written),” Lilian Temu Osaki, “Imaginative Literature as History: Similarities and Diff erences in the Records introduction 17 which pierces the “smoke and darkness”—the obstacles to interaction and mutual understanding among speakers of diff erent languages in southern Tanzania.34 Hussein takes up several important themes related to wartime communication. Th ese include the problem of distinguishing between truth and rumor and the German reliance on African sources of information. In addressing these themes, Hussein, who came from a prominent family in Kilwa, may well have been infl uenced by another work from Kilwa, a long poem about Maji Maji written by Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini shortly aft er the war. Bin Jamaliddini also describes German ways of collecting information from African informants.35 Flows of information interested German witnesses as well as later historians of Maji Maji. Like later historians who wished to learn how a vast and perhaps coordinated movement of resistance had arisen, German observers were keen to know how the call to arms had spread across a large territory in many languages. Th eir terror of the rapid spread of rebellion riveted their attention on African movement and communication, and on its fearful consequences. Th ey were shaken to hear that one of the two healers executed by the Germans at Mohoro in the earliest days of the war (many accounts say that it was Kinjikitile Ngwale, although probably it was not)36 declare from the gallows that the war medicine had already reached distant Liwale and Mahenge. Th eir fear may have sometimes led the Germans to exaggerate the effi - cacy of African communication, as when they claimed that Ngindo fi ghters communicated by writing with charcoal to leave messages in Arabic script on trees.37 Even German military men familiar with the

of the Maji Maji War,” and Eliah S. Mwaifuge, “Art and History: Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile.” 34 Hussein, p. 14. 35 Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini, “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji” (trans. W.H. Whiteley), East African Swahili Committee Journal, Supplement no. 27 (June, 1957). A valuable and more recent presentation is found in Gudrun Miehe, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis and Ralf Grosserhode (eds.), Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swa- hili Poems (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2002), pp. 324–61. Insightful analysis of the account of bin Jamaliddini is found in José Arturo Saavedra Casco, Utenzi, War Poems, and the German Conquest of East Africa: Swahili Poetry as a Historical Source (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007) and “Die Suche nach dem Mittelweg: Das Maji-Maji-Gedicht des Swahili-Dichters Abdul Karim Jamaliddini,” in Becker and Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, pp. 133–42. 36 Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy,” p. 132. 37 “Zur Geschichte des Aufstandes,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8,40 (October 6, 1906): 2. 18 introduction lightening marches of their own troops found African communication surprisingly effi cient. Th e German commander in the western region, Major Kurt Johannes, was impressed by the ability of his enemy to carry dispatches across the 180 kilometers between Njombe and Son- gea in sixty hours. He was also frustrated by signs that the enemy had been forewarned of German troop movements; this frustration led to one of the most terrible incidents of the war—the retributive mass execution at Utengule in Njombe in 1906.38 From the historians interested in African means of communication, the most intriguing description has come from John Iliff e, who likened the wartime fl ow of information to “impulses spreading inland.” “Th ere were rumors of war,” he continued, “there were . . . stories of strange gods. Th ere were rebel warriors with . . . tales of victory. Th ere were rumors of disaster, rumors that maji was a lie. Th ere were German messages passing along telegraph wires.”39 Th e complexity described by Iliff e is also taken up by Hussein and Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini. Yet, Hussein might be said to have gone beyond the historians. Historians have tended to think of communication as a means, particularly a means of building unity and common purpose in a multi-lingual region. Hussein, by contrast, portrays communication as a cause. His Kinjikitile refl ects that, “humankind creates the word, the word gains force, becomes big, big, big until it overcomes humankind by its size and force . . . Th e word which is created by man comes to rule man who created it.”40 Hussein uses his character to suggest that language and communication act on history in ways which are similar to factors which historians might call structural causes. Th ey impel action and infl uence change, yet their eff ects are mediated by more immediate factors or proximate causes. More-

38 “Das Detachement Johannes vom Oktober 1905 bis August 1906,” Deutsch- Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8,45 (November 10, 1906); “Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Detachements des Majors Johannes vom 18. November 1905 bis 10. März 1906,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 17 (1906): 607; “Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Detachements des Majors Johannes vom 11. März bis 3. August 1906,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 18 (1907): 345; Paul Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit in Deutsch-Ostafrika. (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner Missionsgesellschaft , 1911), pp. 213–4. 39 Iliff e, A Modern History, pp. 190–1. 40 “Binadamu huzaa neno—neno hushika nguvu—likawa kubwa—kubwa, kubwa likamshinda binadamu kwa ukubwa na nguvu . . . Neno ambalo limezaliwa na ntu likaja kuntawala ntu yule yule aliyelizaa.” Hussein, p. 23. (Hussein’s spelling renders the varieties of pronunciation of Kiswahili found in the Rujifi -Kilwa region.) introduction 19 over, they possess their own dynamics of change and expansion whose direction societies can infl uence only slightly. We follow Hussein here in suggesting that communication during Maji Maji should be understood as cause, rather than merely as means.

Hussein’s insight provides a way of addressing one of the primary problems in Maji Maji studies—the role of the maji medicine. When Gilbert Gwassa considered what John Iliff e described in 1967 as the central problem of Maji Maji—“how people were mobilized and organized for action”—he conceived of maji as an instrument of unity- building. He likened it to an ideology which could be controlled and used consciously to move the masses.41 It was a “crisis-solving device,” he wrote, which “provided a unifying ideology.”42 It appears true that the maji involved not simply the administering of a medicine, but also instruction which might be compared with the imparting of ideology. Indeed, the plot of Kinjeketile turns on messages which are spread along with the medicine itself. Hussein, however, sees the messages as capturing control of events, rather than being the means of deliberately spreading an ideology of resistance. When trying to apply this view of communication to the maji we are at a disadvantage, for we have very little evidence of the substance of the messages and instruction which accompanied the administering of medicines. Although important studies of healing, by Maia Green and Marja-Liisa Swantz in particular, have benefi tted our contributors, historians of Maji Maji remain heavily dependent upon contemporary written sources which, for the most part, fail to comprehend medicines, their meaning and their function. Despite the unsatisfactory state of our evidence, we suggest abandoning the view of maji as a consciously deployed means or instrument. As an alternative, we pro- pose a position closer to Iliff e’s view of wartime communication. Th is

41 Gilbert Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji.” In his doctoral dissertation, Gwassa argued that the masses were the “main force” in the Maji Maji war, and that the infl uence of the “intelligentsia” in leadership was weak. Th is argument was also directly linked to Gwassa’s view of independence and post-independence politics. Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak,” pp. 530–1. A recent reconsideration of Gwassa and other scholarly literature on the maji medicine, which retains some stress on the instrumentality of the medicine, is Jigal Beez, Geschosse zu Wassertropfen: Sozio- religiöse Aspekte des Maji-Maji-Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905–1907 (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2003). 42 G.C.K. Gwassa, “African Methods of Warfare During the Maji Maji War, p. 131. 20 introduction position would acknowledge the complexity of circuits of communication, including communication between Africans and Germans. It would also regard messages as a causal force which runs ahead of conscious intention, not only because the spread of messages cannot be controlled, but because messages were interpreted in various ways and for many diff erent purposes. Communication became a cause of action, but a cause which could not be regulated or directed. Documentary evidence supports this view of communication as cause. It demonstrates the importance of information passing between Africans and Germans. It also shows how the uncontrolled and perhaps unintended spread of false information became a cause of events. In August 1905, for example, in an overwrought atmosphere “abuzz all around with alarming rumor,” the Lutheran missionary at Manero- mango in Uzaramo, “was informed by a colored Christian . . . that the pagans planned a night attack on Maneromango.” Th is report set in motion a fateful series of events, for the missionary advised the local government representative to request military assistance from Dar es Salaam, where “the authorities were not clear about the state of things.”43 His action led to the murder of a government translator, a devastating scorched-earth campaign in southern Uzaramo, and the capture and execution of the Uzaramo chief, Kibasila. Similarly, in the far western reaches of the Maji Maji region, African residents of Lutheran mission stations linked German and African circuits of information. Th e account of one Lutheran evangelist, Paul Gröschel, is alive with anxiety over his lack of information. Periodically cut off from communication with Germans outside Njombe in late 1905 and early 1906, he depended on his “little birds.” Th ese were his African informants who moved relatively freely between mission stations and their home villages. Sometimes they brought him word of rebel movements which he passed on to a nearby German detachment, but their reports of German troop movements were equally valued by the isolated missionaries.44 Like other German participants caught in the fog of war, however (the fearful paranoia prevailing in the missions was perhaps not so diff erent from the atmosphere of millenarian excite- ment described in some African communities), Gröschel was prone to exaggerate African attempts to gather information. Aft er the outbreak

43 C.G. Bűttner, Der Aufstand in Deutsch-Ostafrika und Seine Folgen, pp. 5–7. 44 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit, pp. 175 and 180. introduction 21 of war and attack on his own mission, in hindsight he felt that several Ngoni men who had sought employment at Yakobi some months earlier must have been sent there as spies.45 Another incident described by Gröschel reveals some of the diffi culty created for historians by the criss-crossing of information through African and German circuits. In December 1905, a German force commanded by a Sergeant Bach approached caves near the modern township of Njombe. Th ey had heard rumors—Gröschel called them “gossip”—that the important rebel leader Mpangile was hiding there. One of the atrocities of the war ensued. Aft er negotiations with an emissary from the people hiding in the caves broke down, the Ger- mans launched an assault, setting fi res at the entrance to force the hiding people into the open. Th e caves may have held 400 to 500 people, and many apparently died of suff ocation or bullet wounds. But only three men were found, none of them Mpangile. Th at the cave was not a rebel stronghold, but a hiding place for women, children and a handful of old men, is indicated by the fact that the emissary chosen by the refugees to approach Bach was a woman.46 Th e colonial government covered up the blunder, with Governor Götzen describing the incident as an “excellent success in bitter cave fi ghting.”47 Götzen’s characterization might well have misled historians, were it not for the intervention of another intermediary—the missionary Gröschel himself. He discussed the assault on the caves in the account of the Maji Maji years which he published in 1911. Although he did not criticize the soldiers directly, he quoted verbatim Bach’s three-page report of the incident, allowing Bach’s own words to reveal the tragic result of his mistaken reliance on rumor. Connections between German and African circuits of communication reveal diffi culties which historians of Maji Maji must not ignore. Th ey show, fi rst, that oral testimony should not be regarded as the product of a stream of African information-gathering and memory which stands separate from German infl uence. Oral testimony is not an independent source which can be used to confi rm or refute Ger- man documentation. Instead, these two forms of evidence appear to have been mixed from the beginning. One possible consequence is

45 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit, p. 141. 46 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit, pp. 172–4. 47 “Űber die in Deutsch-Ostafrika Ausgebrochenen Unruhen” (dispatch of January 16), Deutsches Kolonialblatt 17 (1906): 69. 22 introduction that the testimony in oral accounts about the importance of the maji medicine, including stories about the dawning realization that the maji medicine was a fraud, may refl ect less fi rst-hand experience with the maji in a particular locality than the maji-related rumors obtained from German sources. As Jamie Monson shows in her contribution to this volume, initially fragmentary reports about maji coalesced very quickly among the Germans into a standard story. Th e fi rst German reports of unrest from Matumbi described a variety of medicines and applications. Healers were said to prescribe medicines which would grant, “prosperity and health,” end famine and epidemic, repel crop raiders such as wild pigs, and ensure harvests so abundant that villagers would no longer have to depend on wage labor to obtain cloth. Women and children took medicines to strengthen them against the hardships of fl ight into woodland hiding-places and to preserve them from capture by enemies; men used what were probably hunting medicines to ensure the accuracy of fi rearms. Medicines were drunk, sprinkled on the body, worn round the neck, scattered as ash in fi elds and mixed into gunpowder. Th ese reports said, of course, that medicines were used to change bullets into water, though the practice was said to have been borrowed “from the formerly continual wars of the natives.” Yet, the bravery of Wamatumbi fi ghters was attributed by the early reports not to medicine, but to drinking free-fl owing millet beer aft er a plentiful harvest.48 Perhaps seeking reason to believe that the impetuous execution of healers at Mohoro had been justifi ed, however, the Germans soon began speaking of a rebellion inspired and led by “sorcerers.” Th ey became keenly receptive to rumors of “dowsing in consecrated water by sorcerers.”49 Eventually, the Germans came to believe, as Governor Götzen would put it aft er the war, that, “belief in the power of the magic water . . . was able to produce in the East African [“ostafrikanischen Neger”] an entirely new phenomenon of defi ance of death in combat and to fi ll its adherents with wild fanaticism.”50

48 Quotes from report of Moritz Merker in Kilwa, quoted by Götzen, Deutsch- Ostafrika im Aufstand, pp. 45–6; also, “Über die Unruhen im Süden,” Deutsch- Ostafrikanische Zeitung 7, 32 (August 12, 1905): 1–2. Th e same situation was found in Uzaramo: Th addeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Majimaji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania),” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 235–59. 49 Dispatch of September 24 in Deutsches Kolonialblatt 16 (1905): 576. 50 Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 47. introduction 23

German stories in turn infl uenced African ways of understanding and talking about the war. One factor which may have encouraged the incorporation of German understandings of maji into oral accounts is that, as the participants in our collaborative project learned during their fi eld research, many residents of the Maji Maji region wish to integrate the experience of their grandparents, villages and districts into the nationally-recognized story of Maji Maji. Claiming that their localities shared in the experience of maji is an eff ective way of doing so. Our argument that communication during war should be regarded as cause and not merely means does not remove African agency from the Maji Maji story, but it does relocate it. Rather than fi nding agency primarily in the use of maji to spread ideology and information,51 it stresses the dilemmas confronted by individuals and communities as they received information, rumor, gossip and new healing practices. In ways that are not always clear in conventional Maji Maji accounts, they exercised agency by evaluating such communication within local circumstances. (Th eir local circumstances, of course, were shaped by change on a regional scale in the spheres of politics and economy.) Indeed, messages associated with medicine were particularly susceptible to judgement by locally-infl uential healers, diviners and oracles who were accustomed to giving guidance about spiritual and supernatural powers. Th e reception of wartime messages clearly necessitated a social and political process of deliberation. We see this in a well- known instance from Usangu when its leader, Merere, consulted the lihomelo oracle and priests before allying himself with the Germans.52 Hints of the need for a similar process appear also in Masasi, where the late arrival of news of war prevented suffi cient deliberation. “Maji Maji entered Masasi suddenly,” wrote Yusuf Halimoja. “For this reason there was no one who early on understood well the reasons for and aims of this war.”53

51 Th is was the agency upon which Marcia Wright focused in speaking of prophets such as Kinjikitile as “commissioning agent[s], validating the grievances of the affl icted, providing a ritual of incorporation and sanctioning oppositional mobilization”: Wright, “Maji Maji Prophecy and Historiography,” p. 125. 52 Iliff e, A Modern History, pp. 189–90. 53 Yusuf Halimoja, Historia ya Masasi (Kampala, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1977), p. 164. 24 introduction

Stressing the problems posed by the reception of messages reminds us that African and German actors faced similar diffi culties. German soldiers and administrators found no less diffi culty than Africans in sift ing truth from a confusion of rumor and report. No better example of their diffi culties can be found than the circumstances which led to the execution of Kinjikitile Ngwale at Mohoro. Th e execution may well have been a paranoid reaction to ill-founded rumor. It may also have represented the rash reaction of an isolated offi cal who disliked the deliberate approach of a colleague.54 When one considers that this act may have precipitated the spread of war beyond the Kilwa hinterland, problems of wartime communication appear truly critical. Acknowl- edging such diffi culties helps us to deepen our understanding of Maji Maji as warfare. We begin to see it not only as a moment of unity- building, but also as an enormous tragedy caused by error and mis- judgement as well as deliberate intent. Within the confusing fog of war, the connections between African and German circuits of information were oft en made by individuals who occupied intermediary positions located neither in the ethnic communities which historians have taken as their collective protagonists, nor on the German side. Th e “little birds” who shuttled back and forth between missions and their relatives and friends were a prime example of the people who lived in the interstices. Not only did the African Christians relay information between African and German circuits, but in many cases they themselves lived in somewhat marginal social circumstances. An important early member of the Chris- tian community at Yakobi in Njombe, for example, was a member of a family which had been ostracized over accusations of witchcraft . At Milo in Upangwa [modern Ludewa District], the leader of the early Lutheran community had been made a refugee during the wars of the 1880s and 1890s in Iringa.55 During Maji Maji, moreover, the mar-

54 As suggested by a reading of Otto Stollowsky, “Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika im Jahre 1905/06,” Die Deutschen Kolonien 11 (1912): 138–43, 170–73, 204–07, 237–39, 263–66. Translated by John W. East as “On the Background to the Rebellion in German East Africa in 1905–06, International Journal of African Historical Studies 21 (1988): 677–96. 55 Paul Gröschel, Amelye: Ein Lebensbild aus dem Benavolk in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft , 1911); Mis- sionar Neuberg, Lutengamaso in Milow, Oder ‘Was Gottes Gnade Aus Einem Heiden Machen Kann’ (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft , n.d.). introduction 25 ginalized population probably increased as villagers fl eeing both sides took refuge in mission compounds. Such intermediary niches were created not only by warfare, but also by interconnections between diff erent cultures and language groups, and by the corresponding ability of communities to assimilate newcomers and accommodate movement. As Lorne Larson points out in this volume, for example, to be Ngindo, the ethnic identity which dominated the center of the Maji Maji region, was to live in a world of frequent movement and extensive interconnection across a large region. Regional connections were maintained through trade, marriage, patronage and the distribution of medicines. For this reason, Ngindo-speakers were important players in commerce and politics in many portions of southern Tanzania. One of those regions was Uzaramo, where Ngindo immigrants participated in nineteenth-century political developments. Indeed, Uzaramo was one of many districts in the Maji Maji region where outsiders played an important part in trade and political life, their intervention facilitated by joking relationships and the sharing of clan names across environmental and linguistic frontiers. Other important intermediaries were hunters and traders who traveled widely and frequently obtained wealth and status in milieus far from home. In Uzaramo, as Th addeus Sunseri points out in his contribution to this volume, it was elephant hunters from Ukutu who played a crucial role in the formation of nineteenth- century chiefship.56 Many key individual actors in Maji Maji stood outside their own natal communities and ranged across linguistic and cultural frontiers. Th e individuals whose murders at Maneromango in August 1905 led to fears that Dar es Salaam might come under attack, for example, were an African translator in government employment and an Indian trader. On the rebel side, leadership was provided by elephant hunters, men whose professional success demanded mobility and ability to operate on a variety of natural and cultural terrains. Individuals possessed of similar mobility and cultural agility played crucial roles in spreading the war from Ungindo westward into Ngoni-dominated Songea. One of them was the woman leader at Kitanda, Nkomanile. A

56 Martin Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der Religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Dar es Salaam (Deutsch Ostafrika),” Zeitschrift fűr Kolonialsprachen 1,3 (1910): 210–12. 26 introduction

German account described her has having conducted a sort of shuttle diplomacy in the lead-up to rebellion, moving between the major anti- German leader in Songea, Chabruma, and an Ngindo emissary, Omari Kinjala. Her ability to do so stemmed from her membership in an Ngoni royal family, her close personal (including, perhaps, marital) tie with Kinjala, and commercial contacts between herself and leaders in both Songea and Ungindo, for she ruled a linguistic borderland heavily infl uenced by an itinerant trading community.57 Conversely, in Songea the Germans found a vital source of support in Rashidi Masoud, an Arab trader in ivory and slaves. Although our knowledge of the rugaruga who supported the German askari is limited, we know that in Songea some of the rugaruga were recruited from Masoud’s own men. Heike Schmidt, a contributor to this volume, tells us that they were a mix of war captives and other dependents who came from outside Songea. Th e rugaruga also included Manyema men whose origins lay in the eastern Congo and Lake Tanganyika region.58

Th e circulation of information across overlapping African and Ger- man circuits was encouraged by the nature of the German regime. Th e foundational Maji Maji studies emphasized duality between the colonial regime and its African subjects, stressing the alien nature of the colonial state and the indigeneity of African response. With its bureaucratic institutions, systems of taxation and ways of legitimizing its use of violent force, the German regime was indeed unfamiliar in many ways. It was unfamiliar even in the western Maji Maji region, which has sometimes been said to be the only part of the war zone where states existed at the time of colonial conquest.59 Yet, these Hehe, Sangu and Ngoni polities in Iringa and Songea were not so much states as widely dispersed networks of dependency: their rulers exercised power through face-to-face relationships of patronage, developing neither bureaucracy and other public institutions, nor widely shared political identities and allegiances. Th e Maji Maji region further east was familiar with the mercantile state of the Zanzibari sultanate. Th e peoples of this area knew, however, that whatever its claims to suzerainty in the coastal hinterland, rela-

57 “Zur Geschichte des Aufstandes,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8,40 (October 6, 1906): 1. 58 Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 202. 59 Iliff e, A Modern History, p 181. introduction 27 tions with Zanzibar were always negotiable because the sultans exerted no eff ective military presence on the mainland. In an important refl ection on the background to Maji Maji, the German missionary Martin Klamroth found it important to consider nineteenth-century relations between the Zanzibari sultans and the hinterland societies. Drawing upon oral accounts from Uzaramo communities near Dar es Salaam, Klamroth described the success of Zaramo chiefs in limiting Zanzi- bari infl uence and preventing the sultans from imposing taxation.60 Th e contrast between Zanzibari mercantilism and German imperialism implicit in Klamroth’s essay remains important in Zaramo historical consciousness. It appeared in an interview conducted as part of our collaborative fi eld research, when residents of southern Uzaramo contrasted the regime of the sultans with the Germans by describing the Zanzibaris as equal partners in mutually benefi cial trade.61 Th is may also explain why, according to the playwright Ebrahim Hussein, communities who took the maji medicine believed that it would make them, “the people of [the Zanzibari Sultan Sayyid] Said.” Th is concep- tion of the sultan as a leader who permitted his allies to remain free men may also explain why accounts of the maji medicine frequently say that it was distributed by a healer or messenger named “Hongo Said.” Invoking “Said” may have been a way of claiming the right of free communities to enter voluntarily into a relationship of mutual, if asymmetrical, dependence with a powerful leader such as Sayyid Said. Th us in both the western and eastern portions of the Maji Maji region, the forms of administration introduced by the Germans were unfamiliar. Unlike the Zanzibari sultanate, the German state was capable of extending its military presence and making eff ective its demand for taxes, particularly in the years immediately before 1905. Th e most intrusive aspect of the state between 1898 and 1905 was the imposition of taxation payable primarily in colonial currency. Th e tax was collected by government agents and soldiers who manned a network of posts and harassed villagers by conducting tax raids. Th e abuses of the tax collectors and marked increase in tax rates before the war would, together with compulsory cultivation and other forms of forced labor,

60 Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der Religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo,” pp. 211–2. 61 Interview at Kihale Village, Kisangire, Kisarawe District (July 17, 2004). 28 introduction attract much of the blame when the colonial government investigated the causes of rebellion.62 At the same time, government posts and barracks, together with new roads, railways and telegraph lines, reor- ganized the landscape of German East Africa, while large-scale smallpox vaccination campaigns and other public health activities marked the beginnings of state “biopower.” State regulation restricted several economic activities, including hunting, the collection of forest products such as rubber, and trade. Indeed, the closing of southern ports by the government and the subsequent reorganization of the dhow trade altered the circulation of goods along the coast and into the Indian Ocean.63 While German administration was unfamiliar, it was not altogether modern. Th is is one reason why we avoid situating Maji Maji in the metanarrative of progression from tradition to modernity that marked so much of the commentary of European observers in 1905–7 as well as some later accounts of Maji Maji. In the contribution to this volume by Seth Nyagava, for example, we learn that a political structure based on pre-colonial conquest and alliance in northern Ubena provided the framework within which German authority was fi rst established and later contested. Chapters by Michele Moyd and Heike Schmidt show that German military forces were augmented by African auxiliaries whose recruitment, duties and reward structures resembled those of late nineteenth century raiding parties. While German military success has oft en been attributed to their modern weaponry, Moyd reminds us that the Germans themselves regarded the raiding of these auxiliary fi ghters as “indispensable.”64

62 Kurt Büttner and Heinrich Loth (eds.), Philosophie der Eroberer und Koloniale Wirklichkeit: Ostafrika, 1884–1918 (Berlin: Academie-Verlag, 1981), pp. 268–72. 63 Patrick Krajewski, “Dampfer und Dhaus: Küstenhandel und Landwirtschaft vor dem Krieg, (1890–1905),” in Becker and Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch- Ostafrika, pp. 49–58. 64 Th e similarity between warfare during Maji Maji and earlier forms of raiding was discussed by an authority on East African warfare and participant in one of our workshops, Professor John Lamphear. Th e organization of the colonial military in German East Africa dictates caution in stressing the degree to which military tactics during Maji Maji were infl uenced by German wartime experience and military doctrine. Isa- bel Hull provides useful guidance on this problem as she considers the development of scorched-earth tactics. She argues that in Europe as well as Africa, the German military doctrine of “complete military annihilation [author’s emphasis] . . . slipped easily to encompass civilians and society.” Th ough it was not necessarily the deliberate intent of German commanders, she continues, such slippage “developed from the smaller logics of the organizational apparatus, its tactics, and its (hidden) basic assumptions.” introduction 29

Th e interaction of German soldiers with African fi ghters quite likely made the colonial army one of the principal sites where story and rumor were relayed between African and European circuits of communication. Th e contacts which both the askari and auxiliary rugaruga enjoyed with the societies among whom they campaigned ensured, moreover, that information would also pass between army and local communities. Like the examples of communication between Africans and Germans described above, the role probably played by the military in the circulation of war rumor shows why German contemporaries were wrong in assuming that African accounts of war were merely a refl ection of their primitivism. Th e Germans used stories of maji medicine to characterize African commitment to war as irrational and fanatical, even when they were sympathetic to the material and political grievances which had led to the triumph of superstition. Yet, the stories themselves may have originated and spread initially among the Germans themselves. While it now appears that African accounts of Maji Maji were not the products of purely African circuits of communication untainted by German messages, African accounts need to be better situated within the narrative and storytelling traditions of southern Tanzania. Oral accounts of the war are one of the dimensions of Maji Maji studies most in need of deeper historicization.65 Situating oral accounts of Maji Maji in a variety of historical contexts—including post-1907 political and social contexts as well as narrative traditions—was one of the primary purposes of the fi eld research and workshops which preceded the writing of this volume. Oral accounts of Maji Maji include many elements—such as improbably vast numbers of skulls littering battlefi elds and the use of bees as weapons—found in stories of earlier wars. Th ese appear to have been devices for conveying the hor- ror not only of Maji Maji, but of many wars. Th eir presence in Maji

During Maji Maji, the “smaller logic” may well have been dictated partly by the wartime experience of the Germans’ African allies and auxiliary forces. See Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 166 and 158. 65 Contextualization of oral sources might begin with the interview material collected by the University of Dar es Salaam’s Maji Maji Research Project in 1968. A recent discussion of this material is Ingrid Laurien, “‘Zu Keiner Zeit Konnten Wir Sagen: Jetzt Haben Wir Frieden,’” in Becker and Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, pp. 115–21. An account of seeking oral sources in the Kilwa hinterland is Hubert Gundolf, Maji-Maji, Blut für Afrika: auf den Spuren des 1905 in Ostafrika Ermordeten Missionsbischofs Cassian Spiss, OSB (St. Ottilien: Eos, 1984). 30 introduction

Maji stories raises questions about the extent to which the accounts report events as they happened in 1905–07, and the extent to which storytellers embellished them with conventional tropes and clichés to achieve moral purposes. Maji Maji stories also drew upon narrative convention, we believe, in stressing the importance of supernatural power and individual personality as causes of war. We fi nd this tendency in stories of German commanders believed to have defeated their enemies with supernatural power,66 and also in accounts of other adversaries, such as the German missionary and Bena chief discussed in the chapter by Giblin.

Considering how German information may have infl uenced African oral accounts marks one step towards fuller contextualization of oral accounts. An additional very important step is to consider how storytelling convention, genre and trope shaped accounts of Maji Maji. When they composed Maji Maji narratives, storytellers drew upon traditions of oral narration, making their accounts—like all memory and historical narrative—not simply eyewitness recollection, but a social product whose form and meanings were infl uenced as much by audience expectations as by the narrators themselves. Like the reception of wartime messages discussed above, this is another example of the still underappreciated social complexity in both the making of Maji Maji as event, and in the shaping of Maji Maji as memory. Such complexity was put aside by the prioritizing foundational accounts in their urgency to make Maji Maji part of national history. Shedding new light on this complexity is the primary purpose of the chapters which follow.

66 Th e prominent German military offi cers Von Prince, Von Gravenreuth and Leue were all believed to possess the ability to “freeze” enemies: Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der Religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo,” p. 202. SECTION ONE

CONTEXTS OF COMMUNICATION

Th ese opening chapters provide crucial foundations for the study of communication in Maji Maji. Th ey address a social context in which communication was not only both means and purpose, but exerted enormous infl uence on the course of war. Th is is of course the context of healing and medicine. Monson explores the complex and intensely interconnected world of healing from which the maji medicine and its accompanying message of resistance emerged. She argues that by examining the rumors and stories that circulated about maji during the confl ict and its aft ermath, we can better understand maji’s “narrative effi cacy” during a time of war. Larson situates healing in Ungindo, the heartland of rebellion, yet the portion of the Maji Maji region most neglected by studies of the war. Its neglect can be attributed in part to its subsequent fate, when much of it was turned into the Selous Game Reserve and depopulated. Like Monson, Larson highlights webs of interconnection among healers and sites of veneration. Larson shows that mobility and interconnection across large territories were fundamental characteristics of Ngindo society. For while Ngindo agriculturalists preferred highly dispersed settlement, they remained knit together by trade, kinship, affi nity, shared farming practices and healing. Medicine, healing and the propitiation of spirits also helped Ngindo communities maintain relations with other cultures and language groups. As Larson points out, these included the Germans. Larson traces the growth of grievance against the Germans in the years before Maji Maji, as the trading economy which it regulated, together with government demands for labor, infl icted increasing hardship. Two of the lingering question about Maji Maji are whether which this intensity of grievance prevailed throughout the entire Maji Maji region, and whether it prompted similar responses to the message of maji.

CHAPTER ONE

WAR OF WORDS: THE NARRATIVE EFFICACY OF MEDICINE IN THE MAJI MAJI WAR

Jamie Monson

Th e legend of Maji Maji is magnifi cent, but the truth is even more interesting. —Margaret Bates, Nuffi eld College, Oxford, 1957

Introduction

With these words Margaret Bates concluded her historical introduction to the Swahili poem, “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji,” originally written by Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini in 1912. On the eve of independence, Dr. Bates challenged East Africans to establish the truth by recording their own memories of an event that would otherwise remain “one of the great legends” of Tanganyika’s past. It was indeed a magnifi cent legend—of witchdoctors and magic, of bullets that fell like rain from the bodies of warriors, of snake gods and of the return of the ancestors. In her introduction Dr. Bates provided a preliminary synthesis of the course of events that swept southern German East Africa in 1905–7, as a supporting text for one of the fi rst accounts of the story of Maji Maji to be told “from the African point of view.”1 In the years that followed, historians from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) did set out to gather and record local memories of the Maji Maji confl ict. In what was arguably the most important project in the formative years of the UDSM History Department, students were sent by John Iliff e and Gilbert Gwassa into the southern regions of Tanzania to collect oral memories of the uprising. Th e histories that

1 Margaret Bates, “Historical Introduction,” in Abdul vin Jamaliddini, “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji,” translated by W.H. Whitely, Supplement to East African Swahili Committee Journal 27 (June 1957), 7–8. 34 chapter one

Gwassa and Iliff e produced using these sources form a series of now canonical texts that remain foundational to our current understanding of Maji Maji. Th e project was central not only to the formation of knowledge about the rebellion, but also to the formation of a critical school of historical analysis that became known throughout the Afri- can continent as the “Dar es Salaam School” of historiography.2 In the last ten years, scholars have explored the ways that this approach to Maji Maji’s history facilitated the construction of a national myth during the early years aft er independence. Closely examining the intersection between Maji Maji historiography and nation-building, they have argued that the truth-seeking oral history project of the post-independence era was used in the end to construct another kind of legend.3 Th us nearly fi ft y years aft er her introduction to Jamaliddini’s utenzi was published, Dr. Bates’ simultaneous recognition of the magnifi cence of Maji Maji’s myth and of the importance of seeking the truth continues to hold salience for Tanzania’s historians.4 Th ese are of course themes that have long preoccupied historians of Africa and other parts of the world. Yet there are signifi cant aspects of the Maji Maji confl ict that continue to bring the themes of myth and truth-telling to the surface of popular memory and scholarly investigation. In almost every account of Maji Maji, the war is described as a transitional moment when traditional beliefs collided with and eventually surrendered to the advance of modernity. Th is is a dominant theme in remembered oral accounts of the rebellion that describe the failure of the maji medicine in the face of German military technology. Interviewees

2 Terence Ranger, “Th e Recovery of African Initiative in Tanzanian History,” Uni- versity of Dar es Salaam, 1969; Donald Denoon and Adam Kuper, “Nationalist His- torians in Search of a Nation: Th e ‘New Historiography’ in Dar es Salaam,” African Aff airs 277 (1970), 329–49; Terence Ranger, “Th e ‘New Historiography’ in Dar es Salaam; An Answer,” African Aff airs 278 (1971), 50–61. 3 Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in Revealing Proph- ets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, ed. David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (Oxford, 1995), 124–42; Th addeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania), Journal of African History, 38 (1997) 235–59; Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: Th e Politics of Alli- ance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918, Journal of African History 39 (1998), 95–120. 4 In a recent article in the Journal of African History, Iliff e’s student Felicitas Becker has defended both German colonial and Tanzanian nationalist interpretations of the confl ict, furthering the debate over Maji Maji historiography. Felicitas Becker, “Trad- ers, ‘Big Men’ and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania,” Journal of African History 45 (2004), 1–22. war of words 35 recall the period following the rebellion as a time of conversion to the ‘modern’ religions of Christianity and Islam, and the abandonment of pre-colonial beliefs and practices. German accounts of the rebellion also emphasize a transition from tradition to modernity, not just for East African societies but for colonialism itself. Th e German political press depicted Maji Maji and its aft ermath as a turning point in colonial policy from an older, primitive form of colonialism to a modern and scientifi c colonial method. In his work on the Boxer Rebellion in China, Paul Cohen has argued that when an event is remembered in this way as a great divide between tradition and modernity, its memory takes on mythic qualities that refl ect “the passions and concerns of the present” as much as they do the events of the past. Th is argument is a useful one for understanding the history and memory of the Maji Maji war. In the historiography of Maji Maji there are two dominant mythical elements. Th e fi rst is the role played by prophet-diviners as military leaders. Marcia Wright has shown the way that colonial and national myths were later constructed around the leadership role of the diviner Kinjikitile, and has endeavored to understand more clearly what she has called the “prophetic moment” in which Maji Maji occurred. Th e second mythical element—and the most widely known—is that of the water medicine, or the maji, for which the confl ict is named. Given the centrality of medicine to the Maji Maji story, we might expect there to have been more historical refl ection on its role and meaning. Yet it is not surprising that few historians have attempted to untangle the multiple and complex stories about maji medicine that exist in the written and oral records. Th ese stories come down to us in their most primary form through the lens of German observers and participants in the rebellion, who learned most of what they knew about medicine during the war from their own African representatives (akidas and askari), accused prisoners and mission converts. Th e oral histories collected later during the Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP) refl ected not only the colonial past but also the social and political context of the time in which they were collected.5 Th e challenges of interpreting the role of medicine through these limited primary sources have made it diffi cult for historians to understand what Paul Cohen has called the

5 Th is has been analysed by Th addeus Sunseri in “Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Elipses,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33 (2000), 567–84. 36 chapter one

“instrumental effi cacy” of ritual actions that promised invulnerability in a time of war. In the work of Iliff e and Gwassa, the theoretical focus was not on the instrumental effi cacy of the maji medicine, but on its symbolic effi cacy as a means to bring people together into a mass movement. Th eir approach profoundly infl uenced subsequent interpretations that emphasized a single, unifying form of medicine. Gilbert Gwassa’s focus on maji as ideology was important to the development of a deeper understanding of the medicine’s symbolic function and meaning in a turbulent time. His work acknowledged the power of shared symbols and argued that the peoples of southern Tanzania had developed a common cultural language that made it possible for the maji ideology to unite them. Gwassa’s approach to ideology emphasized the political and revolutionary functions of maji medicine at a time when historians of Tanzania were interested in understanding the historical roots of national unity within an increasingly materialist theoretical framework. He argued in his dissertation that the Maji Maji war “may be said to have been one of the pillars of nationalism in Tanzania,” because of the way local ideology created a mass movement.6 Th e symbolic effi cacy of the maji medicine, in his view, lay in its ability to move the masses.7 Th e Germans also stressed the centrality of medicine in the confl ict, both during and aft er the war. As they carried out their military expeditions, they rounded up healers or zauberers along with dissident headmen, while off ering cash rewards to Africans who brought diviners to their military stations. In their eff orts to identify and punish those who had supported the uprising, the Germans used medicine as

6 Gilbert Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War: 1905– 1907,” Ph.D. Dissertation Th esis, University of Dar es Salaam (1975), 528; recently published as Th e Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War 1905–1907, ed. Wolfgang Apelt (Köln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag), 2005. Th e role of the masses was emphasized heavily in Gwassa’s analysis. Other authors at this time went further to link anti-colonial resistance, nationalism and socialism; Arnold Temu writing in 1969 cited V.I. Lenin to demonstrate these connections. A. Temu, “Th e Rise and Triumph of Nationalism,” in A History of Tanzania, ed. Isaria Kimambo and Arnold Temu (Dar es Salaam, 1969), 190. 7 Gilbert Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji,” in Th e Historical Study of African Religion, ed. Terence Ranger and Isaria Kimambo (London, 1972), 202–19. In his doctoral dissertation, Gwassa argued that the masses were the “main force” in the Maji Maji war, and that the infl uence of the “intelligentsia” in leadership was weak. Th is argument was also directly linked to Gwassa’s view of independence and post-independence politics. Gwassa, “Th e Outbreak,” 530–1. war of words 37 the primary source of evidence: the determination of guilt (and punishment by death), was based on whether an individual or a group had accepted the maji.8 In a parallel argument, Gwassa claimed that only those people who had received the water medicine (and thus a unifying ideology) had actually participated in the rebellion. During and aft er the uprising German reports emphasized the role of maji as they sought to explain the courage and persistence of African fi ghters— qualities they described repeatedly as fanaticism and fatalism.9 Th e very name of the rebellion, propagated by the Germans, foregrounded the importance of a water medicine in these interpretations.10 New historical research conducted over the last ten years in contrast has highlighted the multiple forms of protective medicines that were reported during Maji Maji’s outbreak, calling into question earlier interpretations that argued for a single, unifying ritual element. Sunseri has shown that the primary function of medicine in the Rufi ji area was as a dawa ya kinga or protective substance for ensuring agricultural fertility and rainfall. Its major function was to “protect crops, bring rain, or otherwise ensure a good harvest.”11 Marcia Wright anticipated Sunseri in arguing that this medicine was administered by women, who were a “substantial, integrated element” in ritual activities and in the rebellion.12 Lorne Larson’s early work showed connections between medicines and healers among the Ngindo and longstanding

8 Per Hassing, “German Missionaries and the Maji Maji Rising,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 3 (1970), p. 387. Hassing cites Governor von Götzen’s Reichstag Report, 11 Legislatur-Periode 2, Session 1905/06, Denkschrift über die Ursachen des Aufstandes in DOA 1905, Berlin, January 30, 1906. 9 Moritz von Merker, “Über die Aufstandsbewegung,” Militär Wochenblatt 45 (1906), 1020–1030 is full of such references, for example on p. 1026 he writes that the enemy fi ghters demonstrated a fanaticism and fatalism that had never before been observed in East Africa. Almost every battle description in this text uses the adjective fanatisiert to describe African fi ghters. 10 Governor von Götzen supported and encouraged this view of the rebellion, dis- crediting the movement as the work of diviners and their heathen or washenzi followers. See Von Götzen, Deutsch Ost-Afrika im Aufstand 1905–6 (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1909); and Martin Klamroth, “Beitrage zum Verstandnis der religiosen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Dar es Salaam,” Zeitschrift fur Kolonialsprachen 1 (1910–11) for examples of this view. Th e literature is also reviewed in Iliff e, “Th e Eff ects of the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–06 on German Occupation Policy in East Africa,” in Britain and Germany in Africa, ed. P. Giff ord and W.R. Louis (New Haven, 1967). See also Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs,” pp. 5–7 and Marcia Wright, “Maji-Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” p. 131. 11 Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs,” pp. 10–11. 12 Wright, “Maji-Maji,” p. 138. 38 chapter one witchcraft eradication practices in the area.13 In the Njombe and Son- gea highlands medicines were used to prepare reluctant warriors for battle, while other forms of magic protected warriors and citizens alike by transforming them into anthills or causing them to disappear.14 In Liwale and Matumbi people were told that diviners could enable them to see their ancestors, or cause those fallen in battle to come back to life. Th ese reports along with those referring to leaders as new gods have a millenarian emphasis.15 New work by Sunseri, including his contribution to this volume, links maji rituals to the knowledge and practice of elephant hunters. Th e maji has thus been variously linked to fertility, millenarian visions, witchcraft , warfare, hunting and the protection of villagers. Th e more we continue to learn about the history of maji, the more diff use its meaning becomes. Medicines had already been circulating widely during the era leading up to the Maji Maji rebellion, as communities responded to the pressures of late pre-colonial social change and to colonial conquest. Th ey continued to circulate aft er the rebellion as well, despite increased conversion to Christianity and Islam in the areas that experienced confl ict. Th ese medicines took multiple forms and were continually undergoing modifi cation. Th ey were used in contexts of alliance-building as well as in contexts of rivalry and deception. Th ere were widely recognized ritual specialists in southern Tanzania who practiced healing and dis- pensed remedies both locally and regionally, either by traveling themselves or by attracting pilgrims seeking intervention. Th e infl uence of these specialists increased at the time of Maji Maji, especially in those regions like Mgende that were strategically located at the crossroads of trade and communication networks. Yet the meaning and practice of ritual at this time remained diverse and dynamic. Th us scholars have rightly questioned the claim that there was a single medicine, one that could be called “proto-national,” that spurred the confl ict.

13 Lorne Larson, “Witchcraft Eradication Sequences among the Peoples of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, Tanzania,” unpublished ms. 14 One of the most common motifs in interviews in Ungoni was the transformation of warriors or villagers into anthills as a temporary protective disguise. 15 Missions-Blätter der St. Benediktus-Genossenschaft (November, 1906), cited in Iliff e‘s A History, p. 185; C. Schumann, “Die Schreckenstage auf der Missionstation Jakobi,” in Berliner Missionsberichte (January 1906), 44–5. Leader or hongo Omari Kinjala for example was referred to as a new god or a son of god. See below for more details about the concept of chimulungu in these accounts. war of words 39

In this paper I take the analysis of the role of maji during the war and its aft ermath still further. My approach seeks to go beyond an evaluation of the instrumental and symbolic effi cacy of the maji medicine, to understand its narrative effi cacy in specifi c historical and geographical settings. Although it may appear obvious, it is important to remember that maji medicine was not distributed throughout the landscape as a material substance or “mittel” alone. Rather, maji was accompanied by and formed part of a story—about its origins, its uses, its prohibitions (miiko), its successes and its failures. Indeed, maji is frequently described in both oral and written records as a “teaching” rather than a material substance. Th e German offi cer Stollowsky called it “propa- ganda,” while British colonial administrator R.M. Bell described circulating stories of medicine as a “chain letter.”16 Th e movement of ideas in the early stages of the war in Umatumbi was called njwiywila or whispering, a form of secret communication.17 Th e dissemination of maji as narrative took place through diverse forms—as news of war, as gossip and rumor, even as fashion.18 In December 1905, a kanga cloth appeared in the shops of several southern coastal ports that bore an image of an eye and the words “macho ya Bokero” (Bokero’s eyes). According to a German newspaper report this kanga was worn enthusiastically by coastal “bibis” (adult women) who wrapped it around their waists, circulating the image of the Bokero spirit that possessed the prophet-diviners.19 In the Maji Maji record rumor is frequently mentioned as traveling with, or ahead of, medicine. In the “fog of war” that envelops any violent confl ict, as Paul Fussell has argued, people are in need of news and information about events at the precise moment that these are

16 Otto Stollowsky, “Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des Aufstandes in Deutsch- Ostafrika im Jahre 1905/06,” Die Deutschen Kolonien 11 (1912): 138–43, 170–73, 204–07, 237–39, 263–66. Translated by John W. East as “On the Background to the Rebellion in German East Africa in 1905–06, International Journal of African Histori- cal Studies 21 (1988): 677–96.; R.M Bell, “Th e Outbreak of the Maji Maji rebellion in the Liwale District,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950): 38–57. 17 Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji,” p. 212. 18 John Iliff e referred to these diff erent forms as “impulses” in his A Modern History of Tanganyika: “war, news of war, maji medicines, German telegraphs and German troops were all moving in diff erent patterns,” p. 181. 19 “Das Auge des Bokero,” DOAZ 52 (December 30 1905). In the view of the DOAZ correspondent, the production and sale of this kanga was yet another example of the way Indian traders on the coast took advantage of the rebellion for their own benefi t: they sold the kangas “sich für ihren Handel den Aufstand sowie das Andenken an die bereits gehängten Zauberer und Rebellenführer zu Nutze zu machen.” 40 chapter one obscured and distorted. Rumor in this context becomes important: “In the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty for all and mortal danger for some, rumor sustains hopes and suggests magical outcomes. Like any kind of narrative, it compensates for the insignifi cance of actuality.”20 Historian Luise White has argued that rumors are “confusions and misunderstandings of the best kind” because their expression reveals the way Africans experienced and spoke about the everyday uncertainty within which they lived.21 During the Maji Maji war, the narrative effi cacy of maji medicine lay in its ability to convey meaning within specifi c settings of violence, confusion and insecurity during wartime. 22 As the confl ict unfolded, rumors of maji are reported to have spread through African communities like the fl ames of a fi re or the waves of the sea.

Rumors of maji also spread throughout German communities, both within German East Africa and in Europe. Th e “fog of war” was especially opaque for German military companies operating in the fi eld, where African fi ghters repeatedly cut off the telegraph communications that they relied upon to connect their isolated posts. During the war accounts of maji most oft en reached German military offi cers in the form of eingeborenen Nachrichten or “native reports.” Th ese reports were then recirculated in German intelligence and news accounts where they took on new forms of authority. Meanwhile, German missionaries and other civilian observers were sending their own accounts of the war’s events to newspapers abroad; in many cases these were subsequently reprinted in East African newspapers, oft en with commentary. Th us German stories of maji medicine traveled from East Africa to Germany and back again, shift ing in form and gathering voices along the way, some in the process becoming “phantasiereich ausgeschmückten” (fantastically embroidered).23 In this way maji medicine acquired narrative effi cacy for Germans within their own debates about the war’s causation, and within debates in Germany about colonialism and modernity.

20 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford, 1975), 36. 21 Louise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000), p. 43. 22 Th ere is not room here to go into the multiple ways that stories of medicine circulated within German written sources during and aft er the war. 23 DOAZ 47 (November 25 1905). war of words 41

Following the war, stories of maji medicine continued to have deep meaning for those who remembered the confl ict, as evidenced during the collection of oral interviews aft er independence in 1968, and more recently during 2002 and 2004. In her work on East African rumors about vampires, Luise White argues that stories like these are signifi - cant for historians because they retain potent, consistent images and idioms that extend over large contexts of time and space.24 We can view them as conveyers of strong local and regional meanings that refl ect the experiences of those who tell and retell them. In White’s view, such narratives would have much to tell us about the experience of German colonialism in all its forms, from conquest and administration to the outbreak and crushing of the rebellion. I would add that these narratives can tell us something about the late pre-colonial period as well as the immediate post-rebellion period, when many groups remember joining the Christian church in large numbers in southern Tanzania or converting to Islam.25 If we reconsider these post-colonial narratives of medicine from oral interviews in southern Tanzania, what are some of the deeper meanings that we might fi nd there? Th ere are many possibilities, but I will start by proposing that stories of medicine contain important information about alliances—about which individuals or groups were insiders and which were outsiders; which were friends and which were enemies. Narratives about the circulation of medicine are oft en stories about agreements among people to share protective symbols and ritual practices during a time of crisis. When told in local communities, these stories transmit memories about past relationships among and within groups that have important resonances for people today.26

24 Luise White, Speaking with Vampires. 25 Th e continuities between late pre-colonial warfare and subsequent colonial wars are outlined by Nyagava in this volume and in Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji.” 26 In many ways this function of Maji Maji narrative is not unlike stories of the family recorded by Jim Giblin and Blandina Giblin, that teach new generations about the ties that connect them to relatives and other important people in their real and fi ctive extended families. See James Giblin, A History of the Excluded: Making Fam- ily and Memory a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania, (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). Th ey are also similar to stories about the origins of joking or utani relationships that describe how groups of people interacted with one another in the past. Joseph Mbele, personal communication. 42 chapter one

Medicine in a Time of Crisis: From Fields to Battlefields

In the decades that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, societies in East Africa experienced multiple upheavals resulting from slave trading, cattle disease, colonial conquest, famine and other ills that overlapped with and oft en compounded one another. In this context of change some African leaders, including chiefs and diviners, sought prophetic solutions.27 Terence Ranger has argued that prophetic response in eastern and southern Africa confronted both external interventions by Europeans (thus taking the form of anti-colonial movements) as well as internal affl ictions, thus “arising out of the collapse or inadequacy of indigenous institutions of control; aiming to reconstitute a condition of peace, prosperity and fertility; concerned primarily with internal cleansing and ideological transformation.”28 Th is approach to prophetic movements is a helpful one for understanding the role of medicines and prophecy during the Maji Maji war. It reminds us that religious and prophetic movements at the time bridged the pre-colonial and colonial periods, as communities responded to ills and illness that resulted from multiple causes. It allows us to see the way prophetic response could be both anti-colonial and at the same time internally oriented towards crisis within society, or among societies within a region. Finally, it helps us to make sense of accounts from the Maji Maji era that describe medicines functioning both as agrarian panacea and also as war medicines off ering protection and empowerment against European forces. Maia Green has defi ned medicines in this region of Tanzania as “transformative substances” that “change the state of the person, either

27 Terence Ranger, “Plagues of Beasts and Men: Prophetic Responses to Epidemic in Africa,” in Epidemics and Ideas, Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. T. Ranger and P. Slack (Cambridge 1992), 247; David Anderson and Douglas Johnson, eds., Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, (Ohio 2005); Steven Feierman and Jan Janzen, eds., Th e Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley 1992). 28 Ranger, “Plagues of Beasts and Men,” p. 252. Ranger here cites the interpretations of prophecy by Douglas Johnson and Jeff Peires that sought to move away from a preoccupation with anti-colonial militancy in order to view prophecy as a response to indigenous institutional failures. See Douglas Johnson, Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford 1995); Jeff Peires, Th e Dead will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington, Indiana 1989). war of words 43 by curing, protecting and empowering or, for victims of witchcraft , by weakening, draining and poisoning.”29 Transformative medicines were handled by ritual specialists (most oft en referred to as mediums or diviners), who were associated with specifi c locations where they communicated with ancestral spirits. During the Maji Maji period there were several regional and local centers where ritual specialists played a role in protecting and empowering local communities. Because scholars have recently begun to undertake more detailed studies of this instrumental role of medicine, it is possible here to sketch a general outline as a background to our analysis of the medicine’s narrative function. Th e uses of medicine during Maji Maji can be productively considered in a regional way, in part because the prevailing social conditions were also regional. Th ere were signifi cant diff erences in the experience of confl ict in the years leading up to Maji Maji, diff erences that shaped the way medicine was understood and practiced. In Matumbi and Ngindo areas in the southeast, for example, communities had experienced long-term instability due to raiding attacks from Ngoni and Mbunga in the interior, and from slave traders at the coast. Th ey also experienced disruptions during the early years of German colonialism in the form of forced labor and agrarian decline. Th ese experiences led to increased reliance on medicines of protection or dawa ya kinga, and thus also to the circulation of knowledge about protective resources. During this time of turmoil, according to Larson, ritual activity at Mgende became more important and diviners from the Mgende shrines were extending their reach outwards into new territories. In the southern highlands, accounts describe local leaders seeking news of medicines used in warfare, particularly new and potent medicines from outside the area. War medicines were very much in demand in the late pre-colonial period, as leaders sought both symbolic and material mechanisms for enhancing their prowess in warfare, for the implementation of military alliances, and for the protection of their followers.30 A regional perspective is also useful because shrines and the diviners connected with them were spatially defi ned, rooted in sacred

29 Maia Green, “Medicines and the Embodiment of Substances among Pogoro Catholics, Southern Tanzania,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996), 485–98. 30 For more on the way alliances were formed, and the role of symbolism, see Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji.” 44 chapter one locations while also reaching out to a broader territory. Mgende, situated strategically at the crossroads of trade and communications networks, had strong connections with ritual centers to the west towards Songea and to the east towards the coast. Th e diviners at shrines at Mpanga Falls (Kibesa) and further to the southeast at Ngarambe were mediums for the spirit known as Bokero, or Kolelo. Kolelo has been described as a god who could bring rain and fertility, and protect against drought and crop predators. According to one contemporary German source the spirit of Bokero, through medicines controlled by a spirit medium, could “free those who possessed it from all agricultural cares. Further, it would confer prosperity and health, would protect them from famine and sickness, and would especially protect the fi elds against devastation by wild pigs.”31 An observer described the Kolelo/Bokero cults as embodying a fl ourishing ritual practice that attracted people “from many parts of southern and eastern Tanzania to seek medicines for rain and fertility.”32 To the west towards Mahenge, mbui diviners were also associated with sacred sites, known as ludewa. In a remarkable account of her interview with an mbui diviner near Kwiro Mission in Mahenge in 1959, Dr. Louise Jilek-Aall reproduces testimony from the mbui about his healing practice and his territorial shrine: My grandfather who was a famous mbui made this place his sanctuary. Everything here, the trees and plants, the water in the stream and the very air itself has healing power. A person in trouble will undergo a puri- fying ceremony and sleep here at night. Th e spirits of his ancestors will appear to him in sleep. Th e next morning he tells me his dream and I help him understand the message conveyed to him. . . . Behind the ludewa is a little stream where I can dam the water so that it forms a pool. I will shave everybody’s head and throw the hair into the pool. Th en they all have to take a ritual bath in the clear water. Aft erwards, while they watch me, I open the dam and let the water run out. As the water washes away the hair and dirt from their body, so their guilt and wrongdoings are swept away down the river. I try to reestablish peace between the people according to our custom. Whatever the dispute is about—a barren wife, an unfaithful spouse, a disrespectful child or even a land-claim—we have to abide by the rules inherited from our ancestors.33

31 Moritz Merker, “Ueber die Aufstandsbewegung in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Militar- Wochenblatt. 91 (1906), 1022–23. Translated and published in Gwassa and Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, Part I (Dar es Salaam 1967), 10. 32 Iliff e, “Th e Organization,” p. 504. 33 Louise Jilek-Aall, Call Mama Doctor: African Notes of a Young Woman Doctor (Seattle and Saanichton, B.C. 1979), 157. war of words 45

Several of the themes in this testimony can be found in contemporary accounts of the role of diviners during Maji Maji. At the sacred site, a client would be able to see the spirits of their ancestors.34 Th e diviner used a pool of water for ritual purposes that were connected to cleansing or purifi cation, and sought thereby to resolve disputes among community members. Th e act of shaving the hair has been associated with cleansing and purifi cation in the region up to the present, as the work of Maia Green has shown, especially during anti- witchcraft movements.35 Witchcraft eradication practices were a part of everyday local practice and also spawned periodic movements on a larger scale. Like other uses of medicines, anti-witchcraft practices intensifi ed in the period of social ills, environmental and physical hardship that preceded (and followed) Maji Maji.36 In Uvidunda, a ‘deceiver’ named Hongo reportedly came into the area in August, 1905. He spoke of a prophecy in which god would help them to defeat the Europeans. His teachings were rejected by the Vidunda chief, Ngwira, despite the support Hongo had from the jumbes and old men in the area. Th us Hongo declared himself to be the new chief of the village, and “gave orders that every man must anoint himself with his Usinga medicine; anyone who refused was to be caught and killed. People began to fear that they would be called witches and all the people of Kidodi and the people of Jumbe Kulumzima went to Hongo to receive his medicine.”37 Here the medicine was anointed on the face, chest and legs of those who sought protection. Th e medicine was interpreted in the context of witchcraft eradication in Uvidunda, which according to this recollection caused it to be accepted. Water played a central role in ritual practice at territorial shrines and other ritual centers throughout the region. In Jilek-Aal’s account, the mbui describes a “water ordeal” used during witch-fi nding that involved the sprinkling of water on his hand. Green describes the way wambui sprinkled or distributed water from their sacred pools as a

34 Th e appearance of ancestors at divination sites, guided by diviners, has been interpreted by some scholars as evidence of millenarianism. From these accounts, it appears that this was a common part of healing practices. 35 Green, “Medicines and the Embodiment of Substances,” see also Maia Green and Simeon Mesaki, “Th e birth of the ‘salon’: Poverty, ‘modernization,’ and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania,” American Ethnologist 32 (August 2005), p. 371–88. 36 Ranger, “Witchcraft ;” Larson “Sequences.” 37 Schaegelen, “Th e Ethnography of the Vidunda Tribe,” in Gwassa and Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, p. 18. 46 chapter one form of blessing to convey good health and ‘coolness.’38 Many other accounts describe similar uses of water in ritual practice. At the time of Maji Maji the medium at Kibesa took water from the sacred pool and gave it to his clients, who used it “in general as a panacea” by, for example, sprinkling it over their fi elds.39 Th is water, according to another source, was also poured over the heads of clients or given to them to drink. It was distributed to followers in small lengths of hol- low bamboo pipe, which were worn around the neck as an amulet.40 Th e spirit Kolelo was associated with pools of water at Kibesa and at Ngarambe to the east.41 In one account, the diviner Kinjikitile fell into the pool at Ngarambe aft er becoming possessed. He disappeared into the pool, where he remained overnight. When he emerged unhurt with dry clothes the following morning, he began to speak of new prophecies.42 Th e association of the medicine with the waters of the Rufi ji and the pools at the ritual centers is one explanation for the potency attributed to ‘water’ medicine or maji during Maji Maji. During times of stress in Rufi ji and Kilwa Districts, large numbers of people made their way to ritual centers in order to seek the intervention of the medium, and to propitiate the Kolelo deity. German reports described pilgrimages of hundreds of adults who visited mediums during the time leading up to Maji Maji. According to Sunseri, Kolelo “was placated with gift s such as black cloth, beads, chickens and salt, and by charms placed in fi elds and along crossroads.”43 Th e water medicine was also sprinkled over groups of people, according to one report. An elder from Ngarambe remembered a man named Mpokosi who was sent out as a representative of the Kolelo medium. Th is man participated in a dance known as likinda. During the dancing, Mpo- kosi “used to take his fl y-whisk and his calabash container for medicine, and he went around sprinkling [the dancers] with medicine.”44 Military leaders used medicines as a wartime strategy to ensure (or to coerce) loyalty and commitment among their soldiers. R.M. Bell

38 Green, “Medicines,” p. 489. 39 Gwassa, “Kinjikitile,” p. 206. 40 Merker, “Ueber die Aufstandsbewegung”. 41 Hassing, German Missionaries and the Maji Maji Rising, pp. 374–5; Gwassa, “Kinjikitile,” p. 207. 42 Mzee Mohamed Nganoga Nimekwako of Ngarambe Ruhingo, interviewed 31 Aug. 1967, translated in Gwassa and Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, p. 9. 43 Sunseri, “Famine,” p. 13. 44 Gwassa and Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, p. 11. war of words 47 interviewed elders in Liwale District in the 1950s who explained the way military leaders had used medicines during Maji Maji to coerce participation in warfare. Before the battle of Liwale, “all the young men from the nearby villages [were brought]. . . . to the scene of the battle and there they were made to drink the magic medicine. Th ey were told quite plainly that anyone who refused to join the cause would be killed.”45 Another account recorded by Bell explains that even the famed hongo messenger who reportedly brought medicine and news of war to Songea, Omari Kinjala, was forced to do so by the leader Abdallah Mapanda as a punishment because he (Kinjala) had refused to take medicine initially with the other members of Mapan- da’s forces.46 Medicines used in wartime could be literally transformative, protecting those who entered a battlefi eld by enabling them to change their shapes (into anthills, for example) or by disabling the weapons of the enemy. According to Akim Mustapha Mbano, the war medicines used by Nduna Songea Mbano had the power “to turn Africans into anthills, and this caused the Europeans to be totally confused.”47 War medicines could also protect villages by causing them to disappear temporarily, or turn them into forests. According to interviews in Njinjo and in other parts of Kilwa District, ritual specialists could use medicines to draw a protective boundary around a human settlement that prevented evil forces from entering. At Njinjo this magic perimeter was reportedly so strong during the German colonial period that it made those Germans who crossed the boundary docile and compliant.48 Th is outline of the regional use of medicines during the period of the Maji Maji confl ict allows us to see the larger context of ritual

45 R.M. Bell “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” unpublished manuscript, 1955, p. 6. Ms. is located in Rhodes House library, Oxford University, MSS.Afr.s.452. 46 R.M. Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” p. 8, citing interview with Kinjala’s brother-in-law Abdullah Mtumwa. 47 Interviews with Daniel Mumello and E. Kilasi at Nyikamtwe, Njombe District; Akim Mustapha Mbano in Songea town. See also Tumpe Ndimbwa, “Research Report on Maji Maji Resistance: Study done in Ubena and Ungoni of Southern Tanzania,” July, 2003. Th e MMRP report for Songea states that the diviner Chikusi who was the “most important medicine man and religious priest of the Wangoni,” was able to turn soldiers into anthills. Th is was confi rmed in oral interviews conducted in Mpitimbi in 2003. MMRP 6/68/4/1/p. 9; 2003 fi eld interviews. 48 Interview with Mohamed Abdala Mkuruwili, Njinjo, Kilwa District, July 20, 2004, carried out by Oswald Masebo and Gasiano Sumbai. 48 chapter one and medicinal practice in the southern region of Tanzania. Special- ists in medicine and divination off ered solutions to crises of fertility and agrarian productivity, witchcraft accusations, social confl ict, drought and other ills. Prophetic leadership intersected with or infl u- enced military leadership when communities responded to crises that took the form of internal confl ict, inter-group competition and colonial intervention. Medicines were therefore transformative substances that diminished vulnerabilities and enhanced resilience for those who sought assistance during a time of adversity. New evidence and new possibilities for interpretation have made it possible to see the role of medicines during the time of the Maji Maji confl ict in more complex ways. Th ere were regional as well as local diff erences in the way medicines were used and exchanged, and in the larger meaning of medicine in the region. As Terence Ranger suggested, medicines were mobilized both in response to the external pressures brought by colonialism, as well as to address internal affl ictions. With this background, I would like to shift the focus away from the instrumental function of medicine—the way medicines were used as material substances by ritual specialists—to focus on the way stories of medicine functioned as powerful narratives both during and aft er the Maji Maji confl ict. I believe that this focus will help us to understand not only the stories that have been told about medicine, but ultimately the maji medicine itself, its deployment and its larger meaning. In the next sections of the paper I will consider the way stories of maji functioned as a set of ideas that came to be mobilized within and among societies in southern Tanzania. Narratives of maji medicine had transformative power for African communities experiencing danger and hardship. For Germans in Africa as well as in Europe stories of medicine also infl uenced ideas and events. Th is approach allows us to see the way a dominant narrative about medicine emerged out of multiple narratives, a process that occurred remarkably early in the case of German observers. Following the interplay between German understandings of the role of medicine and those of African actors, we see that new narratives emerged through an interactive process that involved spoken and written forms, Afri- can as well as European. Th ese narratives of maji medicine went on to be deployed in new political, social and cultural settings. With this approach we can better understand the way stories of maji were fash- ioned into explanatory constructs in the prevailing historiography, and how they have retained salience over time. war of words 49

News of War: The “Eingeborenen Nachrichten”

To begin this investigation, it is useful to go back to the fi rst reports of maji medicine that emerged as the war began. It is remarkable in retrospect to see how quickly the Germans formulated their description and analysis of ritual activity aft er the fi rst outbreak of violence. Within a week aft er reports reached Dar es Salaam that “robber bands” from the Matumbi Hills in Kilwa District had attacked the small coastal settlement of Somanga, the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung was off ering its readers an interpretation of the events. Th e fi rst report appeared on August 5, 1905 and stated that this “räuberische Aufstand” (bandit revolt) appeared to be directed against Indians and Arabs, and had been stirred up by the activities of a sorcerer who lived in the Matumbi Hills. As background information to facilitate an understanding of the events, the report added that the “Matumbis” in the whole area were widely known to be thieves and drunkards, and were diffi cult for the authorities to control because of the remote and rugged terrain they inhabited. A week later—two weeks aft er the attack on Somanga—the DOAZ published a more detailed account of the role played by sorcerers in the attack, mentioning that these magicians had found fertile ground among the Matumbi people who were by nature wild and warlike, and who had also been drinking large quantities of millet beer aft er an abundant harvest. Th is was the beginning of an ethnography of rebellion that associated Matumbi ethnicity with negative attributes such as drunknenness, aggression, wild behavior, and receptivity to the workings of sorcerers.49 Th ese two reports—appearing in short succession aft er the outbreak of confl ict in early August—helped to set the stage for the later interpretation of events. Th ey illustrate the way news of the confl ict traveled from local observers to towns, from government reports to the press, and from colony to metropole.50 Reports from the DOAZ

49 “Aus der Kolonie: Räuberische Überfälle der Eingeborene im Süden,” DOAZ 31,7 (August 5 1905). Th e same report was published a month later in the Deutsches Kolo- nial Zeitung (DKZ) 35,22 (September 2, 1905), 375, with the title “Die Anfänge des Aufstandes in den Matumbibergen.” I am using the terms “sorcerer” and “magician” interchangeably here for the term “zauberer” in the German sources. 50 According to Ida Pipping-van Hulten, local newspapers “were lavish with reprint- ing articles that had appeared in large and small newspapers in Germany,” by missionaries and other colonial “authorities.” Pipping-van Hulten, An Episode of Colonial History: Th e German Press in Tanzania 1901–1914, Scandanavian Institute of African Studies Research Report no. 22 (Uppsala 1974), 10. 50 chapter one frequently appeared in the Deutsche Kolonial Zeitung in Berlin some weeks aft er their publication in East Africa. For example, the August 5 DOAZ report on “Räuberische Ueberfälle” described above was repub- lished in the DKZ a month later with the new title “Die Anfänge des Aufstandes in den Matumbibergen,” a title that narratively situated the Somanga attack as the starting point in the Maji Maji confl ict.51 Readers of the August 12 edition of the DOAZ in Dar es Salaam were provided with a full account of the events that had launched the rebellion in the Matumbi Hills. Th e report explained that the rebellion was a movement led by sorcerers who possessed substances that could be used to promote the growth of crops, to protect against famine, and to enhance the fertility of the fi elds. Th ese substances would allow rural people to forego other forms of economic activity, especially rubber collection and cotton planting. Th e substances would thereby enable people to become self-suffi cient and independent from external domination: because the fi elds would be fertile and the crops would fl our- ish, the people in the Matumbi Hills “will have no need for Europeans, Arabs or Indians in order to earn money, and thus will also no longer need to pay taxes.”52 Th e teachings of the sorcerers and the substances they specialized in off ered a kind of economic self-determination for the people, one that was anti-colonial by nature. Th e report went on to describe a second function of the teachings of sorcerers: “Th e people were also taught that the magicians possessed substances that had the eff ect of making water rather than fi re come out of the weapons of the Europeans, when they shot at someone.” Th e report emphasized that there were many sorcerers in the Matumbi Hills and many diff erent practices, but that these practices essentially shared one or another of these two meanings. By classify- ing diverse medicinal substances or “zaubermittel” into two primary forms and functions, the August 12 account introduced a theme that would remain at the core of debates about the Maji Maji confl ict. German observers used these accounts of medicines to develop their own arguments about the causes of the rebellion within diff erent contexts. Some, like Wilhelm Arning, rejected the idea that medicines played a role in the rebellion at all: “Middlemen, medicine men, snake-

51 Th e August 12 report fi lled in more details about the outbreak, showing that violence actually began in Kibata some days earlier. Controversies over the precise origin point of Maji Maji are signifi cant today, as we have stated in the introduction. 52 “Über die Unruhen in Suden” DOAZ 32,7 (August 12, 1905). war of words 51 charmers, magicians, and all the rest are irrelevant, or only exist in the imagination of those who do not want to see,” he wrote in the DKZ on September 1905, arguing that taxation was the true reason for the confl ict.53 For Acting Rufi ji District Secretary Otto Stollowsky, on the other hand, medicines were at the heart of his argument that Maji Maji could (and should) have been foreseen by German observers.54 Th ese early written sources give us a view into the formation of narrative about the Maji Maji war during the fi rst months of the confl ict, for the German side. We can see the way accounts emerged out of specifi c contexts, were then circulated in print, and later became evidence in debates about the war and about colonialism.55 Because there was an overall shortage of offi cial information about the events in East Africa (Von Merker himself warned that reports from the fi eld of battle were woefully thin) some German accounts contained wild speculations about the practices of African warriors and diviners that included cannibalism.56 Reports routinely emphasized the centrality of medicine’s function in turning bullets to water, and sought to fi nd the origin of this practice both inside and outside of Africa. For example, one report that appeared in the DOAZ in November 1905 announced triumphantly that the origins of the water medicine had fi nally been found—on the island of Zanzibar. Zanzibaris had used medicines to make themselves invulnerable to British weapons during the ouster of Seyyid Khalid in 1896; now the authorities only had to discover how this “Arabic” practice had made its way to Umatumbi.57

53 Wilhelm Arning, “Zu den Unrühe in Ostafrika,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 37, 22 (September 16 1905), 390–1. 54 A discussion of the Stollowsky report can be found in Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, ed. David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (London, 1995), 124–42. 55 Sonja Mezger’s important work on debates in the German press shows this very clearly. Sonja Mezger and Inka Chall, “Die Perspektive der Sieger: Der Maji-Maji- Krieg in der kolonialen Presse,” in Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905– 1907, ed. F. Becker and J. Beez, (Berlin: Links Verlag 2004), 143–53. 56 In a report that described a connection between the use of maji in Kilwa District and a similar medicine used in Zanzibar during the British ouster of Seyyid Khaled in 1896, it was stated that “das Verzehren von Menschenfl eisch (meist Leichenteilen) eine grosse Rolle beim ‘Zaubern’ spielt.” On the problems of getting accurate reports in Germany, see , “Aus der Kolonie,” DOAZ 47 (November 25 1905). 57 “Die Maji-Maji Lehre arabischen Ursprungs!” DOAZ 8,2 (January 13 1906). Th is incident was reported in the account of Robert Nunez Lyne, Zanzibar in Contempo- rary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (London 1905), 201, where it was read by German observers. 52 chapter one

At the same time that these accounts were circulating among German audiences, stories of war and of the role of medicine were also on the move within African communities. It is more diffi cult for us to reconstruct the content of these accounts or how they were used. However, because the Germans themselves relied almost exclusively on the reports of Africans—what they called “eingeborenen Nachrich- ten”—we can fi nd some clues in the German sources as to the kinds of stories that were forming on the African side. Th ese accounts give the impression of a network of verbal and symbolic communication that circulated among African communities; while a parallel network circulated versions of the same stories among Germans in the colony and between German East Africa and Europe. Th e eingeborenen Nach- richten operated as a conduit of narrative transmission between the one network and the other. Yet material obtained from the eingeborenen Nachrichten must be used with care, because of the contexts in which they were solicited and recorded. By looking closely at these contexts we become aware of the overall problems of collection, transmission and translation of accounts of medicine at the time. African sources of information during the war included those who were part of the German military and civilian administrations—akida local administrators and askari soldiers—as well as others who were allied with the Germans, for example traders such as Rashid bin Masoud of Songea.58 Missionaries assisted in the collection and dissemination of news during the war when information acquired from their African converts was passed to the colonial government or to the German public in the form of letters, newspaper articles, and public lectures.59 Other sources of information were obtained from the side of the enemy—war prisoners are mentioned most frequently as sources in military reports, as are wounded enemy soldiers and captured villagers. In many accounts it is

58 Von Merker states that it was Rashid bin Masoud who fi rst reported to the Germans that Ngoni leader Chabruma had taken the medicine and thereby become a Haupthetzer or leader of agitation; in the same section of his report he describes “färbige Händler” who brought news of rebel forces gathering at Nyamabengo. Th is was reported also in “Die Ereignisse im Bezirk Ssongea von Beginn der Unruhen bis Mitte November 1905,” DOAZ, 8,4 (January 27 1906); Von Merker, “Über die Auf- standsbewegung in Deutsch-Ostafrica,” pp. 1530–2. 59 For example, a letter from the African mission teacher Daniel Kasuku, originally written in Kigogo from Maneromango, was published in the Berliner Missions-Berichte in January 1906. (pp. 44–5) aft er Kasuku had sent it to missionary Herr Wentzel, in Kröslin. war of words 53 very diffi cult to sort out the precise origins of reports, since (perhaps most oft en) the identities of African sources and European reporters are not identifi ed. Because the Germans relied so heavily on “native reports,” most of them from the side of the enemy, they were vulnerable to deception. In some cases false information was deliberately passed on in an eff ort to mislead German troops. Following a successful ambush on German troops near Ukwege, for example, local people began to appear at military posts throughout the area where they fi rst claimed to surrender and then passed on falsehoods about the positions of the enemy, in hopes of drawing out another ambush.60 Many of the eingeborenen Nachrichten were obtained from those who had suff ered under Ger- man use of force. At Maneromango on the 26th of August, German troops were in the midst of burning and plundering houses, killing the warriors of the leader Kibasila, and carrying out other forms of retributive violence (straf ), when they captured an old woman. As they laid waste to her village, they obtained a testimony from her about a communication between Kibasila and a relative in the Matumbi Hills who had links to a diviner.61 Her story became an important form of evidence—yet we must also acknowledge this context of violence within which captives, prisoners and the wounded spoke to their interrogators. At military stations the Germans paid local people to turn in suspected rebels—defi ned by the Germans as jumbes and zauberer. Th ese activities may have encouraged the German reception of certain kinds of stories, particularly given their insistence on the complicity of diviners. In some cases it is plausible that news of the relationship between medicine, leadership and power may have fl owed from the German to the local African side. In both Dar es Salaam and in Lindi, Ger- man offi cials organized meetings of the local jumbes to impress upon them the dangers of joining the rebellion. Local leaders were warned to beware of outsiders coming into their area with the intention of inciting rebellious acts. In the same meetings they were told to avoid magicians and to be watchful of the activities of sorcerers or anyone

60 Von Merker, “Über die Aufstandsbewegung,” p. 1536. 61 DOAZ (26 August, 1905), 34, 7. 54 chapter one from outside their area who talked of snake gods who might mislead their followers.62 From the reports of missionary Christian Schumann we have other examples of the way stories about medicine—stories that emphasized a particular understanding of medicine that conveyed invulnerability to bullets—were exchanged in both directions between Germans and Africans, and later ended up in print. In the middle of September, Schumann and his colleagues at neighboring mission stations were exchanging messages with one another, with the German military and with their local allies in an eff ort to determine what was going on. When chief Mwakyuma sent a message to Schumann to request his advice, Schumann responded that Mwakyuma “should not get himself involved with the medicine deception, for this was an insurgency against the government.” As Schumann and Mwakyuma continued to discuss the matter, a “medicine man” arrived from Iringa. Schumann interrogated the man right away, in the presence of Mwakyuma’s messengers so that they could be witnesses. When the man explained that Ngoni had forcibly sprinkled him with medicines on the way from Songea, the missionary grabbed a knife. “Before all who watched I grabbed my table knife and said, ‘All of you who have taken medicine, are you all really invulnerable? So that the point of a spear will break before it presses into your fl esh?’ Th en I took his arm and cut into it. When blood then came out, all the blacks rejoiced greatly.”63 Th is account describes the way Schumann learned about medicine from diff erent sources. It shows that Schumann had his own interpretation of the role of medicine, one that he attempted to convey to local leaders in order to infl uence their reception of medicine rumors and their subsequent actions. He was attempting, he wrote, to steer or manage (steuern in German) the superstitions that were arising at the time. To do so, Schumann sent messages of warning to all of the chiefs in the area about the dangerous deception of the medicine stories. “Above all I said to them,” he wrote, “that they should try out the substances by fi rst giving the medicine to a dog or to a sheep and then seeing whether the animal was made invulnerable.”64

62 DOAZ, 36,7, (September 9, 1905). 63 C. Schumann, “Die Schreckenstage auf der Missionsstation Jakobi,” Berliner Mis- sionsberichte (January 1906), 62–3. 64 Schumann, “Die Schreckenstage”. war of words 55

Rumors of Medicine

From these written reports we are able to obtain a sense of the kinds of stories about maji that were told to Germans in specifi c settings. Yet they still do not tell us very much about the kinds of narratives that Africans were circulating within and among their own communities and along trade routes, both on sea and on land. Rumors may have been spreading like wildfi re, but it is diffi cult for us to understand their content and their function from this distance. Fortunately we do have some examples that can give a view into the way narrative emerged, was circulated, and attained infl uence. British colonial administrator R.M. Bell interviewed people living in Liwale District in the 1940s about the history of Maji Maji. His account—both the published version in Tanganyika Notes and Records and a longer unpublished version of his manuscript—provides detailed information about the way news of war and news of medicine circulated between Matumbi and Liwale in the months preceding the attack on Liwale station. News had reached central Liwale that there was a confl ict emerging and that a diviner was dispensing medicine at the ritual center at Ngarambe. Bell’s interviewees explained to him the way this news was exchanged: For about three months before this event [the attack on Liwale military station] the natives of central Liwale had been discussing the Ngarambi doctor’s medicine and the manner in which news of the medicine was circulated is interesting. Nobody who knew of the medicine’s powers was allowed to part with the information except on payment of one pesa. Moreover, no open mention was made of the medicine . . . A man having paid his pesa was naturally anxious to recover it and he would go to a friend and tell him that he knew a secret story which came from the Matumbi (of Kibata). He would explain to his friend that he himself had to pay a pesa for this extraordinary tale and could only part with it on receipt of the same sum. Th ere was of course nothing to prevent a native from making any number of pesa and ‘the story’ went round with the rapidity of a chain letter.65 Th e story that was told in Liwale for the price of a pesa was that anyone who visited Ngarambe carrying pesa and some salt to the diviner Bokero would be able to see their ancestors. Unfortunately, when the elephant hunter Abdallah Mapanda went to Ngarambe he was not in

65 Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” manuscript, p. 5. 56 chapter one fact able to see his ancestors, and was told that in order to do so he must fi rst make war on Europeans and foreigners. Mapanda proceeded to use medicine from Ngarambe to persuade his followers, both young and old, to join him in making war on Liwale station. Th ose who did not participate, evidenced by their refusal to participate in a water ritual, would be killed and their blood taken to feed the Ngarambe diviner.66 Bell’s account conveys a vivid depiction of the way news and rumor of divination and medicine circulated in Liwale District in the period leading up to the confl ict. Th e rumors that circulated like a “chain letter” set the stage for later understandings and actions related to war. Th ey created a context that Mapanda was able to exploit when he recruited local men to attack Liwale, and had an infl uence therefore on the attack and its outcome. Th e assault on Liwale military station was one of the most important early events of the Maji Maji war, and the fall of Liwale—along with the murder of Benedictine Bishop Cas- sian Spiss—was the substance of later news reports that circulated in the interior. Th ese stories of the two African victories circulated along with material evidence in the form of war booty. Th e reports had a profound infl uence on subsequent events, according to observers. Th e German boma at Liwale was attacked in the early morning hours of August 15, 1905.67 Th e story is told in many accounts, both oral and written. Von Merker provides a detailed description of the unfolding of events in his 1906 report published in the Militär-Wochenblatt. Early in the morning on August 15, the Liwale military post was attacked by great numbers of Wangindo, who were armed only with bows and poisoned arrows. Aft er a two-hour battle, four askari had fallen. Th e German offi cer, Staff Sergeant Faupel, retreated from the palisade of the boma to his own house, but was forced to leave it again aft er the rebels set fi re to the straw roof. Faupel tried to run from there with two of his askaris to the neighboring house of the German rubber trader Aimer, but was hit by poisoned arrows and died immediately. Aimer

66 Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” manuscript, p. 6. 67 Th ere is some discrepancy about the date. According to Von Merker’s account, the attack took place at dawn on the 15th. Iliff e has it taking place on the 13th of August, the day before the death of Bishop Spiss and before Abdallah Mapanda’s attack. Bell’s account does not resolve the discrepancy but indicates that we may not have enough concrete evidence to determine the exact dates. Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 172; Von Merker, “Über die Aufstandsbewegung,” p. 1089. Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” manuscript appendix, p. 1. war of words 57 subsequently disappeared, and the two askaris eventually made it to the coast to tell the tale. Th e Liwale military post and the trade headquarters of Aimer were completely destroyed. Th e report of what took place at Liwale was carried to the coast by the two surviving askaris, who were the only survivors on the German side and thus their only loyal eyewitnesses. We may assume that Von Merker’s account was based on their original story. A very diff erent account of what took place at Liwale was told to missionary Schumann in Njombe (Lupembe) later that month. In the last days of August, he wrote in the Berliner Missions-Bericht, there were unsubstantiated rumors buzzing around [Njombe], saying that war was coming. But it was impossible to determine exactly where this war was. On the fi rst of September, the rumors took a more defi nite form. Malinga, one of my people from the Sakamaganga outpost, came from there and recounted amazing stories [märe]. It is said that a new master [Herr] has appeared; whether this is a God or something else, is not yet clear, in any case this new master is said to be more powerful than the whites, and he has come in order to liberate the blacks from the overrule of the Europeans. Two military stations are said to have fallen, nothing could stand in his way. Th e incident is said to have taken place as follows: A white hen came fi rst, followed by a virgin, who was followed by a baboon. Th e hen came up to the Stationschef and greeted him. Th e Stationschef approached the hen, as was appropriate for him as the master [Herr], to ask whether there would then be war, aft er which the hen answered “yes.” In the same moment the baboon sprang onto the roof and set fi re to it. Men then appeared from all sides with long knives and slaughtered the whites together with their askaris. Th e whites tried to defend themselves with their weapons, but when they tried to shoot, water came out instead of bullets. ‘A new Master has appeared, the whites are just old women, they have been deceiving us until now,’ that was the joyful message that moved all the people.68 Here we have two very diff erent “native reports” of the same event, told in diff erent contexts by diff erent Africans to diff erent Germans. Both of them ended up published in European journals, illustrating the way stories were formed and how they subsequently recirculated. Th is particular example also gives us some insight into the role played by rumor during the war. In Schumann’s detailed description we read

68 “Die Schreckenstage auf der Missionsstation Jakobi: 1. Bericht von Superinten- dent Schumann,” Berlin Missions-Bericht (January 1906), 44–5. 58 chapter one fi rst about the tension and anxiety that accompanied the fi rst rumors of war to appear in Njombe. Th e early rumors were not specifi c, only vaguely referring to a war that was “coming,” but not to where or when. Th is state of anxiety and not knowing is what Paul Fussell refers to as the “fog” in which magical outcomes may suggest themselves. Th e fog is itself created by formless hearsay and uncertain stories. Soon, however, a specifi c rumor emerges that has a “more defi nite form”—but what a fantastic rumor it turns out to be, with tales of talking hens and arsonist baboons. It is likely that the animal characters in this report were coded references. One of the diffi culties that faced Germans who sought to obtain and interpret local accounts of events during the Maji Maji confl ict was the fact that stories were oft en controlled by taboos and other restrictions. According to Bell, those who actually visited ritual centers had to follow prohibitions or miiko that included limits on speech, meaning that “true” accounts of what took place there were only fully understood by those who had themselves participated. Th e use of symbolic language was widespread, and has been recorded in several places. It is also remembered in the present day by communities in the areas where the war took place. Th e story recorded by Schumann about the fall of Liwale refl ects some of the symbolic terms that were in use. Th e “white hen” was a reference in Songea to a god known as Chimulungu, and was also used to refer to the rebel leader Omari Kinjala. Euro- peans were referred to as red earth, and warfare was referred to as a “women’s dance.”69 Th ese examples illustrate the ritual power associated with language, in particular with references to the events and practices of war during Maji Maji. Here we see another form of interconnection between ritual practice and narrative during the confl ict. Th e stories that circulated upon the fall of Liwale may have been the most signifi cant narratives to emerge during the Maji Maji confl ict, and were seen at the time as causing events to shift dramatically. Von Merker himself recognized the power of these accounts, writing that the power of rumor had led new groups to join the struggle. He wrote that news of the death of Cassian Spiss and of the fall of Liwale, both confi rmed materially by the circulation of booty, gave

69 Bell wrote that one of the prohibitions that accompanied the dispensation of medicine and information about medicine was a restriction on speech: “. . . a prohibi- tion was put on the use of certain words,” Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” p. 6. war of words 59 the signal to those in the interior that the time had come to launch their attacks. Other writers also attributed the outbreak of war in Son- gea and Njombe to the reception of rumors of victory from Liwale. In the view of R.M. Bell, “Th e moral eff ect of the fall Liwale and the destruction of the missionary caravan was as great as the serious- ness of the situation now confronting the government.”70 According to Von Merker, these accounts had become persuasive through narrative exaggeration: “. . . . deren Wirkung [wurde] durch die üblichen lügenhaft en Uebertreibungen vergrössert.” (their eff ect was increased through the typical untruthful exaggerations). On the German side, accounts of the African victory at Liwale led Governor von Götzen to cable home for reinforcements, and on the same day he received a telegram announcing the dispatch of two cruisers and a company of marines to East Africa.71 From Schumann’s reports at Lupembe we have further accounts of the kinds of rumors that reached the mission, how Africans and Euro- peans understood these rumors, and how they infl uenced the events of the war. As we have already seen, Schumann learned much of what he recorded in his reports from the Africans themselves. He also received news from other missionaries. In early September, Schumann received a report that missionary Neuberg and his family, from Milo mission, had made it safely on foot to Kidugala mission, but that he had been robbed of everything he owned along the way. On the same day Schumann received a message passing along the discovery that the entire rebellion had been organized by an Arab by the name of Sahidi. Schumann had been just about to embark upon a support mission to relieve embattled Yakobi mission, and was setting out on foot to the west with a small party carrying weapons and ammunition. On receiving these two reports, however, he turned back: what if his weapons were seized by bandits, and used by the enemy side? “Heese, Hahn and I decided,” he wrote, “that we would not put up any opposition here, it would have no purpose.” Th ey turned back, leaving missionary Gröschel to defend Yakobi mission on his own. (Schumann would succeed in reaching Yakobi later in September just as the mission fell

70 Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” p. 10 71 Bell, “Th e Maji-Maji Rebellion,” p. 10. 60 chapter one under attack.)72 Th ey buried their ammunition and disabled their fi rearms. In this instance we see the way the combination of two very diff erent forms of news during wartime caused Schumann to change his plans. Th e fi rst report, from Neuberg, was a direct account of the missionaries’ experience on the way from Milo to Kidugala. Th e other report was the repetition of rumor especially threatening to the Chris- tian missionaries—that the rebellion was organized and directed by Muslim Arabs. Th e combination of news and rumor in this case was what frightened Schumann into recognizing his own “foolhardiness” and changing his plans. News and rumor had a direct outcome on the events that took place in the mission battles in Njombe district. In this section we have seen the way that reports of medicine and ritual activity were reported to German observers, and how these then recirculated in diff erent spheres. We have also seen, though not so clearly, how African reports of war and its outcome were narrated, through their documentation in published texts. I have suggested that there were parallel networks in which stories circulated, and that these networks were linked by the stories told as eingeborenen Nachrichten in specifi c contexts. As acknowledged by those who witnessed the war on the ground, narratives had power during the Maji Maji war. News of war and rumors of supernatural intervention moved from one area to another, bringing confusion to some places and clarity to others. Stories of medicine and its effi cacy could turn the tide of the war by encouraging groups to go into battle against the Germans or to join with them as allies.73

Alliance and Deception

In this last section, I will look at the way narratives of medicine have been remembered and retold in the southern regions of Tanzania in the post-colonial period. I am interested here in the way that stories of the circulation and acceptance of maji continue to have meaning and relevance for groups living in the areas that experienced confl ict.

72 Accounts of the attack on Yakobi are provided by the chapters in this volume by Giblin and Nyagava. 73 For example, a leader in Kidugala, Kichwaya, reportedly was unsure about the medicine and when he saw that it had failed to protect fi ghters in a battle with German troops under Nigmann he decided not to join with the rebels.” “Aus der Kolonie,” DOAZ 48 (December 2 1905). war of words 61

Th ere are so many possible ways to approach this material, that I do not have time to consider them all. I will therefore focus on two main themes. First I will look at stories of medicine as stories about alliance and deception. I will go on to refl ect upon the way maji is used to explain a perceived transition from tradition to modernity, a transition also marked by conversion from earlier beliefs to Christianity and Islam. Th is section is mainly based on oral materials collected in 1968 during the Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP) and in 2002–04 by the “Rethinking Maji Maji” research project. Accounts of the use of maji medicines describe actions that are viewed retrospectively as having been either loyal or disloyal to members of communities and their neighbors. Stories of maji recall the way people came together during the confl ict through alliances, as well as the way they betrayed one another through deception. Th ese stories may be told in ways that connect to contemporary tensions within the community, for example between Christian and Muslim neighbors. Or they may reiterate beliefs about identity, for example that certain groups of people were warlike while others were peaceful; or ethical behavior, for example in stories that people in some villages provided protection and refuge to neighbors fl eeing the war while others turned their backs or benefi ted from plunder. In many narratives from Maji Maji fi eld research projects, the spread of medicine is associated with deceit and vengeance. Rather than being a tool of unifi cation, in these stories the maji is described as a ploy that was used to defeat political rivals, to maneuver within secession disputes and to punish earlier misdeeds. Several versions of these narratives are common in Songea District. One of them has to do with the relationship between Ngindo and the Ngoni leader Chab- ruma, referred to above. In most oral accounts, Ngindo are described as specialists in magic, witchcraft or witchcraft eradication, and poisons. Th ese specializations are most oft en cited as the background to their role as the primary circulators of the water medicine during the rebellion. According to some informants in Songea, however, the main reason the Ngindo were circulating medicine was not because the medicine was eff ective, but because it wasn’t. Ngoni leader Chabruma is said to have been deceived into using the maji medicine (and thus into defeat at the hands of the Germans) by neighboring Ngindo. Th ese Ngindo were seeking revenge against Chabruma for the devastation caused by Ngoni raiding parties three years prior to the rebellion: 62 chapter one

Th e people who brought the Maji Maji medicine to Chabruma came from the Wangindo tribe of the Liwale district. It happened that about three years before the Wangindo brought the medicine Chabruma and his soldiers had gone to Ungindo to fi ght and defeat the Wangindo. As a revenge the Wangindo decided to go to Chabruma and persuade him to start war against the Europeans so that he could eventually get bitten [sic] by the latter.74 In many accounts, the arrival of the maji is said to have touched off tensions between the older medicines and new arrivals. In some cases the older medicines were connected to ancestral spirit propitiation practices (tambiko) that were presided over by ritual elders or heads of lineages. In Usangu, Chief Merere had begun to make plans to employ the new war medicine or mlenga that had arrived from Ubena, when his council of elders disagreed, saying that the lihomelo oracle must be consulted. Th e elders sought to uphold the supremacy of their lihomelo oracle in the face of a new form of medicine that was not under their control.75 In this case competition between powerful interest groups in Usangu was expressed in terms of a confl ict between the mlenga medicine and an older divination practice. Other stories of the maji medicine contain powerful memories of past alliances. As I have argued elsewhere, alliances in southern Tanza- nia were among the most important mechanisms used by local people in times of war, famine and hardship.76 In the face of expansionist neighbors such as the Hehe in the late precolonial period, as Mar- cia Wright pointed out in 1968, “it had become expedient to contact alliances with neighbouring tribes, and again these tend to be better remembered in tradition than the growing commercial and economic activity of the same period.”77 Th us not only were alliances important at the time, they have become a strong component of local and regional historical memory. Memories of alliances are important to the narratives of medicine in the Maji Maji record as well. Memories of alliance tell a story about who joined with whom; who refused to

74 MMRP 6/68/4/3/1: “As a revenge the Wangindo decided to go to Chabruma and persuade him to start war against the Europeans so that he could eventually get bitten [sic] by the latter.” See also MMRP 6/68/4/3/8, and other testimonies in this set. 75 MMRP 5/68/1/3/8, Marcia Wright, “Chief Merere and the Germans,” Tanzania Notes and Records 69 (1968), 49; John Iliff e, “Th e Organization of the Maji Maji Rebel- lion,” Journal of African History 8 (1967), 509. 76 An in-depth study of alliances in the southern highlands during the Maji Maji rebellion can be found in Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji.” 77 Marcia Wright, “Chief Merere and the Germans,” p. 42. war of words 63 join; who used medicine to heal and who used it to deceive; who allied with the Germans and who allied with the rebels; and so on. A farmer in Uhehe put it this way when he was interviewed in 1968: “Aft er taking medicine one became a friend of the Mbunga, their ally against the Germans.”78 Another respondent from Uzungwa remembered that wearing a string of castor oil seeds and sticks about the head “was a sign that they were allies of Mbunga.”79 In Usangu, stories of medicine described a chief who gained a strong medicine and potential alliance outside his own territorial boundaries—and the consternation this caused the local elders who were the keepers of the lihomelo oracle. In this story, maji facilitated an external alliance that gave the chief access to an alternative source of ritual power than the one that was forged within Usangu. Th us stories of alliance can be seen as remembering the way local leaders and followers connected to those both inside and outside their communities. Th e tensions and confl icts between diff erent medicines—and therefore between external and internal sources of power—ultimately led to Sangu ambivalence in response to the rebellion.80

Modernity and Conversion

One of the central themes in accounts of maji and therefore in the overall narrative legacy of the war itself is the theme of modernity. Th is theme begins in the German colonial record and continues in various forms, both written and oral, into the present. Many German analyses of the causes of war and the uses of medicine were based on the belief that the war was carried out by disgruntled headmen, who had lost their political and economic power due to German rule. In their struggle to regain their former position, in this view, the jumbes had reverted to their oldest and most traditional ways, to their “tief im Volksglauben wurzelnden übersinnlichen Mitteln.” (supernatural medicines that were deeply rooted in tribal superstitions). Th ey had enlisted the diviners or zauberers at their command in order to drive

78 MMRP 3/68/2/3/2. 79 MMRP 3/68/2/3/6. 80 See, for example, MMRP 3/68/2/1 p. 2: “Th e old men commented that the whole thing was very silly, for the medicine would not and did not work as the doctors had prophesied.” 64 chapter one out the foreign races.81 One correspondent queried, “is it any wonder that they revert back to their ancient customs, turning to the mzimu spirits of their tribes, to the earliest or the most glorious of their ancestors, to seek through them a return to the wonderful former times of independence?”82 Th is view described the use of magic as part of an eff ort to return to an old order, as proof that the rebellion was a backward-looking struggle for tradition by formerly powerful leaders who employed diviners as their co-conspirators. Some Germans described victory over these backward-looking jumbes as a necessary step in furthering modernity and progress. In an account that appeared in the DOAZ, a correspondent defended the violent suppression of African fi ghters by comparing them to the Saxons: Welche blutigen Kämpfe hat es die Franken gekostet, die als Wilde in ihren dichten Wäldern lebenden Sachsen zu überwinden: Wird man da nach Gründen für die wiederholten Erhebungen der wilden Sachsen suchen? Nein. . . . Die Kultur drängte vorwärts, und was sich ihr widersetzte, wurde durch Blut und Eisen belehrt, dass es kein Widerstreben gebe.83 What bloody wars it cost the Franks, to overcome the Saxons who lived like wild men in their dense forests: Does one look for reasons for the repeated uprisings of the wild Saxons? No. . . . Civilization presses forward, and whatever tries to oppose it will be taught through blood and steel that there is no opposing it. Th e division of medicine into the two categories of agrarian and military—described earlier in this paper—was also a part of these debates about tradition and modernity. Th e agrarian function of medicine was embraced by those who believed that the war was based on peasant grievances and therefore rational; the stories about bullets turning into water were proof of a “witchdoctor conspiracy” and a refusal to adapt to the modern world. (It is interesting that later during the 1970s, historians emphasized these wartime functions of maji as proto-nationalist and therefore modern, because they functioned

81 Th is argument had many inconsistencies; while some maintained that the rebels sought to drive away all foreign and dominating races, including Indians and Arabs, other accounts had extensive references to an Indian and/or Arab conspiracy that was behind the violence. 82 “Die Suche nach Aufstandgründen,” DOAZ (December 16, 1905). 83 “Die Suche nach Aufstandgründen,” DOAZ (December 16, 1905). war of words 65 as a unifying ideology, while the role of medicine as agrarian panacea dropped out of the story.) Modernity is also a theme in the oral accounts of the Maji Maji war. Th ese accounts do not refer to medicines as something purely traditional, however, but refer in a variety of ways to maji as something new, or as a combination of tradition and modernity. In the example above from Usangu, the maji was initially rejected not by chief Merere, who actively sought a more powerful war medicine, but by the elders who wished to retain their infl uence as keepers of the oracle. Chiefs and diviners were thus not described as united in an anti-modern eff ort to retain tradition in these accounts, but rather the maji stories reveal tensions between these diff erent forms of leadership and power in local communities. Th ere are many “modern” elements in stories about maji. Several accounts contain references to people purchasing medicine with cash, or carrying containers of coins to support the eff orts of diviners. As we have seen from Bell’s account and can fi nd in other sources, the messages known as njwiwila were sold for one coin.84 Several interviewees stated that Kinjikitile required a payment of 3 rupees in exchange for his medicines. In an interview in Nandete in 2004, Kinjikitile was described as an mchumi or someone who sought economic gain, because he collected these and other payments from his followers. It is evident from the interviews that medicines were already being used before Maji Maji in ways that integrated elements of modernity and tradition. For example, medicines and poisons were applied to guns and to bullets, not just to “traditional” weapons. Th e stories of maji from Umatumbi refer to magical substances being sprinkled into the muzzles of rifl es, and several accounts mention poisonous substances being applied to bullets, the same forms of poisons that were used with arrows. Perhaps the strongest references to modernity in the oral record are those found in stories of conversion to Christianity. By the time the repression of the Maji Maji rebellion was over, the southern region of Tanzania was deeply aff ected by conditions of drought and famine. Some reports speak of German troops deliberately preventing families

84 Gwassa and Iliff e, Records of the Maji Maji Rising, p. 9. Th e use of coins needs to be examined further, however, because coins played a particular role in ritual practice that diff ered from currency exchange. Paper bills did not have this function. 66 chapter one from providing for themselves even aft er the rebellion had been put down, and state that only near mission stations were local people able to fi nd a place of refuge where they could grow food. According to Benedictine Abbot Siegfried, the “high time” of the Ndanda Mission occurred aft er Maji Maji between 1906 and 1916, when the mission was rebuilt with strong fortifi cations. Christianity is almost universally mentioned in oral narratives as the outcome of Maji Maji, as in the example of an elder from Songea who remembered, “the Christian religion spread greatly aft er the war.”85 Stories frequently begin with diviner prophets sprinkling water from gourds, and end with masses of people accepting baptism and settling at missions. Stories of the Maji Maji rebellion are stories not only about rebellion but also about the ultimate defeat of the African forces—and the installation of colonial authority through the superior fi repower of the German army. Th ey are thus stories about loss—about the loss on the battlefi eld, but also about other losses that were cultural, connected to ritual and belief systems. Stories about conversion describe in a dis- tilled and formulaic way the surrender of local communities to “the Germans”—meaning the German military, German missionaries and the German colonial administration. Many accounts—especially those recorded some years aft er the rebellion—lament the defeat during the rebellion of “tradition”—and of people’s faith in that “tradition.” Whether respondents are criticizing the “traditional” medicine for its failure to protect the people, or condemning the Germans, there is universal assent that in the process of the Maji Maji rebellion, there was a dramatic transformation of society. In Songea conversion to the new belief system was symbolically inaugurated at the gallows, when Ngoni war prisoners were baptised by Father Johannes of Peramiho Mission in the last half an hour before their executions. In Songea town in July 2002, Hakimu Mstafa Mbano narrated an account of what happened within his own family at the end of the Maji Maji war, a moment also marked for him by the hanging of the Ngoni chiefs. Aft er the hangings, he said, the grandchildren of Songea Mbano (from whom he is descended) were approached by two strangers, an Arab and a Christian. Each of these strangers had a diff erent religion—the Arab was a Muslim, and the Christian was a

85 MMRP 6/68/4/3/8, p. 3. Th is record credits “Fr. Hilali” with having spread the word in Songea. war of words 67 padre (priest). Because these two strangers had come to spread religion, they wore shoes. Th e grandfathers called the strangers vimulungu because they did not appear to have any toes.86 Th e strangers were not allowed to move freely in the area without escorts; they were therefore given local people as guides who traveled with them as they spread their religion. Hakimu Mbano went on to explain that aft er this, the grandchildren of Songea Mbano decided to follow diff erent religious paths. Th e descendants of Nyuzea Mbano became Christians, while those of Yusufu Ali Mbano became Muslims. From that time onward, the family was separated and did not stay together any longer. Th e family became mixed up thereaft er as a result of adopting diff erent faiths. In this account, the end of the Maji Maji war is described as a time of conversion to new faith traditions, and of the restructuring of family relationships.87 Th ese changes occurred aft er the deaths of the ruling chiefs, including Nduna Songea Mbano himself, therefore during a time of reorganization of power and its dynastic lineage. Th is story eff ectively captures the changes in tradition, faith, family cohesion and power relations experienced by Songea Mbano’s descendants in the wake of the Maji Maji confl ict and his death. Th e account of Hakim Mbano is a powerful testimony to the way the end of the war is remembered as a time of dramatic change in Son- gea, change that is represented by the arrival of newcomers bringing new faiths. Yet it would be wrong to read accounts of medicine and conversion aft er the war as embodying only a nostalgic longing for a failed “tradition.” Rather, they should be viewed as narratives of transition. As we have seen above, the maji in most cases was viewed not as something traditional but as something new, or much more oft en as something that combined elements of tradition and modernity. In

86 Th e term vimulungu (sg. chimulungu) is translated by Bishop J. Komba as spiritual beings. Cited in O.B. Mapunda and G.P. Mpangara, Th e Maji Maji War in Ungoni (Nairobi, 1969). Th e Bantu root of this word, mulungu (mungu in Kiswahili) is most widely translated as “god.” Th e same term was used to describe the messengers who brought news of war into Songea from Ungindo: according to Kassian Njunde of Per- amiho, Chimulungu came to Songea and told the people to reject rule by “red people” and to refuse to pay tax. Th ose who joined with him were called chimulungi. Interview with Kassian Njunde, Peramiho, July 27, 2002. 87 Heike Schmidt has been doing research on this realignment of power and social relationships in Songea District; see Schmidt chapter in this volume. 68 chapter one this way, the stories show the dynamism of the period and of the way people experienced change. In fact, stories of maji medicine themselves contain numerous references to both Christian and Islamic practices.88 In Songea, for example, Nduna Songea Mbano reportedly wrote a letter to his Yao neighbors in northern Mozambique, inviting them to join the war. He sent along “a bottle from prophet Mohamed, it contains the medicine which serves to defeat the Europeans”89 We don’t know if this account is true, and can only speculate on why the reference to Islam was included. How- ever, it is evidence that the maji narratives referred to combinations of elements from diff erent belief systems. Most of these references describe the ways water was sprinkled over people in group settings, or reports that mlungu or a godlike spirit would rise again. In one example the reporter wrote, “Th e whole people of Ngarambi and the neighbouring villages were “baptized” with the maji. Daily there were almost interminable queues to the well of Ngarambi to be “baptized.” Aft er being baptized Bokelo addressed the people.”90 Rather than seeing the stories of medicine and magic as stories of nostalgia for a failed or defeated “tradition,” therefore, it is more accurate to see them as stories of transition. Read closely, the accounts reveal that the maji was used and viewed as a combination of something old and something new. Suspicion arose in Usangu and Songea, for example, because the maji was a new medicine, diff erent from the mahoka or lihomelo rituals of the past, and carriers of maji also required their adherents to discard their previous ritual practices. Rather than seeing Maji Maji narratives as stories of a traditional society forced to undergo conversion to modernity, we should view them as stories about innovations that incorporated their own Christian and Muslim elements. In this way they anticipate the conversion that is to come, and become their own conversion narratives. Stories of maji, then, are worth listening to closely. Th ey are widespread throughout southern Tanzania and they have retained a core of consistent, potent themes and idioms over time. For this reason they can tell us much about the larger meaning of this critical period

88 See Th addeus Sunseri, “Maji Maji and the Millennium: Abrahamic Sources and the Creation of a Tanzanian Resistance Tradition,” History in Africa 26 (1999), 365–78 for a detailed summary of these sources. 89 Mapunda and Mapangara, Th e Maji Maji War in Ungoni p. 13. 90 MMRP 6/68/8/3/8 p. 3. war of words 69 of transition from the late pre-colonial period to German rule. Th ey tell us about the uses of alliances; of loyalties and disloyalties. Th ey tell us about a transition to modernity and Christianity, a transition that was shepherded into being through an innovative African movement that attempted to sweep away colonialism with diverse and dynamic beliefs and practices that incorporated Christian, Muslim, local and regional elements.

CHAPTER TWO

THE NGINDO: EXPLORING THE CENTER OF THE MAJI MAJI REBELLION

Lorne Larson

Th e common tribal characteristics (Zusammengehörigkeit) of the Wangindo, the Wadonde of Liwale, and the Wandendeuli of Schab- ruma, who are located from Kilwa on the coast to [Lake] Nyassa, are another reason for the rapid expansion of the movement outside of the narrow confi nes of the Kichi and Matumbi mountains.1 Long before Maji Maji confl ict ceased, the Colonial Economic Com- mittee was gathering evidence about its causes. In the evidence submitted, the perception off ered in the quotation above was unique. It is a perception that this essay attempts to explore in detail, beginning with a survey of what might be understood by a Ngindo ‘col- lectivity’ in the later nineteenth century. It then embarks on a series of interlocking journeys through the Ungindo region. Th ey take us to its central portion, Undonde; to the land bordering Ungoni, Mgende; to Mpanga in the Rufi ji Valley; and to Utete, south of Mpanga, where we join the Dantz geological expedition of 1899. Th e rich documentation produced by this expedition allows us to establish 1899, the year in which the Germans set in place a nominal district administration, as an historical baseline. Th ese progressions enable us to tease out the diversity of Ungindo, while the baseline helps us to establish the role of medicines, disease and the wild rubber trade in leading to outbreak of war. Th e fi ve years following our baseline are characterized by a Ger- man attempt to create alternative economic activities in anticipation of a perceived ecological destruction of the wild rubber habitat, a fear heightened by the unexpected collapse of the millet harvest hit by disease in 1900–01. Th is evolving economy policy was shaped in the context of proposed investment in a trans-colonial railroad to run through

1 Kolonial Wirtschaft liches Kommittee to Kolonial-Abteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes. 23 January 1906. Bundesarchiv [Barch] R100/726: 28. 72 chapter two the heart of the South. As increasingly dirigiste district administrations ratcheted up control over the Ngindo-speaking areas aft er 1903, disquiet spread among Ngindo leaders as well as the general populace. Th is uncertainty provided the climate in which an evolving apocalyp- tic promise of German destruction could be welcomed. In this climate, a previously obscure character, Abdallah Mapanda, would become the principal Ngindo leader of resistance. Th e essay then examines the events and strategies leading to the initial attacks on Madaba, Liwale and Mahenge, as the confl ict spread beyond the Matumbi hills. Th e fi nal section then briefl y looks at the reshaping of Ngindo demograph- ics over the next four decades and places these in the context of other popular movements in the South that employed elements of the spiritual toolkit also employed in the 1905 confl ict.

On Being Ngindo

Th e obvious element of the Ngindo Zusammengehörigkeit is a linguistic one. Early in the nineteenth century there would have been Ngindo-speakers situated in across the south, between the coast and Lake Nyasa; the Rufi ji and Rovuma rivers would have defi ned northern and southern boundaries of distribution. In the 1840s the incur- sion of Ngoni groups created two decades of competition and confl ict that left one large Ngindo-speaking group, ‘the Wandendeuli’, under Ngoni control and another smaller group, the Ndwewe, in a tribute relationship. Around 1865 a large Ndendeule section, which had now assimilated Ngoni military structures and technology, moved north to the lower Kilombero (Ulanga) valley where they were to form a powerful raiding entity known as the Mahenge or Mbunga confederacy.2 In the southeast, other Ngindo groups in the coastal hinterland were the targets of slave raiders and were observed by a French ethnologist on Indian Ocean sugar plantations.3 Beginning in the 1870s the new stability of the Ngoni and Mbunga states precipitated an increasing number of raiding parties eastwards as far as the coast. Had an individual been able to draw a straight

2 Lome Larson, “A History of Th e Mbunga Confederacy ca. 1860–1907,” Tanzania Notes and Records 81/ 82 (1977): 35–42. 3 Eugène de Froberville, “Notes sur les Va-Ngindo,” Bulletin de la Société de Géog- raphie 4th ser., no. 3 (1852): 425–443. the ngindo 73 line between Kilwa and Songea—and then attempted to walk it—they would have travelled for at least 24 days without encountering a signifi cant settlement. In the far Lindi hinterland there was widespread devastation, with populations being pushed down to the coastal hinterland or sucked back into the area of direct Ngoni control.4 Th e dis- ruptive impact on commerce in this area was somewhat lessened when in 1890 the Arab trader, Rashid bin Masoud, established a trading community in the southern Njelu Ngoni kingdom providing a western anchor to a southern trade route. Yet long-term damage had been done; the Ngindo-speaking communities south of the Mbwemkuru river had virtually ceased to exist. Caravans from both Lindi and Kilwa were forced to lay in enough provisions at Masasi to sustain them for a westward journey lasting 14–17 days through a depopulated zone. Th e northern Mshope Ngoni kingdom also raided to the coast, yet their actions had diff erent consequences. Th e Mshope were careful to maintain signifi cant Ngindo populations (‘the Wadonde of Liwale’) that could function as seasonal provisioning areas from which forays on the coast could be launched or caravans ambushed.5 It was this Mshope raiding route that was to be transformed into the primary transnational commercial route in the South. In a contiguous zone to the north, between the Matandu and Rufi ji rivers lay Utete, inhabited by the ‘Mawanda’ Ngindo. Protected in the south by the buff er zone of Undonde and to the north by an Mbunga confederacy that valued an important trade route connecting the Ulanga valley to Kilwa as well as Bagamoyo, Utete was disrupted on a lesser scale. Along the coast signifi cant ‘free’ pockets of Ngindo refugees existed. A substantial community roughly balanced between Ngindo and Yao expanded rice and sorghum growing along the lower Mandandu river between Kilwa and the Matumbi hills.6 In the north, along the lowest reaches of the Ulanga river, other settlements sought security by submitting to the Mbunga.

4 G. Lieder, “Zur Kenntniss der Karawanenwege im südlichen Th eile des ostfri- kanischen Schutzgebietes,” Mittheilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrte aus dem Deutschen Schutzgebieten (1894) 7, no. 4: 277–81. 5 Map notation on “Karte der Nyäsa-Expedition des Gouverneurs Freiherrn v. Schele. Nach den Aufnahmen von H. Ramsay während der Expedition 1893/94,” Mit- theilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrte aus dem Deutschen Schutzgebieten (1894) 7, no. 4 (Sheet IV, number 12). 6 Walter Busse, “Forschungsreise durch den südlichen Teil von Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Beiheft e zum Tropenplanzer, 3, no. 2 (1902): 98. 74 chapter two

It was the central region of Undonde that came to defi ne the essence of ‘Ngindo-ness’ during the German and British periods. Th ese Ngindo seemed obsessed by a concept of social space realized in a particular settlement pattern. Observations of a traveller traversing Undonde in 1899 indicated independent, widely separated villages of fi ve to twenty houses, each of which was set apart from its neighbour,7 a pattern recognizable fi ve decades later when Crosse-Upcott did his research in the same area.8 His informants off ered a reason for this pattern: distance restricted the eff ectiveness of witches and adulterers. Indeed, the memoirs of the elephant hunter James Sutherland abound in tales of jealous Ngindo husbands, thwarted suitors, and medicines deployed and countered.9 Th ese scattered settlements would be linked together through kinship ties defi ned by marriage, the man fi rst spending time at another settlement performing his bride-wealth labour obligations and the women maintaining ongoing links with her maternal relations once she had moved to her husband’s settlement. Th e major occasion where settlements came together in larger groups for prolonged periods was initiation ceremonies for boys and girls.10 Initiation ceremonies, marital arrangements, business deals, and associated travel were a feature of August—in the security of a gathered harvest. In the annual cycle of events August can be seen as a period where normal conventions of time and place might temporarily be set aside. It is not a coincidence that the 1893–4 coastal resistance as well as the Maji Maji uprising began in this month. Th e agricultural economy of most Ngindo-speaking areas during the colonial period was centered on the cultivation of millets (Kiswa- hili: mtama) backed by cassava as a reserve. Cattle were almost non- existent; goats and chicken were not common. Sandy soils were enriched by a slash-and-burn cultivation where a fi eld was utilized for two or three years before it reverted to thicket. Rainfall shortages were mediated by a relatively high water table. Land was widely available and uniformly suitable for cultivation. Th e chief choice facing agriculturalists would be between exploiting the forested plateau areas

7 Kurt Pfund, Kreuz und quer durch Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin, 1912). 8 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Th e Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo speaking Peoples” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cape Town, 1956):111. 9 James Sutherland, Th e Adventures of an Elephant Hunter (London, 1912), passim. 10 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Male Circumcision Among the Ngindo,” Man: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland 89, no. 2 (1957): 169–89. the ngindo 75 or the more open valleys defi ned by seasonal streams coming off the higher ground. In 1899 settlement was concentrated on the relative security of the forested areas. Th e forests and thickets were sources of additional foodstuff s and materials. Th e forest, unlike cultivated land, was not subject to private rights and was open to all, the important exception being the ownership of man-made beehives. Ngindo men routinely carried bows and poisoned arrows and were able to opportunistically harvest wild game. Th is was a resilient economy: informants in the 1950s could recall no famine before Maji Maji. From a territorial perspective, the southern interior in 1899 was far more than a collection of isolated communities. Th e Kilwa hinterland produced the most tax revenues in the colony; it was the center of the lucrative wild rubber trade; it produced enough agricultural surplus to support a North suff ering locust depredations. Th e economic predominance of the South in German thinking can be seen in the growing push for a transnational railroad running from Kilwa to Lake Nyasa. Th e fragmentation of Ngindo settlements was associated with a general disdain for larger authority. Within the small kinship settlements, respect was determined by seniority and command of protective medicines relating to agriculture. As a consequence Ngindo society has usually been described as stateless or acephalous. Yet, as Felici- tas Becker has argued, ‘big men’ emerged. Th ey usually acquired their position through temporary control of medicine, labor, land, water and trade, and force of character. Two Ngindo examples are known in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Likongowere carved out a sphere of infl uence north of the upper Matandu by fi rst participating in the nascent rubber trade, then investing capital in guns to pursue elephant-hunting, and subsequently acquiring slaves and refugees to expand agricultural production.11 Somewhat further south in the vicinity of Barikiwa a famous medicine-man called Mbunda protected the area from wild animals and Ngoni raiders; at the time of Maji Maji his grave was a prominent site of veneration.12 Th e Germans were to identify approximately nineteen individuals they could appoint as leaders, but could scarcely credit that they would lead military resistance. Th e Ngindo featured as shy and timid

11 Crosse-Upcott, ‘Social Structure,” 354. 12 Crosse-Upcott, ‘Social Structure,” 308–9. 76 chapter two

‘victims’ in German thinking, a view oft en framed in the context of the shattering of Ngindo peoples by Ngoni military incursions in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Arning pursued the subject in Undonde in 1904.13 On my trip last November I enquired in all places about the occurrences of the past. I found people who sought retroactively to enhance the martial reputation of their forefathers by claiming the latter had more than once resisted the Wangoni with weapons in hand. Th ey were immediately given the lie by a few locals who scornfully suggested that the mode of fi ghting in the past owed more to legs than arms. Th is encapsulation of the Ngindo identity is derived from men talking to men. Women were objects to be controlled, starting from the female initiation ceremonies where child betrothals were negotiated. Th e Ngindo attitude to adultery also refl ects the idea of women as property. Marital infi delity was considered an occasion to exact fi nancial compensation rather than an excuse to physically punish or exclude. Th e tendency of German colonial offi cials to punish (usually 1–2 months in chains) rather than compensate in adultery cases was a major frustration to Ngindo males before the rebellion. Within this environment women developed their own sphere of expression: through taking lovers, in spirit possession ceremonies and in a control of medicines. Men might think they controlled but they also feared; Crosse-Upcott noted an almost universal belief in the ‘malevolence’ of women among Ndonde males. At the outset of the rebellion one of the most prominent Ngindo leaders was in hiding for executing a female witch; he had acted out of frustration with the indiff erence of the German authorities.

The Ngindo in Maji Maji Historiography

It was in Undonde that the modern rewriting of the Maji Maji rebellion began. Bell’s 1950 study14 of the rebellion among the Ndonde Ngindo was ‘modern’ in the sense that it was based on oral sources,

13 W. Arning, “Das Dondeland und seine Bewohner,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, no. 35 (1905): 370. 14 R.M Bell, “Th e Outbreak of the Maji Maji rebellion in the Liwale District,” Tan- ganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950): 38–57. the ngindo 77 challenged the semi-offi cial account laid down by von Götzen15 in 1909, and it explicitly indicated a parallel between this war against a colonial power and the contemporary emergence of a nationalist movement in Tanganyika. A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, a South African anthropologist, also attempted to understand the Ngindo component of the rebellion.16 Paradoxically this initial fl owering of Ngindo studies ground to a halt in the post-independence era, exactly at the time when there was increased interest in Maji Maji within the context of a nationalist historiography. For more than a decade aft er Independence the area south of the Rufi ji was host to a network of guerrilla training camps engaged in the fi ght against Portugal, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Foreign researchers were banned from the area and even Tanzanians were not free from restrictions on research activities. Th e Maji Maji Research Project of 1968 did not cover Ungindo because none of its student researchers came from the area. It was rather an earlier 1966 seminar paper by Terence Ranger that put the spotlight on the Ngindo areas, and did so with a rather unusual perspective.17 He looked at the Ngoja witchcraft eradication movement of the late 1920s and had noticed a parallel with Maji Maji in terms of geographical coverage, distribution patterns and lineage involvement within the Ngindo areas. In this same period Marcia Wright examined the impact of a wild rubber trade.18 For the next two decades there was an omi- nous silence in Tanzanian historiography. Aft er more than fi ve decades therefore there would seem to be a strong argument for putting Undonde back at the geographical center of an area study. Th is study is enhanced by new material: the diary of the traveller Kurt Pfund,19 the diaries of the military commander of

15 Graf von Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905–06 (Berlin, 1909). 16 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Th e Origin of the Majimaji Revolt,” Man: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland 98, no. 2 (1960): 71–3. 17 Terence Ranger, “Witch-craft Eradication Movements in Central and South- ern Tanzania and their connection with the Maji Maji Rising,” University of Dar es Salaam seminar paper. 30 November 1966. Th is was extended to later movements in Lorne Larson, ‘Witchcraft Eradication Sequences among the Peoples of the Mahenge District’, a paper originally presented at the Nairobi Conference on the History of African Religious Systems, June 1974. 18 Marcia Wright, “Rubber and the Kilwa Hinterland,” Historical Association of Tanzania conference paper, 1974. 19 Pfund accompanied the government geologist Dantz on a one-year tour of the South. His diaries were privately printed in 1912 for ‘ a small circle of my friends and the members of my family’. Given the unusual nature of its provenance, this source is rarely cited in bibliographical sources. I would like to thank the antiquarian bookseller 78 chapter two the Mahenge boma, Th eodore von Hassel,20 and the discovery of the unexpurgated manuscript of Bell’s original research.21 It also benefi ts in no insignifi cant way from a meticulous ‘scraping’ of the published record.

The Medicine-men of Mgende

At the end of 1905 Governor Götzen was acutely aware that Mgende was completely under the control of the insurgents. It was, he noted, “where Ngoni, Wapogoro and Wangindo interests come together, as well as where the boundaries of the Kilwa, Mahenge and Songea district boundaries meet.” He was to make a further intriguing statement, that it was there “where in all probability the origin of the whole movement should be sought.”22 Four months later German forces compelled the retreat of many rebel leaders to Mgende to the settlement of kwa Mponda; these included Kinjala and Mapanda from Liwale, Kapolo from Madaba; as well as the Ngoni leaders, Chabruma and Palangu. Th e major German military detachments in the southern interior encircled this area. Th e Mgende campaign did not capture these leaders, but it scattered them and arguably dealt the “last blow” to the resistance. Von Götzen’s description of this campaign gives the impression that the rebel leaders had been pressed into an inhospitable area. Iliff e partially supports this impression with a description of a “tangled, waterless Grenzwildnis”.23 Such impressions are deceptive. Reliable seasonal and permanent water supplies allowed sections of Mgende to grow a wide variety of crops.24 In 1897 Alfons Adams gained a much more positive view aft er

Anton Breuer whose meticulous descriptions of his off erings on the Internet led me to realize the value of the book. 20 Th eodore von Hassel, ‘Ein Tagebuch aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika von 1903–1910’. Typescript, 1977?. Available as a typescript copy from a number of online sources. Th e manuscript contains two discreet components. Th e diary is quoted extensively in Walter Nuhn, Flammen über Deutsch-Ostafrika (Bonn, 1998). 21 A copy of Bell’s original manuscript has survived in the Rhodes House manuscript collection at Oxford University. It contains signifi cant material omitted from the published version. R.M Bell, “Th e Maji Maji Rebellion 1905–1906,” mss. Afr. s.452, Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 22 Götzen, Aufstand, 137. 23 Iliff e, Tanganyika, 198. 24 One of the few descriptions of Mgende locates it as “ the area east and south of the Luwegu from where that river is joined by the Horobo until its confl uence with the Mbaragandu. It is a jumbled mountainous area with hills ranging from 350 to 900 m the ngindo 79 travelling for four days northwards from the edges of Ngoni control without seeing a settlement or wild game. “We were happy,” he notes on hitting the fi rst Mgende village, “to be in an inhabited, hospitable area again”. At kwa Mponda he was easily able to re-provision and hire new porters. He also observed: Th e Wangindo are very well clothed compared to the other Negroes of the interior. Th is is connected to the substantial rubber trade that is conducted with the coast through black and Arab traders.25 Adams recognized that Mgende was situated at a key east-west position along a primary caravan route. Travellers oft en referred to this route to Kilwa as the ‘Mgende Road’. Th e area was a diffi cult terrain in which to conduct military campaigns, but the Mshope Ngoni in an earlier period were insistent on controlling this key area, and aft er years of bitter fi ghting the peoples of Mgende acquiesced in a loose tributary relationship.26 Mgende was the home of the Ndwewe Ngindo (grouped around the Mbarika hills) who possessed the mbui medicine-men, widely famed as herbalists, diviners and rainmakers.27 In the neighboring Ngindo- speaking areas along the Luwegu and Mbaragandu area it was said as late as the 1950s, “the Ndwewe have no temporal power, but without them we would never recover from our ailments.” Mgende was subsumed into the Selous Game Reserve in the 1940s, yet even today the name persists in the South as generalized ‘spirit territory’ incor- porating dispersed shrines known for their hostility to witchcraft and associated with famous witchcraft eradicators.28 Th is style of magic associated with Mgende may also be known as uliro and has been associated by Gwassa with the Mpanga shrines on the Rufi ji.29 in height. It is inhabited by a mixture of Wanduewe, Wangindo and Wapogoro. Th e settlements are concentrated along the river valleys and are most numerous along the Luwegu itself and along the Luhanjandu. Th e most important jumbe is Mponda, who lives east of the Luhanjandu, just before it enters the Luwegu”. Johannes, ‘Das Expedi- tionskorp Johannes vom 11. März bis 3. Mai 1906’ Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8, no.48 (1906).: n.p. 25 Alfons Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes (St. Ottilien, 1899), 131–32. 26 Adams, Im Dienste, 132. 27 Kunibert Lussy, “Die Wapogoro (Tanganyika-Territory): Notizen über Land und Leute,” Anthropos XLVI (1951): 440; Crosse-Upcott, “Th e Social Structure”, 528. 28 Personal communication from Felicitas Becker. August 2005. Th e interpretation is my own. 29 An uliro shrine in Mgende was the most powerful in the Mahenge district in the early 1920s. See Eric Reid, “Some Notes on Witchcraft among the Wapogoro”, 22 September 1930. Ulanga (Mahenge) District Book (Microfi lm, Tanzania National 80 chapter two

Th e institution of mbui also existed among the Pogoro of the Mahenge Highlands where it attained a high degree of organizational complexity and prestige. Th e Mahenge Highlands had successfully defended its independence from the invading Mbunga, Rivers Bena and Ngoni in the mid-nineteenth century. Oral evidence generally suggests that refugee Ndwewe fi rst introduced the institution of mbui to the Highlands at this time and that it was elaborated as a response to the social tensions generated by assimilating large numbers of outsiders. By at least the turn of the century roughly a dozen contiguous spirit provinces existed in the Mahenge Highlands each associated with a territorial shrine (ludewa) situated near a pool of water in forest and administered by an mbui. Th e latter had roughly three interrelated functions—to ensure the fertility of the fi elds and the family, rainmak- ing, and the adjudication of disputes (almost exclusively witchcraft and adultery accusations). Th e wambui observed a hierarchy of importance among themselves. Th ey could also act in concert in the face of serious external threat, for example, a major outbreak of disease.30 In the mbui complex we have a potential model for understanding the dynamics of territorial shrines further down the Rufi ji drainage system, both during and prior to the 1905 confl ict. We will return to this in the next section. Spirit concepts could exert a powerful hold on the imagination unconnected with a specifi c individual or a specifi c location. Th e Maji Maji literature has tended to associate the snake spirit concept specifi cally with the Bokero shrine on the Rufi ji or the Kolelo shrine in the Uluguru Mountains. In fact the snake spirit concept—and specifi - cally that of hongo—existed over a wide geographical area. Th e spirit hongo (songo, hongwe, songwe)31—the giant, crested, crowing serpent who preyed on men in the deepest bush—was most deeply entrenched among the Yao in the hinterland of Lindi. Th e ethnographer Weule noted this in 1906: “Both children and grown-up people are more concerned about the songo than about any other creature; it is said to live

Archives [TNA]. Lienhardt discusses uliro in the context of Nguvumali Mpangile in the 1950s. Hasani bin Ismail, Th e Medicine Man: Swifa ya Nguvumali (Oxford, 1968). Edited and translated by Peter Lienhardt, 71–72; Gwassa, “Kinjikitile,” 206. 30 See Maia Green, “Th e Construction of ‘Religion’ and the Perpetuation of ‘Tradi- tion’ Among Pogoro Catholics, Southern Tanzania’ (Ph.D diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 1993). 31 Among the Yao songo or songwe; among the Ngindo hongo or hongwe. Th e h_ and s_ are phonological alternates among diff erent languages of the Bantu group. the ngindo 81 among the rocks, to have a comb like a cock and to produce sounds by which it entices its prey . . . Th e crowing serpent is well-known by hearsay throughout Nyasaland . . . Th e natives who have told me about it had never seen it themselves, but had heard about it from others.”32 A year later Bishop Spreiter, travelling near Tunduru, was told by his porters of giant snakes called hongo who lived in certain rock formations. “According to what I was told, the body is as thick as a bull or an elephant, and one to two kilometers long. Th e snake eats people up.”33 It was not just in the Yao areas that the hongo belief existed, although it was probably strongest there. A contemporary account by an elephant hunter widely-traveled in the core Ngindo areas told similar stories.34 Indeed, the hongwe spirit was used as a fi gure of terror in Ngindo initiation rites.35 Similar beliefs—although less pronounced— were reported for the Matumbi, Pogoro and Mbunga areas.36 In the Matumbi area, and along the lower Rufi ji, the concept of hongo was sometimes elided with that of nyamguni (literally ‘the whale’) and the habitat of caves and bush was transformed to water pools and even the ocean. Intriguingly, it was suggested by a paleontologist of the 1909– 11 Tenadaguru dinosaur expedition that the elaborate snake spirit stories he collected in the south (as well as in Uluguru) had a purpose in themselves, that they might be interpreted as political allegories of power, between the coast and the interior, between conquerors and the conquered.37 In addition to the powerful spirit fi gures, the constant battle to protect themselves and their crops from more mundane marauders also occupied people’s minds. Hunters used nets, poisoned arrows and fi rearms to reduce foraging wild pigs. Villages might even relocate to more favourable places; the village of Madaba in 1899 moved to a more open area to deny access to baboons that were destroying crops. Th e cultivation of millet was routinely supported by protective

32 Karl Weule, Native Life in East Africa (London, 1909),159–60. Th e passage in the German original is slightly more ‘fearsome’. See Karl Weule, Negerleben in Ostafrika (Leipzig, 1909), 200. 33 Missionsblätter (April, 1908), 105. 34 Sutherland, Adventures, 143. 35 Crosse-Upcott, “Male Circumcision ,” 186. 36 Ambrosius Mayer, “Religiöse Vorstellungen und Gebräuche bei den Matumbi”, Missionsblätter (July/August,1911): 220. 37 E. Hennig, Am Tendaguru (Stuttgart, 1912), 133–4. 82 chapter two medicines as observed by Pfund as he moved into the heart of Utete, and the implication was that this had been a common sight throughout Uzaramo onwards. “In the vicinity of almost all mtama fi elds up to now I have found small, elegant straw huts—generally about one meter high—in which mtama heads are placed. Th e sorcerer or medicine-man of the village (if not the Jumbe, then his brother or a relative) has, in secret ceremonies, prepared these structures as dawa or medicine to protect the crops from weather and wild animals. Many jumbes have been deposed, if their medicines are ineff ective.”38 Th ese shrines sound very similar to the Kolelo ‘ritual huts’ described by Sunseri within the context of a famine crisis in Uzaramo in 1905. But it would probably be a mistake to make the jump to Kolelo (or Bokero) shrines in Utete in 1899; it would be more logical to accept that protective shrines were a persistent feature of the agricultural landscape north and south of the Rufi ji, but that local practitioners routinely supplied the medicines at the heart of the shrines. Only at times of prolonged agricultural crisis would the supply of protective medicines be extended to territorial cults that were seen to be potentially more effi cacious. Wild pigs and baboons were the common pests most destructive to crops, but close to the deeper rivers of the Rufi ji and Ruvu, hippopotami were equally destructive to both rice and millet. In the middle course of the Ruvu in 1899 “a powerful medicine- man (Zauberer) of the vicinity had driven the wicked beasts from the river”.39 Further to the west, along the conjoined borders of the Kilwa, Mahenge and Songea districts, elephants were the most feared destroyer of crops with a single herd of two hundred being recorded as late as 1905. Again medicines were deployed here, generally, and more specifi cally by the specialized cadre of African elephant hunters who attempted to kill them.40 Attacks on people from wild animals—particularly lions—were also a feature of rural life. Th ese attacks appeared to be on the increase during 1903 and 1904. Man-eaters in the Dar es Salaam district alone killed fi ft y-one people in 1903.41 Marauding lions also affl icted Kilosa, Kilwa and the Rufi ji districts. One massive lion hunt around Mohoro in 1904—in which all senior German district

38 Pfund, Kreuz, 35. 39 Dantz, ‘Expedition’, 215; Pfund, Kreuz, 16. 40 Von Hassel, ‚Tagebuch‘, Part I. 41 “Raubtierplage,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanishe Zeitung VI , no. 8 (1904): n.p. the ngindo 83 offi cials participated—was halted at a strategic point so that a ritual specialist could neutralize the power of the cornered lions.42 Th e participation of Germans mentioned above illustrates another point, that recourse to medicine-men by individuals and groups, or large gatherings at dances involving spirit possession, were seen by most offi cials as a normal part of the cultural landscape. As a missionary conceded, “We were used to it.”43 Th e district offi cer at Mohoro visited the Mpanga shrine and even issued a licence. At roughly the same time the Bezirkschef of Mahenge was engaged in a battle with a famous rogue elephant in the upper Ulanga valley, an animal considered an evil spirit in its own right. Von Hassel’s eventual victory not only established his reputation as a brave man, it also confi rmed that his ability to control spirits was strong. He became widely known as ‘Ma’ngmula’, the name of the elephant he had vanquished.44 Th e Germans were not just passive observers, but also active participants. To explore this argument further we can return to Mgende where, in 1899, a smallpox epidemic was raging. Many people perished, fi elds were abandoned, and the survivors fl ed to the bush convinced that evil shetani spirits were to blame.45 Th e origin of this disaster was Zanzibar where the infection had been offl oaded from shipping in 1897. By early 1899 Uzaramo and Ukutu were ravaged by a virulent strain of this disease and it began to radiate out from Kilwa via infected caravans to reach the Ngoni kingdoms and Lake Nyasa. All Europeans, African soldiers and other government employees were routinely inoculated against smallpox, but by early 1898 the only major mass inoculations of Africans had been that carried out at Sadani on the northern coast. Concerned by the disruption to trade and economic production, the colonial administration moved rapidly to promote immunization, developing transport techniques to get starter vaccines into the interior, and utilizing the military doctors of the Schutztruppe as the main technical agency, supplemented by missionaries in other areas. Th roughout Ungoni thousands fl ocked

42 “Löwenjagd in Mohorro,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanishe Zeitung VI, no.11 (1904): n.p. For man-eating leopards terrorizing Madaba aft er Maji Maji, see Steiner, “Menschen- fressende Leoparden in Nord-Donde-Land,” Ostafrikanisches Weidwerk 12 (1906): 3. 43 Ambrosius Mayer, ‘Wie 1905 in Matumbi der Aufstand begann’ Missionsblätter (May, 1914): 230. 44 Von Hassel, ‘Tagebuch’, I: 42:53. 45 An account of smallpox in Undonde and Mgende is “Die Pockenerkrankung im Kilwabezirk,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1899): 659. 84 chapter two to the touring military doctor in 1899 for inoculation.46 In excess of 100,000 people were immunized and by 1901 the epidemic was under control. Arguably, the German smallpox inoculations are the best- documented example of a mass recourse to protective medicines in the south before Maji Maji!47

The Middle Rufiji: The Crossroads

From a hill north of the Mpanga section of the Rufi ji it is possible to see the physical features that mark the important shrine centers associated with the rebellion: to the north is the prominent shape of the Uluguru mountains and the Kolelo shrine, to the south are the less prominent Nandanga hills associated with the fi gure of Ngameya, and in a south-easterly direction are the Kichi/Matumbi hills and the Ngarambe shrine associated with Kinjikitile. Each of these centers was approximately eighty kilometers from the Kibesa shrine of Bokero at Mpanga. Almost no serious research has been directed at this central Rufi ji shrine, so it is worth quoting one of the few eyewitness accounts contained in the evidence of the investigative commission. We are interested here more in aspects of the detail than in the Ger- man interpretation. A man near the west border of the Rufi dyi District by the name of Magumbiro [Mkumbiro] (probably of Mrufi dji-Mpogoro ancestry) used the existence of a hot spring in that area to enrich himself by exploiting the superstitions of people to whom he sold a water medicine. It appears that this medicine was initially only off ered for domestic ailments: against the destruction of fi elds by pigs, against sickness, against the impotence of men and the infertility of women, etc. In order to make his off ering more popular and authoritative, the witchdoctor appeared to have resuscitated an old, half-forgotten belief in a snake god known to the Bantu Negro. Th is was reinforced by the location of the witchdoctor near the Pangani rapids, a famous natural phenomenon known to the Warufi dji, Wapogoro, Wandonde and

46 Pfund, Kreuz, 104. 47 “Die Impfungen welche vom 1. Juli 1896–30. Juni 1898 durch die Aerzte der Kaiserlichen Schuttzruppe ausgeführt worden sind,” Arbeiten aus den. Kaiserlichen Gesundheitamtes [AKG], XV (1899): 357; “Gesundverhältnisse in Deutsch-Ostafrika im Jahre 1899/1900” and “Gesundverhältnisse in Deutsch-Ostafrika im Jahre 1900/ 1901” AKG (1901): 362–3, 583–4. the ngindo 85

Wangindo as well the Wakutu, Waluguru, Wandendereko, Wazaramo and other peoples. As such it was eminently suited to be the seat of a snake god. One has eyewitness evidence regarding this crude deception from a coastal Negro engaged in trade in the area at the time. Magumbiro, alias Bokero Mkubwa, sat hidden in a hut blowing notes on a gourd fl ask. His son Legitive, also known as Bokero Mdogo, received supplicants for medicine in front of the house and interpreted the notes emanating from within. Sometimes he would say, ‘God says the water is eff ective against pigs’; at other times he would say ‘God says the water helps with infertility.48 Th e Pangani rapids were a cultural meeting place; Magumbiro’s alleged ancestry is in itself a testimony to this fact. Th e German administration recognized this when Mpanga became the intersecting point for fi ve district boundaries. In a sense, Mpanga was like Mgende, a place where cultures ran together and where administrative oversight was light. Th ere has long been speculation that there were connections between the Kolelo shrine to the north and the Bokero shrine on the Rufi ji. Th is may well be the case, but the argument is based on little more than the similarity of names. It may well be useful to scan the eighty kilo- meter view we have sketched above. Sunseri documents local shrines based around hot springs and forested pools along the lower Rufi ji. To the south there were shrines at Nandanga and Ngarambe overseen by Mawanda (Ikemba) Ngindo. To the west we might postulate the diff u- sion of mbui rituals among the oft en quite substantial Pogoro populations just south of the Rufi ji. (Th e use of gourd fl asks to interpret the wishes of the spirits is very much a feature of Ndwewe and Pogoro mbui, as is indeed the use of liquid medicines and water cleansing rituals.)49 Th e argument here is not that Mkumbiro was necessarily a Pogoro mbui but rather the mbui system provides us with a comparative template: numerous local territorial shrines engaged with local territorial spirits and local populations, sometimes competitive with neighboring shrines, sometimes interacting through apprenticeship

48 Regierungsrat Winterfeld, ‘Bericht den zur Erforschung der Ursachen des Auf- standes eingesetzen Kommission’, 4 December 1905. Barch R1001/726/91–92. 49 For a description of gourds used by an Ndwewe mbui see ‘Chapter 16: Th e Invin- cible Diviner’ in Louise Jilek-Aall, Call Mama Doctor (1979). Published electronically at www.mentalhealth.com/books/mama/mama-16.html. 86 chapter two and marriage.50 Yet, in time of crisis, they were able to establish a network of cooperation. And chaos did come to Mpanga during the late nineteenth century. Aft er the Mbunga had established themselves in the lower Ulanga Val- ley they incorporated Ndamba and Pogoro peoples into their confederacy and launched raids to the north and east. By 1879 the Mbunga were raiding up to a corridor running from the Uluguru Mountains to the Rufi ji or, in terms of our discussion, from ‘Kolelo to Bokero’. Near the Rufi ji end of the corridor were a number of fortifi ed villages built in response to this threat, the most important being the Kutu town of Behobeho, an important caravan staging point between Bagamoyo and the Ulanga fl oodplain. In 1879 Th omson described it as “a charming village, consisting of a winding line of houses of most varied and irregular architecture—impregnable with its forest-bound walls of tall trees bound together into an impenetrable mass of creep- ers of all sizes.” Th e nearby Kutu town of Mua was fortifi ed in a very similar manner.51 A year later, just south of the Rufi ji river very close to Mpanga itself, Beardall “reached the village of Kigumi, situated in a patch of thick jungle and well stockaded. It is a large village of nearly 200 huts, the people being Wagangi [Pogoro] with a mixture of Rufi ji and Gindo people who have sought protection here.” Th is style of village was new, defensive and it integrated refugees from quite diverse backgrounds. Outside these incipient conurbations, it was noted that “many of these Rufi ji people, when they have got in their crops hide themselves and their grain in the low reedy islands, of which there are many in this part of the river.”52 Th ese large, stockaded villages are of particular interest. Consider that Kigumi was twenty times the size of a typical Ngindo settlement and four to fi ve times the size of Madaba or Liwale, the largest Ngindo settlements to the south. Both in terms of size and the mixture of people, it was the antithesis of the Ngindo ideal. Similar forced concentration of Ngindo and Pogoro in the 1940s resulted in an explosion of witchcraft accusations until a ritual specialist was brought in with

50 Bell makes these explicit connections among the shrine leaders of the rebellion. Bell, “Outbreak”, 48. 51 Joseph Th ompson, “Notes on the Route taken by the Royal Geographical Soci- ety’s East African Expedition from Dar—es-Salaam to Uhehe; May 19th to August 29th, 1879,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (1880): 108. 52 William Beardall, “Exploration of the Rufi ji River under the orders of the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (Nov, 1881): 645, 648. the ngindo 87

‘cleansing’ medicines.53 A similar situation might have arisen within the population concentrations of the late 1870s leading to the emergence of ritual leadership around the Kibesa shrine. (Remember that this is the period when Mbunda becomes the ritual protector of eastern Undonde against Ngoni raids and the Pogoro mbui are consolidating infl uence in the Mahenge Highlands.) Th is speculation must be married with what happened next. In 1880 the Mbunga put the fortifi ed town of Behobeho to the torch and kwa Korogero, a nearby settlement, became the main centre on the upper Rufi ji. Th e ruler Korogero lived here,54 on suff erance from the Wamahengi [Mbunga], to whom he pays a sort of yearly tribute, part of which he collects from neighboring small chiefs. Th e Mahengi people seem to look on this part of the country as a sort of raiding preserve. Th ey are too clever to depopulate the country by one big sweep, but make periodic raids, burning one or two villages and carrying off a few slaves. Th e name ‘Korogero’ may just as well be associated with ‘Kolelo’ as ‘Bokero’ has been, and may also indicate a degree of control by the shrine over the area in the 1880s. In 1884 the Mbunga had established a major northern outpost at Kisaki in Ukutu to supply their raiding activities, which were now being pushed deep into Uzaramo. By around 1890 the Mpepo Ngoni had also moved into the lower Ulanga forming an alliance with the Mbunga that gave them raiding rights into southern Uzaramo. Around 1890 the settlement of kwa Korogero disappears to be replaced by Kip- ambabwe, a settlement controlled through the 1890s by the Kungu- lio family. Beginning in 1893 the Germans begin a counter-off ensive pushing the Mbunga and the Mpepo Ngoni permanently back into the Ulanga valley. Kipambabwe then became a major German staging post for the pacifi cation of the South. In the midst of this uncertainty, the Mpanga region remained a signifi cant trading crossroads; there is no evidence that the Mbunga deliberately targeted trading caravans in their raiding. Th e east-west route from Dar es Salaam to the Ulanga valley crossed here with a

53 Larson, ‘Sequences’. On the relation between population concentration and the issues of witchcraft in other areas, see E.E. Evan Pritchard , Witchcraft , Oracles and Magic among the Azande, (Oxford,1937): 37 and Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebel- lion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, 1985): 36–37 54 Beardall, “Exploration,” 648. 88 chapter two north-south route that ran from Kilwa (via Matumbi) to Kisaki on the central caravan route. Mpanga was a key break-point on the water route from the Rufi ji delta, along which fl owed a trade in rice and, increasingly, rubber. Kipambabwe was the signifi cant commercial settlement in the area.55 Th e European and Asian commercial community at Mahenge was headquartered in either Bagamoyo or Dar es Salaam and this was their preferred route to the coast.56 At the outbreak of violence in 1905 the Mahenge administration was driving an improved road towards the middle Rufi ji. Th e Kibesa shrine that came to prominence in 1904–05 therefore did not exist in a vacuum, tucked away in some oracular isolation. It was embedded in an area that had suff ered huge disruption during the later nineteenth century and it was close to a major communication route.

Utete and Undonde

Th e little-used path from Kipambabwe to Undonde was taken by the Dantz geological expedition in 1899. One of its members was the gen- tlemen traveller Kurt Pfund, whose diaries are a valuable but rarely used source for the central Ngindo areas of Utete and Undonde. Th e diarist traversed the area from Dar es Salaam to Songea in the months of July and August. Th is was an intense and critical period in the annual social and agricultural cycle of the south since it covered the fi nal ripening and harvesting of the millet crop. If the harvest was good—as it was generally in 1899—it triggered a celebratory season of beer-making, travelling and initiation rites until the rains material- ized in November. If this harvest failed, this was a season of despair. August was also the peak month for wild rubber collection and the collection of tax arrears (largely paid in rubber) was in full swing in 1899. Caravan traffi c obviously operated during the dry season from May to October and increased signifi cantly towards the latter end as

55 It was mentioned as a village of 20 huts in 1997. W. Bornhardt, Zur Oberfl ach- gestaltung und Geologie Deutsch-Ostafrikas (Berlin,1900), 354. But Pfund suggests a growth in importance just two years later: Pfund, Kreuz, 25 56 Th e recent work by Patrick Krajewski at the University of Hanover underlines the substantial volume of trade that continued to fl ow over this northern route until the First World War: “Maji Maji and the Rubber Question: Notes from the Dhow Trade” presented at a symposium on the Maji Maji War. Wissenschaft kolleg zu Berlin. 1 April 2005. the ngindo 89 accumulated supplies of rubber and wax began to work their way back to Kilwa. Th e core northern Ngindo settlement area by the 1890s was Utete,57 south of the Rufi ji area of Mpanga, inhabited by ‘Mawanda’ Ngindo and, by the First World War, “still little known” to the colonial administration. We have no population statistics for Utete; we only know the area covered approximately 3,000 km2. An extrapolation from the Undonde statistics would suggest a population of about three to fi ve thousand people. Within this area the Dantz expedition met two substantial leaders, Punulo and Kapolo. In 1899, the latter was the jumbe of a substantial town of forty houses called Madaba or Maraba. A new German fl ag fl ew in the square of Kapolo’s village in 1899—but the nearest German presence was in Barikiwa, fi ve days march to the south.58 Th is settlement commanded the mid-point of a northern trade route from Kilwa into the lower Ulanga valley and Mahenge High- lands. It is here that the Dantz expedition met their fi rst coastal traders from Kilwa.59 A trade route from Kilwa had existed through this area for at least two decades. Madaba is oft en ignored in the literature since it was not on a route routinely traversed by European travellers, yet it was second only to Liwale as caravan transit point to Kilwa in the southern interior.60 Th e section of the route between Kilwa and Madaba had better access to water and provisions than routes further south. From here the route continued for three days through the Makua enclave of Mbwera to the confl uence of the Rufi ji, Ulanga and Luwegu rivers at the Shuguli falls. Th is is essentially where the Rufi ji and Madaba routes connected. Th e village of Mlongora here served a similar purpose as Kipambabwe on the middle Rufi ji, off ering ferry services, canoe hire and provisioning. Caravans could then head down the Ulanga valley to various collection points or branch southwards along the Luwegu towards the Mahenge Highlands. Th e Dantz expedition observed that the fi elds in Utete were larger than any seen since Dar es Salaam and it was in Madaba that large, elevated granary structures for storing grain surpluses were seen for the

57 Th is should not be confused with the town of Utete on the lower Rufi ji. 58 Fur Utete see Pfund, Kreuz, 35–40. 59 Dantz, “Die Reisen des Bergassesors Dr. Dantz in Deutsch-Ostafrika in den Jahren 1898, 1899, 1900,” Mittheilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrte aus dem Deutschen Schutzgebieten (1901): 220. 60 Paul Fuchs, “Die wirtschaft liche Erkundigung einer ostafrikanischen Sudbahn,” Beiheft e sum Tropneplanzer 4/6 (September, 1905): 244. 90 chapter two fi rst time. Th e Dantz expedition was to witness the best millet harvest since 1893. As the expedition moved south and east from the confl u- ence of the Luwegu and Mbaragandu, they left Utete and entered the other core Ngindo area of Undonde.61 It had a population estimated at 20,000–25,000 people. Th is was a largely plateau area (500–800m) of approximately 12,000 km2. Its elevation and sandy soils were eminently suitable for the prolifer- ation of wild landolphia vines and a ‘Donde’ classifi cation marked the highest quality rubber to be shipped out of Kilwa. By 1893 Undonde was producing wild rubber for export. Its agriculture production continued to be dominated by millet and cassava production but the small southern river valleys that came off the plateau along the line of Liwale and Barikiwa also enabled the cultivation of maize, sweet potato, and even rice and sugar cane. Th e forested zones of these valleys were also optimum places for the placement of manufactured beehives designed to attract wild bees; maximum production was always correlated with proximity to streams. In this area Pfund noticed that “bees hum in the crowns of trees. Honey fl ows in streams in Donde! Simple beehives— rolls of bark—are seen hanging in many trees.”62 Although honey was a social currency in Undonde, it was beeswax that was emerging as a commercial product second only to rubber. Food and water were just as important to the area’s reputation as rubber or beeswax. Undonde—like Mgende—was a strategic ‘island’ between Lake Nyasa and Kilwa. To reach the eastern Undonde border village of Kingwichiro from Kilwa entailed a march of nine to twelve days through uninhabited territory during which the availability of water was the major concern.63 About eight per cent of porters coming from Kilwa were water carriers; these were dropped in Kingwichiro and picked up by caravans coming from the opposite direction. To then reach Ngoni territory from the western Undonde border village of Chechere involved crossing another ‘empty quarter’ of ten days, along three possible routes that merged again on the upper Luwegu river; the most important of these routes was the northern Mgende

61 See entries for ‘Donde’, ‘Wadonde’ and ‘Wangindo’ in Heinrich Schnee (ed.), Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (Berlin, 1920) and [A Pfüller], “Donde, Ein Land der Zukunft ,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung (1903) 5, no 34: n.p. 62 Pfund, Kreuz, 68. 63 See H. Tornau, “Die geologischen und hydrographischen Verhältnisse an der Karawanenstrasse Kilwa-Songea,” Berichte über Land- und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch- Ostafrika (1904/06), II: 128–42. the ngindo 91 route. Without provisioning in Undonde (food for the western journey, food, water and porters for the Kilwa stretch), long distance caravans or military expeditions could not survive. Although small units were the norm within Undonde, there were exceptions, generally close to the main central trade route. In central Undonde, jumbe Yima-Yima exhibited a considerable wealth—a large house, fl ocks of goats and chickens. His gift s to the Dantz expedition were the most generous in their trip through the south. Since the main Ngoni war route passed close to his village, he may have benefi ted earlier from an Ngoni alliance. In 1899 he controlled a market hall frequented by rubber traders from the coast. Th ere was also a collection of known ‘big men’ along the trade route. It was jumbe Mpembetu , controlling the key eastern town of Kingwichiro, at which caravans now made their initial entry to Undonde from Kilwa, who emerged as a dominant fi gure; his importance may have been inadvertently strengthened by the move of the German outpost from Barikiwa to Liwale, altering the line of the caravan route:64 Mpembetu is the one chieft ain that all the Wandonde follow today, even though he does not carry the title of Sultan. Th e old chiefl y family died out and only one member, Abdallah Mapauda [sic], remains, although his status is not universally recognized.’ Indeed, the one thing to remember about Abdullah Mapanda in the years preceding the rebellion is that he was most defi nitely not a ‘big man’ in a political sense, although he desperately wanted to be, a situation that is critical to the understanding of the rebellion in Undonde. He did however have a regional reputation as a master elephant hunter. He was already known in 1904 as a man who ‘hated’ Europeans and avoided contact with them.65 Six hours to the north-west of Liwale was the base of Omari Kinjala. Th e only published evidence of this leader before 1905 is a mention that he owned cattle.66 Th is in itself may not seem exciting but these are the only African-owned cattle in Undonde and the only source for

64 W. Arning, “Wanderungen im ostafrikanische Aufstandsgebiete,” Deutsch Kolo- nialzeitung (1905), no. 48: 501. 65 Von Hassel, ‘Tagebuch’, I: 21. 66 “Auszüge aus der Jahresberichten der Bezirksamte und Militärstationen vom 1. July 1900 bis Juni 1901,” Berichte über Land-und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika I, 1/2 (1902):101; Panse, “Tsetse-Immunisierungversuche in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Deut- sches Kolonialblatt 8, no. 7 (1907): 291. 92 chapter two cattle was Ungoni. German sources during the war would state that Kinjala’s connections with the Ngoni polities were “long-standing” and he is credited with brokering peace treaties with the Mshope Ngoni in the 1880s and 1890s.67 On a personal level these connections were probably with the female nduna, Nkomanile of Kitanda, a trusted administrator of nkosi Chabruma. Her headquarters in Kitanda were a well-known provisioning stop on the western stages of the Mgende Road and she may well have been Chabruma’s liaison with Mgende leaders before and aft er the inclusion of that area in the Mahenge military district. It is also important to realize that Kitanda itself was pre- dominantly Ndendeule with an intermixing on Ndwewe, an ‘Ngindo’ area in its own right.68 German-appointed leadership in 1899 was already under stress from the requirement to pay tax, a greatly increased commercial community and its provision of credit, and the impact of wild rubber production, not to mention the Ngindo disdain for authority. Pfund met a jumbe near Barikiwa who was having serious problems. “Among part of his subjects, watoto or children as he called them, a bloodless revolution has broken out. Th ey want to get rid of him and move away.” Th e approximately nineteen majumbe initially recognized by the Germans in Undonde and Utete had achieved their status in spite of the Ngindo aversion to constituted authority. Th is generation of self-made leaders also had to cope the diminution of their powers in controlling witchcraft and adultery. Th e names of all the majumbe encountered by Pfund in 1899 do not exist in 1905— with one exception. Were they pushed from above or from below and how was succession handled? Th at one exception was Kapolo from Madaba. He had bowed to pressures from below to deal with issues of witchcraft and had executed two suspected female witches. By doing so he exercised a judicial function over which the colonial administration claimed exclusive right. He was forced to fl ee to save his life. Although his eldest son was also implicated and punished, he was allowed to succeed to the position of jumbe, as was a younger son aft er the rising. In 1905 local leaders could still muster suffi cient authority to draw

67 “Zur Geschichte des Aufstandes,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8, no. 40 (1906): n.p. Th is article is essentially an ‘obituary’ for Omari Kinjala. See also Crosse- Upcott, “Social Structure”, 426. 68 “Bericht der Stationschef Albinus über eine Bereisung seines Bezirks. Aug bis November 1904,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt XVI (1905): 349. the ngindo 93 hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people into a confl ict. Did they do this on the basis of older authority and resources or did they have to continually re-invent themselves? A literal interpretation of watoto as ‘youth’ alerts us to potential divisions within Ngindo society based not just on gender but also on generation. Crosse-Upcott has said that Ndonde elders were venerated and considered ‘half-spirits’, yet they were not immune to the universal ambitions of the young. Wild rubber (unlike farm land and bee-keeping trees) was not subject to individual ownership nor did it require communal labor; it therefore provided a potential avenue for the young to establish an independent economic base. Th ey could also diff erentiate themselves from their elders in cultural terms. Th e venerable Yim-Yim might be dressed in traditional garb but he was surrounded by young advisors in fashionable coastal clothing, waung- wana (coast-men) in the making. Generational distinctions became important in the initial stages of the rebellion: those with little to lose were eager to initiate change and older fi gures with much to lose were not averse to using young men as messengers in dangerous situations.

Caravans, Conflict and Culture

Within a short period of time from the establishment of the initial military post at Barikiwa, over one hundred coastal traders and two German trading houses moved into the area to exploit rubber.69 Hun- dreds of caravans also passed through Liwale along the Mgende route from Lake Nyasa to Kilwa and from the Ulanga Valley through the northern routes via Madaba or Kipambabwe. Caravans and African traders were widely targeted during the rebellion and this may not be entirely due to the prospect of loot. Little attention has been paid to the potential violent nature of the caravan entity. Pfund was well attuned to this: Th ere is a very noticeable development along well-travelled caravan routes, and it certainly exists here. While it is normally understood that settlements should spring up along communication arteries, and stimulate economic activity along their length, the opposite appears to be the

69 Glauning, “Über einen Marsch von Oberlst. Glauning Kilwa-Barikiwa-Songea- Nyassa,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1900): 54. 94 chapter two

case here. Everywhere there are uninhabited huts fallen into disrepair and shambas left neglected. Th eir owners have retreated far back from the caravan routes and those that are left are inclined to follow them. Too much has been stolen by the porters of passing caravans. Very few caravans are accompanied by Europeans—and if this is the case—there is little chance of the guilty being punished.70 Aft er emerging from the ‘empty quarter’ the previous day he had witnessed the punishment of some of his own hungry porters who had raided the food of a passing Ngoni party. Th e edges of these wilderness areas could therefore become places of danger and confl ict. Th e rationale for the fi rst Mgende military post was not just to protect caravans but also to protect inhabitants from caravans!71 Markets that serviced caravans in these areas tended to be ‘moveable’, assembled from the surrounding area specifi cally for a caravan aft er the security situation was assessed.72 Villagers also became wary of caravans since they were seen in a very real sense as carriers of death.73 Th e Dantz expedition itself was infected at an early stage with smallpox and trailed a string of infected and dying porters into the southern landscape. An expedition in this situation was like a shark that has to keep moving in water to survive; to stop to apply quarantine measures along large sections of the Mgende road would have been in many cases a sentence of death by starvation for the whole caravan. Under the Pax Germanica thousands of Nyasa, Ngoni and Yao porters were traversing back and forth across the Mgende Road carrying news and gossip as well as loads. Th ey were increasingly joined by experienced porters moving down from the central caravan route and other parts of the colony A 1904 report noted. “there were Swahili out of Dar es Salaam, Kilwa and Tanga, also Wanyamwezi and Batongo and others from distant places. One had made this journey fi ve times. Others had been on Lake Tangan- yika, the Victoria Nyansa [sic], and at Blantyre. One had served as a

70 Pfund, Kreuz, 86–7. Examples of this behaviour were noted in Undonde just prior to the outbreak of the rebellion: [Pfüller], “Zum Niedergang des Gummihan- dels,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 6, no. 28 (July, 1904): n.p. 71 Natzmer, “Reisebericht des Majors von Natzmer über seine Reise Barikiwa- Langenburg-Iringa,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1900): 65. 72 Pfund, Kreuz, 68. Dated 17/18 August 1899. 73 For the role of caravans in spreading disease, see Dr. E. Steudel, “Die ansteck- eneden Krankheiten der Karawanen Deutsch-Ostafrikas, ihre Verbreitung unter der übrigen Bevölkerung und ihre Bekämpfung,” Koloniales Jahrbuch (1894): 171. the ngindo 95 soldier, fi rst in Dar es Salaam and then for four years in Neu-Langen- burg (in Rungwe).”74 Hundreds of itinerant rubber collectors, largely from the west, joined traders as seasonal residents in the Ngindo areas. Kiswahili was understood in almost all areas and the more important leaders had access to literate clerks. But culture did not just fl ow from the coast to the interior. Th e Chechere-Barikiwa-Mpembetu axis also formed a rough cultural frontier within Undonde. Th e most striking physical manifestation of this was the southern occurrence of body tattooing among men and the pelele lip plug among women, but it also was evidenced in wood carving, pottery design, and the architecture and pictorial decoration of residences.75 In this respect Undonde was heavily infl uenced by the Makonde-Makua-Mwera-Yao complex south of the Mbwemkuru river.

The Glory of the South: Rubber, Tax and Credit in 1899

When Karl Pfund reached Barikiwa in 1899 he spent several days recording details of conditions in the area as supplied to him by the military post and the local German trading houses. Th e system of taxation in 1899 he described as follows:76 A tax of three Rupies is raised from every healthy, adult black, a ‘head tax’ in spite of the offi cial designation ‘hut tax’. Th e tax roll is estimated at 14,000 Rps, but this has not been achieved this year because of the weak rubber harvest. Although the annual tax has been due for some time now, many jumbes, who are responsible for their subjects, are still in arrears. As of next year, tax must be paid in cash; up to now it has been paid in goods, mainly rubber. Th is change has been made under pressure from a few trading houses. Th e institution of taxation in Undonde needs to be put in a wider context. Th e introduction of the 1897 hut tax was considered to have

74 “Zum erstenmal von Kilwa nach Wiedhafen,” Missionblatter der Brüdergemeinde (1905): 50. 75 Dr. Fülleborn, “Über die Darstellung der Lebensformen bei den Eingeborenen im Süden der Deutsch-Ostarikanischen Colonie,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (1900): 511–534; Kurt Pfund, Kreuz, 60–61, 69. A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Barikiwa Pottery”, Tanganyika Notes and Records 40 (1955): 24–9. 76 Pfund, Kreuz, 67. For an overview of the tax legislation in German East Africa, see A. Bursian, Die Häuser- und Hüttensteuer in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Jena, 1910). 96 chapter two gone most smoothly and completely in the southern districts of Kilwa, Lindi and Mikindani. (Th e Liwale post collected 10,000 rupees in the fi rst year in Undonde.)77 Even though Pfund talks of a slow tax uptake in 1898/9, these three districts still accounted for over 60% of the territorial tax collected midway through that year, with Kilwa the largest contributor. By 1905, the Ngindo in Undonde and Utete has been paying tax for nine years and were the ‘senior’ taxpayers in the colony. Unlike millet, wild rubber production is highly sensitive to rainfall. In a wet year a man could gather 20 balls daily. In the drier year of 1899 the daily takings in Undonde were only seven or eight balls. No indication is given of the prevailing local price but if the government guaranteed price of one rupee per fi ft y balls were an indication, then it would have taken someone approximately twenty-one days to collect suffi cient tax money. Already there was offi cial concern about the destruction of rubber plants by over-exploitation and bush fi res. Intimately associated with the rubber trade was the issue of indebtedness to a commercial community that grown considerably in the short time.78 Rubber could be a source of wealth for the natives if the traders—Arabs and Indians—did not conduct a ‘vampire’ business. In the Undonde- Barikiwa area alone around 300 Arabs and Indians are settled. Th ey or their representatives, mostly intelligent coastal Swahili, travel around the villages with cloth and other barter goods. Th ey extend credit on all kinds of goods to natives who, like children, immediately want everything that pleases them. ‘Pay over time, perhaps in a year—or later. Whenever you wish!’ With these and similar enticements, the blacks are off ered immediate gratifi cation. In the following year, during the rubber harvest, the traders appear again to retrieve their debts, now substantially increased by interest. Th ey remain in the villages, usually as guests of the jumbe and at his expense, until they are paid in rubber (since cash is obviously not available). And aft erwards they provide new goods on extended credit. In this way almost all the jumbes are indebted to Arabs and Indians for large amounts, trapped by the imprudence of their people. Th e evidence on credit has to be evaluated in the context of a fi erce rivalry between German commercial houses, a strong underlying prej- udice against Indian commercial concerns, as well as a general belief— itself essentially racist—that credit would inevitably place Africans in

77 Adams, Dienste, 144. 78 Pfund, Kreuz, 66. the ngindo 97 unmanageable debt. As far as the large commercial houses were concerned, they were primarily focussed on having local administrative authorities assist them in recovering debts through legal and administrative means and, since the legal position remained very unclear, the amount of support diff ered wildly between districts and between administrators.79 Although the quotation above describes a collective responsibility for debt by majumbe in 1899 this may have been a temporary phenomenon; the rapidly increasing monetization of the economy was transforming credit and debt in many ways.

‘Countless Decrees’: 1900–1904

Th e initial investigation of the rebellion listed numerous factors contributing to the outbreak of the rebellion: taxation; communal cultivation schemes; the inadvisable—and oft en illegal—provision of forced labour to white settlers; hunting regulations that discriminated against African elephant hunters as well as reducing the means allowed to protect crops against predators; the diminution of authority of traditional leaders and the inappropriate behaviour of African soldiers, police and civil servants; unpaid construction of roads; and taxes on the brewing of millet beer. Th e Colonial Economic Committee made a trenchant remark: “Th e basic reason for the movement lays in the countless decrees through which the government has sought for years to stimulate the productive capacity of natives by reshaping their habits along European lines.”80 Th is section examines how these issues may have applied to the Ngindo areas in the fi ve years aft er Pfund made his 1899 journey. Wild rubber and millet were the twin pillars of the Ngindo economy. Whereas the long-term viability of wild rubber collection was already being discussed, the stability of millet production was assumed. At least it was until 1900 when an unprecedented stem borer infestation (known locally as mafuta or asali) destroyed the entire sorghum millet crop and people were lucky to retrieve enough for seed. In the

79 See Jamie Monson, “From Commerce to Colonization: A History of the Rubber Trade in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, 1890–1914,” African Economic History 21 (1993): 113–130. 80 Kolonial Wirtschaft liches Kommittee to Kolonial-Abteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes. 23 January 1906. Bundesarchiv [Barch] R100/726, 28. 98 chapter two

Lindi hinterland at least 2,000 people perished from famine. In order to control the infestation, the government in 1901 forbade the cultivation of millet in fi elds previously infested; in eff ect little sorghum millet was cultivated in 1901 and there was a temporary switch to fi nger millet, maize, sesame and groundnuts. In 1902 drought and continuing pockets of stem borer infestation again seriously restricted millet output.81 Yet, the many deaths in the Lindi hinterland do not seem to be mirrored in Undonde and Utete. Th ere are no Ngindo traditions of ‘famines that kill’ in this period and the people appear to have been protected by granary reserves, cassava backup crops, crop diversifi cation and forest foraging.82 A resident observer could say of Undonde in 1903 that “famine is very rare.”83 Th e Ngindo areas did have diffi - culty, however, in providing for the caravan trade during this period. Th is long-term disruption in the agricultural cycle, combined with the perceived inevitability of wild rubber decline, promoted a more dirigiste approach to export agriculture based on cultivated rubber and cotton in Kilwa and the vegetable oil crops of sesame and groundnuts in the Lindi district. Although the implementation of this policy became most obvious in 1902 across the south-east of the colony, the technical preparations had been in place for several years in Undonde. Th e government had appointed a full-time agriculturalist in 1900 to administer a new experimental plantation in Liwale.84 Th e focus of the plantation was cultivated rubber, specifi cally manihot glaziovii, and by mid-1903 over 49,000 trees had been planted on 192 hectares. In July

81 Th e discussion of this agricultural crisis is derived from “Auszüge aus der Jahresb- erichten der Bezirksamte und Militärstationen vom 1.July 1900 bis Juni 1901,” Berichte über Land-und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika I, 1/2 (1902): 23–136; “Auszüge aus den Berichten der Bezirksämter, Militärstationen und anderer Bezirkststellen über die wirtschaft liche Entwicklung im Berichtjahre vom 1.April 1901 bis 31.März 1902,” Berichte über Land-und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika I,3/7 (1903): 205–323; “Auszüge aus den Berichten der Bezirksämter, Militärstationen und anderer Dienst- stellen über die wirtschaft liche Entwicklung im Berichtjahre vom 1 April 1902 bis 31 März 1903,” Berichte über Land-und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika II,4 (1904): 37–122. 82 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Ngindo famine subsistence,” Tanganyika Notes and Records (1958): 1–20. 83 Pfüller, “Donde”, n.p. 84 For the initial establishment see Walter Busse, “Über die Stammplanze des Donde-Kautschuks und ihre praktische Bedeutung,” Der Tropenpfl anzer V,9 (1901): 403–410; Kurt Gruber, “Über einige auf den Kautschukplanzungen Barikiwa-Liwale bei dem Anbau von Manihot Glaziovii gemachte Erfahrungen,” Berichte über Land- und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika II,4 (1904):121–7. the ngindo 99

1902 the fi rst demonstration of manihot productivity was made to all the Ndonde majumbe, apparently to general enthusiasm. In October all village leaders were ordered to establish manihot plantings and to inter-plant cotton. Th e Kilwa Kommunalverband, however, was unwilling to rest its ‘development’ policy on an initiative that had a productivity lead- time of three to fi ve years. In 1903 the order went out to establish communal cotton plantations throughout the Kilwa district at the sites of all akida (African civil servants) and major African leaders. In 1904 this was enforced in Undonde; in 1905 it was extended to Utete. African overseers were hired to enforce participation. By slip- ping compulsory cotton cultivation on the back of the rubber scheme, the Germans were, literally, sowing the seeds of future confl ict. On his 1904 journey through Undonde, Arning noted an apparent movement of population southwards from Liwale to the Mbwemkuru river, now the least supervised of Kilwa’s boundaries. He found the people there hostile and he attributed that primarily to policies supporting the forcible cultivation of cotton.85 With the disappearance of stem- borer and the advent of good rains, agricultural production—as well as increased wild rubber productivity—kicked into an upward cycle that lasted until the rebellion and this provided a viable economic alternative to cotton production Th e prevalence of pombe (millet beer) that the economist Fuchs noted with disapproval in Undonde in 1904 was a sign of good times. In 1904, command of Mahenge was assumed by Hauptmann Th eodore von Hassel, who was determined to institute substantive change on a radical scale.86 Shortly aft er his arrival he acted on longstanding complaints from Kilwa that Ngindo tax defaulters were using the Mbaragandu border as a tax haven.87 He immediately toured the eastern boundary and deposed a large number of local leaders.88 Von Has- sel then introduced another plank of his development policy into the same area: the upgrading of a road system that would link Mahenge more effi ciently to Kungulio, Madaba and Liwale. It was not just the

85 Arning, “Bewohner”, 372. 86 For a general description of von Hassel’s new policies see “Aus dem Bezirk Mahenge,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 7, 16 (1905). 87 Rode to Mahenge Station 22 December 1904. TNA G1/91/236; von Hassel to Government. 15 February 1905 TNA G1/91/238. 88 Von Wangenheim, “Politische Verhältnisse in Bezirke nach dem Aufstande”, 27 July 1906. Barch 1045/13. 100 chapter two

Mahenge district that saw an acceleration of road-building just before the rebellion. In May 1905 the settler Pfüller was uneasy with the policy that the Liwale post was pursuing: “Quite apart from the unpaid cleaning of the barabara [road]—a practice common to all districts— the new construction of large, public thoroughfares seems a risky step that may serve to embitter the Wangindo since it confl icts with their rubber collection and fi eld preparation.”89 It was not just on roads that compulsion was applied. Th e work of the Liwale experimental station had excited the interest of existing and new European commercial interests, who now established their own rubber and cotton plantations near Liwale during 1903.90 Plantations required cheap labour and that was not so easy to acquire locally, since the Ngindo despised waged labour either as plantation labourers or as porters. It was Ngoni, ‘Nyassa’, Yao, Pogoro from the Mahenge High- lands and even Nyamwezi who provided the labor. However, in 1904 the local military post was still tried to provide forced labour for the local plantations.91 Wild rubber continued to be the main source of tax money for the Ngindo and, in the crisis years between 1900 and 1903, Ngindo males were on the rubber-collecting trail from April through to August. Th ere was widespread evidence that wild rubber stocks were being over-exploited, but the local German rubber expert, Kurt Grüber, was highly critical of the idea of a mindless destruction. He saw local Ngindo conservation eff orts already in place since 1900 whereby low- rainfall localities in the north of the district were rested on the initiative of local majumbe.92 But what was diffi cult to control was the infl ux of large numbers of strangers who had no permanent connection with the area and no interest in conservation. Many observers also saw the large trading houses as resistant to conservation, terrifi ed of the short- term impact on extended credit, and eff ectively forcing people into destructive practices. In 1903 the rubber collection benefi ted from a good rainfall; Traun and Stürken alone shipped 150 loads to Kilwa. In 1904 the rainfall was substantially less and the same company only shipped nine loads.93

89 Pfuller, “Niedergang”, n.p. 90 Fuchs, “Sudbahn”, 244. 91 Fuchs, “Sudbahn”, 248. 92 Grüber, “Erfahrungen”, 126. 93 Wilhelm Arning, “Zu den Unruhen in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Deutsche Kolonialzei- tung 12, no. 37 (1905): 390. the ngindo 101

In early 1905 the inevitable happened: Mahenge district imposed a ban on the collection of rubber on the eastern slopes of the Mahenge plateau. Th is had a knock-on eff ect on Undonde, which attracted a larger than usual number of collectors and traders.94 In April 1905 restrictions were also placed on Liwale, where a 7,500 ha forest reserve was created north of the settlement.95 Just before this last closure it was suggested that the tax in wild rubber took thirty days to collect, a twenty-fi ve per cent increase on what Pfund has observed in 1899.96 Th e closure of so much rubber territory now probably even made this fi gure unrealistic. Th ese closures had implications for the chain of credit and for the indebtedness of African producers. It was a phenomenon of early 1905 that, in both Mahenge and Liwale, areas that were to participate in the rebellion, tax was paid promptly. Observ- ers linked this to a practice by which traders paid the tax of rubber producers as an advance against collection, a practice that offi cially or unoffi cially bypassed a general ban on extending credit to Africans unless approved by the district authorities. Arning was told by the Traun und Stürken representative in late 1904 that the incredible sum of 80,000 rupees had been advanced in this manner in the Liwale area alone that year. Arning suggested that the attempt to collect these debts during the poor harvest of 1904 and the 1905 closure of rubber areas contributed to the participation of the Ndonde in the rebellion.97 From about 1901 it was increasingly left to women, children and the elderly to deal with crop protection and other agricultural duties during the prolonged seasonal absence of males.98 Th e issues explored by Sunseri for the Zaramo—notably shift s in gender power—were probably a feature of the Ngindo area. Honey collection, traditionally a male function, appears to have shift ed to women when men were absent. Even the growing importance of the trade in

94 [Pfüller], “Die wirtschaft liche Lage und Sklavenhandel in Donde” Deutsch- Ostafrikanische Zeitung 7 no. 16 (April 1905), n.p. 95 Th addeus Sunseri, “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915,” Environmental History 8,3 (2003): 438. 96 See note 104. Th is is a notional fi gure. Th e calendar time taken to accumulate this amount of rubber could extend over several months. 97 Arning, “Unruhen”, 390. How Aimer arrived at a fi gure almost equivalent to the entire tax revenue of the Kilwa district is not known. 98 “Auszüge aus den Berichten der Bezirksämter, Militärstationen und anderer Bezirkststellen über die wirtschaft liche Entwicklung im Berichtjahre vom 1. April 1901 bis 31 März 1902,” Berichte über Land-und Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika I,3/7 (1903): 252. 102 chapter two wax may have now involved women. A song collected at Barikiwa in the 1950s commemorates such a historical situation.99 Th ere’s famine in Kilingula Th e womenfolk climb for the bees Th eir kimbundi (smoker) is clothing. Th eir ntulakilo (bark rope) is beads. Th ere’s a famine at Kilingula. In the absence of men, communal work parties became even more important and such labor was traditionally rewarded with millet beer. When a brewing tax was imposed in 1904 Ndonde leaders refused to enforce it and, in an almost unique reversal of government policy before 1905, the brewing of pombe for work parties was granted an exemption.100 From 1904 the workforce of women and the elderly also had to cope with the increased demands imposed by compulsory cotton cultivation. Th e changing role of women, the seasonal absence of men and the presence of large numbers of male ‘strangers’ (traders, porters and rubber collectors) in the Ngindo villages also provided the opportunity for real and suspected adultery, a situation that was oft en linked in Ngindo society with the use of medicines and accusations of witchcraft . In the 1903 season over 20,000 porters spent some period of time in Utete or Undonde and that fi gure does not include large numbers of transient rubber collectors. To express those fi gures from a diff erent perspective, there were four ‘strangers’ at some time in these areas for every nominal adult male! Th e Ngindo ideal of spatial isolation, discussed in the opening section, was under severe assault. At the turn of the century, there were only eleven Europeans in the Kilwa district, three of them in Liwale. A traveller in 1900 noted that it was extremely rare for Kilwa offi cials to penetrate into the interior101 and there is no indication that the district offi cer at Kilwa ever visited Liwale before 1905. One result was incomplete and faulty intelligence at the most basic level. Th e other was an over-reliance on African soldiers as agents and the introduction of the akida system, the placement of coastal ‘Arab’ civil servants as regional administrators. Lack of knowledge was paired with a conceptual blindness based on racism. African peasants were demonstrably the engine of growth

99 Crosse-Upcott, “Bee-Keeping”, 90. 100 Pfüller, “Lage”, n.p. 101 Kurt Oberländer, Eine Jagdfahrt nach Ostafrika (Berlin, 1903): 129. the ngindo 103 in the colony, yet they continually were assumed to be economically incompetent. White settlers were demonstrably incompetent yet they were protected and promoted. Germany was the nation that globalized beer production in the nineteenth century as well as the social concept of the seasonal bierfest, yet brewing by Africans was seen as immoral and an invitation to famine. Racism bred a climate of violence. Th e German traveller Oberländer noted the constant sound of chain gangs in Kilwa town in 1899 and sat in on court proceedings where public lashings—the infamous ‘hamsa ishirini’—were routinely administered, aft er which the prisoner had to stand and salute the court.102 Oberlän- der was not critical of this situation; he saw force as a natural form of communication with Africans and semi-slavery as their natural condition. In the interior any white traveller was considered to have the authority to inspect the documentation of African caravans or to administer corporal punishment to Africans or to harangue African leaders. Th e cult of violence spread down the change of command and African soldiers, police and civil servants applied force, either for their own benefi t, or in fear of being the recipients of violence themselves if they were judged not to have implemented German policy rigorously. When Abdullah Mapanda cut the throats of African soldiers on the grave of his maternal uncle Mpinga in August 1905, he was not only symbolically repudiating the contract that his uncle had made with the Germans in 1897, he was expressing a widespread hatred of the African police at Liwale.

The World Turned Upside Down

Th e liquid medicine that was eventually to give its name to the rebellion was not particularly unusual in the sense that it promised to confer invulnerability. War medicines, were always a feature of any African society that engaged in confl ict with other polities. What gives it a particular uniqueness is its combination with an apocalyp- tic, millenarian message, a process that to my mind is insuffi ciently stressed within the literature.103 Th is millenarian message unfolded in

102 Ibid., 127. 103 Sunseri does look at this but with an emphasis on provenance rather than process. Th addeus Sunseri, “Majimaji and the Millennium: Abrahamic Sources and the Creation of a Tanzanian Resistance Tradition”, History in Africa 26 (1999): 365–78. 104 chapter two stages. Th e fi rst aspect (which may have become prevalent as early as mid-1904) was an assertion that the Kibesa shrine on the Rufi ji or the shrine at Ngarambe could bring back the ancestors to life or, at the very least, allow the living to communicate with the dead. Th is connected directly with the main focus of Ngindo religious ritual: the veneration of immediate ancestors. Th e second version invoked an angry and active God who would bring fl oods and lions to destroy the Germans as well as certain segments of the African trading community. Th e fi nal version required African shock troops—the ‘soldiers of God’—to assist the Supreme Being in his mission. In that fi nal version the maji gained new credence: to take it was not only to forge links with other Africans across wider areas, it was in a real sense a commitment to God’s purpose. Conversely, those who refused to take the medicine exposed themselves not only to attack by others but also to the wrath of God. As with many millenarian movements, you could choose to be saved or you could choose to be damned. A captured combatant at Mahenge gave the following information to his interrogators: “He told us that the enemy has received an order from their God to kill all Europeans, soldiers and Mohammedans, but to do no harm to the Indian merchants. Th eir God accompanies them into battle. He stands behind their ranks and drives them on with his sword. Whoever fl ees will be destroyed by the sword of God, or by the lions he has with him.”104 In a twist that is quintessentially Ngindo, the spread of the message from the territorial shrines became entwined with Islam in Undonde. In 1905 a Muslim cleric called Msham Ngojuwa journeyed to the shrine at Ngarambe. He returns with the maji and the story that “darkness would descend on the earth for seven days, whereupon it would lift to revealing a stretch of ocean where each boma [German fort] has stood.” He also claimed that the medium had ordered all supplicants to accept the Islamic faith under the pain of being devoured by lions. He and his assistant were immediately inundated with requests for baptism by water and continued until they dropped from exhaustion. Some observers—starting with Crosse-Upcott—rather simplistically see this event as the beginning of mass acceptance of Islam among the Ngindo.105 A cleric involved was more perceptive: “It was conver-

104 Missionblätter (January/February 1911), 92. 105 More recently Becker has talked about a ‘mass conversion’ preceding the rebel- the ngindo 105 sion by intoxication, not real conversion.”106 What it does reveal is a strong popular disquiet in the Undonde area leading to receptivity to the message of the shrines. Th is is key to the ability of local leaders—particularly Abdullah Mapanda—to mobilize mass support. It would be better to see the progress of Islam in the Ngindo areas as a longer process that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the interwar period, a process that is traced by Alpers for the Yao immediately to the south. It was a top-down process embraced initially by the majumbe and more gradually by the Ngindo in general.107 Th e Swahili phrase for Muslims, waislamu, was still seen at the time of the rebellion as a synonym for ‘traders’—and they were very explicit targets for the rebels. To me, it seems that the one signifi cant Islamic act of the rebellion was the successful intervention of jumbe Abdallah Chimaye in Undonde to stop the killing of Muslim traders in Undonde, overriding the message of the northern shrines.

The Flashpoint of Rebellion108

When the German administration at Mohoro swept up two shrine leaders (Mkomaniro and Kinjikitile) in July it missed one key individual, either because they hadn’t yet heard of him or because he was located just outside their jurisdiction in the Kilwa district. Ngam- eya was reputed to have strong ties with the Mpanga shrine but was himself usually located straight south in the Nandanga hills near to Madaba. Virtually all the informants interviewed by both Bell and Crosse-Upcott point to Nandanga as the primary source for news and medicine in Utete and Undonde. Indeed, that was also true for the Mahenge district. Ngameya played an activist role, directing the outbreak of violence and closely controlling the distribution of booty. He is reputed to have had a coastal clerk to aid him in receiving supplicants. Ngameya disappeared from offi cial accounts very quickly but lion, based on the evidence of a 1912 government survey of Islam. Becker, “Traders”, 20. I don’t interpret the same data in such strong terms. Th e offi cer in Liwale talks of the Ngindo as “superfi cially infected by Islam:” Liwale to Government, Dar es Salaam. 5 December 1912, TNA G9/48, 93. 106 Crosse-Upcott, “Social Structure”, 484–7. Crosse-Upcotte’s informant was one of the cleric’s assistants. 107 Arning, “Bewohner”, 371. 108 Th e accounts of the rebellion in Utete and Undonde, unless indicated otherwise, are taken from Bell’s published and unpublished versions. 106 chapter two it is highly likely that he was the ‘powerful Jumbe Hongo’ who was killed in the area of the Pangani rapids on November 5, 1905 during a surprise attack.109 In death as in life he never ventured outside of a spirit territory running roughly between Kungulio and Madaba. In Utete violence spread westwards along the Madaba trade route. Th e fi rst act of war was initiated in the fi rst week of August by jumbe Ngaruwa of Kitope in conjunction with a hongo messenger sent from Ngameya. An Arab trader was then killed at Lukiloro and his shop was looted; the same happened at Matanda. All of the Utete villages clustered to the east of Madaba rapidly joined the maji forces and advanced on Madaba. In 1905 the settlement was the seat of an akida with responsibility for Utete. Th e renowned jumbe Kapolo of Madaba, whom Dantz had met in 1899, had become an outlaw, hiding in the forest to escape an accusation of murder from the colonial government because he had punished two female slaves for witchcraft and one had died.110 His eldest son, also imprisoned for a year for the same incident, had taken his position. Both joined the advancing insurgents. In Madaba the violence continued. Th e akida was absent deliver- ing tax money to Kilwa; his wife was tortured and raped. Two Swa- hili overseers of the hated communal cotton schemes were killed, as were fi ve coastal traders. All looted goods was delivered to Ngam- eya at Nandanga. All Indian traders in the settlement were spared in accordance with Ngameya’s strictures. Th e timing of the outbreak in Utete may be loosely linked to the arrests of the main shrine mediums by the Mohoro district offi ce in mid-July. Aft er the fall of Madaba, Ngameya wanted to push the confl ict down into Undonde but learned that Liwale has already fallen in an independent development. His attention turned westwards towards the Ulanga valley and the Mahenge Highlands to which he sent hongo intermediaries. Th ese messengers moved westwards into the Mbunga confederacy and brought the maji to Sultan Kindunda at Ifakara. Th e Mbunga had the longest active tradition of resistance to German rule in the south and there was confl ict over tax as late as 1902. Ifakara itself was a major commercial centre where the district authorities had installed a military post in 1901 to control the seasonal trading community.111

109 “Deutsch-Ostafrika: Tätigkeit der kaiserlichen Marine während der Niederwer- fung des Eingeborenen-Aufstandes”, Beiheft zur Marine-Rundschau (May, 1907): 47. 110 Bell, “Maji-Maji”, 42. 111 Grawert to Government. 3 November 1911. TNA G1/91/125–126. the ngindo 107

Th e military post had other tasks that were less well regarded by local residents. Th ey supervised unpaid labour on the government rubber plantation as well as on a nine-meter wide road that stretched from the Ulanga river to the northern district border. Th e debate that unfolded in Ifakara was essentially between the cautious elders and the impatient young. Th e same debate ensued in the Kiberege and Mofu sultanates. Th e youth prevailed and the formidable military organization of the Mbunga confederacy was resurrected. Th e resident military detachment was overwhelmed, shops were looted, traders were killed and the rubber plantation uprooted. Over the next several weeks at least nine caravans were overwhelmed in the lower Ulanga valley. Other hongo messengers from Madaba proceeded down the Mbaragandu providing encouragement and coordination for an attack on the administrative headquarters. On August 30th von Hassel waited for an assault behind the still incomplete walls of the Mahenge boma. It was the fi rst time that the maji forces had confronted a full military fi eld company reinforced by reservists and African auxiliaries. A force of Pogoro and Ngindo from the southern edge of the Mahenge Highlands formed ranks facing the boma. Th ey were fortifi ed by a belief in a maji that was said to confer invulnerability against German bullets. As their assault began, the two machine-guns and rifl e fi re of the 14th Company shredded their ranks for a period of fi ft een minutes before the attack broke. Minutes later another mass attack from the Luhombero-Mbaragandu side was again shattered within steps of the German defences. “Th e fanaticism of the attacking forces is quite extraordinary”, wrote a missionary observer of this second attack “Th ey (Wangindo and Wapogoro from the Luhombero Valley) advanced forward in rank and fi le.”112 Two days later an Mbunga force of over 2,000 warriors, arrayed in their regimental formations, charged the fortifi cations from the north. Th irty warriors—‘the bravest of the brave’—broke through the defensive lines to throw fl asks of maji medicine against the fortifi - cation walls. Because the attack was ultimately repulsed with huge loss of life among the insurgents, this is oft en portrayed as a major defeat. Yet because the defence had literally exhausted the ammunition of the German forces, it removed Mahenge from any eff ective regional

112 Missionblätter (January/February 1911), 92. Th is is the journal of the Benedic- tines of St. Ottilien. 108 chapter two military role for months while the rebellion spread to the south and north. As late as the end of January 1906 von Hassel raged: “Th e Sta- tion is master of the plateau—and no further.”113 Th e information is somewhat richer for Undonde proper. In the preceding year, secret discussions among Ndonde leaders may have been in progress, probably facilitated by larger gatherings at initiation ceremonies. Many village heads from across Undonde were known to have visited jumbe Mpembetu in November 1904 near the end of the dry season.114 In fact, the Germans argued that a conspiracy based on an Ngindo-Ngoni alliance in Undonde was parallel to, but initially unconnected with, the occurrences in the Matumbi hills. Th e key individual in this plan was Omari Kinjala, the Ndonde jumbe who had long-standing commercial and diplomatic contacts with the northern Ngoni kingdom. A 1906 obituary lays out the essence of the proposed alliance: Kingalla fi rst opened negotiations with Chabruma. Discussions about the rebellion had certainly already taken place in April 1905 and tenta- tive plans were formulated by mid-June of that year. Th e initial contacts between Chabruma and Kingalla were mediated by the female jumbe Mkomanire of the Landschaft Kitanda. She was a former slave (Unfreie) who had built up a reputation with both Europeans and Africans. Her territory was well regarded by coloured travellers, for there a man could be certain to have all his wishes satisfi ed. Aft er Mkomanire had travelled back and forth between both parties on several occasions, a direct meeting was arranged between the two protagonists in mid-July to fi nalize the negotiations over participation in the rebellion. Th e alliance between Wangoni and Wangindo was sealed by the marriage of Kingalla and Mkomanire. Th en everyone went home to await a suitable moment to strike a blow.115 For this shuttle diplomacy to have unfolded in the stated timeframe, Kinjala would have had to have been resident in Kitanda or Mgende during these negotiations—and some oral evidence appears to support this.116 Th e oral evidence on the Ngindo side also generally sup-

113 Von Hassel to Kwiro Mission. 30 January 1906. MD1/5. 114 Arning, “Bewohner”, 371. 115 “Zur Geschichte des Aufstandes,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8, no. 40 (1906): n.p. 116 Crosse Upcott, “Social Structure,” 468. Bell, on the other hand, asserts that “there is not a shred of evidence from native reports to support this contention.” Bell, “Rebellion”, 50. the ngindo 109 ports the existence of the marriage—although without exploring its origins. If we accept that the quotation sets forth the German analysis of events, then we may have the origin, cited earlier, of von Götzen’s claim that Mgende was the seat of the rebellion! Th is purported conspiracy was framed in the style of former nineteenth-century alliances without any acknowledged infl uence from the northern shrines; there is no evidence that any of the Ndonde majumbe had visited the shrines at this point or sent messengers to investigate. Th e conspiracy may or may not have existed, but it does have the satisfying ability to connect together disparate events that have always seemed puzzling on their own. However, Abdullah Mapanda was not one of the ‘big men’ involved in these discussions. His uncle Mpinga had been a major power in eastern Undonde and negotiated the initial German presence at Barikiwa as a counter-weight to Ngoni pressures. On Mpinga’s death at the turn of the century the nephew was denied any political post and was bitter and resentful. Abdullah Mapanda was objectively an unlucky man. Engaged in the rubber trade, he ran up substantial debts to Aimer, the Traun and Stürken factor at Liwale. Off ered a gun by Aimer to recoup his losses by hunting elephants (a skill in which he had expertise), he promptly blew off part of his hand. In the stories and rumours reaching Undonde from the northern shrines he now saw the opportunity restore his fortunes. He travelled to Ngarambe to investigate the message of the maji. Mapanda had always seen Omari Kinjala as the most important fi g- ure in Undonde and tried to involve him at the earliest stage in his own plans but he was countered with silent disdain. Th e original manuscript of Bell’s seminal 1950 article gives us much more detail on the personal relationship between the two men. Although Omari Kinjala remained aloof, his younger brother had an interest and a grievance. He also had been in debt to Aimer and on two occasions was fl ogged to encourage repayment. When he expressed an interest in travelling to the Ngarambe shrine he was forbidden by his older brother. When he made an attempt anyway, a party was sent to retrieve him. On his second attempt he met Abdullah Mapanda on the return leg of his journey and returned with him to eastern Undonde. Kinjala now had even more reason to dislike Mapanda and he disdained a renewed invitation to jointly lead an alternative insurrection. Abdallah Mapanda precipitated the rebellion in Undonde by killing two African soldiers—and eff ectively pre-empted the previous 110 chapter two conspiracy. He was joined by the eastern majumbe who were worried that their earlier discussions would become known to the Ger- man authorities and who also had to belatedly recognize the growing popularity of Mapanda, now eff ectively the chief hongo in Undonde. Many of the traders at Kingwichiro kwa Mpembetu were attacked and their shops looted. Th e insurgents advanced westwards to overwhelm the small garrison at Liwale. Spoils from the looting were carefully allocated among the majumbe; there is no indication that anything was sent to the northern shrines. Aimer, the German factor, was one of the victims. Because of Kinjala’s refusal to join the fi ght, he was placed under arrest. Although Mapanda argued for his death, his life was spared by the other majumbe on condition that he led the war westwards into Ngoni territory. His forces met a German relief column coming from Songea and defeated it. Th e other leaders returned to the defence of Undonde and Kinjala advanced into nkosi Chabruma’s territory with two hundred followers. In a remarkable transformation—still by no means fully explained—Omari Kinjala moved from experienced diplo- mat to charismatic prophetic fi gure, “the soul of the rebellion between the Mbaragandu and Lake Nyassa”. None of the prominent Ngindo leaders—with the possible exception of the wily Kapolo—survived the rebellion. Th ey were either captured or executed, died in combat or took their own lives. Many people died of famine in the aft ermath, a situation precipitated by both a ‘scorched earth’ policy during the war and a major disruption to the agricultural cycle aft erwards. Th e German administration was no longer easy with the image of the ‘timid’ Ngindo; it maintained major military garrisons in the Ngindo region until 1912.

Maji Maji in a Wider Context

A series of witchcraft cleansing movements occurred in the South during the British colonial period. All, either in their geographical coverage or in their use of the spiritual toolkit discussed more fully in the introduction, had comparative connections with many aspects of the Maji Maji rebellion. Since their study has shaped the approach to this study, they are summarized below. Scarcely a decade aft er the end of the 1905–07 confl ict an Ngindo medicine-man by the name of Ngoja bin Kimeta begins to make his the ngindo 111

Plate 2.1. Th e boma at Liwale, built with forced labor to replace the German headquarters destroyed during Maji Maji Photo taken in 2004 by Felicitas Becker reputation in Dar es Salaam He makes several forays along the Central Railroad and into the South but it is not until the late 1920s that a witchcraft cleansing movement in his name sweeps through the South. It distributes medicines through agents, it mimics the 1905 distribution routes; it is received favourably in roughly the same areas; and even occasionally involves the same lineages, the Kapolo family in Madaba being one example. Local ‘Ngoja’ agents continue to exist in the early 1930s but by this time the Tanganyika administration began an assault on the Ngindo core areas in the guise of providing more eff ective crop protection against elephants. Th e broad scheme was to drive elephants westward and move people eastward into more concentrated settlements closer to the administrative centers. Aft er 1940 large sections of Ngindo settlement were brought within an extended Selous Game Reserve. 112 chapter two

With the increased appearance of sleeping sickness, possibly causally linked to the new policy, additional rationale was given to force the Ngindo into settlement concentrations to the east. Utete ceased to exist; the town of Madaba was abandoned in 1945. Continuing and partially successful attempts to depopulate Undonde were eventually abandoned in 1948 on the argument that the Ngindo were a potential labor force for the new government economic folly in the South—the Groundnut Scheme. Th e remnants of the trading routes towards the Rufi ji and Kilwa were destroyed and the subsequent expansion of the Selous made that situation permanent. In 1940 increased numbers of sleeping sickness cases in the Ulanga district now gave the needed medical justifi cation to force the Mgende Ngindo and the eastern Pogoro in from the peripheries along the Mbaragandu to two population concentrations in the Luhombero (1941) and Ruaha (1942) valleys close to the southern and eastern edges of the Mahenge Highlands. Further concentrations were to encircle the Mahenge Highlands in 1943 and 1944.117 Th e impact of the game control and sleeping sickness policies was more devastating to the Ngindo than any nineteenth-century raids of the Ngoni. Forced into unfamiliar and marginal lands, denied access to a mix of ecological zones, disrupted during key agricultural seasons, the Ngindo were faced with a food security situation that deteriorated rapidly. In the 1950s the Undonde Ngindo remembered three ‘famines that kill’: that caused by Maji Maji itself, the requisition policies of the First World War, and the 1940s resettlement policies.118 Th e District Commissioner at Mahenge was under no illusion about the popularity of his policies. “Th ese people do not like being concentrated, and we must not blind ourselves to this fact and also to the fact that they hate Europeans and loath the Government and desire to be as far away from both as humanly possible.” Th e possibility of another rebellion lurked at the edges of the minds of some overstretched offi cials. ‘It would take but a whisper!’ reads the enigmatic minute on a sleeping sickness report.

117 Roderick P. Neumann, “Africa’s ‘Last Wilderness’: Re-Ordering Space for Politi- cal and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania’, Africa 73,3 (2001): 641–65. Th e best survey of sleeping sickness concentrations in Ulanga is found in ‘Settlement Offi cer’s Handing Over Notes. Mahenge-Ulanga. November 1955’ Area Offi ce Mahenge T.5/15. For the wider Ulanga context see Larson, “History”, 299–305. 118 Crosse-Upcott, ‘Famine”, 1–20. the ngindo 113

Th e Ruaha and Luhombero concentrations together contained most of the peoples of southern Mahenge who had accepted the maji in 1905 and whose forefathers had participated in the fi rst two massive attacks on Mahenge boma. In 1942, an explosive outbreak of witchcraft fears in the Ngindo-based Luhombero settlement, and major population leakages from the area, threatened the whole basis of population concentration. In a reversal of the situation in 1905, it was the government who called in a ritual specialist to calm unrest. Th e specialist was an Ngindo mbui called Ngope who lived outside the Ngindo core areas, north of the Mahenge Highlands. A missionary-anthropologist described him in 1939 as: . . . presently the most frequented and most infl uential exorcist . . . from the Ngindo tribe among which he has many advocates (Zutreiber) throughout the land. Has more terrifying and awesome working methods than his colleagues in the mountains [Pogoro wambui], leads a more secluded life to make himself inconspicuous from the Government and the Mission. Desires considerable sums for his consultations; what costs much, is worth much. His threats oft en come true in the most striking way, perhaps because he himself is well versed in poisons. His oracles are so shrewd as to have originated with the Devil himself.119 In the following year, similar unrest erupted among the eastern Pogoro in the Ruaha settlement, and Ngope’s services were required again. From 1942 until his death in 1944, he was resident in the Ruaha population concentration. On the eastern side of the Selous it was the Ngindo medicine-man Nguvumali who exerted a similar infl uence among the Liwale Ngindo and the Rufi ji peoples, oft en operating in conjunction with district and provincial authorities.120 Our last example is not strictly speaking Ngindo—but nearly so. Amri bin Makwela was a Yao from the Tunduru district of southern Tanganyika. In late 1948 he burst on to the scene in Dar es Salaam

119 Aquilin Engelberger, Unsere Neger (Micro-Bibliotheca Anthropos, vol. 13), pp. 320–321, n.3. In the same year, a district offi cer could speak of “a greatly respected anti-witch named Ngope . . . Ngope shaves the heads of suspected witches aft er which they can safely be received back into society. Probably he copied his technique from the late Ngoja. Th ere does not seem to be anything anti-social in his activities—quite the reverse.” Assistant District Offi cer Mahenge to Provincial Commissioner Easter. 9 January 1939. TNA: 61/128/I/102. 120 See Hasani bin Ismail, Th e Medicine Man: Swifa ya Nguvumali (Oxford, 1968). Edited and translated by Peter Lienhardt; Lorne Larson, “Problems in the Study of Witchcraft Eradication Movements in Southern Tanzania’, Ufahamu 3 (1976): 88–100. 114 chapter two where he attracted thousands of people until banned from practising in the capital. His apotheosis as a medicine-man was startlingly similar to Kinjikitile Ngwale; he operated under the professional name of Songo; he off ered medicines against witchcraft and wild animals; he claimed to raise the dead.121 Early in 1949 he travelled to Morogoro, Kilosa and then to the Mahenge district, where he attracted great crowds at the Mbunga centre of Ifakara. As he later proceeded through the sleeping sickness concentrations along the Kilombero valley, he waited to be invited into he territory of the Bena mtema, Towegale bin Kiwanga. Towegale was the most powerful African chief in the Eastern Province. His father had been the main German ally in the South, had killed the hongo messengers in 1905, and had taken his warriors to join the defence of the Mahenge boma where he himself had been killed. Mtema Towegale, his religious and political authority threatened by Songo in a similar way, called for government assistance and an armed police patrol from Morogoro ejected the medicine-man from the district. Songo was deported back to Tunduru and placed in restricted residence where he died. For the British administration and its African allies he had evoked too many memories of the Maji Maji rebellion; he held out the possibility that a popular movement could overthrow the colonial status quo.122

121 Oswin Baumann, “Songo”, Missionsbote (March/April, 1950): 20–9. In Ifakara, Songo was remembered years later just as much more for his power over local, man- eating ‘spirit’ lions as for his witchcraft cleansing activities. Communication from Jamie Monson. 122 “People warned the mtema that if Songo were allowed to continue his work, he would eventually remove the linyautwa [royal clan oracle] and burn it and the country would be destroyed without the linyautwa.” Interview: Gustav Mwaliga with Nasoro Lipinda, 19 December 1970, Ngoheranga. Th is is a representative opinion of a number of interviews done in the Malinyi area. It is interesting that although the local people rarely saw witchcraft eradication movements as anti-colonial, they were aware that the British tended to see parallels between such movements and the Maji Maji rebellion. “Th e Europeans told Song that he was not to go into those areas reached by Maji Maji, i.e. south of the Central Railroad . . . Th e Europeans prevented Songo from doing his work because they were afraid his power would provoke another Maji Maji.” Interview: Gustav Mwaliga with Musa Mwinule. 18 December 1970, Ngoherange. SECTION TWO

STRADDLING BOUNDARIES

These chapters discuss occupational groups whose importance in Maji Maji has been neglected, yet who played a crucial part in communication during wartime. Although they were enemies, they shared unusual mobility and easily crossed environmental, cultural and ethnic boundaries. One group were the ivory hunters discussed here by Sunseri; the other were the askari, the African soldiers in the German army studied by Moyd. Sunseri argues that ivory hunters were particularly harmed by the German intrusion into the ivory trade. Highly mobile, agile in crossing cultural and environmental frontiers, and expert in the medicines used in war as well as hunting, ivory hunters nursed deep grievance against colonial authority and possessed the means to mobilize resistance against it. Maji Maji studies have long doubted the idea that healers provided military leadership during the war; Sunseri shows that it was instead ivory hunters who provided vital leadership, while also facilitating communication over long distances. The askari were renowned for their terrifying brutality, a point illus- trated by Giblin, Nyagava and Schmidt below. Yet, they were motivated, argues Moyd, by a deep sense of professional and masculine honor. To understand their concept of honor, Moyd situates the askari both in the institutional setting of the German military, and in their more intimate, and highly multicultural, settings of comradeship and family. This second setting was particularly important in facilitating intercommunication during warfare. Through their marital and family relationships, the askari sunk roots in cultures and communities throughout the Maji Maji region. These connections surely madeaskari and their wives prime relay-points where German information and rumor intersected African circuits of communication. Unrestrained by ethnic and language boundaries, askari as well as ivory hunters made interregional communication a vital structural factor in the war.

CHAPTER THREE

THE WAR OF THE HUNTERS: MAJI MAJI AND THE DECLINE OF THE IVORY TRADE

Thaddeus Sunseri

In 1905, Hans Paasche, sent to secure the Rufiji River from Maji Maji rebels, encountered a band of suspected rebels armed with muskets just south of the river. According to Paasche, the leader of the band stepped forward and challenged Paasche’s contingent of marines and askari with the words, “Come here if you are men.”1 At that point one of the marines shot him dead, and the other rebels fled. Paasche later learned from the local akida, a German ally, that the fallen rebel leader was a hunter and the main instigator of rebellion in that locality. Paasche’s account is one of many that mention the role of hunters in the 1905 rebellion. According to R.M. Bell, the “moving spirit” of the rebellion around Liwale was an elephant hunter named Abdalla Mapanda, whose village of Kitandangangora lay on the periphery of the newly-created Matandu River game reserve [see also chapter by Larson in this volume].2 By mid August 1905 rebel forces under Mapanda converged on the Liwale boma, killed a small German contingent after laying siege, and destroyed a German rubber plantation. North of the Rufiji River the most well-known Zaramo participant in the rebellion was Kibasila, latest descendent of a lineage of reputed elephant hunters. The Germans had recently created a game reserve on the upper Rufiji River just southwest of Kibasila’s territory in his ancestral land of Ukutu. The epic poemUtenzi wa Vita vya Maji Maji, composed in the years after the rebellion by Abdul Karim bin Jamalid- dini of Lindi, also drew attention to the presence of hunters in the war with the line, probably referring to Abdalla Mapanda, “Madman Fundi

1 Hans Paasche, Im Morgenlicht: Kriegs-, Jagd-, und Reise-Erlebnisse in Ostafrika (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Son, 1907), pp. 107–108. 2 R.M. Bell, “The Maji Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950): 38–57; Tanzania National Archives (TNA) G8/653, Waldreservat Liwale, 9 April 1905; Lott to Government, 20 December 1906. 118 chapter three

Mtambo gave up elephant hunting and destroyed his bait. Now he’s abject and poverty stricken.”3 The official German report on the causes of the uprising took note of the role of elephant hunters as war leaders, and Governor Götzen temporarily ameliorated hunting ordinances in an effort to help quell the rebellion.4 Though not as well known as spirit mediums and majumbe headmen in planning and leading the rebellion, hunters, particularly elephant hunters, had a central role in the war. The African elephant hunters who fought in the war opposed an enemy led largely by hunters of a different sort. Germans arrived in East Africa with their own hunting ethos, one that clashed with Afri- can hunting practices. Paasche’s account of the war along the Rufiji River was as much a record of his wartime hunting forays and the wildlife trophies that he brought back to Germany as it was of the war. In the decade before Maji Maji the German colonial state had begun to implement a series of ordinances that aimed to restructure hunting practices in German East Africa. In particular they sought to impose German notions of weidgerecht, or hunting ethics, which were at odds with African hunting practices that aimed primarily to protect fields from crop predators, obtain meat, and kill elephants and other large mammals for ivory, horns, and pelts. German sport hunting was not simply the upper class obsession that John MacKenzie describes for the British empire.5 In German East Africa it was aimed at low- level administrators and junior military officers, a right that came with service to the empire. Along with this right came a belief that Ger- man methods of hunting were professional and humane, while Afri-

3 Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini, “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji,” Trans. W.H. Whiteley, Supplement to the East African Swahili Committee Journal 27 (June, 1957): 48–49, stanza 155. The original reads, “Wazimu Fundi Mtambo kaacha kuwinda tembo ameharibu vyambo; sasa dhalili fakiri.” ‘Fundi’ was a term used to designate a specialist elephant hunter. See also Gudrun Miehe, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis and Ralf Grosserhode (eds.), Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2002), p. 341. 4 Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BAB) R1001/724, Denkschrift über die Ursachen des Aufstandes, 33b. This point was noted in L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan,The Rul- ers of German Africa 1884–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 120. 5 John M. Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). For a recent critique see Lance van Sittert, “Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province c. 1850–1950,” Journal of African History 46 (2005): 269–91. the war of the hunters 119 can methods were neither. As Germans imposed their vision of the proper hunt, they singled out elephants as affording special protection by creating a licensing system that virtually excluded Africans from hunting elephants. This was coupled with the creation of game reserves in each district on the eve of Maji Maji that offered wildlife of all sorts refuge from hunting. The international convention that met in London in 1900 to create rules to regulate hunting and create game reserves in Africa was the brainchild of Hermann von Wissmann, the first military conqueror of German East Africa. It reflected the close convergence between European military and hunting cultures. While Maji Maji was a symbolic clash of hunting cultures, it also had important material dimensions. In many respects it represented the last gasp of a caravan trading system that centered on the ivory trade. During the nineteenth century many East African polities coalesced around the ability of chiefs and big men to monopolize ivory, either by hunting elephants directly or by imposing a tribute on caravans that passed through their lands. Before the word hongo was used to refer to the emissaries of the Maji Maji rebellion it referred to the levies demanded from passing caravans. The prevailing logic is that by the end of the nineteenth century the ivory frontier had moved to the deep interior, effectively outside the borders of modern Tanzania. However, elephants were by no means hunted out in German East Africa, having moved to the peripheries of settlements or finding refuge in the forests and woodlands that punctuated the landscape. There was still great profit to be made in hunting elephants for ivory at the beginning of the twentieth century when prices were high and one tusk was of great value. In 1900 elephants still haunted the forests of the Maji Maji outbreak region and virtually every region where the rebellion spread, posing both a threat to crops and a promise of riches. German hunting laws that protected elephants simultaneously threatened peasant subsistence and the power base of local big men and majumbe whose prestige, wealth, and patronage often lay in hunting elephants. One dimension of Maji Maji, then, was a material and metaphorical war between African and German hunters. Although this essay will focus on the decline of elephant hunting and the ivory trade as a factor in the Maji Maji war, it is most appro- priately discussed alongside other conflicts over environmental control that came with German colonialism. These include German attacks on African methods of farming, African control of the forests, and 120 chapter three peasant protection of their fields from crop predators. I have discussed these issues elsewhere, so I will not do so explicitly here.6 German curtailment of African participation in the ivory trade reverberated along what Monson has called networks of “alliance and territorial authority” that long predated colonial rule.7 It furthermore paralleled other colonial intrusions into trade networks, particular the usurpa- tion of the trade in wild rubber and its replacement by plantation rubber.8 German efforts to promote plantation agriculture and cash crops, especially cotton, were also part of the equation, as they threatened to replace African subsistence and autonomy with the precariousness of wage labor and market dependence on food, to which Africans often turned in times of famine. While Maji Maji was a complex episode in Tanzanian history, it is best understood as the culmination of decades- old changes in the political economy of the mainland rather than as a sudden rupture after the turn of the century.

Ivory and Political Consolidation in Nineteenth Century Tanzania

The role of hunters, particularly elephant hunters, in the Maji Maji war is not surprising given the importance of ivory in nineteenth century East African history. Ivory was the single most important trade com- modity from the mainland, accounting for 36% of total export value from Zanzibar in the years 1869–71, which was three times the value

6 Thaddeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania),” Journal of African History, 38, 2 (1997): 235–59; Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania, 1884–1915 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), Chapter 4; “Reinterpreting a Colo- nial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915,” Envi- ronmental History 8, 3 (2003:, 430–51. 7 Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918,” Journal of African History 29, 1 (1998): 95–120. 8 On Maji Maji and the decline of the rubber trade see Juhani Koponen, Devel- opment for Exploitation: German colonial policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Helsinki and Hamburg: Finnish Historical Society, Studia Historica 49 and Lit Ver- lag, Studien zur Afrikanischen Geschichte , 1995) pp. 237–40; Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (eds.), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (London: James Cur- rey, 1995), pp. 124–42; Felicitas Becker, “Traders, ‘Big Men’ and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji rebellion in Southeast Tanzania,” Journal of African History 45 (2004): 1–22; Sunseri, “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion.” the war of the hunters 121 of cloves in those years.9 In the nineteenth century, East Africa was the largest source of ivory in the world, drawing in traders from around the globe.10 This was in part because of East African ivory’s specific characteristics. Tanzanian ivory came from the savanna elephant (L. africana africana), and was therefore soft, as opposed to the hard ivory of forest elephants (L. africana cyclotis) found west of the Congo border.11 Soft ivory was opaque, white, smooth, and easily worked, thus desired for ornaments, billiard balls and piano keys. Even the smaller tusks of female elephants found a steady market. The hard, translucent ivory of West-Central African elephants, which was more difficult to carve, nevertheless had a large market in Britain for cutlery handles, and at the end of the nineteenth century much of this ivory passed over East African caravan routes.12 Like other products of the “legitimate trade” era in Africa, the rise of a middle class consumer culture in the West was a major stimulus to the ivory trade. In 1859 almost half of ivory exported from Zanzibar went to Western countries, the rest going to India. MacKenzie points to the huge growth of the piano industry in the United States in illustrating ivory’s importance in trade, from 10,000 pianos in 1850 to 370,000 in 1910.13 In 1843 700,000 lbs. of ivory worth $540,000 were exported from Zanzibar. This increased to 875,000 lbs. in 1848–49 (no price given), but decreased to 488,600 lbs. worth $660,000 in 1859.14 On average 1,240,800 lbs. (564,000 kg.) of ivory were exported annually from East Africa in the years 1879–83

9 Bruno Kurtze, Die Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913), p. 31. 10 R.W. Beachey, “The East African Ivory Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Jour- nal of African History 8, 2 (1967): 269–90, here 269; MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 148. 11 Beachey, “East African Ivory Trade,” 274; Marion Johnson, “Elephants and Imperialists,” in Jeffrey C. Stone (ed.), Exploitation of Animals in Africa (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University, 1988), pp. 157–91, here 159. These two elephant species are the result of a separation caused by the emergence of the Rift Valley in eastern Africa some eight million years ago, the same event that separated apes and hominids and ushered in modern human evolution. Yves Coppens, “East Side Story: The Origin of Humankind,” Scientific American May 1994, pp. 88–95, here 95. 12 MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 148. 13 MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 148. 14 C.S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the East Afri- can Littoral 1798–1856 (New York: African Publishing Corporation, 1971), p. 370. 122 chapter three at a time when the price averaged about $140 per frasila.15 Ivory prices at Zanzibar roughly tripled from 1850 to 1890.16 Because Zanzibar ivory came from a huge region of eastern and northeastern Africa, it is difficult to assess its precise sources at any given time. According to French observations of the trade in 1849, an estimated 533,000 to 653,000 lbs. were shipped from the mainland through Zanzibar. Of this, at least half went through the ports of Kilwa, Mbwamaji, and Bagamoyo.17 One third was exported from the Kenyan ports of Mombasa and Lamu. It is clear that all caravan routes to the coast provided ivory, but the central routes opposite Zanzibar were favored. While trade ports were essentially fixed, ivory sources came from a moving frontier, as elephants near the coast were either hunted out or migrated inland by the 1840s, necessitating ever- expanding trade penetration inland throughout the nineteenth century. However, elephants did not just move in a linear path to the interior, but also occupied inaccessible highlands, woodlands, and coastal forests that dotted the landscape, which local chiefs sought to control. For societies that did lose direct control of elephant herds, the ability to demand tolls from passing caravans through force of arms offered a substitute means of garnering trade wealth. Control over sources of ivory or caravan routes through which ivory flowed led to the political coalescence of many mainland African societies. Among the Kimbu of Western Tanzania, for example, traditions of origin speak of the desire to control the ivory trade as the dominant factor in their conquest of the region in the eighteenth century.18 Sub- ordinate chiefdoms were expected to greet newly-installed paramounts with gifts of ivory, slaves, and cloth. Nyamwezi chiefdoms were said to have all been founded by hunters, who had to prove their right to kingship by killing an elephant.19 Among emergent polities on Mount Kilimanjaro in the eighteenth century, control of ivory sources and trade outlets was fundamental to state formation, and remained a pri-

15 Norman Bennett, Studies in East African History (Boston: Boston University Press, 1963), p. 89; Heinrich Schnee (ed.), Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920), pp. 557–58. One frasila was about 35 lbs. 16 Bennett, Studies, p. 89. 17 Nicholls, Swahili Coast, opposite p. 374. 18 Aylward Shorter, Chiefship in Western Tanzania: A Political History of the Kimbu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 130, 151. 19 R.G. Abrahams, The Political Organization of Unyamwezi (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1967), p. 32. the war of the hunters 123 ority well into the nineteenth century.20 In Kenya elephant hunting and the ivory trade were instrumental in shaping Kamba social and political institutions and cultural identity.21 Ivory was also among the commodities that facilitated political consolidation in the southern highlands of Tanzania.22 Compelling evidence points to the importance of elephant hunting for the formation of political identity in the coastal hinterland—the Maji Maji outbreak region—in the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier. A Zaramo tradition tells of a Kutu elephant hunter named Kibamanduka who agreed to protect coastal people from Kamba invaders in exchange for recognition as paramount chief, called Pazi, and for a tribute that included salt and cloth.23 This tradition suggests that the exchange of ivory for cloth was an important economic base for emergent Zaramo political authority. Descendants of Kibamanduka also assumed the title of Pazi, and many of the region’s chiefs and headmen in subsequent years claimed descent from Kibamanduka. Thepazi of Vikindu in the late nineteenth century, Kawamba Mschale, was an elephant hunter and trader.24 Among southern Zaramo the origins of mapazi of the Kibasila lineage were also from Ukutu, whose forbear migrated eastwards as an elephant hunter, establishing trading relations with Zanzibar-appointed traders at Kisiju. Rufiji, Matumbi, and Ndengereko narratives also mention the role of elephant hunting in their past a few generations before the Maji Maji war.25 Traditions assert that the Rufiji valley was occupied by twelve sons of a Hehe chief named Wamabanguru,

20 Ludger Wimmelbücker, Kilimanjaro—A Regional History (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), pp. 129–131. 21 Edward Steinhart, “Elephant Hunting in 19th-Century Kenya: Kamba Society and Ecology in Transformation,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, 2 (2001): 335–349; Thomas Spear,The Kaya Complex: A History of the Mijikenda Peoples of the Kenya Coast to 1900 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978). 22 Monson, “Politics of Alliance and Authority,” p. 100. 23 Tanganyika District Books (hereafter TDB) Reel No. 13, Vol. 1, Wazaramo; Mar- tin Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Daressalam (Deutsch-Ostafrika),” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen. 1–3 (1910–1913): 37–70, 118–53, 189–223 (here 44, 210). For other versions of this story see John Gray, “Dar es Salaam under the Sultans of Zanzibar,” Tanganyika Notes and Records (hereafter TNR) 33 (1952): 1–21 (here 2). On Kamba ivory trading see Isaria Kimambo, “The Economic History of the Kamba 1850–1950,” in Bethwell A. Ogot (ed.), Hadith 2 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1979), 79–103, here 81. 24 BAB/R1001/726, Booth report, 16 January 1906, 126. 25 TDB-Reel 8, Rufiji District Tribal History and Legends. 124 chapter three who founded the dominant lineages north of the river. One of those sons, Sule, settled at Rusende in the Rufiji flood plain, and earned a reputation as an elephant killer—perhaps as much to protect crops as to garner wealth from the ivory trade. As a result of this reputation Pazi Kawamba of Vikindu visited him and appointed him chief. Matumbi and Kichi traditions assert that their lineages derived from two Hehe immigrants who followed after Wamabanguru’s sons. One of the immigrant chiefs, named Mbonde, was the patriarch of several lineages south of the river, but eventually crossed the river to the north, settled at Rusende and married Sule’s granddaughter, thus uniting the two dominant Hehe migrant traditions in a lineage known for elephant hunting. Thus, polities of the greater Rufiji basin north and south came to see themselves as related to lineages that originated in Uhehe, and some point to specific connections to elephant hunting and trade with coastal elites at the moment that their lineages coalesced. Descendants of these founding fathers only two or three generations removed can be identified as localmapazi and majumbe on the eve of Maji Maji. Zaramo mapazi were well known for extorting tolls from caravans that passed through their lands headed to the main ports of Bagamoyo and Mbwamaji. Richard Burton passed through these lands in 1858 and wrote of the fear that travelers had of the Zaramo, and consequently their willingness to pay for transit access. “The p’hazi, or chief of the district, demands a certain amount of cloth for free passage from all merchants on their way to the interior; from those returning he takes cattle, jembe, or iron hoes, shokah or hatchets, in fact, whatever he can obtain, if not contented his clansmen lie in ambush and discharge a few poisoned arrows at the trespassers.”26 The result of such tolls was that the Zaramo emerged as a prosperous people at mid-century. Chiefs distributed trade commodities, especially cloth, down a hierarchy of officials, who in turn distributed them among their own followers.27 Almost all men and women wore cotton cloth, making them distinct from peoples further west who were not able to corner the caravan routes. Similar efforts to tap into the caravan

26 Richard F. Burton, The Lakes Region of Central Africa (New York: Dover, 1995), pp. 90–92. 27 On the role of cotton cloth in east African trading networks see Jeremy Prest- holdt, “On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” American His- torical Review 109, 3 (2004): 755–781. the war of the hunters 125 trade were seen further south, where the Rufiji River emerged as an important trade conduit to the coast. During his brief sojourn up the Rufiji River in 1874 Stanley was informed that the “countries” beyond the upper Rufiji were important sources of ivory, where it could be purchased for half the Zanzibar selling price.28 By that time the river had become an alternate export route, as labor costs for porters and tolls had become burdensome for merchants along the central caravan route. Nevertheless, polities living along the lower courses of the river expected traders to stop and pay for their access. For much of the nineteenth century an accord existed between hinterland communities and leaders of coastal ports under the authority of the Sultan of Zanzibar that guaranteed the free flow of trade in exchange for an annual tribute. Ivory was one of two mainland trade commodities (the other being copal) for which the Sultan demanded a fixed 20% export duty at Mrima ports.29 According to a Zaramo historical tradition, the Sultan’s men were allowed to administer Dar es Salaam and Kisiju ports in order to protect trade. “Said Majid [Sultan from 1856–1870] agreed that to help the country the dues on ivory should be divided amongst the Wazaramo themselves, and the dues on incoming trade should be his for the payment of his Akidas [administrators] and their askari [soldiers].”30 Breaches of this guest-host relationship, such as the granting of land and transit rights to Europeans without Zaramo approval, led to immediate repercussions, including attacks on coastal communities and cessation of the caravan traffic. When this happened, such as in 1873, commerce at Zanzibar dried up, ivory prices spiked, and Western traders were at risk of vastly diminished returns on their trade.31 Elephant hunters earned prestige both because they were able to stockpile and redistribute imported commodities such as beads, cloth, silver, and firearms and because they offered their communities protection from famine by destroying crop-marauding elephants and other wildlife. In the heyday of elephant hunting tremendous wealth

28 Henry M. Stanley, “Explorations in Central Africa,” Journal of the American Geo- graphical Society of New York, 7 (1875): 174–282, here 190. 29 Abdul Sheriff,Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East Afri- can Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey, 1987), p. 121. 30 Saidi Chaurembo in TDB Reel 13, “Notes on the History of Dar es Salaam,” Dar es Salaam Extra-Province District Book, Vol. I. 31 Gray, “Dar es Salaam,” p. 10. 126 chapter three could be amassed. The ground tusk custom enabled chiefs or local big men to amass significant power by monopolizing half of all ivory procured, since hunters remitted one tusk of every elephant to the local chief or hegemon as a symbol of respect for ancestral traditions and territorial rights.32 Furthermore, in the nineteenth century mature elephants were more numerous, thus tusks bigger, it being common for a tusk to weigh 50–70 kg.33 At a time when the price averaged about 18–21 Rupees. per kg., such as the years 1879–83, one elephant with 50 kg. tusks could thus earn a chief 1000 Rupees (about $470) according to the ground tusk principle, with another thousand going to a hunter or hunting party and their dependents and clients.34 Control of hunting grounds was a factor in competition over control of forests, woodlands, and other elephant habitats in the nineteenth century, and in some regions ivory ornaments themselves symbolized chiefship or military authority.35

Trade Disruptions and the Advent of German Colonialism

German merchants intruded onto the mainland in the 1880s in a heavy-handed way that disrupted long-established patterns of trade in ivory and other mainland commodities, spawning a coastal uprising that in some respects was a prelude to the Maji Maji rebellion. The beginning of formal German colonialism following the coastal rebellion ushered in trade controls and proscriptions on African elephant hunting that would draw hunters further in opposition to the government. Chancellor Bismarck’s interest in East Africa was set in motion in 1884, building on German mercantile interests long active on Zan- zibar.36 At the time the Sultan of Zanzibar exercised suzerainty over the coast of East Africa, and had established garrisons and toll stations at various points along the coast and on major inland caravan routes. Coinciding with the Berlin Congress that launched the European

32 On the ground tusk principle see Beachey, “East African Ivory,” 275; Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1975), p. 18. 33 This weight class was considered by the major German importing firm of H. Meyer to be “soft, middling heavy.” Schnee, Kolonial-Lexikon, p. 558. 34 Bennett, Studies, p. 89; Schnee, Kolonial-Lexikon, pp. 557–58. 35 Monson, “Politics of Alliance and Authority,” p. 104. 36 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, pp. 69–85. the war of the hunters 127 scramble for colonies in Africa, Bismarck saw strategic advantage to granting a letter of protection to the Society for German Colonization, controlled by a self-proclaimed conquistador named Carl Peters, who through force and deception sought to obtain treaties from African chiefs that purportedly granted the Society rights of control. Already by 1886 Peter’s Society moved from a medium of land grabbing to a corporation called the German East Africa Corporation (DOAG) controlled by German bankers, industrialists, merchants, and stock- holders, including the Kaiser himself. At that time the DOAG Pro- tectorate included a contiguous mass of land inland from Bagamoyo and Pangani north of the Kingani/Ruvu River for a distance of a few hundred miles. In contrast to the well-developed trade connections of Indian communities (some 1500 Indians lived on the mainland in the late 1880s), the DOAG’s fifty-six agents had no prior experience in the region, bringing with them arrogant attitudes toward Africans that inhibited trade.37 The Sultan retained control of a ten-mile wide strip of the entire coast, and coastal hinterland polities south of the Ruvu were left free of DOAG control.38 In 1888 the new Sultan, Khalifa, whose brother died that year, signed a treaty granting the DOAG the right to administer coastal trade on the Sultan’s behalf along the coast and at inland toll stations. This treaty empowered the DOAG to appoint customs’ officials, to take over garrisons and unoccupied buildings, exact taxes and tolls, take over “unoccupied” land, and negotiate treaties with inland Afri- can societies.39 The conventional thinking is that a new and weak Sul- tan was swindled by the provisions of the 1888 lease under pressure of German gunboats. However, the DOAG stood to lose a great deal from the lease if it could not squeeze profits from the caravan traffic quickly. To do this, the treaty empowered the DOAG to assume control over the coast in novel, and, from the perspective of African villagers and coastal elites, severely intrusive ways. The company tight- ened the screws on trade and customs tolls and as much as possible

37 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, p. 151. 38 A map of this protectorate is found in Kurtze, Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesell- schaft, opposite p. 182. 39 The German text of the treaty is found in Kurtze,Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesell- schaft, pp. 183–196. The English version, which was authoritative in cases of dispute over treaty provisions, is found in Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, Accounts and Papers Vol. 74, Colonies and British Possessions, 9 February 1888–24 December 1888, “English Text of German Concession,” pp. 272–275. 128 chapter three channeled trade through stations under its control.40 It tried to curtail the practice of basing tolls on the auctioned price of ivory at the central toll house in Zanzibar, which created fluctuating prices and generally higher costs for European merchants. Each month the DOAG publicized a new price list for different grades of products, usurping the ritual of price negotiation that was exactly the point where African producers had once held leverage. The events that followed are fairly well known, although still not completely understood.41 As DOAG agents attempted to pull down the Sultan’s flags and raise those of the company at the major toll stations in August 1888, Swahili town notables organized a general resistance to the DOAG that by September grew into a major coastal rebellion that lasted two years. DOAG agents in all the “district towns” were chased out, except in Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam, where they hunkered down and where trade virtually ceased. Hinterland traders joined town notables in driving out the Germans, though they made it clear that once the Sultan’s authority and pre-existing trading norms were reestablished, trade as usual would resume. In Kilwa the two DOAG agents were killed as a rebellion that included the town notables, led by the liwali Mataro, and 15,000 to 20,000 armed Africans, many of whom were Yao ivory and rubber traders, occupied the town and sought to find an outlet for a large caravan of ivory that had just reached the town.42 They re-hoisted the Sultan’s flag and prevented some 200 Indian traders from departing while making it clear that what they really wanted was “to carry on trade and to export all goods save the necessities of life.”43 In September 1888 Yao forces occupied the Rufiji Delta, and others took the northern Rufiji coastal port of

40 Kurtze, Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, pp. 146–147. 41 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Conscious- ness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995); Robert D. Jackson, “Resistance to the German Invasion of the Tanganyikan Coast, 1888– 1891,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Ali Mazrui (eds.). Protest and Power in Black Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 37–79; J.A. Kieran, “Abushiri and the Germans,” in Ogot, Hadith 2: 157–201; John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 91–98. 42 Hall to Freemantle, 27 September 1888, in Accounts and Papers, 88; Kieran, “Abushiri and the Germans,” pp. 177, 188. One of the Yao leaders was Machemba, who was a key figure in the rubber trade from the southeast. Jackson, “Resistance to the German Invasion,” p. 73. 43 Euan-Smith to Salisbury, 22 October 1888, in Accounts and Papers, 94. the war of the hunters 129

Kisiju.44 In January 1889 the Reichstag in Germany voted two million marks to finance a military expedition to put down the East African uprising.45 Aided by a growing food shortage along the coast and the gradual fractioning of the resistance movement, German forces burned villages and moved from the northern coast to the south prosecuting the war. This was the beginning of the German conquest of the mainland and of formal German colonial administration. Following the coastal rebellion, stockpiled ivory flooded the coast, so that in 1890–1 950,000 lbs., about twice the normal annual average, was traded from Zanzibar.46 A German report claimed that most of the ivory that arrived at the coast in 1893–4 was the product of caravans that had been sent into the interior 1½ to 2 years before, but that could not find an outlet on account of Congo warfare.47 This ivory was of rather low value at $140 to $145 per frasila compared to $160–170 per frasila the year before, perhaps indicating “hard” Central African ivory. By 1900 export tolls were established in Congo and British possessions (especially Uganda), so that most ivory exported from Ger- man East Africa was from that territory.48 However, an underground ivory trade sought to by-pass German outlets along the coast. German authorities imposed a curfew on non-Europeans in most coastal ports after ten at night, apparently to curtail covert nighttime trading that could not be regulated.49 The ivory trade to Lindi was largely diverted into Portuguese territory as a result. In Bagamoyo for a time it was illegal for traders to meet arriving ivory caravans outside the town, where business could be conducted furtively. Even after the coastal rebellion had been quelled, “a few energetic Arabs or native chiefs,” especially Machemba and Hassan bin Omar, held great sway over trade along the southern coast. For much of the 1890s the southern

44 Karl Grass, “Forststatistik für die Waldungen des Rufiyideltas, angefangen im Jahre 1902,” Berichte über Land- und Forstwirtschaft (hereafter BLF), II (1904–06): 165–96, here 167. 45 Jackson, “Resistance to the German Invasion,” p. 66. 46 Beachey, “East African Ivory,” p. 287. About half of this quantity (462,000 lbs.) came from German East Africa. “Die Entwicklung von Deutsch-Ostafrika während der letzten zehn Jahre,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 11 (1900): 179–82; Schnee, Kolonial- Lexikon, p. 558. 47 “Jahresbericht über Zoll- und Handelsverhältnisse,” Beilage zum Deutschen Kolo- nial Blatt (hereafter Beilage) 1894, p. 69. 48 “Die Entwicklung,” DKB 11 (1900): 180. 49 TNA G8/67, DOAG, Bericht über . . . Eindrücke und Erfahrungen, October 1892, p. 2. 130 chapter three coastal hinterland was threatened by raids from Ngoni, Magwangwara, and Mbunga from the interior, which can be seen as a struggle over resources. Although trade in rubber experienced a boom, ivory trading was under assault. The idea that elephants had simply been hunted out is untenable.50 The Lindi station chief noted that elephants and hippos were to be seen along the Mbwemkuru River in 1896.51 Pfund had no trouble observing “numerous elephant trails” near Behobeho on the upper Rufiji in 1899.52 At the time a Greek traded in ivory and rubber at Kungulio on the Rufiji River. Pfund observed elephants and other wildlife along the Luwegu branch of the upper Rufiji and in the region of Ungindo, which would be important in the Maji Maji rebellion a few years later [see also chapter by Larson in this volume].53 Marching toward Son- gea, Pfund noted damage to forests caused by elephants and recent camps of African elephant hunters, where elephant skeletons had been left behind.54 In spite of the presence of elephants, there is no doubt that the ivory trade continued to decline. Between 1890 and 1905 the ivory trade from German East Africa declined by 89%.55 At least part of the explanation for this decline must be found in the impact of German hunting laws.

The Impact of Colonial Hunting Laws and Game Reserves

Between 1896 and 1903 the German colonial government introduced comprehensive hunting laws in German East Africa, modifying them steadily over the years in a progressively draconian way with respect to African hunting.56 While it is unlikely that the German administration successfully enforced these ordinances throughout such a vast region

50 “Die Entwicklung,” DKB 11 (1900): 180. 51 BAB/R1001/1040, Fromm to Government, 29 July 1896, 3. 52 Kurt Pfund, Kreuz und Quer durch Deutschostafrika (Dresden, n.d.), pp. 25, 69. 53 Pfund, Kreuz und Quer, pp. 71, 76–77. 54 Pfund, Kreuz und Quer, p. 98. 55 “Die Entwicklung,” DKB 11, 1890, 180; Schnee, Kolonial-Lexikon, pp. 558–559. 56 For an overview of these policies see Koponen, Development for Exploitation, pp. 536–42; MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, Chapter Six; Bernhard Gißibl, “German Colonialism and the Beginnings of International Wildlife Preservation in Africa,” in Charles Closmann and Frank Zelko (ed.), “Nature, Culture, and Protest: New Perspec- tives on German Environmental History,” supplement to the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 3 (2006): 121–143. the war of the hunters 131 as southern Tanzania, their impact was enough that they were cited by many Africans interviewed in 1905 as a reason for their participation in the Maji Maji uprising. In 1900 the colonial powers met in London at the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa to endorse general wildlife protection policies, which were incorporated in modified form into the revised 1903 hunting ordinances in German East Africa. Germans had complex and contradictory motives for promulgating hunting ordinances. An ongoing consideration was to garner “a not insignificant source of income” for the government.57 Some sought to protect valuable wildlife species. Others wanted to curb the “unsportsmanlike exercise of the hunt.” Colonial hunting ordinances coincided with the flowering of an ethos of sport hunting in Germany called Weidgerechtigkeit that viewed the hunter as the ruler of nature, yet with a moral obligation to kill wild animals as quickly and humanely as possible and in general to hunt with fairness and even parsimony.58 European sport hunters, including many members of the colonial administrative and military hierarchy, believed that African (and some European) hunting was unsportsmanlike (unwaidmännisch).59 Governor Götzen wrote in 1902 that “the native is without doubt the real destroyer of wildlife in Africa” because Africans hunted for practical reasons of field protection, meat procurement, or “to earn his living,” and not for sport.60 Colonial hunting ordinances that gave centrality to hunting permits fully intended to allow German officials and soldiers the opportunity to hunt. As Götzen wrote, the hunting permit should not be so expensive that “an honest soldier will be deprived of earned and healthy pleasure after strenuous work.” The new battery of laws after 1896 aimed at replacing an African with a European hunting ethos. This discussion will highlight the laws that affected elephant hunting, although the ordinances also addressed crop predators, game and trophy species, and beasts of prey. The thrust of the laws was to eliminate African elephant hunting altogether, although they never went quite so far. The trend was seen in an 1898 memorandum to

57 Beilage zum DKB, 1897, p. 88. 58 Hubertus Hiller, Jäger und Jagd: Zur Entwicklung des Jagdwesens in Deutschland zwischen 1848 und 1914 (Münster: Waxmann, 2003), pp. 124–127. 59 Gißibl argues that early colonial hunting ordinances, including the establishment of hunting reserves, was motivated in large part by the appalling slaughter of wildlife by Europeans. Gißibl, “German colonialism,” pp. 7–8. 60 BAB/R1001/7776, Götzen to Foreign Office, 15 July 1902, pp. 134–35. 132 chapter three district authorities specifying that elephant hunting permits would no longer be issued to Africans.61 Instead, district stations would employ specialist hunters to whom firearms would be issued and who would be instructed in sportsmanlike hunting. They would also act as forest and game wardens, presumably protecting villages from elephant and other wildlife depredations. In payment they would receive a tusk for every elephant they downed. However, the actual 1898 hunting ordinance allowed for independent African elephant (or rhino) hunting if the hunter paid 500 Rupees for an elephant-hunting permit, good for a year. Each additional member of the hunting party would have to pay 5 Rupees for a “small” hunting license, and parties would be limited to thirty hunters. A shooting fee of 100 Rupees was required for every elephant bagged, or instead one tusk could be remitted to the district office. The law forbade the hunting of nursing elephants. In regions where it was traditional for chiefs to receive a ground tusk, such as the centralized polities of southwestern and western Tanzania, the ordinance specified that, of two elephants bagged, one tusk would go to the chief, one to the district office, and two to the hunter—an interesting example of condominium rule at a time when colonial authority was not yet secure in all parts of German East Africa. The revised hunting ordinance of 1903 incorporated some provisions from the London Wildlife Convention that further curtailed elephant hunting.62 It included a ban on the sale of elephant tusks less than 5 kg. in weight, and extended the restrictions on elephant hunting to include all young and female elephants. This provision is likely to have been responsible for the increase of the elephant population in general, including their role as major crop predators. It was expressly prohibited to hunt elephants using pit traps, nets, fire, or poison arrows. Only “reliable and known” Africans would be issued elephant hunting permits, and they were allowed to hunt only in districts in which the permit was issued, whereas European permits allowed them to hunt throughout the entire protectorate. Africans were prohibited from using breech loaders to hunt, and after 1903 hunting parties were limited to six persons. One report on the causes of the 1905 rebellion pointed to the “decisive effect” of hunting laws that no longer permit-

61 “Rundererlass an die Bezirks- oder Bezirksnebenämter sowie die Stationen im Innern,” DKB, 1898/99, pp. 318–19. 62 BAB/R1001/7776, Jagdschutzverordnung für das deutsch-ostafrikanische Schutz- gebiet, 1 July 1903. the war of the hunters 133 ted many people who had hitherto lived from elephant hunting to continue this pursuit.63 The 1903 ordinance eliminated the provision that a ground tusk go alternately to a local chief, specifying instead that in lieu of a 100-Rupee shooting fee for each elephant bagged, one tusk of each elephant would go to colonial authorities. This provision eliminated a large source of revenue for chiefs, and likely incited some to participate in the Maji Maji uprising. The commission that investigated causes of the Maji Maji was very clear that a major reason for majumbe participation was intense frustration with their loss of authority and “every foundation of respect” in their localities, respect that had been symbolized by the ground tusk right that was now usurped by the colonial administration.64 If the aforementioned curtailments on African elephant hunting were not enough, in 1901 Governor Götzen banned elephant hunting in Kilwa and Songea districts altogether “in order to protect elephants.”65 Evidence from the few surviving penal records shows that the colonial administration was serious about enforcing the hunting ordinances. In December 1896 in Kilwa district, one Sadi wadi Chande Mkwaguju was punished with two months in chains for violating the hunting ordinance.66 In October 1902 in Tabora district Sultan Mchamba received 1½ months imprisonment in chains for inciting his people to hunt elephants without permits.67 In the same district two men estimated to be in their fifties received the same sentence a month later for illegal elephant hunting, and were made to relinquish two tusks. Ten other Nyamwezi hunters in three parties were convicted of poaching in a three-month period in late 1903 and early 1904. Paralleling hunting ordinances was the creation of wildlife reserves (originally called hunting reserves—Jagdreservate), in which it was completely prohibited to hunt game of any kind, including vermin— crop predators like wild pigs and baboons.68 The first two reserves were

63 BAB/R1001/726, Winterfeld, Bericht der zur Erforschung der Ursachen des Auf- standes eingesetzten Kommission, 4 December 1905, p. 98. 64 BAB/R1001/726, Vincenti and Haber report, 17 January 1906, pp. 112–113. 65 “Bekanntmachung,” Amtlicher Anzeiger 2, 34 (14 November 1901). 66 BAB/R1001/5075, Auszug aus dem Strafbuch des Bezirksamts Kilwa für das Vierteljahr vom 1. Oktober bis 31. Dezember 1896, 87b. 67 TNA G50/9, Strafbuch Militär-Station Tabora 1902–04. 68 Visiting German elites were allowed to hunt in these reserves. Gißibl, “German colonialism,” p. 8. 134 chapter three

0 60 mi Dar es Salaam 0 60 km Morogoro . R u v u R Ru aha R. Morogoro G.R. Rufi ji R. INDIAN Mahenge Utete Mohoro OCEAN R. G.R. ro Kilombero be m (Ulanga) Somanga o il River K Mahenge R. ndu Kilwa Kivinje ata 9˚S M Matandu . G.R. egu R w u L . u R Liwale kur em bw M Lindi

Selous Game Mtetesi Reserve Game (Established in 1922) Reserve

a R. um v u R PORTUGUESE 38 ˚E EAST AFRICA

Map 4. Game Reserves after 1908, with the Selous Reserve created in 1896, one west of Kilimanjaro and the other northwest of the upper Rufiji south of the military garrison of Kisaki.69 In response to the London Convention of 1900, the revised 1903 ordinance man- dated that at least one game reserve be established in every administrative and military district. Thirteen were demarcated in the first year.70 In the Maji Maji outbreak region three reserves were in place by 1903: one on the upper Rufiji north of Mpanga (150,000 ha); one directly west of the upper Rufiji (450,000 ha); and one along the Matandu River in Kilwa district from Liwale town almost as far as Kilwa Kivinje, encompassing 265,000 ha. The Maji Maji outbreak region of Ungindo and Umatumbi was sandwiched directly between the two Rufiji reserves and the Matandu reserve, offering shelter to elephants and other crop predators, while

69 Beilage zum DKB (1897), p. 88. 70 BAB/R1001/7776, Jagdschutzverordnung für das deutsch-ostafrikanische Schutz- gebiet vom 1. Juni 1903, p. 194. the war of the hunters 135 making ivory procurement in these vast spaces illegal. Governor Götzen directed that the borders of the reserves be publicized and that Afri- cans be schooled in their provisions, so there is no reason to believe that Africans were ignorant of their significance.71 A jumbe named Amiri was employed in Kilwa district as overseer of the Matandu game reserve by 1905, receiving a monthly salary of 12 Rupees.72 Although Götzen directed that the regulations governing the reserves be treated with leniency for the first year, beginning in 1904, a year before the war’s outbreak, Africans felt their full impact. This impact was already discernible on the upper Rufiji in 1899, where elephants had become a problem, trampling fields of millet and maize.73 Götzen reported in 1902 that wildlife had increased significantly in the two game reserves then in existence. While theoretically game reserves were carved out of “where possible uninhabited land,” this was clearly not the case with the Matandu reserve, which encompassed riverine farmland between Liwale and Kilwa.74 The circumscription of elephant hunting zones was reported to be a cause of discontent among professional hunters that led them to rebellion.75 The effect of the hunting ordinances was to make African hunters hard pressed to make a profit. While this included greater cost to register firearms and purchase powder and lead, whose sale was now controlled by the state, it can also be inferred from the great expense of the elephant permits. Assuming that a modest-sized elephant with 10 kg. tusks was bagged, 400 Rupees could be earned in 1901 at a time when the price was about 20 Rupees per kg. However, the lead hunter would have to pay 600 Rupees for the hunting permit and shooting fee combined, and each additional hunter in the party would pay 5 Rupees, almost twice the annual hut tax. If two elephants were bagged of the same size, 800 Rupees could be earned, at a cost of 700 Rupees for combined permit and shooting fees. If this included a party of ten hunters, then 50 Rupees would remain after subtracting the cost of their permits, and each would accrue 5 Rupees profit.

71 BAB/R1001/7776, Runderlass No. 31, 1 June 1903. 72 TNA G3/70, Kilwa District Office to Government, 12 September 1905. 73 Pfund, Kreuz und Quer, pp. 22–23. 74 BAB/R1001/7776, Götzen to Foreign Ofﬁce, 15 July 1902, 134–35. 75 BAB/R1001/726, Winterfeld, Bericht der zur Erforschung der Ursachen des Auf- standes eingesetzten Kommission, 4 December 1905, p. 98. 136 chapter three

Yet this assumes that inland ivory sellers received the same price as that at the coast, which is unlikely. A rule of thumb was that the inland price was half that of the coast.76 It is likely that hunting parties would avoid elephants with small tusks, since far greater profits could be accrued for larger beasts for the same shooting fee, thus increasing the possibility of immature elephants raiding fields. Africans were further handicapped by the ban on use of poisons to hunt, and some professional hunters surely felt the impact on the ban on African use of breech loaders. While trade muskets—the typical African firearm— were perhaps a superior weapon for elephant hunting in dense bush, this was only true when the weapon could be fired in a succession of volleys by a group of perhaps a dozen men, since reloading might not be possible around an injured bull elephant.77 Following the 1903 ordinance African hunting parties were limited to six men, danger- ously low for such a precarious business. In 1905 ivory exports from German East Africa sunk to a low of about 23,000 kg.78 The colonial official Stuhlmann did not believe that the decline was because of a decrease in elephants; indeed, elephant herds had begun to recover. Rather, as African elephant hunting was handicapped by colonial ordinances, it became the purview of European professional and sport hunters. In 1898 it was reported that only two elephant permits were issued in all of Lindi district, a region where chiefship was often built on ivory trading.79

Maji Maji and the Hunters

Although almost all Africans were involved in hunting at one level or another in cases of large-scale game drives to eliminate crop predators, elephant hunting was a specialized activity. Hodgson’s overview of

76 For example Eberstein, “Ueber die Rechtsanschauungen,” Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten (MaddS) 9 (1896): 176. The Tabora station chief Gansser claimed in 1900 that ivory sold for about 7–9 Rp. per kg. Heinrich Dauber (ed.), „Nicht als Abentheurer bin ich hierhergekommen . . .“: 100 Jahre Entwicklungs- „Hilfe“. Tagebücher und Briefe aus Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1896–1902 (Frankfurt: Verlag für Inter- kulturelle Communication, 1991), p. 172. 77 C.J.P. Ionides, “Pages from a Tanganyika Game Ranger’s Note Book: II,” Tangan- yika Notes and Records 30 (1951): 48–49. 78 Schnee, Kolonial-Lexikon, p. 559; “Die Entwicklung,” DKB 11 (1900): 180. 79 Beilage zum DKB, 1897–98, p. 80. On Lindi ivory trading see Victor Berg, “Das Bezirksamt Mikindani,” MaddS 10 (1897): 219. the war of the hunters 137

Ndamba hunting techniques offers insight into the practices of specialist hunters in the greater Rufiji basin, including Ungindo.80 Hodgson suggests that Ndamba hunting techniques share commonalities, and perhaps were directly influenced by, practices of other professional hunters of southeastern Africa, including Yao, Makua, and Chikunda.81 Hunting experts—mafundi—set themselves apart from other members of society through ritual scarification of their arms and hands. They were led by a principal fundi who prepared hunting medicines, presided over rituals, led the hunt, and procured the ground tusk that was to be given to their chief or to the chief of the territory on which the elephant was killed. The other tusk went to the man who first drew the elephant’s blood, although its proceeds were distributed to members of the hunting party in the form of cloth or other gifts. The principal fundi sometimes laid claim to the ground tusk in cases where no territorial chief existed or when the fundi acted as a chief in his own right. The preparation and use of hunting medicines was reminiscent of some medicines used during Maji Maji, and may very well have influenced how Maji Maji dawa was used. A hunting expedition was preceded by frequent ritual bathing the week beforehand, a practice that offered spiritual protection during the hunt. The day before the hunt began the party met in the bush to be bathed head to foot with a medicine prepared by the head fundi. Among the Ndamba this was a water mixture made from leaves and bark derived from seven tree species. The bathing was done in conjunction with the cutting of new scars or the opening of old ones. The ceremony was intended to disguise the scent of the hunters from their quarry, ensure a successful hunt, and protect them from attack. The chief hunter carried some of the medicine in case further ablutions were needed during the hunt.

80 A.G.O. Hodgson, “Some Notes on the Hunting Customs of the Wandamba and the Ulanga Valley, Tanganyika Territory, and Other East African Tribes,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 59 (1926): 59–70. Ndamba is a name for “small scattered communities of the Valley swamps” of the Ulanga tributary of the Rufiji River. A.T. and G.M. Culwick,Ubena of the Rivers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), p. 22. See also Lorne E. Larson, “A History of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, c. 1860–1957,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, 1976), pp. 26, 113–116. 81 Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman discuss Chikunda elephant hunting practices in Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004), pp. 87–98. 138 chapter three

Some of the variations of maji medicine might have been influenced by the use of hunting medicines as described above. A Mwera account from Lindi District attributed the origin of maji medicine to “Mganga Njeketile of Umatumbi,” who, possessed by spirits, carried a leather purse full of roots and leaves that could be used to cure a variety of ailments.82 His nephew, Bokela, decided to use these medicines to combat the Germans. Bokela dug a well in which he soaked the roots and leaves, and in which he required all males of Ngarambe to immerse themselves, making them immune to German bullets. It is notewor- thy that the Mwera had a tradition of elephant hunting predating the war, and would have certainly been influenced by the elephant hunting norms of their Yao and Makua neighbors.83 While taboos inter- sect with African cultural life in complex ways, prohibitions on sex before battle in many of the regions of Maji Maji conflict may very well have stemmed from hunting practices, since hunting and warfare both had many sexual and patriarchal overtones.84 Accounts of the uprising frequently enjoin rebels not to have sex before battle, just as members of hunting parties were required to abstain from sex and fast for three days before the hunt.85 Wives of hunters were expected to be celibate during the hunt, and their activities while their husbands were away were strictly regulated. If a woman was noisy while her husband was away hunting—speaking loudly, pounding maize, quarreling with neighbors—it made elephants restless and dangerous, and other imprudent behavior of wives was believed to spoil the hunt and endanger their husbands. It was fairly easy for wives to be blamed for an unsuccessful hunt. If a menstruating woman touched a man’s gun, it would have to be bathed with the medicine used on the hunt. If a member of the party shot poorly during the hunt, his wife was likely to be blamed. If a hunter was killed during a hunt, his

82 Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP) 7/68/1/1, Aidan K. Kalembo, “An Account of the Maji Maji Rising in the Lukuledi Valley”; 7/68/1/3/17, “Notes on the Maji Maji Rising Collected by Thomas Rashidi Kambona for Fr. Siegfried Hertlein O.S.B.” 83 Edward Alpers, “Trade, State, and Society among the Yao in the Nineteenth Cen- tury, Journal of African History 10, 3 (1969): 405–420. 84 Hodgson, “Some Notes,” 61–62; Isaacman and Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond, p. 90; Culwick and Culwick, Ubena of the Rivers, pp. 183–84. For a discussion of the role of miiko prohibitions in modern Tanzania see Jamie Monson, “From Protective Lions to Angry Spirits: Degradation and Discourse in the Kilombero Valley, Tanza- nia,” paper presented to conference on Trees, Rain, and Politics in Africa, Oxford University, September 2004. 85 For example MMRP 9/68/1/4/6; 9/68/1/3/1; 9/68/1/3/3. the war of the hunters 139 wife was strongly suspected of adultery and likely sentenced to death. Bell’s account of the rebellion around Liwale includes several episodes where women were depicted as witches, adulterers, and betrayers of the rebel cause.86 The centrality of elephant hunting to wealth and power relations among people of southeastern Tanzania offers a context for understanding the participation of elephant hunters in the Maji Maji rebellion. The leader of the rebellion around Liwale, the elephant hunter Abdalla Mapanda, was directly affected by the creation of the Matandu River game reserve that incorporated his village.87 While before the war Ungindo was not deemed to be a major region of elephant hunting, clearly many majumbe profited from the occasional bagging of elephants that was now circumscribed.88 During the war eleven Indian traders at Kilwa were prosecuted for supplying iron and gunpowder to rebel chiefs, who paid them with ivory.89 The principal emissary of the rebellion between Ungindo and Ungoni, Omari Kinjala, was found to be in possession of a musket and three elephant tusks when he attempted to flee to Portuguese territory toward the end of the war.90 While the rebel whom Hans Paasche encountered and killed along the Rufiji in the vignette that opened this article was not identified as an elephant hunter, it seems likely that this was his profession as his renown was based on his occupation.91 North of the river, the most prominent Zaramo to participate in Maji Maji, Kibasila, was a pazi chief whose power stemmed from elephant hunting.92 The forests near Kibasila’s village of Kisangire had been targeted as a forest reserve in 1904, and the game reserve of the upper Rufiji to the southwest, located in Kibasila’s ancestral homeland of Ukutu, had been closed to hunting since 1896.93 In Vikindu forest

86 Bell, “Maji-Maji in Liwale,” pp. 42–43, 47. 87 Bell, “Maji Maji Rebellion,” TNR, pp. 38–57. 88 Sporadic tusks found their way to Kilwa and Mohoro before the war, and occasionally large stocks arrived from Songea. In September 1903 267 tusks arrived from Songea. TNA G59/2, Verwertung und Behandlung des fiskalischen Elfenbeins, 1898– 1915. 89 BAB/R1001/4826, Haber to Foreign Office, 18 June 1906, 12b, 16b. 90 TDB- Nachingwea District Book, Vol. I, R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji rebellion in Liwale District,” p. 32. Bell’s original account differs in some details from his published article, cited above. 91 Paasche, Im Morgenlicht, p. 108. 92 BAB/R1001/726, Booth report, 16 January 1906, p. 126. 93 TNA G8/581, Waldkarte des Bezirks Dar es Salaam, 1904, 40. 140 chapter three just south of Dar es Salaam, grievances over the hunting laws were said to be a factor in the participation of Zaramo leaders of that locale, who, as mentioned above, had repute as elephant hunters.94 While the depredations of elephants and the circumscription of elephant hunting does not feature prominently in the testimony of informants of the Maji Maji Research Project, one elder from Lindi District, Abdala Undi, mentioned as one of the grievances that led to the war a tax on killing elephants (kuua ndovu) which was “the business of many people in those days because we were able to sell tusks for good prices.”95 A cryptic line from the Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji Maji seemed to associate participation in the uprising with the end of elephant hunting in the case of Fundi Mtambo.96 More direct information on the role of elephant hunters in the uprising comes from German reports on the prosecution of the war in the southwest and in the Grenzwildnis (uninhabited lands) just west of Ungindo along the Mbarangandu branch of the upper Rufiji. It will be recalled that in 1901 Governor Götzen banned elephant hunting permits in Songea and Kilwa districts, directly threatening a source of income for chiefs of these vast regions. Ever since the assertion of Ger- man rule in the late 1890s in Songea region, Ngoni chiefs and other elites had lost considerable influence, territorial control, and sources of income from the trade in slaves and the sale of ivory.97 Chief Chabruma of the Mshope Ngoni, who had repute as an elephant hunter, had been deprived of half his territory under German rule, and thus to the right to elephants on it. After 1903 all chiefs lost the ground tusk right. Since chiefs and other territorial leaders had benefited most from the rights to ivory, it is understandable that they were the ones actively to embrace the rebellion when Omari Kinjala arrived from Ungindo spreading news of rebellion.98 Elephant hunters took the lead in opposing German forces owing to their military skills and knowledge of the landscape. Among the Mshope Ngoni, an elephant hunter named Magewa led the resis-

94 BAB/R1001/726, Booth report, 127b. 95 MMRP/7/68/2/3/1, Mzee Abdala Undi, 24 May 1968, 2. 96 Abdul Karim bin Jamaliddini, “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji,” stanza 155. 97 Patrick Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiogra- phy,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975): 407–24, here 412. For a general background to this region see Monson, “Politics of Alliance and Author- ity,” pp. 110–113. 98 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 417. the war of the hunters 141 tance against a German contingent.99 In mid-March 1906 Magewa led a force of “300 elephant hunters and Ngoni” along the Luwegu River, plundering villages that they considered to be loyal to the Ger- mans.100 Among the Njelu Ngoni (also known as the Magwangwara), resistance was offered by Masese Mbano, who eventually found refuge under the Yao chief Mataka on the Portuguese side of the Ruvuma, where large stores of ivory for trade to the coast had been stockpiled free of German control.101 German forces reported that Ngoni combatants included “numerous elephant hunters whose base was the great forests along the Rovuma [River].”102 During the latter stages of the war in the vast wilderness between Ungoni and Ungindo, the Mba- rangandu River became an organizing point for rebel leaders from Madaba, Liwale, Umatumbi, and Undonde, who assembled at the village of Kopa-Kopa, the seat of a famous elephant hunter.103 During their attempted flight into Portuguese East Africa toward the end of the war, Omari Kinjala and Abdalla Mapanda and their cohorts met up along the Mbarangandu with an Ngoni named Mgwacha, who led an army of over one hundred armed hunters.104 It seems clear from this evidence that Maji Maji was propagated and fought in large part through ivory trading and hunting networks that long predated the war. Just as the impact of German hunting laws and proscriptions on ivory selling had forced the trade across the Ruvuma into Portuguese territory before the war, Maji Maji rebel leaders used those same links to evade German forces during the war. While African motives for participating in the rebellion varied from region to region, it is notable that the plundering of caravans and trading stations was a prominent rebel activity. In Mbunga accounts of the uprising the desire to obtain cloth was often given as a reason for participating in the war. The Mbunga had arguably been most affected by the creation of the two upper Rufiji game reserves on lands that they

99 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 423. 100 “Bericht,” DKB 18 (1907): 340. See also Graf Adolf von Götzen, Deutsch- Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905/06 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1909), p. 124. 101 “Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Detachements des Majors Johannes vom 11. März bis 3. August 1906,” DKB 18 (1907): 340; Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 423. 102 “Bericht,” DKB 18 (1907): 336. 103 “Bericht,” DKB 18 (1907): 344. 104 TDB, Bell, “Maji Maji Rebellion in Liwale,” p. 31. 142 chapter three

Source: Hans Paasche, Im Morgenlicht: Kriegs-, Jagd- und Reise-Erlebnisse in Ostafrika (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1907). Plate 3.1. African Wall Painting at Time of Maji Maji War had not so long before exploited for elephant hunting.105 Mzee Sefu Matunga recounted that the instigator of the rebellion, Ngamenya, directed his compatriots to attack European and Indians and plunder their cloth.106 In his account of the uprising among the Mbunga, Almasi concluded that the primary aim of the rebellion was to seize European and Asian property, mainly money and clothes. “Go and fight the Europeans,” a woman said to her husband, “so that we may get clothes to wear.”107 Indeed, in the first month of the war eleven trading caravans that departed Bagamoyo for Ifakara and Mahenge were plundered variously by Mbunga, Ngoni and other forces, mostly to obtain cloth of various kinds.108 It is tempting to see these raids as an attempt by societies, deprived of access to ivory and the exchange value that it brought, to garner cloth and other commodities by other

105 Lorne E. Larson, “A History of the Mbunga Confederacy ca. 1860–1907,” Tan- zania Notes and Records 81 & 82 (1977): 35–42, 38. 106 MMRP 8/68/1/3/2, Mzee Sefu Matunga. 107 MMRP 9/68/1/1, O. Almasi, “The Maji Maji Rebellion in the Mbunga Area South of Ifakara: A Survey,” p. 6. 108 TNA G3/74, Akten betreffend Entschädigung für Verluste im Aufstand. the war of the hunters 143 means. The elephant hunter Chabruma of the Mshope Ngoni was among those who directed their followers to plunder these caravans.109 Within months of the outbreak of war, Governor Götzen appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the uprising. Among the grievances that the commission was asked to investigate were the affects of the hunting ordinances, including curtailments on ivory trading.110 While the complaints that the commission heard highlighted the devastations that wildlife caused to peasant fields, they also pointed to the curbing of elephant hunting as a special problem. The official report noted, “It appears that the striving of the government to protect the precious ivory was one of the causes of dissatisfaction; for the leaders of the rebellion include an exceptionally large number of elephant hunters who are now handicapped in the exercise of the hunt.”111 Another report from December 1905 stated that, whereas previously 50–60 hunting permits were issued (per year?), there were no longer elephant hunters in Dar es Salaam district.112 Apart from direct curtailments on hunting, since 1904 the administration had required Africans to register their firearms, had begun to prohibit Africans from owning breech loaders, and had begun to control the sale of powder and lead. Two commission members concluded that the “more intelligent natives” rose up before the availability of firearms became more difficult. Several months after the outbreak of the war, in November 1905, the colonial administration overturned some limitations on ivory trading in an attempt to ameliorate this wartime grievance. Governor Götzen suspended a key provision of the 1903 hunting ordinance by directing local district officials to treat all ivory brought for sale by Africans as “found” even if it might have been obtained by hunting, which allowed the seller to keep the proceeds from both tusks since there would be no shooting fee.113 Götzen’s successor, Governor Albrecht von Rech- enberg, pointed out that this amelioration was more generous than the African “ground tusk” custom of relinquishing one tusk. One report claimed that the ameliorated rule led to a revival of ivory caravans,

109 TNA G3/74, J. Haddad of Massagatti, 3 October 1906. 110 BAB/R1001/723, Götzen to Foreign Office, 18 October 1905, 151. 111 BAB/R1001/726, Schultz and Booth report, 11 December 1905, 104–105. 112 BAB/R1001/726, Westhaus report, 21 December 1905, 122b. 113 BAB/R1001/7682, Rechenberg to Colonial Department, 17 May 1907, 22–23; “Sonderbare Finanzpolitik,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 9, 4 (26 January 1907: 1–2). 144 chapter three one arriving in Lindi in early 1907 with forty-six tusks, some freshly hunted. This temporary amelioration of the hunting ordinance was counter- balanced by harsh steps to reinforce German authority in regions of rebellion. Germans demanded that rebellious regions pay an indemnity tax, provide penal laborers to the government, and give up weapons of all sorts to the government so that “the memory of their subjugation will be permanently awake.”114 The decree also required rebel regions to give up to the treasury all “fruits of the land” except crops, “in particular those of the forest and the valuable forest products like rubber as well as the native right to ivory.” The major rebel leaders who were caught were executed, while others fled into Portuguese territory. The last generation of African elephant hunters was thereby erased, and with the submission of weapons, African hunting in general was severely encumbered. Maji Maji thereby paved the way for the dominance of European sport hunting and the emergence of a wildlife conservation hegemony in German East Africa.

Conclusion: The Twilight of African Elephant Hunting

The years after Maji Maji saw the implementation of two revised hunting ordinances in 1908 and 1911 that reflected policy debates over wildlife protection. The 1908 ordinance encapsulated the attitudes of the Rechenberg regime, committed as it was to agricultural development and avoidance of the kinds of grievances that led to Maji Maji. Rechenberg believed that curtailed African access to firearms and gunpowder following the war increased wildlife destruction of crops.115 He therefore gave wide latitude to African peasants to kill crop predators classified as vermin, especially wild pigs and baboons, and allowed the use of poisons, arrows, nets, traps and fire to hunt except in wildlife and forest reserves.116 If firearms were not used, Africans required no permit to hunt, although hunting without a permit was confined to their districts of residence.117 For 3 Rupees annually, Africans could purchase a permit that allowed hunting with muskets in their dis-

114 BAB/R1001/724, Haber to Foreign Office, 16 July 1906, 116b–117a. 115 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg to Colonial Office, 14 November 1908, 171. 116 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg report, n.d., 21. 117 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg to Mpapua District Office, 15 July 1909, 234. the war of the hunters 145 tricts, although government approval was needed to own firearms and gunpowder following the war.118 While arrows and muskets were considered to be African weapons, in theory Africans could purchase expensive permits to use breech loaders to hunt, although the cost was prohibitive.119 An additional threat to crops and fields was the expansion of wildlife reserves and, following the war, the rapid demarcation of forest reserves that harbored wildlife.120 The 1908 ordinance doubled the size of the upper Rufiji wildlife reserve, expanding it eastwards into Rufiji district, and for the first time a 580,000 ha wildlife reserve was created in Lindi district, the largest in German East Africa.121 The Lindi district officer directed local rulers to inform their people, especially “people who hunt animals,” of the exact borders of this reserve.122 While hunting to protect fields was eased, the 1908 ordinance made hunting elephants prohibitively expensive for Africans. It now required 750 Rupees to purchase a permit to hunt elephants, in addition to a shooting fee of 150 Rupees, or remittance of a tusk weighing at least 10 kg. At a time when ivory was worth about 22 Rupees per kg., a hunter would have to bag two elephants with good-sized tusks to make a profit, and Africans were hard-pressed to compete with the easier access that professional European hunters had to breech loaders. European professionals evidently were successful enough that Rech- enberg limited each district to a maximum of three elephant-hunting permits. The German wildlife protection lobby and sport hunters attacked the 1908 hunting ordinance as too permissive of African hunting, leading to a revised ordinance already in 1911. Prominent among the critics was Hans Paasche, whose time fighting Maji Maji rebels along the Rufiji was preoccupied mostly with hunting. Paasche published an article in the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung criticizing the 1908 ordinance and denying that wildlife posed an especial threat to agriculture in spite of myriad claims to the contrary.123 Rechenberg pointed out that during Paasche’s short stay in German East Africa he killed

118 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg to Colonial Office, 14 November 1908, 171. 119 T. Siebenlist, Forstwirtschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1914), p. 67. 120 Sunseri, “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion.” 121 Die Landesgesetzgebung des Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Schutzgebietes (Tanga/ DaresSalaam: Kaiserliches Gouvernement, 1911), pp. 591–601. 122 Geheimes Staatsarchiv—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Schnee, Schrift- stücke in Suaheli, File 72, “Kwa maliwali na maakida wote,” 18 January 1911. 123 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg to Foreign Office, 13 March 1907, 35. 146 chapter three enough elephants to earn tens of thousands of rupees, then returned to Europe to pose as a protector of elephants.124 The wildlife lobby, represented by the Commission for the Improvement of Wildlife Protec- tion in German East Africa, called for changes in the 1908 ordinance that included a limitation on how many elephants and other protected species could be killed annually by a single hunter.125 While the Com- mission attacked all professional (i.e. for-profit) hunting, it singled out Africans as a particular threat. It claimed that because multiple Africans hunted on one elephant permit, they were a principal force in devastating elephant herds. The Commission called for a ban on African ownership of firearms and a ban on all hunting by Africans, including African askari and Schutztruppe soldiers. The Commission countered Rechenberg’s argument that applying hunting ordinances too strictly might lead to another rebellion by claiming that African access to firearms posed the same threat. Even though the Commis- sion did not win the ban on African hunting and firearms possession, its reforms made elephant hunting too expensive to be pursued as a legal profession by Africans or Europeans. Although the hunting permit was cheaper after 1911 at 450 Rupees, a shooting fee of 140 Rupees was required for one elephant, and a fee of 450 Rupees was required for the second. No hunter was allowed to kill more than two elephants on a permit without approval from the Chancellor in Germany. While the modified law eliminated professional hunting, it still made room for planters, officials, and soldiers to hunt elephants and other large game for sport trophies.126 Handicapped by inferior weapons, limitations on their movement, high-priced permits, and competition from European sport hunters, Africans were virtually excluded from hunting elephants. Franz Stuhl- mann wrote that by the end of German rule Africans only infrequently hunted elephants.127 Loopholes that allowed Africans to claim ivory in their possession as ‘found’ were eliminated by the statute that proclaimed all ‘found’ ivory as the property of the state. After 1911 it was

124 BAB/R1001/7777, Rechenberg to Foreign Office, 13 March 1907, 36; BAB/ R1001/7778, Lindequist to Kaiser Wilhelm, 25 October 1911, 123. 125 BAB/R1001/7777, Kommission für Besserung des Wildschutzes in Deutsch- Ostafrika to Dernburg, 7 February 1910. 126 Lists of European permit holders were published in the Amtlicher Anzeiger, showing that sport hunters came from a wide range of occupations and classes. For example Amtlicher Anzeiger 14:75 (31 December 1913): 188–89. 127 Stuhlmann asserted this in Schnee, Kolonial-Lexikon, p. 557. the war of the hunters 147 illegal to market any tusk that weighed less than 15 kg., and the protection of young or female elephants, missing in the 1908 ordinance, was reinstated. Under early German rule it was rare for elephants to be included in the many complaints about crop devastation by wildlife. The restrictions on elephant hunting changed this. By the end of Ger- man rule planters along the Rufiji complained about elephant devastation stemming from the upper Rufiji wildlife reserve, and following World War I elephants emerged as a major cause of crop devastation throughout southeastern Tanzania.128 In Lindi district following the war there was a saying that “if elephants are killed, food will increase,” and in Rufiji district hundreds of people fled from locales where elephants were protected.129 By accelerating the demise of African elephant hunters, Maji Maji paved the way for an ecological crisis that would characterize the British period of Tanzanian history.

128 TNA G8/589, Gouvernementsrat, Wald- und Jagdreservate und gesunde Einge- borenenpolitik, June 1913; TNA AB94 Rufiji Annual Report 1924, Colonial Secretary to Forest Conservator, 23 May 1925; TNA AB97 Rufiji Annual Report 1925; TNA 274/ G1.1, Mwenyenzi Kikale Rufiji to D.C. Utete Rufiji, 26 December 1946, 278. 129 “Ndovu wakiuawa chakula kitazidi.” Mambo Leo 4 (1923), 11; TNA AB.97, Rufiji Annual Report for 1925.

CHAPTER FOUR

“ALL PEOPLE WERE BARBARIANS TO THE ASKARI . . .”: ASKARI IDENTITY AND HONOR IN THE MAJI MAJI WAR, 1905–1907

Michelle Moyd

Introduction

In the history of colonial warfare in East Africa, the Maji Maji conflict represented an intensification of tactics and strategies that had already been applied by the German Schutztruppe during the previous fifteen years in the conquest of German East Africa.1 Thus from the military history perspective, Maji Maji could simply be described as another in a long series of wars fought to secure part of East Africa for the Ger- man empire. Maji Maji differed from previous “punitive expeditions” or “wars of pacification” characteristic of German colonial conquest in East Africa, however, in significant ways. First, its territorial scope far surpassed any previous wars in the colony. The numbers of people and ethnic groups involved in the fighting against the Germans were correspondingly high. The Maji Maji soldiers’ coordination and military organization also reflected a level of sophistication that astonished and confused contemporary observers. Finally, and most importantly, Maji Maji resulted in unprecedented loss of life and physical devastation as the German Schutztruppe waged a terror campaign throughout the southeastern portion of the colony in an effort to destroy the rebels’ basis of support.2 It was a period marked by the emergency recruitment of new troops, both regular and irregular, to supplement the

1 Erick J. Mann, Mikono ya damu: “Hands of Blood”: African Mercenaries and the Politics of Conflict in German East Africa, 1888–1904 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002). 2 For various commentaries on these aspects of Maji Maji, see G.A. Graf von Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905/06 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1909); G.C.K. Gwassa, “African Methods of Warfare During the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907,” in Bethwell A. Ogot (ed.), War and Society in Africa: Ten Studies. (London: Frank Cass, 1972); Merker, “Über die Aufstandsbewegung in Deutsch-Ostafrika während der Monate August bis November 1905,” Militär-Wochenblatt 1906, no. 45 (1906); Otto Stollowsky and John W. East, “On the Background to the Rebellion in German 150 chapter four existing force of askari—the African soldiers who made up the bulk of the Schutztruppe in East Africa.3 Their increased presence and mobility throughout the colony made them highly visible to a wider range of Tanganyika’s populations during this period, while also giving the askari themselves increased access to peoples and property made vulnerable by the war. From a historiographical perspective, the Maji Maji war generated considerable amounts of evidence and commentary from an unusual diversity of perspectives. German military men, colonial administrators, missionaries, and African civilians all left records of what they observed during the war. This unique evidentiary base allows for a concentrated analysis of askari actions within the context of war, and allows us to consider what their actions reveal to us about their identities as askari.4 Standard sources used in writing Maji Maji history are rife with references to the actions of the askari in German East Africa. These materials show unequivocally that the askari acted with near impunity in the exercise of violent power, securing for themselves the spoils of war along the way. Their spectacular abuses and atrocities have featured prominently in explanations of the causal factors leading to the conflict in 1905.5 As yet, however, the askari have not been analyzed as actors in the conflict. What is known of their activities during the Maji Maji war is usually summarized on the one hand by the oft-repeated claim that the askari remained loyal to the German cause, and on the other hand, the equally oft-repeated claim that they were extremely brutal in carrying out their duties as German “mercenaries.” This paper

East Africa in 1905–1906,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 4 (1988). 3 The wordaskari is the Arabic and Kiswahili word for ‘police’ or ‘soldier’. The German, British, Belgian and Italian colonial militaries in East and Central Africa all used this word to refer to their African soldiers. 4 At the beginning of the war there were 1701 askari in the Schutztruppe. These were supplemented by the 659 police-askari available in the colony. More African troops were recruited later in the war. About 200 German officers and NCOs were on hand at the beginning of Maji Maji. An additional 47 arrived in late September 1905 to help with leadership duties. A contingent of 150 German marines also landed that month, rounding out the forces available to the Germans in defeating the Maji Maji fighters. 5 See, for example, R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in the Liwale District,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950); and Per Hassing, “German Missionaries and the Maji Maji Rising,” African Historical Studies III, no. 2 (1970). askari identity and honor 151 takes a more detailed look at askari behaviors during this conflict to demystify them as historical actors in this and other colonial wars in German East Africa. Askari-ness, or the claim to membership within the group known as askari, rested on several interrelated types of honor. First, those parts of askari behaviors driven by what might be classified as typical mercenary factors, such as willingness to kill and be killed for pay or other reward, might be reclassified within the category ofprofessional honor. This leads us to ask what happens to our picture of the askari if we view them as a professional military force with its own internally- driven ethics instead of as a mercenary force with none. Secondly, askari-ness also rested on a variant of Muslim honor that formed in relation to Maji Maji participants as well as other Muslims in the colony. Third, a key feature of beingaskari involved family honor, whereby part of askari actions had to do with concerns about household maintenance and incorporation of new family members through enslavement or seizure of women and children during war. Finally, a sense of masculine honor resulted from the struggles over what it meant to be a man and an askari. It was infused by the military cultural backgrounds of the original Sudanese troops who were the most senior African soldiers, German officers and NCOs, and the competing masculine identities brought to bear by newer recruits from other ethnic groups. Each of these pillars of self-understanding contributed to a willingness to fight for the Germans and fueled the behaviors so often remarked upon in Maji Maji sources. They also helped the askari reinforce their claims to power and group membership.

Mercenaries, Professionals and Honor

For the askari, Maji Maji represented an expanded, if dangerous, opportunity to seize war spoils in greater quantities than usual, to enhance their power within the colony, and to cement their own sense of group prestige. Although previous campaigns in German East Africa were similar in tactics and effects on local civilian populations, they had involved less territory, fewer captives, and generally focused on defeating one sub-region or polity at a time. But during Maji Maji, the askari were constantly on the march, and their mobility throughout the southeastern portion of the colony gave them increased opportunities to capture women and children, livestock, and food stores for their 152 chapter four own benefit. Viewed in crass economic terms, the war was profitable to the askari, though they too experienced property losses, injuries, and death in the war. With the end of Maji Maji, the militarization of the colony was more or less complete, and the status and position of the askari in the colony was stronger than ever. How was their behavior in this war a reflection of their own identity—theiraskari -ness—within colonial society and culture, beyond the obvious material benefits they received as colonial soldiers? What can be learned generally about the conflict by keeping in mind how participants and traumatized civilian populations viewed the askari in this heightened context of violence? Close examination of commentaries made by observers on askari military actions during Maji Maji yields insights into how the askari viewed themselves in relation to others in the colony, and suggests ways that we might look at the askari beyond the commonly used epithets “loyal” or “brutal”. The uncritical use of such terminology, and the lumping of askari behaviors under the category mercenary (“Söldner” in German) obscures the possibility of considering pressing questions about the nature of human involvement in warfare and about soldiers’ decisions to involve themselves in killing. I thus leave aside the question of whether or not they were “brutal” or “loyal”, and instead ask how a reading that situates their actions in context complicates these descriptions. What did the askari expect for their service and their agreement to put themselves in harm’s way? How did their work within the colonial regime foster their identities? How did Maji Maji challenge their askari-ness? Answers to these questions add new dimensions to an already rich historiography on the war, because they clarify what they war meant to askari. They also have provocative implications for efforts to understand how and why soldiers agree to risk their lives and kill others in warfare. A “mercenary” is “[a] person who works merely for money or other material reward; a hireling; a person whose actions are motivated primarily by personal gain, often at the expense of ethics.”6 The word has come to be associated almost exclusively with its military connotation—“a soldier paid to serve in a foreign army or other military organization.” Contemporary writers and later historians have all used the term mercenary to describe the askari. The three key elements in these definitions are the assumed lack of affiliation or loyalty to a

6 Oxford English Dictionary (Online). Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2000–]. askari identity and honor 153 higher cause such as nationalism or patriotism, a corresponding lack of ethics, and the primacy of some sort of material gain as motivator. But in using this descriptor to discuss these soldiers who were so central to the accomplishment of German colonial designs, what is lost? Is it enough to assume that the askari signed on to fight, kill, and possibly be killed, solely for economic reasons? If so, how are we to explain the nature of askari violence, which included rape, mutila- tion, torture, and humiliation of captives? Surely these things cannot be explained simply by invoking the profit motive. After all, if askari served mainly for economic reasons, how would they be any different from colonial wage laborers, who also gained materially from agreeing to work for the colonizers? Compared to “mercenary,” the word “professional,” when applied to the military, emphasizes the virtues of loyalty, obedience, voluntarism, and desire to achieve “the highest standards of military effectiveness, principally in combat.” It thus differs slightly in meaning from “mercenary,” but also shares some key characteristics. In any case, these terms are not mutually exclusive, though “mercenary” has negative connotations that “professional” might not.7 In Honour in African History, John Iliffe contends that, with the onset of colonialism, colonial regimes achieved considerable success in “channeling male honour in new directions” following the fragmentation of African notions of honor caused by colonial conquest and cultural interventions. Citing Frank Henderson Stewart’s work, Iliffe defines honor as “a right to respect.”8 He continues,9 As a right—like, say, a right to privacy—honour exists both subjectively and objectively. It exists subjectively in the sense that individuals believe they are entitled to respect. But it exists objectively only if others treat them with respect and if the individuals can if necessary enforce respect. Most or all people believe that they have a right to respect as individuals, but they can enjoy and confer it only as members of groups. The groups determine the criteria of honour, but any society is likely to contain several groups with different criteria, so that honour is a contested category.

7 See Allan R. Millett, “Professionalism”, , accessed 11 October 2005. 8 John Iliffe,Honour in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4. 9 Ibid. 154 chapter four

Thus codes of honor can potentially inform many aspects of group identity and how individuals conduct themselves in groups. In order to be granted respect within the group, and to benefit from the respect conferred within the group, members have to conform to certain group expectations of honorable behavior. One of the ways the colonizers “channeled male honour” was by supporting the “regimental ethos of colonial armies.”10 Colonial troops participated in this ethos by interlacing “mercenary calculations” of profits accrued by fighting for the colonizers with a sense of “warrior honour” that had origins in pre-colonial African honor cultures. European efforts to inculcate notions ofesprit and collective loyalty also contributed to these new codes of honor.11 Thus, while there were obvious material benefits to be gained from agreeing to risk death in furthering colonial causes, this mercenary impulse does not suffice to explain what drove soldiers like the askari of German East Africa. After all, returning to the analogy with colonial wage laborers, laborers in colonial economies did not volunteer to die as part of their work regime.12 In a context where patriotic or nationalistic sentiments and their rhetorical and symbolic expressions are at best marginal as factors encouraging men to volunteer to become askari, we must search for other ways of explaining why askari saw it as worthwhile to contract with the Germans to fight their wars. Iliffe’s argument that honor occupied a central role in soldiers’ will to fight suggests the value in considering theasker’ s “intangible motives” during Maji Maji.13 The concept of honor provides a starting point from which to explore the reasons why askari fought. In short, using the Maji Maji war as a case study, I pursue an understanding of what motivated the askari to risk life and limb in the colonial cause, and to kill for that same cause. This essay attempts a deconstruction of the askari as mercenary, and investigates the content of the term “mercenary” as it applies to them. The factors compellingaskari to fight

10 Ibid., p. 227. The other two methods of channeling male honor identified by Iliffe were through notions of Christian respectability and working-class masculinity. 11 Ibid. 12 David E. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: the Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 75. Discussing the British colonial army in India, he writes, “Sol- diers had much in common with other migrant laborers; but the duties of the coolie on a tea plantation did not include laying down his life. Homo Oeconomicus never won a battle.” 13 Ibid., p. 77. askari identity and honor 155 were multiple and overlapping, and are best understood as having intertwined and mutually reinforcing origins in material incentives, processes of self-identification and maintenance of group boundaries, and the particular dynamics set in motion by a military culture at war.14 All of these factors relate directly to an askari code of honor, or ethic, that elevated certain traits over others in the preservation of askari identity and culture, and that ordered group conduct. The desirability of these traits was reinforced by the askari’s employers, the German Schutztruppe officers. Beingaskari essentially meant emulating the senior Sudanese troops, who were professional soldiers, Muslims, and family men. They were, in fact, the masculine model for newaskari recruits. While it is true that the askari seemed not to have any particular patriotic or nationalistic reasons for joining the Germans, they certainly had institutional loyalties to live up to, and these had only partly to do with material incentives.

Mercenary/Professional Honor

Evidence of askari brutality and what might be considered classic mercenary motivation and behavior emerge clearly from the source material. Tendencies towards brutality bolstered by a distinct superiority complex vis-à-vis other African peoples characterized askari behavior even before the war. As one witness to Maji Maji noted in discussing prewar labor conditions, The askari were a calamity. You carried a heavy load. He did not assess your strength to carry the load. If it were too heavy for you carried it until you died . . . All people were barbarians to the askari. A small mistake would be punishable with twenty-five strokes. This witness also pointed out that on a whim anaskari could demand that a local ruler ( jumbe) immediately “fetch [the askari] a very beautiful woman and slaughter a chicken or goat for him. Without these

14 Tarak Barkawi, “Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War Against Japan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 1 (2004): 155. Barkawi makes the point that in imperial armies ethnicity, race, and nation were not self-evident categories around which colonial troops might rally against an enemy, yet these forces could often be highly effective in battle. 156 chapter four things [the jumbe] he would be in trouble.”15 Theaskari were a familiar and often unwelcome fixture in the districts where they had outposts, and were a constant reminder of German power. Askari were hated as supervisors of forced labor and as unscrupulous “perpetrators of illegal exactions.”16 In short, even before the war began, the askari had built themselves a reputation as the blunt edge of colonial rule.17 Nearly all observers of their conduct during Maji Maji made note of their ruthlessness and willingness to apply any means necessary to defeating the people whom they called “shenzi”—the Maji Maji soldiers and their supporters.18 According to both German and African descriptions, the askari killed unflinchingly and without remorse, and were not keen to take male prisoners. For example, Mzee Ambrose Mwiru reported that after a resurgence of rebel activity in an area previously subdued by the Germans,19 So the business of Maji Maji began again. And more askari swarmed the country . . . Askari were then sent to villages to seize food and people’s grain. However, it was better if white [i.e. German soldiers] rather than black askari came to the village. These Africanaskari killed everyone, children, elders, and women. They ripped open pregnant women and left them to die. And sometimes they did worse things which I cannot tell here for they were really terrible. Similar observations are made by Captain Rudolf von Hirsch, a Schutz- truppe officer stationed in Iringa during the war, who wrote a letter to his father in Germany in January 1906. In it, he noted that askari “glowed with the thirst for revenge” in avenging the deaths or injuries

15 G.C.K. Gwassa and John Iliffe (eds.),Records of the Maji Maji Rising (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1969), p. 8. 16 Lorne E. Larson, “A History of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, Ca. 1860–1957” (Ph.D., University of Dar es Salaam, 1976), p. 109. 17 On their practices in previous wars, see Thomas Morlang, “ ‘Ich habe die Sache satt hier, herzlich satt.’ Briefe des Kolonialoffiziers Rudolf von Hirsch aus Deutsch- Ostafrika 1905–1907,” Militaergeschichtliche Zeitschrift 61 (2002): 501. All translations from German are mine, unless otherwise noted. 18 Hans Paasche, Im Morgenlicht: Kriegs-, Jagd-, und Reise-Erlebnisse in Ostafrika (Berlin: C.U. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1907), passim. Washenzi (mshenzi, sing.) can be translated as “barbarians” or “uncivilized people.” Coastal Swahili also often referred to anyone from the interior as washenzi. See Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Ports- mouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), pp. 241–3. 19 Gwassa and Iliffe (eds.), Records of the Maji Maji Rising p. 23. Mzee is the Kiswa- hili word used to refer to an elder. askari identity and honor 157 of fellow troops who had been attacked by Maji Maji fighters.20 He concluded, “It is good that they are so furious . . . ”21 Their consistent wrath against the enemy gave German Schutztruppe officers a sense of security that their African troops were fully committed to defeating their opponents. Askari zeal in seizing village women, livestock, and food supplies, and in burning villages to the ground, also emerges from numerous contemporary narratives. Colonial military officers like Hirsch often remarked on askari actions with some disapproval, but they generally turned a blind eye to the abuses in favor of keeping the askari happy. German officers believed, with justification, that askariif were allowed to take war spoils and were well compensated for their willingness to risk their lives in defense of colonial rule, they would be less likely to stray to the other side, desert, or to exhibit cowardice. As Juhani Koponen puts it, “During German rule the trustworthiness of the askari was never taken for granted. It was conceived as an acquired trait to be fostered with care and a generous salary.”22 The askari conformed readily to the Germans’ scorched earth policy, or Hungerstrategie, put into effect when it became apparent that the Maji Maji fighters had opted to fight in a guerrilla style that made it impossible for the German force to defeat them in direct confrontation. While this style of warfare was nothing new in the history of Schutztruppe campaigns in East Africa, the unprecedented scope of Maji Maji in terms of territory and numbers of people involved caught the German force off-guard.23 The state of emergency in German East Africa during the rebellion, and the urgency with which the Schutz- truppe confronted it, created a space for the askari to operate with relative impunity. It allowed them to enrich themselves even further beyond the prewar day-to-day level of expropriation and violence.24 The askari could expect more than material and human rewards when they overran abandoned villages or captured women, children,

20 Morlang, p. 511. 21 Ibid., p. 511. 22 Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1994), p. 570. 23 The official history of theSchutztruppe estimated that the rebellion encompassed 150,000 square kilometers. Ernst Nigmann, Geschichte der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe fur Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1911), 91. 24 On the regime of violence in German East Africa, see Koponen, pp. 359–66, 396–415. 158 chapter four food, or livestock. Such conduct drew the attention of their officers and could result in rewards.25 As in European militaries of the age, and as was also the case in some precolonial East African military cultures, rewards were given to troops who distinguished themselves under fire. For example, the German district officer in Lindi wrote to the Gov- ernor’s office in Dar es Salaam in October 1905 to ask the imperial government to provide funds to pay those “coloreds” who had demonstrated “good performance during the uprising.” These included the former askari Jussuf, who was given 20 rupees for “endangering his own life” in bringing missionaries and nuns from the Nyangao mission station to the coastal town of Lindi following a rebel assault on the mission.26 It is unclear whether Askari Jussuf had been brought back into service for the duration of the war, or if he had simply volunteered to bring the mission personnel to safety following the attack on Nyangao. In any case, it was in the government’s interest to promote askari loyalty, and providing rewards and opportunities to veterans was one way to do so. Askari took advantage of Maji Maji to better themselves materially and monetarily. In other instances, askari apparently mutilated enemy corpses to prove their deeds to commanders and receive compensation. For example, Mzee Msemakweli of Upangwa reported that askari and their captives cut off the genitalia of dead Maji Maji soldiers to prove that they had killed combatants, not civilians, so that they could be rewarded accordingly. Others reported that hands were cut off for the same purpose.27 Such acts were also performed in some precolonial military traditions, for example, among the Nyamwezi, who later were recruited as askari.28 These acts served not only as a means of verifying numbers of combatants killed, but also as displays of power infused with meanings and aimed at terrorizing the local population.29 Perfor-

25 Aylward Shorter, “Nyungu-ya-Mawe and the ‘Empire of the Ruga-Rugas’,” Jour- nal of African History IX, no. 2 (1968): 242. 26 Tanzania National Archives (hereafter TNA) G 3/70, Kosten des Aufstandes im Suden des Schutzgebiets 1905/Unterbringung und Verpflegung der Truppen, pp. 59–60. Veterans often lived near military stations and were known to have rallied to the cause during Maji Maji. See for example Stollowsky and East, p. 689. 27 MMRP 4/68/1/2 cited in Jigal Beez, Geschosse zu Wassertropfen: Sozio-religiöse Aspekte des Maji-Maji-Krieges in Deutsch-Ostafrika (1905–1907) (Köln: Köppe, 2003) pp. 97–8. 28 Shorter, 241–2. 29 See Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone, African Issues (Oxford; Portsmouth, N.H.: James Currey; Heinemann, 1996) for an elaboration of this theme in a more recent context. askari identity and honor 159 mance of such acts by individual askari bolstered their identity within the group by reinforcing key values such as bravery, ruthlessness and conformity.30 It should also be noted that although German Schutz- truppe did not acknowledge having themselves committed these acts during Maji Maji, they too attached symbolic value to the taking of heads and the preservation of skulls as trophies and as anthropological specimens to be studied back in Germany.31 Some Schutztruppe officers offered more critical opinions of what they observed of their troops’ seeming enthusiasm for extreme violence against combatants and captives. Marine Lieutenant Hans Paasche, who led a group of askari and German marines on campaigns in the Rufiji area in the fall of 1905, reported an incident in which he intervened to stop his askari from such behavior. After the askari witnessed a “shenzi” jumping off the roof of a house in a seemingly abandoned village the troops were occupying, they captured him. Paasche explained, “Theaskari eagerly reported that they were ready to send the shenzi to kingdom come, and were not very happy when I didn’t give them a corresponding order; but . . . an execution was now out of the question.” He goes on to reflect that he could not bring himself to do harm to this “defenseless” man, even though the askari pointed out to him the prisoner’s insignia marking him as a Maji Maji soldier—a headband threaded with stalks of millet or maize on the forehead and blue or black kaniki cloth. These items marked him, in their eyes, as a legitimate target for execution.32

30 The cutting off of hands and other body parts has been a widespread phenomenon in warfare and organized violence in many different parts of the world. One article particularly helpful in explaining the local cultural meanings behind specific violent acts is Robert McKinley, “Human and Proud of It! A Structural Treatment of Headhunting Rites and the Social Definition of Enemies,” in George N. Appell (ed.), Studies in Borneo Societies: Social Process and Anthropological Explanation, (De Kalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies Northern Illinois University, 1976). See also Richards. 31 Allison Redmayne, “Mkwawa and the Hehe Wars,” Journal of African History IX (1968); Edgar V. Winans, “The Head of the King: Museums and the Path to Resis- tance,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 2 (1994); and Martin Baer, Eine Kopfjagd: Deutsche in Ostafrika (Berlin: Links, 2001). 32 Paasche, p. 118. On Maji Maji insignia, Beez, p. 127. Paasche records another instance in which the askari discerned between combatants and non-combatants: “As I looked through the binoculars into the distance over the plain, I suddenly saw, to my dismay, a long line of natives with weapons, one behind another, coming through the reeds. The Ombasha [African corporal] calmed me right away: the people wore white shirts and not the blue loincloths of the rebels, so they had no evil intentions and only wanted to bring their guns to the boma.” 160 chapter four

Source: From the Archive of the Erzabtei St Ottilien, Germany. Provided by Felicitas Becker. Reproduced by permission. Plate 4.1. Prisoners in the Hands of Askari during Maji Maji

Their disappointment in not being allowed to kill the prisoner on the spot speaks to an element in their conduct that goes beyond the mercenary, but might be explained if we look at it as an element of professionalism. Being forbidden by Paasche to do as they liked with a clearly identified combatant provoked a dissonance for them—how could they be good soldiers if they were not allowed to treat the prisoner as the shenzi he clearly was in their eyes? Despite their skepticism, however, they obeyed Paasche once he made clear he did not want the prisoner executed. In short, despite their violent excesses, askari did not simply behave violently without constraint. They paid attention to their officers orders, or lack thereof, in deciding how to treat captives. The underlying assumption seemed to be that if the officer said nothing, the askari had a free hand. But if they intervened to stop violent acts, as did Paasche in this case, askari had to stand down. In other words, the askari had remarkable power and autonomy in the colony, but they too had to operate within certain power constraints that were defined and regulated by their German officers and NCOs. askari identity and honor 161

Source: From the Archive of the Erzabtei St Ottilien, Germany. Provided by Felicitas Becker. Reproduced by permission. Plate 4.2. A Site of Execution during Maji Maji

To breach this power relationship would have endangered the professional honor that askari needed to defend in order to stay askari. This dynamic meant thataskari needed to pay close attention to their officers to develop a keen sense of what each one would tolerate since officer behavior was inconsistent in the application of violence. It is perhaps unsettling to think of the behaviors described above as representative of professionalism. However, I think it is actually more useful than settling for the term, “mercenary,” which invites the assumption that the askari did what they did with no sense of purpose other than for material reward, or out of simple bloodlust. In John Iliffe’s words, “Human beings seldom do things they believe to be wrong. They do wrong things because they believe them to be right. That 162 chapter four is why honour is so important. It is an immensely powerful motivator. It expresses a group’s highest values.”33 Theaskari behaved according to established professional standards that were defined partly by their officers, partly by their own previous military experiences,34 and partly by the particular dynamics of Maji Maji. In the strictest sense of the word, the askari were indeed mercenaries, but they were also guided by a professional code or ethic that informed their battlefield actions and drove them to behave “honorably,” at least by their own measure, and generally by their German superiors’ standards as well. Schutz- truppe officers prized obedience, loyalty, and resourcefulness among their troops. They especially valued the service of those Africans, the askari among them, whom they could trust in carrying out the work of preserving colonial security and forcing into submission those who would subvert the colonial regime. In the official history of theSchutz- truppe, Captain Ernst Nigmann emphasized these desirable qualities in summing up askari performance in Maji Maji:35 Rivaling their white officers in zeal, stamina and determination, our good coloreds followed them, loyal even unto death. German army discipline made them into soldiers: ‘hard bodies and cheerful disposition, as the harsh and stressful African way of war demands.’ Not surprisingly, Nigmann emphasizes German leadership and training as being the causal factors in askari performance. Without dismissing the importance of the values instilled by German military training and tradition, it should also be noted that the askari themselves chose the extent to which they would exert themselves in the German cause. One of the reasons they chose to do so was to be rewarded for doing their jobs well—in short, for being professionals.

Muslim Honor

Many askari considered themselves Muslim. Contemporary observers, including missionaries, government officials,Schutztruppe officers and scholars, noted that Islam was a key element of being askari. Wherever

33 Iliffe, p. 8. 34 The Sudaneseaskari , for example, were recruited from Cairo and had been trained by the British and employed by the Egyptians in the Mahdi wars in the 1880s. Nyam- wezi and Manyema recruits also came from specific East African military traditions. 35 Nigmann, p. 123. askari identity and honor 163 there were askari, they often said, there was Islam.36 They remarked with amazing consistency that the askari and other Muslim government officials played a defining role in the spread of Islam throughout the colony. In November 1906, Captain Hirsch, now stationed in Iraq, wrote to his family in Germany,37 To mother’s questions about the spiritual influence on my people and so on, I must answer them all with a flat ‘No’. The askari are the carriers [Träger] of the Mohammedan religion. Allah il Allah sounds through the whole land. Despite all reports [to the contrary] from the missionaries, it is a fact that only the blind can’t see or don’t want to see . . . Where there is a Sudanese askari, he builds Allah a church [sic], even here [in Iraq]. The Sudanese are the enemies of Christendom and the enemy of the East African Negro. The Sudanese is the friend of the European, and [as] hated as these are. Thus in case of emergency, Europeans are dependent on the Sudanese and the Sudanese are dependent on the Europeans. Here, Hirsch expresses his frustration with the failure of Christian- ity to take hold in the colony. He had a personal investment in the Christianizing ideal, and found it most disappointing that Africans were “not yet ripe for our wonderful religion of love,” and that they did not “have the nice deep interior structures, that for example the old Germans already had in their blackest paganism.”38 He obviously sympathized with missionaries’ constant complaints to colonial administrators about the negative effects of Islam on their Christian- izing work. Although there were Christian askari in the Schutztruppe, they were few.39 They did not enjoy a good reputation as soldiers. In November 1906, Captain Hirsch noted that he had three Christian askari in his company, but that all three had deserted and were now sentenced to hard labor in chains.40 He later described his “personal experiences with black Christians” as “quite sad,” noting again that almost all of his Christian askari had deserted while they were on expedition. He

36 C.H. Becker and B.G. Martin, ed. and transl, “Materials for the Understand- ing of Islam in German East Africa,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 68 (1968): 39; “Reisebriefe unseres Missionsdirektors. In Dar-es-Salam,” Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionsblatt 68, no. 4 (1913): 76. 37 Cited in Morlang, p. 516. 38 Cited in Morlang, p. 520. 39 A 1913 survey conducted by the colonial administration showed that in the Schutztruppe there were 1748 Muslims, 737 “animists,” and 113 Christians. Bunde- sarchiv Berlin, R 1001/923, pp. 172–4, cited in Morlang, p. 501. 40 Ibid., 516. 164 chapter four continued dryly, “I still have one Mister Christian, but he’s usually sitting in detention.”41 It seems likely that the Christian troops were marginal figures who were trusted neither by their officers, nor by fellow Muslim askari. Given that the German officers usually reported on askari conduct favorably, these remarks on the Christian troops offer a striking contrast, and indicate, even if only obliquely, the centrality of Islamic identity amongst askari. Hirsch also recognized the influence of Islam amongst his own troops, especially the Sudanese, and accepted that this was a necessary side-effect of having such excellent and dedicated soldiers, who “kn[e] w no cowardice” and would “die beside the European, [and] never desert,” as thirty-six of his other askari had done up to that point.42 While Schutztruppe officers may have wished that Muslims were not so numerous in their force, they accepted their presence as a price worth paying for a trustworthy and dedicated military. This philosophy had been in place since the days of Schutztruppe founder Hermann von Wissmann, who had urged his officers to respect the religious practices of Muslim troops “so that the sense of dependency may not be disturbed by considerations of religious and racial distinctions.”43 German officers and others who interacted with theaskari understood “Islam” to be closely related to askari behavior which they were most interested in nurturing. This is a point worth emphasiz- ing, particularly given that Europeans generated nearly all historical sources available on the askari. The possibility that European sources emphasized certain aspects of askari-ness over others as a function of their own cultural blinders deserves consideration. As Abdul Hamid el-Zein proposes, we would do well to treat askari Islam in the Ger- man colonial context as an “articulation of structural relations” and

41 Ibid., pp. 519–20. German Evangelical missionaries in the southwestern part of the colony reported that after the end of the war in 1907 large numbers of Africans sought positions as askari. A few were Christians. One report noted disappointment that of five people who wanted to join theaskari , two were Christians, “but they unfortunately are not the best ones. We gave our approval.” Here the missionaries are expressing their hope that the force would become more Christian. Herrnhut 3. und 4. Vierteljahres Bericht, 1907, Rungwe, cited in Bernd Arnold, Steuer und Lohnarbeit im Südwesten von Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1891–1916, ed. Horst Gründer, Europa-Übersee, vol. 4 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1994), p. 192. 42 Cited in Morlang, p. 517. 43 Hermann von Wissman, Afrika: Schilderungen und Ratschlaege zur Vorbereitung fuer den Aufenthalt und den Dienst in den Deutschen Schutzgebieten (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1903), cited in Marcia Wright, “Local Roots of Policy in German East Africa,” Journal of African History 9, no. 4 (1968): 624. askari identity and honor 165 to “analyze the relations that produce its meanings” in order to avoid explaining the role of Islam in Maji Maji as “a fixed and autonomous form referring to positive content which can be reduced to universal and unchanging characteristics.”44 In short, in counting Islam as a source of askari self-understanding and concepts of honor, one must also highlight the primary structural relationships between askari and German officers and NCOs that defined the terms of service. Both Hirsch and Wissmann noted this “dependency” as a characteristic of the relationship between askari and Germans, and Islam was a part of the ideology infusing this mutually dependent relationship. In referring to the peoples of East Africa, askari used the term washenzi in much the same way that coastal elites had used it to describe people of the interior in the 1889 Abushiri war. It labeled them as backwards, uneducated barbarians whose place was to provide labor for those of higher status.45 German officers also used the term freely to describe their adversaries, so it is not surprising that the askari used the term as well. To the askari, adherence to Islam embedded them in a prestige culture already inhabited by the coastal elites who served the Germans as local administrators, clerks, and scribes. This status, backed up by the relative wealth and standing inherent in their position in the colonial regime, contributed to their oft-reported superiority complex vis-à-vis other inhabitants of the colony. As soldiers of the German colonial army, they reinforced their self-understanding by participating in the military defeat and destruction of Maji Maji soldiers, since these were the most visible examples of people who adhered at least in part to local cosmologies and practices that were denigrated as shenzi religion.46 Theaskari ’s Muslim identification partly legitimized their actions, and perhaps gave their wartime actions particular meanings, quite apart from the material and professional motivations discussed already. Askari actions against the Maji Maji rebels proved their Muslim cre- dentials amongst themselves, and bolstered a sense of shared identity with other Muslims in the colony.47 Because the Sudanese askari came from a background of military slavery, and because they had ingrati-

44 Abdul Hamid el-Zein, “Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977): 251, 253. 45 See Glassman, pp. 62, 241. 46 Beez, pp. 132–3. 47 See Becker and Martin, p. 61. 166 chapter four ated themselves to the colonial rulers, they were not considered by Muslim elites to be their equals.48 They were seen as “quintessential outsiders,” the debased dependents of their German employers, slaves in all but name.49 Their powerful position within German East Africa as colonial functionaries was made ambiguous by virtue of their slave origins in Sudan and Egypt. Yet the power and authority vested in them by their German superiors—in essence, their patrons—made it possible for them to minimize their slave backgrounds and to view the majority of Africans in the colony as shenzi, a status that could be equated to the status of the legally “enslaveable” within Muslim law.50 Scholars of Islam in West Africa have shown that standard Islamic texts and popular stories enjoined Muslims to enslave unbelievers. These also conveyed the idea that acts of violence against “unbelievers” were legitimate, even laudatory.51 Such stories might have played a role in shaping askari conduct against those who occupied the “cog- nitive category” of shenzi during Maji Maji.52 The war created a space in the askari gained material rewards and new household members, as the next section will show. For the Germans, conduct of the war had little to do with Islam, but for most askari, the opportunity to enslave “unbelievers” might have meshed with a particular interpretation and practice of Islam central to their askari-ness. In this sense, perhaps

48 On the ‘Sudanese’ or ‘Nubi’ background of colonial troops in East Africa, see Douglas H. Johnson, “The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery in Northeast Africa,” Ethnohistory 36 (1989): 72–88 and Timothy Parsons, “ ‘Kibra is Our Blood’: The Suda- nese Military Legacy in Nairobi’s Kibera Location, 1902–1968,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 1 (1997): 87–122. 49 Glassman, pp. 79–80. For a comparable case in West Africa, see Sean Arnold Stilwell, Paradoxes of Power: the Kano “Mamluks” and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804–1903 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), pp. 120–121. 50 Muslim documents defining the “categories of the enslaveable among the peoples of the Sudan” began circulating in West Africa around 1600. See Bernard Barbour and Michelle Jacobs, “The Mi’raj: a Legal Treatise on Slavery by Ahmad Baba,” in John Ralph Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1985). According to this document, “[. . .] the reason for slavery is non-belief [in Islam], though there are caveats for Christians, Jews, and others under treaty protection.” See pp. 128, 129. 51 M. Hiskett, “Enslavement, Slavery and Attitudes Towards the Legally Enslavable in Hausa Islamic Literature,” in John Ralph Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1985), p. 119. 52 Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, “Models of the World and Categorial Models: The ‘Enslavable Barbarian’ as a Mobile Classificatory Label,” in John Ralph Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1985), p. 28. askari identity and honor 167 the askari were fighting a different war from that of their German superiors. Given what is already known of the central role of Islam in shaping askari-ness from the inception of the Schutztruppe it is not surprising that it played a role in Maji Maji. Sudanese soldiers’ songs collected by Karl Weule and others indicate that Islam was indeed a key part of how these soldiers interpreted events.53 With new recruits joining the force from different parts of the colony, as well as an infusion of Sudanese recruits from Eritrea who arrived late in 1906, the stakes for proving that one really belonged to the askari were high.54 Indeed, Nyamwezi men, who were among those recruited at this time, already had a history of claims to status vis-à-vis Arab and Swahili coastal elites.55 This too may have been a factor in how Islam manifested itself as part of askari-ness during a time of significant change in the force’s makeup. Space does not permit detailed exploration of the impact of the late nineteenth-century’s Sudanese Mahdi wars on “Sudanese” troops’ Islamic belief and practices. Nonetheless, it should be noted that these soldiers were recruited and trained in a time and place profoundly affected by long histories of military slavery and slave raiding. The millenarian Islamic movement known as the Mahdiyya also affected the region for the better part of two decades.56 Sudanese askari were influenced by their experiences in the Mahdiyya as combatants in the Anglo-Egyptian army and as prisoners-of-war. The British even gained recruits from the Mahdi’s army in the midst of the war.57 They

53 Karl Weule, Native Life in East Africa: The Results of an Ethnological Research Expedition, trans. Alice Werner (London: Pitman & Sons, 1909); D. Hay Thorburn, “Sudanese Soldiers’ Songs,” Journal of the Royal African Society 24, no. 96 (1925). 54 Lieutenant Georg Maercker observed in 1894 that there were tensions between Sudanese recruits from Egypt and those from Eritrea, with the former judging the latter as “shenzi.” Georg Maercker, “Kriegsführung in Ostafrika. Vortrag gehalten in der Militärischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin am 15. November 1893,”Beihefte zum Militär- Wochenblatt 1894, no. 6 (1894): 151–2. 55 Glassman, pp. 61–4. 56 L. Carl Brown, “The Sudanese Mahdiya,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Ali Al Amin Mazrui (eds.), Protest and Power in Black Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 57 “A man was a Dervish one day; the next day he was in the ranks and probably went out to fight against his late emir without any training of any sort, his neighbours in the ranks putting him in the way he should go.” B.R. Mitford, “Extracts from the Diary of a Subaltern on the Nile in the Eighties and Nineties,” Sudan Notes and Records XVIII (1935): 180. 168 chapter four had firsthand knowledge of the Mahdiyya’s Islamic orthodoxy and its inspired soldiers, who became renowned for their battlefield displays of “amazing personal bravery.”58 Figuring out exactly how they were influenced remains an area for further research. Islam complemented other elements of being askari well. In vanquishing or capturing unbelievers, askari bolstered their own sense of Muslim honor while also gaining material reward and wealth in people, thus strengthening their claims to askari-ness.

Family Honor

Another key feature of askari culture and identity was their role as “family men.”59 Most askari had wives or women companions who were as important a part of askari culture and the colonial military as the askari themselves. Schutztruppe officers allowed the Sudanese troops to transport their wives and other family members from Egypt at the very beginning of recruitment in 1888, and the askari wives became a permanent feature of boma life in the colony. Additionally, askari kept women and children captured in warfare as war spoils and, these enslaved persons became incorporated into askari households as wives, domestic servants, and askariboys.60 German reporting on numbers of women captured during the fighting was routine, indicating their acceptance of the practice.61

58 Brown, p. 145. The bravery of the Mahdiyya soldiers became known to the Brit- ish public through popular publications such as Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy- Wuzzy”. 59 Timothy Parsons, “All askaris are family men: sex, domesticity and discipline in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964,” in David Killingray and David E. Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire: the Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). 60 On askari wives see Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lilian Barber, 1993); Arnold, pp. 191–2; and Magdalene von Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1903). On askariboys, see Heinrich Fonck, Deutsch Ost- Afrika: Eine Schilderung Deutscher Tropen nach 10 Wanderjahren (Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1910), p. 66. Fonck described the askariboys thus: [Their] origins are unknown, they are simply there. Often they are boys without kin who are kidnapped as children or are sold [by their parents]; runaways who are captured and sold, continually displaced until they end up at a garrison where they take up service with an askari.” The practice of taking women and children as captives in warfare and incor- porating them into households was widespread in East African warfare. 61 See, for example, entries by Paasche for 4 and 5 November 1905, RM 121/I/452 (Kriegstagebuch Oblt. z. See Paasche), Bundesarchiv-Militärchiv, Freiburg. See also askari identity and honor 169

In 1912, five years after the end of hostilities, the Apostolic Vicar in Dar es Salaam wrote to the colonial governor in Dar es Salaam on behalf of all the East African bishops asking that all mateka, or prisoners of war from Maji Maji, be released immediately. This letter prompted a government circular requiring each Bezirk to report the numbers of mateka still being kept captive. The responses to the inquiry were largely negative, but some Bezirksamtmänner reported that there were in fact still some women prisoners-of-war in askari households.62 The Bezirksamtmann at the Neu-Langenburg station wrote, “In this district there are a number of women who were given as war booty to askari and other natives who had shown their loyalty and devotion to the government in the uprising of 1905/06. When these women marry, their master [Herr] receives bridewealth.” According to this officer, the women could leave at any time if they or their relatives preferred, as long as the costs of their “long-term [jahrelang]” maintenance (about 10 Rupees per year) were reimbursed to their Herrn. The officer concluded “This system has proven itself and is viewed with approval by the natives concerned.”63 In 1913, the same administrator wrote to the governor’s office revis- ing his characterization of these women as war booty, explaining that these were girls who had fled the fighting and hidden in the wilderness [pori]. When they were found the government was not able to care for them, but “saw a need to do so.” They gave the children, mainly girls, to askari and other “natives who stayed loyal to the government” with the understanding that they would later receive “bridewealth or other compensation” for their troubles. The commander of the 13th. Feld- kompagnie at Kondoa-Irangi responded in 1913 with a list of askari who still “were in possession of women captured in the war, some to whom they are legally married.”64 Two of the women were designated as “nicht rechtmässig”, or not legally married, wives. Thus the incorporation of captives intoaskari households was widespread, despite protestations to the contrary from some Bezirk officers. The practice of using women war captives to increase the size of one’s

Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania 1870–1918,” Journal of African History 39 (1998) 113–116. 62 TNA G 9/4, Missionswesen Allgemeines, Bd. 4, 1912–1915, pp. 3, 23–64. 63 Ibid., p. 38. 64 Ibid., p. 64. 170 chapter four household and ensure that the needs of the askari were taken care of both at home and while in the field was integral toaskari culture, and was also embedded in wider East African understandings of what occurred in warfare. As Jamie Monson puts it, “Because of the centrality of women’s productive and reproductive labor in the politics of alliance and authority, women were targeted for capture and exchange during raiding and warfare.”65 In this regard, the askari were not so different from the Nyamwezi and Ngoni soldiers who had also developed fearsome reputations for raiding and taking captives before the Germans colonized the region. Yet not all women were brought into askari communities involun- tarily, and many askari wives committed themselves to the life of the military wife and engaged fully in the administrative structures that ordered their lives. The benefits of being anaskari accrued to their wives and families, and they held the colonial government responsible in this regard. In a circular issued during the war and signed by Gover- nor von Götzen, the government explained the strict procedures used to provide askari wives with portions of their husbands’ pay while they were involved in expeditions away from home. For example, “If askaris want to transfer amounts of money to lawful wives left behind, the expedition leader [i.e. Schutztruppe officer or NCO] must certify to the paying cashier that the unit has recorded the payment to the wife [Frauenzahlung] and has correspondingly adjusted the askari’s pay.”66 Each Frauenzahlung was to be accompanied by the askari’s identification mark and current information on the residence of the wife. The document went on to provide detailed instructions on what cashiers should do if the askari wife resided in a location different from the disbursal site. The local bursar would receive reimbursement from the Dar es Salaam comptroller as long as the wives to whom they made payments were in possession of a valid identification document, called a Frauenteilzahlungsausweis. The circular admonished officials to pay close attention to documentation of these payments.

65 Monson, p. 114. 66 TNA G 3/70, no date, no page number. Emphasis in the original. The emphasis on the word “lawful” [rechtmässigen Frauen] is no doubt a reference to the common practice of askari having multiple wives. Although this practice was tolerated by colonial authorities, they legally recognized only one wife for purposes of pay. See for example TNA G 2/4, pp. 143–4, which is a register of Sudanese recruits, their legally recognized wives, and children who were brought to East Africa in 1902. askari identity and honor 171

The attention paid by the colonial government in the midst of war to pay allotments to askari wives indicates that perhaps some problems had arisen that required bureaucratic attention. Were askari wives extracting money from their husbands’ wages while they were away? With their husbands on expeditions far from home, and unsure of when they might return, were askari wives simply trying to maintain their households under difficult circumstances? Did the wives exert pressure on the askari or on the Schutztruppe officials to secure allotments? Anecdotal evidence from Schutztruppe memoirs supports the idea that askari wives exercised their rights in collecting pay from their husbands’ salaries, and in taking their husbands to task for failure to provide for their families.67 The colonial authorities and military officers took theaskari wives as seriously as the askari themselves. Of course, the government also had an interest in streamlining administrative and financial processes and in making sure money was not being disbursed fraudulently to unau- thorized persons. Nonetheless, the effort expended in trying to ensure that askari families were taken care of also indicates a recognition of the effect of family welfare on troop morale and loyalty. In short, there was a synergistic effect generated by the colonial government’s desire to keep its force generally satisfied and in good spirits, and theaskari ’s willingness to do the work the Schutztruppe demanded of them. Askari commitment to service was thus embedded in an understanding that their families would be taken care of so that they could concentrate on making war. Another part of askari expectations as family men was that war would give them opportunities to increase the size of their households through capturing women and children, thereby ensuring future wealth, security, and prestige, as well as promoting some measure of

67 Ernst Nigmann, Schwarze Schwaenke: Froehliche Geschichten aus unserem schoe- nen alten Deutsch Ostafrika (Berlin: Safari Verlag, 1922); See also Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa pp. 200–209 for a discussion of the nuances of askari community life. According to sketches made by former Schutztruppe doctor Otto Pieper in 1908,women of Umatumbi favored a tattoo with a design that was a copy of the rank of Sol, one of the most senior askari ranks generally held by so-called Sudanese soldiers. Without further evidence it is hard to know what the tattoo meant: was it a wife boasting about her husband’s status, making fun of an askari, or a display of a prestige or ritual symbol? Nevertheless, this bit of evidence is suggestive of ways that women might have viewed askari after the war. Otto Peiper, “Ethnographische Beobachtungen aus dem Bezirke Kilwa, Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Baessler-Archiv 10 (1926) 30. Cited in Beez, pp. 135, 171. 172 chapter four domestic stability and affection while in garrison.68 Captive boys and young men often became askariboys who later trained as askari, sig- nalers, or messengers themselves. These incorporated peoples were viewed positively by Schutztruppe officers, since they provided many of the services required on the military stations, such as laundering, cooking, cleaning, fetching water and cultivating gardens. Family honor then is another way of explaining why askari agreed to fight and die for German colonial ambitions.

Masculine Honor

Another angle from which to consider the askari as actors in wartime is to explore how askari perceptions of masculinity, or masculine honor, were made manifest in the conflict. It is quite difficult to separate out masculine identity markers from the constitutive elements of askari identity elaborated above, particularly those of Islam and family. Indeed, these threads of identity were tightly interwoven and mutually reinforcing. In this final section I would like to suggest two possibilities for further research in this area as a way of interrogating this part of askari identity. The first is to consider theintra-askari dynamics that may have influenced performance of masculinity within this military culture and at war. Secondly, we might consider how German masculine ideals challenged or reinforced aspects of askari identities as conceived from within askari culture. Here I do not mean to suggest that German military masculinity was somehow external to askari culture, for the Schutztruppe officers were as much a part of this mili- tarized community as the askari themselves. Yet there are identifiable elements of German military masculinity that can tell us much about the askari themselves. In choosing to participate in the Schutztruppe, the askari also tacitly confirmed certain trappings of German military masculinity as desirable.

68 R.W. Beachey, “Macdonald’s Expedition and the Uganda Mutiny, 1897–98,” The Historical Journal 10, no. 2 (1967): 242–3. Sudanese troops in the employ of the British colonial military in Uganda mutinied in September 1897 because of “neglect of their comforts and such matters as pay, rations, and clothes—the later were all in arrears. Their work was heavy and their pay was less than that of their counterparts in German East Africa, and small in comparison to Swahili porters. Perhaps their deepest grievance was separation from their wives—accustomed as they were to having a number of women in constant attendance.” askari identity and honor 173

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this paper, the askari serving at the time of Maji Maji were composed of troops recruited from several different groups from eastern and northeastern Africa. Each of these groups, including the “Sudanese,” Manyema, Nyamwezi, and Sukuma, brought their own sense of what it meant to be men into the Schutztruppe. Yet these distinct military backgrounds ultimately became subsumed by askari-ness—an identity that was professional, Muslim, family-based, and masculine in particular ways. At the heart of this askari-ness were the Sudanese soldiers whom the German officers revered for their soldierly skills and martial spirit. They occupied the highest ranks possible for African troops, received the best pay, wore special uniforms, and were entrusted to lead small patrols and expeditions on their own without supervision from a white officer or NCO.69 Some were described by observers as being fanatical in their Muslim belief.70 Their insistence that their families be brought from Cairo to East Africa in the late 1880s cemented the German commitment to askari families from the very earliest days of the Schutztruppe. In the midst of Maji Maji, Lieutenant Paasche confirmed the centrality of the Sudanese ideal in creating askari through training: Each day one could watch [German] Sergeant Kühn [on the grass exercise field] training the askari, and in a short time a few of the newly recruited Negroes became, through imitation, a few old Sudanese—the best soldier-type among the Negroes.71 Thus from the moment a young man became anaskari , his education in being askari was intertwined with becoming more “Sudanese.” Yet the Sudanese troops had their limits. For example, a Schutz- truppe officer on expedition in Uhehe in March 1898 noted that the Sudanese askari could not withstand steep ascents of mountains or cold, wet weather, because in their homeland they had not experienced such environments.72 In May 1907, after the Maji Maji fighting

69 See numerous references throughout the papers of various colonial officers and administrators, including Nachlass Leutnant Correck, HS 908, Bayerisches Haupt- staatsarchiv Abt. IV. Kriegsarchiv, München; Nachlass von Prittwitz und Gaffron, Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig; Nachlass Alfred Reuss, KlE 857, Bunde- sarchiv Koblenz. 70 See, for example, Adrien Atiman, “Adrien Atiman: By Himself,” Tanganyika Notes and Records June 1946, no. 21 (1946): 68. 71 Paasche, p. 130. 72 Nachlass von Prittwitz und Gaffron, “Tagebuchblätter (maschinenschriftlich) Reise von Mohorro nach Uhehe und Aufenthalt daselbst” (August 1897–August 1898), Box 245, Folder 2, p. 210, Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig. 174 chapter four had largely ceased, Captain von Hirsch wrote a letter from Tabora saying that he had to dismissed one of his Sudanese troops for “sowing discontent” and “being fresh” to the (white) doctor. Hirsch sent him to the coast for punishment, but from there he was released and sent “home to Cairo” at the state’s expense.73 Hirsch remarked bitterly, “This is how the Negroes are. 110 [Marks] pay per month, war decora- tions . . . treated like a gentleman and when he doesn’t like it anymore, impudent, unpleasant, and always unthankful.”74 This evidence suggests that the Sudanese troops, though prized for their experience and military skills, did not always live up to their vaunted reputation. Askari identity may have been molded around the Sudanese model, but this model of the ideal African military man was not always what the Germans thought it was. As one scholar studying another context puts it, askari “developed a sense of their own masculinity at times in overt contrast to the gendered ideals of their employer and at other times sharing some of the terms.”75 Being “fresh” to a European doctor could be an example of an askari expressing himself as a man within the constraints of the German colonial racial hierarchy in East Africa.76 Askari identity contained more than just the Sudanese element. The German ethnographer Karl Weule spent time in the coastal town of Lindi in the period following Maji Maji, and his observations of askari and the auxiliary troops known as rugaruga show the potential value in looking beyond the Sudanese core identity so celebrated by Schutztruppe officers. Weule recorded marching songs by Nyamwezi and Sudanese askari which celebrated success in battle and bravery against the enemy. This example reveals two distinct military traditions in askari culture, and there were certainly more given the recruitment of other groups such as the Manyema and, later, the Ngoni.77

73 Morlang, p. 519. 74 Ibid., p. 519. 75 Lisa A. Lindsay, “Shunting Between Masculine Ideals: Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era,” in Andrea Cornwall (ed.), Readings in Gender in Africa (London, Oxford, and Bloomington: International African Institute; James Currey; Indiana Uni- versity Press, 2005), p. 146. 76 For other examples of askari embroiled in confrontations with white people in the colony, see Thomas Morlang, “ ‘Prestige der Rasse’ contra ‘Prestige des Staates’: Die Diskussionen über die Befugnisse farbiger Polizeisoldaten gegenüber Europäern in den deutschen Kolonien,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 49 (2001). 77 Weule, pp. 30–1. On the Manyema in an earlier period, see Melvin E. Page, “The Manyema Hordes of Tippu Tip: A Case Study in Social Stratification and the Slave askari identity and honor 175

Paasche and von Prittwitz both pointed out that different groups of askari had different eating habits and food preferences.78 The recruitment of large numbers of rugaruga and other auxiliaries from various groups in German East Africa was also a source of competing masculine identities that may have stimulated the askari to incorporate new elements or reformulate old ones. Therugaruga had different training and responsibilities in military confrontations, had different political allegiances, were less dependent on the Schutztruppe organization, and perhaps had other interests in fighting for the Germans. The violence attributed to rugaruga during Maji Maji and afterwards rivals descriptions of askari violence.79 These observations lead me to wonder how the increased presence of these temporary troops during Maji Maji may have encouraged particular kinds of violent acts in battle. The askari also distinguished themselves from the porters, another group that offsetaskari masculinity, who accompanied every military mission. Further research may clarify the nature of masculine identity struggles among the askari during the war and afterwards. A final consideration in thinking aboutaskari masculinities concerns German influence onaskari -ness. Hirsch pointed out that the Sudanese troops were treated, to his mind undeservedly, as “gentle- men.” Other Schutztruppe officer memoirs confirm that theaskari commanded respect and garnered considerable trust from their Ger- man officers and NCOs. Theaskari conformed to German expectations of soldierliness by wearing uniforms, drilling, conducting target practice, and being reliable and self-sufficient in the field.80 Askari even

Trade in Eastern Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies VII, no. 1 (1974). 78 For example, Paasche, p. 50. 79 Detlef Bald, “Afrikanischer Kampf gegen koloniale Herrschaft: der Maji-Maji- Aufstand in Ostafrika,” Militaergeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1 (1976). 80 Both Paasche and Prittwitz remark in their diaries on how uncomplicated the askari were in the field. For example, Paasche wrote “Theaskari are very unassuming and we do not have to bring along a large column for them; after long marches they perform sentry duty, conduct patrols, protect the porters, and only need to eat once a day (their food is easily brought along), and they sleep on the ground, without a bed, mosquito net or tent.” Paasche, pp. 96, 300. Prittwitz also frequently noted that the askari, in contrast to the porters, almost never complained about hunger or being tired. Of course, the askari did not carry 60 pound loads up and down steep rugged terrain on a daily basis, so had less to complain about. Nonetheless, the emphasis placed on a certain military stoicism and simplicity indicates that German officers found these traits admirable in their men. 176 chapter four played German marching music in bands that included brass instru- ments and drums. As Paasche said, The uniform and weapons changed the unimpressive bush Negroes into usable soldiers within a few weeks. When it came to battle, each one took his place in the line . . . The trust that was placed in them made them proud and they rose to the effort.81 This transformation of young African men into “usable soldiers” also marked the outcome of a fusion of German and African masculine military ideals which convinced German officers that they were dependable and capable. Schutztruppe officers gave senioraskari , usually Sudanese NCOs, remarkable autonomy in leading patrols and small-unit operations. This was partly necessitated by the small numbers of German officers and NCOs available to take on these roles. But it also had to do with how German officers were trained at home. Prussian military training after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 emphasized “mission tactics” [Auftragstaktik] in battlefield leadership. The emphasis on mission tactics in warfare “required that officers think and act independently without waiting for orders that inevitably would arrive too late.”82 As one training manual from 1888 asserted, “The highest commander and the youngest soldier must always be conscious of the fact that omission and inactivity are worse than resorting to the wrong expedient.”83 Officers who demonstrated their abilities in this area were considered exemplary. They in turn valued it highly in their African troops, particularly in the demanding East African environment where they faced not only overwhelming numbers of opponents, but also vast, unfamiliar geographies and languages. While German officers certainly valued askari military skills and ruthlessness, they prized their ability to operate independently. Askari responded to the trust placed in them by not disappointing their officers. A feedback loop betweenaskari performance and German officer expectations reinforced this particular aspect of German military masculinity in ways that ensured the askari’s continued cooperation.

81 Ibid., p. 130. 82 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 115–6. Hull contends that this aspect set the Prussian military apart from other contemporary European militaries. 83 Prussia, War Ministry, Exerzir-Reglement, 2nd ed., cited in Hull, p. 117. askari identity and honor 177

In some instances, however, tensions between German ideals and those of the askari appear. For example, the incident cited above in which Lieutenant Paasche forbade the execution of a prisoner, with the askari expressing disappointment in Paasche’s decision, can be read as a moment in which German and African notions of soldierly masculinity clashed.84 The askari were often baffled by German officers’ fascination with beautiful landscapes and with hunting game— two elements in Schutztruppe masculinity.85 Though they frequently assisted in hunting, their reasons for doing so—usually the anticipation of a feast afterwards—were different from those of the Schutz- truppe officers, who often simply wanted to take trophies. German officers also viewedaskari family life favorably. In this, they drew on their ideals of German families at home since most of them were unaccompanied by family in the colony. Askari wives and domestic issues in askari families caused officers to intervene inaskari family life in ways that can best be interpreted within a framework of patrimonialism.86 They mediated adultery disputes and claims against runaway servants, and listened to wives’ complaints about their husbands’ alcoholism and financial irresponsibility.87 These examples point to ways of understanding how askari masculine honor was informed by, but distinct from, German military masculine ideals, and how this masculinity was performed during Maji Maji.

Conclusion

In the years between the end of Maji Maji and the outbreak of World War I, there was a period of relative peace in German East Africa. Famine conditions affected most of the Maji Maji region and did not

84 Paasche, p. 292 for a similar incident in which an askari wants a captive to be punished. 85 Schutztruppe officers integrated hunting into their daily routines in times of war and peace, and were always effusive about the beautiful landscapes they encountered in their travels around the colony. See Paasche, passim, and Nachlass Prittwitz, passim. On landscape as a medium of imperial representation, see W.J. Thomas Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in W.J. Thomas Mitchell (ed.),Landscape and Power Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 86 Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. III (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968): 1010–11, 1015–20. 87 See Bundesarchiv Berlin R155F/6672; Bundesarchiv Berlin R1001/923; and Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa, p. 207. 178 chapter four abate until 1908, and disease took a devastating toll on the population as well.88 Although reforms were set in motion with the aim of reducing the influence of the military in the colony, these were largely cosmetic in nature and did little to change the military presence. Theaskari , having proven their loyalty to the regime, settled back into garrison life with its routines of training, patrols, ceremonies, and domesticity. They could now enjoy the spoils of war, which included expanded larger households and holdings of livestock, and free rein in their dealings with inhabitants of the areas in which the war had been fought. Their status and power in the colony were perceived as problematic by some Germans, though they also recognized that the askari were indispensable as long as an all-German military force was not possible. German settlers and traders became especially concerned with what appeared to be an increased presence of askari and ex-askari as traders in direct competition with European traders.89 They called for government intervention to solve the problem. German insecurity regarding askari adherence to Islam burst into the open in July 1908 when the “Mecca Letters” appeared along the coast of German East Africa. These letters,90 purported to be an account by one Sheikh Ahmad, Keeper of the Prophet’s Tomb, of a vision in which Mohammed instructed him to warn all Muslims that the Day of Judgment was approaching, and that they must therefore return to piety and discipline, holding themselves aloof from unbelievers. Rumors circulated that the askari, having been inspired by these millenarian letters, would rise against the German colonizers. Such a mutiny would have caused a massive security problem since the askari were the last line of defense between the Germans and the African peoples of the territory.91 Thus the relationship between the askari and the

88 C.G. Buettner, Der Aufstand in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika, Neue Missionsschriften, vol. 32 (Berlin: Berlin Missionsgesellschaft, n.d.), p. 30. 89 See for example “Der schwarze Soldat als Konkurrent der europäischen Privathän- dler in der Kolonie?,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung X, no. 17 (1908). 90 John Iliffe,Tanganyika Under German Rule 1905–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 190. 91 “Die militärische Lage in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Usambara Post 7, no. 25 (1908); Michael Pesek, “Islam und Politik in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” in Albert Wirz, Andreas Eckert, and Katrin Bromber (eds.), Alles unter Kontrolle: Disziplinierungsprozesse im kolonialen Tansania, (1850–1960) (Köln: Köppe, 2003). askari identity and honor 179

Germans was uneasy in the aftermath of Maji Maji, despite the loyalty demonstrated by the force during the war. The tensions which surfaced between Maji Maji and World War I reflect another underlying conflict between ideas of theaskari as mercenary and as loyal. While German colonizers celebrated the loyalty and brutality of the askari, they were not sure where the askari’s fundamental loyalties lay. Though they applauded theaskari for uphold- ing their standards of professionalism and honor, they were unsettled by the presence of elements of askari honor that had little or nothing to do with German honor. Parts of askari life were closed to German officers, and this was cause for concern. German exhortations of askari loyalty in writings right through to the outbreak of the Second World War betray an acknowledgment of the fragility of askari loyalty and an awareness of the allegiances and intangible motives that made askari want to belong to the German military. Theaskari might learn German marching songs and express allegiance to the Kaiser, but German patriotic and military symbols did not necessarily mean the same things to the askari as they did to the Germans.92 Personal loyalties to specific German officers also played a role, but again, this does not suffice as an explanation of why the askari fought. They fought Maji Maji for their German commanders, and to win German aims, but they also fought it for their own reasons. In doing so, they reinforced and reformulated their sense of honor as a group, and articulated an askari ethic that defined membership in the group. Maji Maji is an historical instance where this askari ethic comes through clearly in the historical evidence. Tracing these threads of askari honor back to previous conflicts and forward to World War I may show how such notions informed this particular military culture and its constituent communities over time. This approach reveals how colonial power was expressed through the askari, who, far from being mere mercenaries, had their own complex reasons for participating in its exercise.

92 Askari involvement in East African dance societies is an area deserving of more detailed consideration. T.O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: the Beni Ngoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

SECTION THREE

AT THE APEX OF VIOLENCE: MAJI MAJI IN SONGEA

Songea witnessed the most concerted German military effort and most sustained fighting during Maji Maji. Its politics were also the most complex of any region involved in the war. Its conquest in mid-nineteenth century by Ngoni migrants who established the Mshope and Njelu kingdoms created a welter of divisions not only among nobles, but also between nobles, their sutu subordinates, and their tribute- paying dependents. Songea’s importance as a source of ivory and as an intersection on trade routes between Kilwa and Lake Nyasa introduced an additional layer of complexity with the arrival of slave-holding Arab traders from the coast. The chapters in this section explore the impact of social diversity on Maji Maji. Schmidt reveals an extraordinary multiplicity of motivations, struggles and social cleavages during the war. She argues that men, particularly male sutu, joined their Ngoni masters in making war not simply because they were committed to the anti-German cause, but because war offered an opportunity to achieve mature masculinity and superior status as “Ngoni.” Her argument reveals a striking similarity between these men and their opponents, the askari discussed by Moyd who also pursued masculine honor. The image of Maji Maji as a set of multiple struggles is not easily reconciled, however, with the interpretation of Maji Maji as a proto-nationalist movement, an understanding which for numerous reasons appears particularly strongly rooted in Songea. This may be one reason for the relative silence about Maji Maji which Schmidt finds there. This section also offers the first attempt to apply archaeological investigation to Maji Maji. Bertram Mapunda gives us an archaeology of what might be called social membranes, boundaries which permit and channel intercommunication. One of these was Kitanda, a borderland between Wandendeuli and Wangindo territories ruled by an Ngoni woman, Nkomanile. Both chapters in this section provide extensive discussion of Nkomanile, the most prominent woman 182 section three involved in the war.1 Not only the importance of Nkomanile, but also the significance of Kitanda as the point wheremaji and the message of rebellion passed from Ungindo to Songea are emphasized by Lar- son and Schmidt. Mapunda agrees with them, while also observing that Kitanda was located near a major source of water for wildlife, a fact which supports Sunseri’s view of hunting as a primary vehicle of intercommunication across the Maji Maji region. Mapunda also studies the residences of Rashidi bin Masoud, an Arab slave trader from Kilwa who became a vital ally of the Germans. (Masoud’s postwar career at Kilwa is described below by Becker.) Mapunda’s findings about the size of Masoud’s camps and their populations show that, just as Schmidt argues, Masoud was capable of providing a large contingent of fighters to support the Germans. Although Masoud and his slaves were ethnic and cultural outsiders in Songea, his camps were permeable membranes diffusing many kinds of information about Islam, coastal Swahili culture, the market demands of Kilwa, and the intrusive nature of German colonialism.

1 The documentary record of Maji Maji spelled this name inconsistently. Mod- ern historiography has settled on “Mkomanile,” which represents the pronunciation encountered by Professor Schmidt in the Njelu and Namabengo areas of Songea. In recent years, however, scholars who are speakers of Ngoni have preferred an initial “n” sound, though here, too, minor inconsistency lingers. The prominent playwright Professor Amandina Lihamba rendered the eponymous title of her play as “Nkho- manile,” while Professor Bertram Mapunda in this volume uses “Nkomanile.” This volume retains Professor Mapunda’s spelling, which reflects the pronunciation heard by the editors during their own visit to Kitanda. CHAPTER FIVE

“DEADLY SILENCE PREDOMINATES IN THIS DISTRICT” THE MAJI MAJI WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN UNGONI1

Heike Schmidt

During the Maji Maji war, the German colonial government concentrated its military efforts in the southwest region known as Ungoni or Songea District. In his published book-length account of the war, Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen began his discussion of the area by stating that this exertion required an explanation. He offered four reasons: It appeared that the people of Ungoni had risen in unity; Son- gea was remote and by late August 1905 cut off from direct communication with the coast; the white settler population in the neighbouring district of Neulangenburg was endangered by Wangoni raids, and the Wangoni, the ruling ethnicity, had a fierce warrior reputation. Conse- quently, he concluded, the war lasted longest in Ungoni, even though the area saw the first military engagement of the conflict planned by the government. Once the colonial army ended the rebellion in this region, the war was over.2 In his book, Götzen pursued his own agenda by explaining the necessity of the military efforts in southwestern Tanzania, and especially by legitimizing the brutality of colonial warfare under his gov- ernorship. The Maji Maji war in this region presented the colonial government with a particularly difficult challenge. The colonial army faced an enemy highly experienced in mobile warfare, and a political

1 I would like to thank Jan-Georg Deutsch for comments and patient advice, Aimee Lee Cheek for making the first draft a better narrative, Max Paul Friedman for listening while I was mulling over early ideas, and the participants of the African History and Politics Seminar at the University of Oxford whose constructive criticism challenged me to write this chapter. The research in Tanzania would not have been possible without funding by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation. I also express my gratitude to the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology for granting my research permit. Abbot Lambert Doerr and the Benedictine Brothers and Sisters at Peramiho, especially Brother Polykarp, generously welcomed me and facilitated my research. 2 Graf Adolf von Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905–06 (Berlin: Reimer, 1909), pp. 200–02. 184 chapter five elite, so the officials feared, who would fight without reserve, as they had nothing to lose and the restitution of their powerful past to gain. This chapter demonstrates that the official explanation only partially explains the causes and course of the war in Ungoni. The main argument of this study is two-fold. First, the apparent unity among the Maji Maji warriors and supporters in Ungoni which worried the officials was not prescribed by a noble leadership, but a shifting alliance representing a range of different interests. The Maji Maji war provided an opportunity to young men to enhance their gender, age, and social status and thus attracted a broad range of men from the area.3 In short, cause and mobilization have to be examined both from a radically local perspective which allows for a specific understanding of these choices, and, at the same time, from the broader argument that young men often join military conflict in order to assert their masculinity. Second, the colonial administration was correct in seeing Ungoni as a particular challenge within the war. Paradoxically, the reason lies in the tactics chosen by both sides. Most of the military encounters initiated by the warrior parties were a return to late nineteenth century raiding patterns rather than a concerted effort to defeat the enemy. After the battle of Namabengo, the warriors shifted raiding and looting with at times very sizeable military units, to guerrilla style mobile warfare. This, together with the ruthless counter-insurgency campaign by the German colonial army, resulted in a long, drawn-out total war that devastated the region for years to come and had long-term socio- political ramifications. The rate of casualties and displaced people was so high and the impact of the famine caused by the German troops so profound that in April 1907 the new District Commissioner Keudel reported “a deadly silence predominated in the district.”4 This case study of Ungoni examines the two Ngoni kingdoms, Mshope and Njelu, including their tribute paying areas. As such it is a fluid cat-

3 For a more detailed discussion of the re-negotiation of marginality during and in the aftermath of the Maji Maji war, see, Heike Schmidt, “The Maji Maji War and Its Aftermath: Gender, Age, and Power in South-Western Tanzania, c. 1905–1916,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, forthcoming. 4 Peramiho Abbey Archives (hereafter, PAA) A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, April 16, 1907. Please note that all translations of written sources in German and Kiswahili are the author’s. The only exception is Alfons Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes: Erinne- rungen aus meinem Missionsleben in Deutsch-Ostafrika (St Ottilien: Post Türkenfeld, 1899) where an English translation available at Peramiho was used (mss., n.p., n.d.). the maji maji war and its aftermath 185 egory. Ungoni denotes a sense of belonging and political identity in relation to the Ngoni kingdoms during the period under discussion. It is thus preferable to Songea District, the designation bestowed by the colonial administration which had created the district with clearly delineated boundaries according to its own interests, paying little attention to a local sense of territoriality. This chapter will first position this study within the existing historiography, and then follow a chronological approach by providing a brief introduction to the history of Ungoni leading up to the Maji Maji war with an emphasis on the imposition of colonial rule. This is followed by the reconstruction of the course of the war with the arrival of maji and an examination of insurgency and counter-insurgency tactics. Finally, the chapter revisits critically the major questions in Ungoni’s historiography: the causes of the war and the allegedly early end of the fighting.

The Historiography

Historians have paid little attention to Ungoni. The British government sociologist Philip Gulliver put together a district survey in 1954, and sources and research on Ungoni emerged in the context of the Maji Maji Research Project through interviews carried out by Univer- sity of Dar es Salaam students.5 Patrick Redmond has so far been the only historian to produce a detailed study of Ungoni with his doctoral research in the 1970s. He did so, however, without ever having set foot in the district to which access was restricted at the time due to the liberation war in neighbouring Mozambique.6 Also, Redmond

5 Philip Gulliver, An Administrative Survey of the Ngoni and Ndendeuli of Songea District, (Mss., n.p. [Songea], 1954). For the Dar es Salaam school, most useful are the unpublished Maji Maji Research Project, 6/68/4/1–8. See also, O.B. Mapunda and G.P. Mpangara, The Maji Maji War in Ungoni (Dar es Salaam: East African Publish- ing House, 1969). 6 Personal communication with Lorne Larson, Northfield/Minnesota, November 2001. Patrick Redmond, “A Political History of the Songea Ngoni from the Mid-Nine- teenth Century to the Rise of the Tanganyika African Union” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1972), “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiography,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975): 407–24, and The Politics of Power in Songea Ngoni Society, 1860–1962 (Adams Press: Chicago, 1985). See also, Igor Kozak, “Two Rebellions in German East Africa and Their Study in Microcosm” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1968), chapter four, “The Maji Maji Rebellion in Ungoni. A Study in Microcosm.” For a recent view on the war in Ungoni, see, Alfred Fuko, 186 chapter five did not conduct interviews. Father Elzear Ebner spent forty years in Ungoni and had great linguistic and ethnographic expertise, but did not extend his research to the National Archives of Tanzania or to Germany. He was a missionary, and the Benedictines published his history of the area posthumously.7 By the time of the completion of the Maji Maji Research Project of the late 1960s, the rich historiography of the Maji Maji war had explored most of the existing written sources in the national archives in Germany and Tanzania. Mostly, historians have since had to rely on reinterpretation which often involved asking new questions and paying attention to overlooked material. Most recently, as reflected in this volume, historians have begun to generate new oral data. For this study, the author carried out interviews and personal communication in Songea District.8 The bulk of the new evidence presented here, however, is located at the archives of the Benedictine Abbey at the Peramiho mission station. The wealth of material, including the chronicles of Peramiho and Kigonsera stations and correspondence by German colonial officials, allows for new insights into the Maji Maji war in Ungoni and for a contribution to the historiography of the war as well as to the wider field of resistance. This chapter takes issue with some of the core findings in the literature on the Maji Maji war in Ungoni. These include claims that the military conflict in the Njelu kingdom ended in January 1906,9 that

“Die schwierige Suche nach historischer Wahrheit: Ansichten eines Nachgeborenen,” in Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905–1907. (Berlin: Links Verlag, 2005), 179–83. Fuko provides a brief partisan view as a Mgoni government employee. For studies on overlapping areas, see, James Giblin, A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2005) on Njombe District and Lorne Larson, “A History of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, ca. 1860–1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dar es Salaam, 1976). 7 Elzear Ebner, The History of the Wangoni: And Their Origin in the South African Bantu Tribes (Ndanda-Peramiho: Benedictine Publications, 1987). 8 The author conducted all interviews herself with the help of an interpreter to facilitate communication, as they were carried out in Kiswahili, at best the second language of all participants. Personal communication refers to informal conversations which were not taped, but for which notes were taken. 9 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 421 and Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, pp. 148f. Following Redmond is Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918,” Journal of African History (hereafter, JAH) 39, 1 (1998): 112. Iliffe acknowledged that the last rebels were caught three years after the war began, but still gave the impression that the war was over by January 1906. A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: the maji maji war and its aftermath 187 the divergent interests of the Wangoni and their subject people, the sutu, meant that the latter did not support the former’s attempt to recover their precolonial power by ridding the area of colonial rule,10 that maji merely provided a spark and unity while grievances against German colonial and missionary presence led to resistance,11 and that the Wangoni participation in the Maji Maji war can be explained by their failure to resist colonial conquest.12 It also addresses a silence— the important role of Nkomanile, the royal woman through whom the messenger Omari Kinjala introduced maji in the area, which has been overlooked. Finally, this study attempts a response to the challenge which Marcia Wright posed in her 1995 Maji Maji article—to look for “multiple causations” of the war and not “revert to single or very few factors.”13 In short, it presents a new interpretation of the course and the causes of the war in Ungoni.

Ungoni Before Colonialism

Although the German empire founded the colony of German East Africa in 1891, Ungoni remained a backwater from the perspective of the colonial state until the end of the century; the attempt to directly impose colonial rule finally occurred in 1897–8. What officials encountered was a complex, multi-ethnic alliance of societies centred on two Ngoni kingdoms. Before the arrival of the Wangoni, the two main ethnic groups in the area were Wamatengo to the west and Wandendeule to the east and north-east. The Wangoni were immigrants from northeastern South Africa which they had left during the mfecane, the early

Cambridge University Press, 1979), 197–99. Already in 1968,however, Kozak argued that the war “did not come to an abrupt end.” Kozak, Two Rebellions, p. 98. 10 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” pp. 412, 417, Ebner, The History of the Wan- goni, p. 137. 11 Mapunda and Mpangara, The Maji Maji War in Ungoni, p. 11. 12 Iliffe began his still seminal 1967 article by rejecting “delayed resistance” as an explicatory model for Maji Maji as “too simple a concept” (p. 497), but then proceeded to conclude that “the basically tribal nature of the Ngoni rebellion” can be explained as just that. “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,”Journal of African History (hereafter, JAH), 8, 3 (1967): 497, 512. 13 Marcia Wright, “Maji-Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in Revealing Proph- ets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, eds. David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (London: James Currey, 1995), p. 135. 188 chapter five nineteenth century period of upheaval in that region.14 Three Ngoni groups arrived in Songea in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the early 1860s two remained as co-existing kingdoms, Njelu and Mshope. They were ruled by kings nkosi( ), who were assisted by military leaders (manduna)—some of whom later became colonial chiefs—and civil leaders (lidoda). In the following decades the two polities transformed themselves from highly centralised military style migrant kingdoms, whose survival depended entirely on military prowess and the incorporation of young men during their long years of migration, into settled kingdoms.15 Patrick Redmond argued that as a political entity Njelu in particular became decentralised and even disintegrated.16 It is true that within the polities some individuals rose to relative independence, such as Nduna Songea. He reached warlord standing in his role of initiating raids into the coastal hinterland by the 1890s, assisted by his own military power of five hundred warriors and the favourable location of his headquarters at the main caravan route. Still, even Songea acknowledged the nkosi’s authority in political and judicial decision-making, and during the Maji Maji war he joined forces with the nkosi of both kingdoms.17 Contrary to Redmond’s assumption, not decentralisation but rather intricate patterns of power relations emerged between the Wangoni and their subject people, the sutu. One important element of social and political cohesion remained the fluidity of ethnicity available to men. Ungoni’s population was divided into three groups: “true” Ngoni, Ngoni, and sutu. True Ngoni is an ascribed status and refers to the South African emigrants and their direct descendants through the

14 For the mfecane debate, see Carolyn Hamilton, The Mfecane Aftermath: Recon- structive Debates in Southern African History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Univer- sity Press, 1995) and Norman Etherington, “Were There Large States in the Coastal Regions of Southeast Africa before the Rise of the Zulu Kingdom?” History in Africa 31 (2004): 157–183. For a more detailed discussion of earlier Ngoni history and in particular power and social relations Ungoni, see, Schmidt, “The Maji Maji War and Its Aftermath”, Redmond, The Politics of Power, chapter 1, and Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, passim. 15 Rasmussen developed the concept of migrant kingdom. Kent Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi’s Ndebele in South Africa (London: Rex Collings, 1978). 16 For an early view, see, Tom von Prince, “Aus dem deutsch-ostafrikanischen Schutzgebiete,” Mitteilungen aus den Schutzgebieten, 7 (1894): 213–22. Redmond, The Politics of Power, pp. 68, 83, and passim. 17 Ibid. p. 69. the maji maji war and its aftermath 189

Kitanda

ila R. tuk Ru . MSHOPE R hu NGONI hu Ru Luanda Lituhi Maposeni Peramiho Mang’ua Songea . Matomondo R

N a JE Kikole w LU Mpitimbi im k u Lake Mbinga NG L ONI 11 ˚ S Nyasa

Mbamba Bay

. a R m u v Mitomoni u 0 30 mi R

0 30 km 35 ˚E PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA

Map 5. Songea and Ungoni unbroken male line. Ngoni, on the other hand, is an acquired identity. Any sutu man—that meant any man who was seen as a subject, whether he was a slave,18 tribute paying, or merely acknowledging the authority of the Wangoni—could, if allowed to, fight in the Ngoni army and distinguish himself in battle. This resulted in material rewards and could also lead to ascent to Ngoni status. Once a man was considered to be Ngoni, whether he earned that status or by birthright, his military success in raiding could allow him to become nduna or lidoda.19 This was the case, for example, with Songea Mbano, the most powerful nduna in Njelu at the turn of the century. He was the son

18 Please note that here the term slave is used in the context of a range of relationships of dependency. The term is applied where the sources state or imply that the client was considered property that could be sold. 19 Interview with Mzee Edmund Simba, an eighty-one year old man, Mpitimbi, March 21, 2001 and with Nkosi Xaver Usangira Gama, seventy-nine years old, Ndi- rima, March 3.2001. The office of chief was officially abolished in Tanzania after independence in 1963. Nevertheless, in Njelu, the nkosi is still regarded as king, though without direct political and certainly no military power. According to Gulliver a man who became unsuccessful could also lose his status. An Administrative Survey, p, 25. 190 chapter five of a Shona-speaking slave from present-day Zimbabwe whose father had been captured during the migration.20 Changing one’s ethnicity appears to have been a male prerogative, as the core value of Ngoni ethnic identity was a specific understanding of masculinity.21 Sutu women were instead often integrated into Ngoni households as wives, and their children were Ngoni, defined by their father’s status. Raiding for people, food, and ivory was crucial to the polities for three reasons. First, it established Wangoni overlordship over the sutu by forging intricate networks of power relations. Second, it provided the economic base for the kingdoms. Third, it forged social cohesion as access to Ngoni ethnicity and power became synonymous with an understanding of masculinity as warrior prowess and thus Ngoni status became available to men of different backgrounds. As will be shown, the Maji Maji war provided an opportunity for young men to pursue this avenue of social and political mobility. By the late nineteenth century both Njelu and Mshope had become settled kingdoms with fluid and complex power relations centred upon the nkosi and his advisors. Geographically, Ungoni was favourably located on a main caravan route. It connected the Central African slave raiding and elephant hunting areas, Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) and Ungoni of the interior with the major Swahili ports, Kilwa, Lindi, and Mikindani, on the Indian Ocean coast. From the 1870s Songea attracted coastal traders. In 1889 Rashid bin Masoud from Kilwa was the first of these to settle in Ungoni. One of his residences, Kikole, quickly became the centre for the trade in slaves and ivory to the coast.22 It was into this mix that the German colonial power sent a military expedition to establish colonial rule.

20 Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 70. 21 For more detail, see, Heike Schmidt, “A Conspicuous Silence on Masculinity: Gender and Slavery in South-Western Tanzania”, (Tallahassee: ms., 2008). For a study which makes the same connection between masculinity and ethnicity, albeit in a very different historical context, see, Isaacman, Alan and Barbara Isaacman,Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 ( Portmouth/NH: Heineman, 2004). 22 Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter, BArch) R1001/289 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Von Kleist an Gouverneur, Ssongea, 05.02.1898: 42, Von Prince, Aus dem deutsch-ostafrikanischen Schutzgebiete, p. 217, Redmond, The Politics of Power, pp. 90f. the maji maji war and its aftermath 191

The Imposition of Colonial Rule

The colonial state saw Ungoni as one of its last frontiers because of its relative remoteness—Songea is located about one thousand kilometres from Dar es Salaam, the capital city—and also because of the colonial power’s absorption in military campaigns elsewhere. This finally changed in the late 1890s. In 1894 Mshope had sent a huge raiding party of reportedly some three thousand warriors to the coastal hinterland of Mikindani. On their return along the left bank of the Ruvuma River, the German side, the warriors are reported to have collected tribute in the form of people and ivory and to have arrived in Ungoni with two thousand captives, mostly women and children mateka (war captives). In 1896 groups of Njelu warriors carried out the last big raid close to the coast followed by smaller and more decentralised attacks on caravans.23 This clearly challenged the notion of a German monopoly of violence and their alleged protection of their subject people. In the same year Governor Wissmann reported to the German Chancellor Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst that the caravan route from Lindi via Masasi to Lake Nyasa was largely impassable due to the devastation caused by the raids. Contact with the administrative post in Langenburg could only be maintained via British territory. He urged the establishment of a station in Ungoni.24 Thus, in 1897 the government sent Lieutenant Philipp Engelhardt to “pacify” the area by demanding subjugation and the surrender of all mateka and other booty. Engelhardt marched into Njelu and established his camp which henceforth became the administrative headquarters (boma), and eventually the town of Songea. He called the leaders for a meeting to make his demands known. When the twenty-one men who met him refused to cooperate, he had them detained and mounted a display of German firepower by shooting through some shields—documented in photographs taken by the accompanying government physician Fül- leborn.25 On the second day, several of the elders attempted to flee.

23 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Engelhardt, Sson- gea, 02.08.1897: 203–205, Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 98. 24 BArch R1001/1026 Militärstationen: Governor to Reichskanzler Fürst zu Hohen- lohe-Schillingfürst, Dar es Salaam, April 1896. 25 Engelhardt lent Fülleborn his camera. Friedrich Fülleborn, Das Deutsche Njassa- und Ruvuma-Gebiet, Land und Leute, nebst Bemerkungen über die Schire Länder. Mit Benutzung von Ergebnissen der Njassa- und Kingagebirgs-Expedition der Hermann und Elise geb. Heckmann Wentzel-Stiftung verfasst (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1906), p. 14. 192 chapter five

When Engelhardt had his troops open fire on them, five men were killed and two female mateka and a “boy” were injured. Engelhardt reported proudly that on the same day one hundred war slaves were surrendered. Fülleborn’s account presented a picture of great success and easy subjugation, while Governor von Liebert praised the exploit to the German chancellor as the “surprisingly great and marvelous results of this unbloody punitive expedition by a weak Company.”26 Historians of Ungoni have argued that these events constituted the blanket acceptance of German colonial rule, and John Iliffe in his early work contended that the Maji Maji war in Ungoni was a case of delayed resistance.27 According to Ebner, Engelhardt apparently became known as Bwana Hundu (Master Leech) “because like a leech he sucked all the blood out of the Wangoni and made them weak.”28 However, Engelhardt himself presented a different picture. While it is true that no military confrontation occurred, it is important to understand why that was the case and how what became known as the boma incident was perceived. A close examination of the events provides important background for a reinterpretation for the causes and the course of the Maji Maji war. Engelhardt’s account of the occurrences in 1897 shows that he struggled to get the Wangoni in Njelu to surrender any significant number ofmateka .29 There appear to be two reasons for his difficulties in Ungoni. First, local leaders probably understood the handing over of war slaves not as a concession to the permanent establishment of German overlordship but rather as a tribute payment. After all, this was one of the few occasions when they

26 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Gouverneur Lie- bert an Reichskanzler Fürst Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Dar es Salaam, 17.09.1897: 199, Engelhardt, Ssongea, 02.08.1897: 202, Fülleborn, Das Deutsche Njassa- und Ruvuma- Gebiet, p. 15. 27 Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 100, Iliffe, “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,” p. 512. Oral evidence collected by the Maji Maji Research Project in the 1960s appears to support this. However, it is likely that social memory at that point was shaped by the perception of German military prowess manifested in the Maji Maji counter-insurgency campaign, as will be shown below. 28 Ebner acknowledged that Chabruma “unwillingly” and “gradually acquiesced in the political changes and the new situation.” The History of the Wangoni, p. 129. 29 In the published version of his account, Engelhardt did claim the surrender of “several hundred mateka” as success. The description of difficulties was cut. Also, on his way into the interior, his call on leaders of victimized societies in the coastal hinterland to lay claim to their abducted people—a tactic aimed at establishing the scope of the problem—had proved futile. BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Engelhardt, Ssongea, 02.08.1897: 202f, R1001/289 Von Kleist an Gou- verneur, Ssongea, 05.02.1898: 39f. the maji maji war and its aftermath 193 had directly encountered the German presence in their area. From their perspective, it was fair to assume that they were facing a militarily powerful but numerically insignificant and temporary enemy. Secondly, Engelhardt recounted that when mateka were not surrendered in sufficient numbers at theboma , he went to Maposeni, the capital of the Njelu nkosi, Mputa (1899–1906), to demand their release. Even so, they merely trickled in over the course of eleven days until Nduna Songea intervened. Engelhardt had singled him out for punishment with imprisonment and the confiscation of fifty head of his cattle. But the other leaders frankly said that it was his fault that he had gone to the boma in the first place when called to meet the Ger- mans.30 This implies that there was no notion of overall subjugation, but of negotiation of a particular confrontation. Finally, Redmond and others claim that the boma incident intimi- dated the Ngoni into submission. This is unlikely, since they saw themselves as potent warriors and were regarded as such by the Ger- mans. Even the Wamatengo, one of their subject people, whom both the Wangoni and the Germans considered to be incapable of military resistance, rose against German colonial rule five years later. They did so with such effect that a punitive expedition was sent to subdue the rebellion.31 The colonial government also demanded submission from the Mshope kingdom. Thenkosi , Chabruma (1882–1907), might have been willing to recognize the German presence as permanent. There is some evidence that he submitted to German authority on the coast in 1895, and he did not resist a punitive expedition which confiscated foodstuff and cattle.32 However, he continued to send raiding parties to the coast and refused to follow the order to report to the governor. Thus, by 1897 Governor von Liebert described Mshope as “the last worrisome part of the colony.”33 When Engelhardt passed through the area at that time on his way from Njelu to Uhehe further north-east

30 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Engelhardt, Sson- gea, 02.08.1897: 205f, R1001/289 Von Kleist an Gouverneur, Ssongea, 05.02.1898: 39. 31 BArch R1001/234 Bezirksamt Ssongea: Bezirkschef Albinus‚ “Dienstreise im Bezirk Ssongea,” Ssongea, 15.11.1904: 7f. 32 BArch R1001/287 Expeditionen der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Gouverneur Wissmann an Reichskanzler Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, Dar es Salaam, 16.12.1895: 10. 33 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Gouverneur Lie- bert an Reichskanzler Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, Dar es Salaam, 07.09.1897: 191. 194 chapter five to aid in suppressing anti-colonial resistance there, Chabruma volunteered auxiliaries. Ebner contended that the nkosi “did not dare fight against the expedition,” and that he “showed himself very submissive” towards Engelhardt.34 However, in the light of the three thousand warrior-strong foray into the coastal hinterland in 1894 and the developments in Njelu, this seems unlikely. This successful raid must have tremendously boosted the nkosi’s confidence and standing among his followers. Also, in the 1870s and 1880s the Wangoni had fought wars against the Wahehe, and it is possible that Chabruma saw sending some of his men with Engelhardt as an opportunity for revenge. Certainly it is striking that during the Maji Maji war, as the German colonial army recruited Wahehe to operate as auxiliaries in Ungoni, the Wahehe took with them many Ngoni women and children as war captives, indicating enduring hostility. The Benedictine Father Alfons Adams reported thatNkosi Chabruma did not welcome his presence in January 1898 as he disliked and dis- trusted Europeans. While Adams had travelled through large parts of the colony, only in Mshope was he forced to struggle to obtain food. Chabruma had reportedly avoided Lieutenant Engelhardt a few weeks earlier with the excuse of being absent on hunting expeditions or being sick and had also refused to meet with another missionary, Father Hartmann, in the same year.35 Chabruma did grant Adams an audience, but there certainly is no appearance of fearfulness or submission to be found in the account which describes the two men facing each other, the nkosi seated on “his finely worked Arabian chair,” the missionary on his “high backed chair”, both surrounded by their retinue at the nkosi’s capital, Usangira. Adams described the encounter: “Chabruma . . . stared at me with a gaze that I had often seen on the face of Negroes of royal birth.” Still, the missionary claimed that the nkosi listened to his “well-intentioned personal advice not to avoid the German authorities in such an obstinate way, since this could cost him his authority and possessions,” that he promised to submit to the Germans at Songea, and that he met his request for porters.36 Adams’

34 Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, p. 129. 35 Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes, p. 124. See also, Sebastian Napachihi, The Rela- tionship Between the German Missionaries of the Congregation of St. Benedict from St. Ottilien and the German Colonial Authorities in Tanzania 1887–1907 (Ndanda- Peramiho: Benedictine Publications, 1998), pp. 80f. 36 Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes, pp. 125–127. the maji maji war and its aftermath 195 claim of Chabruma’s concessions contrasts with his own description of the nkosi’s demeanour and account of subsequent events. This might either be explained as a cultural misunderstanding, perhaps due to mistranslation during the encounter, or as a well-meaning interpretation on the part of the author of his success where other missionaries and the German authorities had failed. In fact, the assigned porters ran away the very next day. Chabruma had already told him that if that happened, he would have to replace them himself. With the exception of the queen mother who extended her hospitality to him at Gum- biro, Adams failed to find any other cooperation from locals.37 While there is no conclusive evidence, it appears most likely that Mshope, like Njelu, saw the German presence as a temporary and unwelcome threat which was interpreted in local terms. It has been argued that Engelhardt’s 1897 punitive expedition did not effect full Ngoni submission to colonial rule, nor did the German administration fully and convincingly establish its presence. One indi- cator of this is the fact that the two kingdoms managed to mobilize thousands of warriors during the Maji Maji war. Still, the turn of the century represents an important turning point. The German presence remained minimal but its influence increased dramatically. First, slave raiding ceased almost entirely, probably because the colonial state now effectively controlled the coastal hinterland, at the time the main supply area for Ungoni. Second, Benedictine missionaries established their first mission stations: Peramiho in 1898, about twenty-five kilometres west of Songea and close to the Njelu nkosi’s capital, Maposeni; and Kigonsera in 1899 between Peramiho and Lake Nyasa. The missionaries slowly began to find converts and to pioneer western style education.38 Third, the colonial state introduced taxation, the collection of which expanded greatly from 1,672 Rupees in 1899 to 38,045 Rupees in 1903. This was seen as a success for a station in the interior, though considering the district population of about 80,000, clearly, many people did not pay tax.39 Referring back to this time period, in

37 Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes, pp. 126, 128. 38 For a history of the Benedictines in Ungoni, see, Lambert Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998: In the Service of the Missionary Church, 3 volumes (Ndanda-Peramiho: Benedictine Publications, 1998). 39 The District Commissioner expected that with an estimated tax of forty to forty- five thousand in 1904, Songea would outdo all other districts of the interior. BArch R1001/234 Bezirksamt Ssongea: Bezirkschef Albinus, “Dienstreise im Bezirk Ssongea,“ Ssongea, 15.11.1904: 16, PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, June 30, 1907. 196 chapter five

1906 the District Office explained that no war penalty fines had been collected yet due to lack of availability of military force: “Just by issu- ing the order, people will not bring any money. Even in peacetime this cannot be effected for the common tax.”40 In short, the years leading up to the Maji Maji war brought change but the imposition of colonial rule was not a decisive turning-point in Ungoni.

Maji Arrives in Ungoni

In May 1904, Major Kurt Johannes found that Songea District was fully pacified and that it “appeared to promise a future of undisturbed development.”41 In April of the following year, the colonial government switched the area from military to civil administration. Three months later, in July 1905, the Maji Maji war began in the Matumbi hills in the central eastern part of the territory with the uprooting of cotton from communal fields. From there it spread rapidly north, south, north-west, and south-west. On 18th August 1905 rebels took the boma in Liwale, in southeastern German East Africa. They instituted a Maji Maji council which tried a young local man, Omari Kinjala, who had refused to take maji, the war medicine. Initially, he was sentenced to death but then was given a second chance when three local leaders intervened on his behalf. He was told that he would be released on condition that he would be a maji messenger and take the war medicine to Ungoni. He also was to kill a German planter, Pfüller, on the way; the farmer, however, escaped to Songea.42 This appeared to be nothing short of a suicide mission or at least Kinjala risked enslavement, considering that, ethnically Ngindo, he represented a member of the slave raiding societies for the Wangoni. Oral testimony by eyewitnesses described him as a slender young man with a goatee, dressed in a white loin

40 Tanzania National Archives (hereafter TNA) G3/71 Vol. IV Kosten für die Bekämpfung des Aufstandes im Süden des Schutzgebietes: Bezirksamt Ssongea an Gouvernement Dar es Salaam, 23.04.1906: 25. 41 BArch R1001/1026 Militärstationen: Hauptmann Johannes an Gouvernement, “Bericht über den Bezirk und die Militärstation Ssongea,” Ssongea, May 30, 1904: 128. 42 Among the various versions of how Kinjala became Ungoni’s maji messenger the most reliable appears to be: TNA 16/37/29 Native Revolt of 1905 (Maji Maji), R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,”, Songea (March 23, 1941), pp. 29–31, Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, pp. 172f. the maji maji war and its aftermath 197 cloth, held by a white girdle.43 The task of spreading the word of war and of presenting himself as a ritual authority to Ngoni elders was formidable. Though the evidence that documents how Kinjala went about his task is contradictory, he certainly chose what proved to be a successful approach. In August 1905, Omari Kinjala first went to the Kitanda area in Mshope to Nkomanile, a royal woman and recognized by the Ger- mans as a chief in her own right. After a while he told her about maji and asked her to broker the idea to Chabruma.44 This she did, but first she introduced Kinjala to Chabruma’s brother and main political rival, Parangu. This proved to be strategically important, as co-opting Parangu eliminated any possibility of a major split over the question of the acceptance of maji and Kinjala’s legitimacy. Parangu had fiercely contested his brother’s ascent to the nkosi-ship, claiming that he broke succession rule which reserved the right to the first born son by the first wife, even if he was younger than a half-brother as was the case between the two of them.45 None of the contemporary sources, social memory, or historical treatments fully acknowledge Nkomanile’s part in the Maji Maji war. Usually, her role as cultural broker between messenger and ruler is accepted almost as a given. Redmond, for example, wrote that “Kinjala contacted Mkomanilo, who brought him to see Chabruma,” and in his earlier article he merely referred to her as “a subchief of Chabruma.”46 Mapunda and Mpangara contended that Kinjala approached Nko- manile as “one of Chabruma’s female ndunas,” that they entered a temporary marriage, and that he revealed maji to her in bed.47 Iliffe followed Bell, the British administrator, who wrote an account of Maji

43 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, 16.06.1906. 44 Interview with Susana Mbeya and Andreas Haule, Maji Maji Resarch Project 6/68/4/3/1: 1, 6/68/4/3/3: 2. 45 Nduna Palango, “History of Nduna Palango,” (District Office Songea, March 1938) in TNA 24/1/1 Songea District Office, p. 13. Chabruma and his descendants claimed the reverse, that he was the first born son of the first wife and that Parangu’s mother was taken by his father in marriage in order to punish her first husband who had conducted a raid without his permission. “History of Nduna Palango by Inkosi Mbonani,” District Office Songea, March 1938: 15. 46 Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 121, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 417. 47 Mapunda and Mpangara, The Maji Maji War in Ungoni, p. 11. Johannes believed that she married Kinjala during the war. Major Kurt Johannes, “Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Detachements des Majors Johannes vom 18. November 1905 bis 10. März 1906,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 17 (September 1, 1906): 605. 198 chapter five

Maji based on German sources and interviews with eyewitnesses and their descendants. Bell believed that Kinjala and Nkomanile, a royal Ngoni woman, had already been married before the conflict. He goes so far as to argue that this is why Kinjala was chosen as messenger for Ungoni.48 It is quite possible that the relationship between Nkomanile and Kinjala has been misunderstood. While the possibility of a brief sexual encounter cannot be excluded, it is very unlikely that they were married. First, sexual relations between them would have violated the nkosi’s guardianship over her, whether she was his relative or his wife. Adultery would have been a grave violation of customary law, especially as the husband was of royal status.49 Second, the ethnographic evidence on Ngoni society suggests that under all circumstances true Ngoni women avoided marrying men considered to be sutu. Kinjala, ethnically Ngindo, came from a slave raiding area. If she was in fact not already Chabruma’s wife, then Nkomanile was probably a royal woman who was expected not to marry, as was the case with another chieftainess, Namabengo. Third, Bell claims that Kinjala initially set out from Liwale with his three wives, one of whom was Nkomanile. But as a ruling chief, it would have been impossible for her to live with her husband in a different area.50 Fourth, considering the time it takes to walk from Liwale to Kitanda and the process from Kinjala’s revealing himself as a messenger to Nkomanile to Chabruma’s accepting maji, Kinjala cannot have spent more than a few days, probably less than a week, with her. According to Iliffe, Kinjala reached the eastern border of Ungoni on August 26. The military conflict began eight days later. This makes it unlikely that they entered a temporary marriage at that point.51 Fifth, Bell’s chronology is faulty, as he claims Kinjala had “come to an agreement” with Chabruma already in late July, whereas

48 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 173, TNA 16/37/29 Native Revolt of 1905 (Maji Maji), R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,”, Songea (March 23, 1941), pp. 36f. Bell in turn largely followed Götzen. The latter did at one point say that Kinjala and Nkomanile were married, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, pp. 208f, but earlier in the text, he referred to her as “a woman” rather than Kinjala’s wife (p. 120). 49 The sentence for adultery was usually the death penalty. Ebner,The History of the Wangoni, pp. 164f. 50 TNA 16/37/29 Native Revolt of 1905 (Maji Maji), R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,” Songea (March 23, 1941), pp. 36f. 51 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 173. the maji maji war and its aftermath 199 in actuality he became a messenger after the Liwale boma fell in mid- August.52 In short, the ideology and war medicine were introduced to Ungoni by Kinjala through a royal woman. (On the issue of Nkomanile’s status, see also the chapter by Mapunda in this volume.) Nkomanile was not merely fulfilling her wifely duties nor was she just any local ruler whom Kinjala encountered on his way to the nkosi. In Ngoni society, it was common for royal women to have male clients, and it is quite possible that this was the nature of their relationship. Nkomanile was much more than a mere facilitator. For a short time, she was a central figure in the geopolitics of the entire region. Major Johannes, in charge of counter-insurgency, recognized her significance and had her hanged, breaking German practice not to execute women.53 Once Parangu accepted Kinjala’s legitimacy, they all went to Nkosi Chabruma’s capital, Usangira. Despite the introductions by Nko- manile and Parangu, the nkosi was sceptical and, to use John Iliffe’s phrase, “employed a ruler’s devices” to establish Kinjala’s legitimacy.54 Chabruma had Kinjala and the medicine examined by ritual experts, including his war-diviner. Chabruma further had the medicine tested on a dog and then a man who was convicted of adultery with his wives. Both died, but Kinjala claimed that maji would only protect against Germans and their allies. He persuasively told of great military victories on the coast and its hinterland.55 Chabruma decided to take the water and have all his people follow suit. He also sent messengers to Nkosi Mputa of Njelu to come and take the medicine, which Mputa did. Kinjala from there proceeded to Namabengo, another female ruler, and finally to Mputa’s headquarters in Njelu.56

52 TNA 16/37/29 Native Revolt of 1905 (Maji Maji), R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,”, Songea (March 23, 1941), p. 37. Again, he follows Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 120. Various sources date the attack of the Liwale boma differently, but agree that it occurred between August. 13 and 18. See Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji”, p. 113. 53 TNA G3/77 Ersatzentschädigungsansprüche Bezirk Ssongea: Aussage Askari Ibrahim Ali Habshi, Ssongea, December 16, 1907: n.p. 54 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 186. 55 Haule talked of adultery with Chabruma’s wives. The plural could be a slip in transcription or indicate that the culprit was not caught in flagrante and thus was more generally accused of having transgressed boundaries of propriety towards the royal women. Interview with Kayinjila Kanyika Haule, Maji Maji Research Project 6/68/4/3/6: 2, PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, 16.06.1906. 56 Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, p. 139. 200 chapter five

The medicine and ideology of the Maji Maji war were accepted differently in the two kingdoms. While Iliffe is probably right in assuming that Chabruma paid little heed to the religious meaning of maji, the thorough introduction and testing indigenized and appears to have established legitimacy of the medicine in the eyes of many.57 In Mshope, Chabruma set up centers for the application of maji by local ritual experts, and most accepted it. In Njelu, on the other hand, the initial large-scale taking of the water appears to have occurred before Kinjala’s arrival. Mputa established a main ritual center at Runduzi River, near his capital and Peramiho mission. By November 1905 at the latest, the colonial army fully controlled the area militarily, making access almost impossible. Also, in Njelu maji was mostly distributed not by ritual experts but by political leaders.58 Probably for lack of legitimacy maji was much more reluctantly accepted, and by fewer followers, in Njelu. This was true even though here some leaders also indigenized the war medicine, as evidenced by a letter sent by Nduna Songea to the Yao chief, Mataka, a Muslim leader south of the border in Portuguese East Africa and one-time opponent whose slaves the nkosi had raided. Mataka controlled much of the trade south of the border and at least at times operated as a warlord. He successfully played the two colonial powers against each other and came to host many of the Ngoni refugees in his territory.59 Songea tried to win Mataka as a military ally for the attack on the boma by presenting maji as an Islamic potion: “I am also sending you a flask of the Prophet Muhammad, which contains the means of conquering the Europeans. Have no doubt about it, it possesses great power. . . . Now let us forget our old quarrels.”60 In the end, almost all political and military leaders took the medicine in both kingdoms. At most, one chief in each area refused maji. Namabengo convinced the Germans that she did not join the rebels,

57 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 186. Mapunda and Mpangara, on the other hand, claim that Chabruma sent a relative to the Bokero cult headquarters to establish religious legitimacy. Mapunda and Mpangara, The Maji Maji War in Ungoni, p. 18. 58 Mapunda and Mpangara, The Maji Maji War in Ungoni, pp. 13f. 59 BArch R1001/220 Bezirksamt Lindi. 60 Carl Heinrich Becker, “Materials for the Understanding of Islam in German East Africa,” Tanzania Notes and Records 68 (1968): 58; “Materialien zur Kenntnis des Islam in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Der Islam 2 (1911): 41f. For the opinion that maji triggered the war in Ungoni but otherwise played a minor role, see Records of the Senior Sociol- ogist—Arusha: Gulliver to Fosbrooke, Songea, March 20. TNA 468/1/1/B, 1953: 9. the maji maji war and its aftermath 201 though this was probably not true. In Njelu, nduna Putire, out of political disgruntlement over the succession crisis of the nkosi-ship, aligned himself with the Germans.61 However, during the events leading up to the second attack on Kigonsera mission station in December 1905, even Putire, who was Muslim, threatened the porters who assisted the evacuation saying that had he already taken the dawa (medicine), the missionaries would not have escaped.62 The fighting began.

The Course of the War

Insurgency Rumour of a possible rising first reached German officials in Songea on August 22, 1905, and a series of developments alarmed them in the following days. They noticed that the locals ceased to come to the market in Songea town and refused to pay tax or come to court hearings. Instead, the district commissioner encountered what he perceived as impertinence. Rashid reported that maji had arrived, that the chiefs had left for an unknown destination, and that Ngoni laborers did not return for work. The general population had deserted their homesteads for the bush, and the wali of Songea had disappeared. Then a postal carrier was murdered. In response, on 1st September 1905 District OfficerBezirksamtmann ( ) Richter left Songea to march to Chabru- ma’s capital, Usangira.63 Apparently while he was on his way, the war began in Mshope with attacks on representatives of the colonial state. In Parangu’s own words, written in the late 1930s: “After [the] Ger- mans came Chabruma and Palanga [sic] tired at peace.”64 Parangu and his men are reported to have first killed a coastal administrator wali( ),

61 According to Mapunda and Mpangara three leaders who opposed Mputa refused to take maji in Njelu: Putire, Chabruma Gama, and Usangira Gama. The Maji Maji War in Ungoni, p. 13. Redmond follows this interpretation. The Politics of Power, p. 123. Ebner, however, pointed out that the latter two leaders could not take maji as they were in Songea town when the medicine arrived. The History of the Wangoni, p. 139. 62 Cyrillus Wehrmeister, Vor dem Sturm: Eine Reise durch Deutsch-Ostafrika vor und bei dem Aufstande 1905 St Ottilien: Missionsverlag St Ottilien, 1906), p. 190. 63 Anonymous, “Die Ereignisse im Bezirk Ssongea von begin der Unruhen bis Mitte November 1905,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, Beiblatt 8, 4 (January 27, 1906): 1. 64 Nduna Palango, “History of Nduna Palango,” Songea District Office, March 1938, TNA 155/24/1/1: 14. 202 chapter five clerks, and tax collectors.65 There had been eight of these officials in the District at the end of 1904. District Commissioner Albinus identified them as two men from Kilwa; three mission educated converts; and two resident “Waswahili”—including Mzee bin Ramazani, who was wali of Songea and who survived the war; and one “Half-Arab.” The eight men were assisted by three African soldiers askari( ) in collecting tax.66 According to most accounts, Richter, accompanied by three Europeans, thirty-one askari and twenty-five of Rashid’s men as auxiliaries, managed to take the nkosi by surprise. This led to the first battle of the Maji Maji war in Ungoni on September 3, 1905. With their superior firepower, the Germans suffered only five casualties and one wounded in contrast with two hundred dead on Chabruma’s side.67 From there the fighting escalated with attacks against traders and caravans, the destruction of the only white settler farm in the District, owned by John Booth, and an attack against the protestant mission station Yakobi in Ubena on September 19, 1905 (see chapters by Gib- lin and Nyagava in this volume).68 In Njelu the war began at the same time with a quick series of attacks on major political, cultural, and economic targets, starting with Rashid

65 Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 126. 66 BArch R1001/234 Bezirksamt Ssongea: Bezirkschef Albinus, “Dienstreise im Bezirk Ssongea,” Ssongea, 15.11.1904: 16, R1001/220 Bezirksamt Lindi: Bezirksamt- mann Ewerbeck,“Erwiderung auf Auszug aus Bericht Stationschef Ssongea,” Lindi, 29.07.1901: 115. Mzee bin Ramazani published an article in both Kiswahili and Ger- man entitled “Report by a loyal native about the rising in Ssongea District” in 1906 and 1907 respectively in colonial newspapers. In 1913 he temporarily fell out of grace with the German administration when he was found guilty of bribery and fraud and put in chains. PAA A/10 Peramiho Chronik-Notizen: 29.09.1913. For a full discussion of the text, see, Ludger Wimmelbücker, “Ansichten eines ‘regierungstreuen Eingebo- renen.’ Mzee bin Ramazani über den Krieg im Bezirk Songea,” in Becker and Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg, pp. 122–132. Wimmelbücker identifies the author as an African voice. While historians have established that Swahili are culturally African, Ramazani did not see himself this way. As Wimmelbücker himself observes, this clearly emerges from the text in which Ramazani distinguishes between coastal civilization and African backwardness. The colonial government referred to all colonial subjects as Eingeborene (natives) irregardless of their ethnicity. However, they chose wali among the coastal population for their distinctive perspective from the people of the interior. 67 Anonymous, Die Ereignisse im Bezirk Ssongea, p. 1. 68 Redmond, The Politics of Power, pp. 126f. Chief Ngozingozi, who is discussed later in this essay, took part in the attack on Yakobi. Alexander Merensky und Karl Axenfeld, “Die Schreckenstage auf der Missionsstation Jakobi,” Missionsberichte der Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der evangelischen Mission unter den Heiden zu Berlin (1906): 62–94. the maji maji war and its aftermath 203 bin Masoud’s headquarters at Kikole. After he refused to take maji, Rashid, the main coastal trader in the area, prepared for several days for the attack. He called on all his followers, including those from his other residences, to assemble at Kikole, which they fortified by digging three wells and trenches and by constructing a wooden palisade with entrenchments and loopholes.69 Rashid and his men successfully warded off the attack as well as a second major onslaught, with heavy losses on the side of the Wangoni. Social memory today recounts the battlefield strewn with fallen warriors’ remains.70 Nevertheless, Nkosi Mputa’s men quickly proceeded to assault both Benedictine mission stations, first Peramiho which they destroyed on September 9 and two days later Kigonsera, followed by a second attack on December 3, 1905. The warriors killed some of the Christian converts in these attacks. The Benedictine nuns and monks had been unsuspecting until August 21, when the rumor of a rebellion in Ungindo reached Peramiho. From the night of the 26th, the mission was guarded at night, and two days later the missionaries at Kigonsera began discussing the possibility of an uprising in Ungoni. On August 31, misinformation reached the station that Mputa had been caught and Chabruma and other leaders were submitting at the boma. Still, all managed to flee, with the exception of Father Francis Leuthner, superior of Peramiho, who insisted on staying behind when the station was evacuated.71 In May 1903, Leuth- ner had antagonised Nkosi Mputa and many of his followers when he had pupils of one of the mission schools pull down the main spiritual shrine of the kingdom. At this shrine the nkosi revered his ancestors, held rain rituals, and made sacrifices to ensure social harmony and the soil’s fertility.72 Throughout German East Africa by this time, Afri- can men, women, and even children used the colonial judicial system to seek retribution for their grievances against Europeans. This might explain why Mputa took the mission to the colonial court. However,

69 Anonymous, “Der Bericht eines regierungstreuen Eingeborenen über den Auf- stand im Bezirk Ssongea,” Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung 9 (January 12, 1907): 2. 70 For a detailed discussion of Rashid’s and his slaves’ role in the war as well as war slaves and the famine, see, Schmidt, “The Maji Maji War.” 71 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, August 21, 28, 31 1905 and St Scholastika Peramiho Chronik, August 26, 1905. 72 Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, pp. 136f., 141–5, 178. An elder related that in recent times at the local ancestral shrine, male elders like him became ritual experts who also made sacrifices on behalf of cultural outsiders, small scale gold miners, to ensure their success. Interview with Mzee Lazarus Ulangani Tawete, a seventy-one year old man, Namatuhi, March 21, 2001. 204 chapter five the district commissioner did not wish to cause a major scandal and refrained from sentencing Leuthner. Instead, he recommended that the Benedictines pay fifteen Rupees compensation, which they did. The conflict flared up again in 1904, this time between the mission and the colonial government, as Leuthner prevented arbitration by refusing to acknowledge any wrong-doing.73 Apparently this caused much resentment. Evidence suggests that Nkosi Mputa had Leuthner captured, tortured, and assassinated.74 The fourth wave of attacks in Njelu was directed against theboma in Songea town. District Commissioner Richter managed to repulse it with difficulty, and the warriors decided to blockade the station for the time being. For a while, communication with the coast, and especially Dar es Salaam, was only possible via British territory and Cape Town.75 This situation lasted for several weeks until relief troops arrived in October, Lieutenant Klinghardt with fifty askari on the first of the month and Captain Nigmann with forty-one askari on the sev- enteenth.76 The next day intelligence reached the boma that the Wan- goni were planning a concerted attack, and the newly arrived troops almost immediately proceeded to stake out the camp. They found that at Old Namabengo, also known as Lumecha, east of Songea, five thousand warriors with two hundred guns under the leadership of both nkosi, Chabruma and Mputa, as well as Kinjala and Nduna Songea had assembled. The colonial troops, consisting of eleven Europeans, 122 askari, and numerous auxiliaries, managed to set up an ambush. The Wangoni probably expected the relief troops to arrive along the caravan route from the east and were caught unaware by the western approach. Also, another factor which contributed to the success of the

73 At that point even Governor von Götzen and Bishop Cassian Spiss became involved. TNA G9/6 Vol. II St. Benedictus Missionsgesellschaft: Stationschef Albinus an Gouvernement, Ssongea, February 15, 1904: 21, Gouverneur Graf von Götzen an Bischof Cassian Spiss, Dar es Salaam, March 21, .1904: 28. For Leuthner’s view, see, Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, pp. 136f. 74 Letter by Joseph Sihaba about the last days in Peramiho, Wiedhafen, November 16, 1905, edited and published in, Wehrmeister, Vor dem Sturm, pp. 184–189. For an account of Maji Maji, including the attack on Peramiho, by its former Abbot, a trained historian, see, Doerr, Peramiho, 1: 35–65. For the view by a Benedictine sister, see, Bernita Walter, Von Gottes Treue Getragen: Die Missions-Benediktinerinnen von Tutzing, 2 (St Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1992): 171–195. 75 Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 201. 76 Anonymous, Die Ereignisse im Bezirk Ssongea, p. 1, “Aus der Kolonie. Gefechte der 2. Kompanie Iringa vom 3. September 1905 bis 17. November 1905,” Deutsch- Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8 (February 24, 1906): 8. the maji maji war and its aftermath 205

Plate 5.1. Askari Machine-Gun Practice By Permission of Berlin Mission Society ambush was that major attacks were usually carried out with the rise of the moon at night as had been the case at Peramiho.77 In the night of October 20–1, the German troops mounted machine guns on hills on the western side of the Ngoni camp but it was in the early morning hours that they opened fire, taking the Wangoni entirely by surprise. The Namabengo battle did not cause many casualties, but it changed the course of the war. The Wangoni regrouped and henceforth avoided any large scale military confrontations. Instead, they reverted to classic guerrilla warfare: ambush and hit and run attacks by small, mobile units. The month of November saw constant military confrontations between colonial troops and groups of Ngoni warriors throughout Ungoni. On

77 For the Peramiho attack, see, Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, p. 144. A recent overview of the war mistakenly locates Namabengo west of Songea; Felicitas Becker, “Von der Feldschlacht zum Guerrillakrieg: Der Verlauf des Krieges und seine Schau- plätze,” in Der Maji-Maji-Krieg, 83. 206 chapter five

November 2, Lieutenant Klinghardt advanced on Nkosi Mputa’s capital and destroyed Maposeni. In a revenge attack six days later, Mputa ambushed Klinghardt and a series of battles ensued between them. The nkosi was only captured on January 10, 1906.

Counter-insurgency On November 29, 1905, the course of the war took another important turn, when Major Johannes arrived with the 8th and 13th Field Com- panies and 1,500 porters.78 The military initiative shifted to the German side. As commander of relief forces, Johannes had been instructed by Governor von Götzen to implement a famine strategy and to show no mercy towards the rebellious population.79 Johannes took his marching orders to heart and implemented a ruthless counter-insurgency campaign. He had about one hundred Ngoni elders executed in the spring of 1906 in order to eliminate the entire military and political elite, and had other warriors and supporters pursued without mercy. The scorched earth tactics involved the destruction or confiscation of all foodstuffs and the burning of all fields and homesteads. This quickly proved effective: the area close to Songea town had already seen food shortages in spring 1905 and November to January is the planting season in Ungoni.80 Major Johannes’ use of violence against women, children, and the elderly had already caught public attention in Germany in 1896, when a local newspaper published an article about a punitive expedition in which he was involved.81 Even though this issue was brought to the chancellor’s attention, it was dismissed as a smear campaign against the colonial army and did not impede Johannes’ career. From 1905, Johannes ran the Ungoni campaign ruthlessly, even by the standards of colonial violence. He himself explained that the colonial troops were given orders to detain women and children as hostages. They were to be taken captive first, and then it was to be established whether they were Maji Maji supporters or loyalists. This tactic was intended to

78 Johannes, Bericht über die Tätigkeit, p. 601, Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Auf- stand, p. 203. 79 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 193. 80 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, March 15, 1905. 81 BArch R1001/287 Expeditionen der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Justizminister an Reichskanzler Fürst zu Hohenlohe, Berlin, December 18, 1896: 41–44. the maji maji war and its aftermath 207 force surrender by preventing supplies reaching the warrior bands but also acknowledged the important role women played during warfare. These hostages most often had the status of war slavesmateka ( ). Offi- cially, the taking of war captives had been illegal since 1897. Johannes justified the capture of women and children, however, by pointing to the necessities of warfare and the importance of rewarding the auxiliaries (rugaruga). Both soldiers (askari) and rugaruga took mateka as war booty and Johannes pointed out that the redemption prize paid by relatives was a material reward which the auxiliaries deserved, as they were not otherwise compensated for their services. Some of these women were still in the possession of their captors on the eve of the First World War (see also chapter by Moyd in this volume). One of the ironies in Ungoni was that many of the rugaruga who captured Ngoni women and children and requisitioned food were Rashid bin Masoud’s men, which means they were slaves themselves. At the outbreak of the war, Rashid volunteered his slave army of up to 1,400 men to assist the counter-insurgency effort.82 Other rugaruga who were directly recruited by the colonial government often came from ethnicities hostile to the Wangoni. The main military goal of the counter-insurgency campaign was to capture the male rebels or force them to surrender. Captured warriors were assigned to forced labor, their leaders were to be executed. By the beginning of 1906, about one hundred Ngoni elders had been detained and put in chains at the boma in Songea. Johannes ordered their summary execution on three dates: February, 27, March 20 and April 12, 1906. One of the Benedictine fathers, Johannes Häfliger, spent a little time with the elders, trying to console and to convert them to Christi- anity in their last hours. He provided a deeply moving account of their prison conditions and his conversation with them. On the first execution date, fourteen of the thirty-one men agreed to baptism. Their main concern was to send messages to their families. Their response to the imminent execution was a mixture of indifference, fear, and defiance.83 The elders were forced to build the road down the hill to

82 District Commissioner Richter claimed that the number of actual fighting men was lower. Still, he conceded that Rashid volunteered one thousand rugaruga. TNA G3/77 Ersatzentschädigungsansprüche Bezirk Ssongea: Rashid bin Masud, Ssongea, 23.10.1908, Bezirksamtmann Kilwa Richter an Gouvernement, Kilwa, 26.12.1908: n.p. 83 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, February 27, 1905. 208 chapter five the execution ground, plant saplings to mark it as an alley, construct the gallows, twine the rope with which they were hanged, and dig their own graves. Häfliger took photographs which document the prisoners walking to the gallows in chains.84 Except for Nduna Songea, who was hanged later, the executed men, including Nkosi Mputa, were buried in mass graves.85 While the graves of the leaders, though not indi- vidually marked, are known, most descendants of the victims, whether those killed in combat or by starvation and related causes, were left without a site to revere their ancestors. As one elder put it, they are left “unprotected” up to this day.86 As elsewhere in the colony, forced labour for captured rebels was implemented without delay. In Songea District, men and women had to carry papers identifying them as loyalists to distinguish them from the former rebels. The document was referred to as “security pass” (Sicherheitsschein) or “freedom pass” (Freischein) because it protected loyalists from the abuse of rugaruga.87 Apparently others sought those carrying the passes as patrons hoping that their association with them meant that the protection extended to them as clients. Accordingly, when the handful of converts who had fled with the missionaries returned to Peramiho, one thousand people converged around them.88 Carrying such a pass, however, did not guarantee indemnity from harassment. In December 1906 the German Sergeant Weck had his men check men and women for passes as they stepped out of church in order to recruit labour for repairing the roof of the food magazine at the nearby military post. Father Häfliger claimed that they even entered the church and disturbed the service.89 Once order returned, it was common practice to send prisoners to the coast to do hard labor in chain gangs, for example in road con-

84 Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, n.p. 85 Interview with the Maji Maji Memorial Committee (Baraza la Makumbusho ya Maji Maji Mila na Desturi), Songea, March 28, 2001. At that interview the following members were present: Halana Mbawa Bruno, Aidan Ambros Kambanga, Theobalid Kaziyote, Shaibu H. Mkesso, Kosima Daudi Ngonyani, Joachim Ngonyani, and Swede Sanangula. Interview with Andreas Haule Maji Maji Research Project 6/68/3/3/2: 2. 86 Interview with Mzee Lazarus Ulangani Tawete, Namatuhi, March 21, 2001. 87 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, January 17, September 27, November 29, 1906, January 28, 1907. 88 PAA Peramiho Chronik Band 2/I, January 13, 1906. 89 PAA C/10 Briefakten Kigonsera: Bericht des Sergeanten Weck zu dem Schrei- ben des Paters Johannes Häfliger in Kigonsera vom 30. Dez. 1906, Mayangayanga, January 4, 1907. the maji maji war and its aftermath 209 struction.90 Former rebels and their supporters, including prisoners in chains, were ordered to cultivate maize in government fields in Umatengo to secure food supplies for the troops, causing horrendous death rates.91 Wangoni were also assigned to work as caravan porters. In January 1906, the boma sent three hundred Wangoni to the coast. This practice apparently lasted some time, as it was only in May 1908 that the missionaries reported the arrival of their first caravan with coastal carriers.92 The average journey between Songea and Kilwa or Lindi took eighteen to twenty days in good years.93 In 1906 and up to mid-1907 the casualty rates among caravan porters were tremendous because of depopulation and war-related lack of food and water along the route.94 Also, caravans were one of the main targets of the war. Still, by 1908 the famine was so bad that around Kigonsera Mission more and more people volunteered as porters or to do any kind of work to make a living.95 In short, the German counter-insurgency campaign in Ungoni presents an extreme case of colonial violence. Of course, such violence, or at least its threat, was always part of the colonial project.96 Major Johannes was crucial for shaping the campaign, but he was not the only representative of the colonial state with a sinister outlook for Ungoni’s population. District Commissioner Richter, when alerted by one of the locally resident Benedictine fathers to the developing famine in early 1906, responded: “That is the way it is supposed to be. Let them starve to death. We will always find food for ourselves. . . . This is the only way to make them weary of waging war.”97 The ruthlessness of the campaign in Ungoni caught public attention in Germany when, for example, the Frankfurter Zeitung carried a critical front page article in 1907:

90 TNA G3/70 Vol. I Kosten für die Bekämpfung des Aufstandes im Süden des Schutzgebietes, Gouverneur von Götzen, Befehl an die Truppenführer im Aufstands- gebiet, Dar, November 11.1905: 175. 91 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, January 17, 1907. 92 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, January 23, 1906. 93 BArch R1001/220 Bezirksamt Lindi, Reisebericht von Bezirksamtmann Zache, Lindi, January 23, 1900: 38. 94 See, for example, PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, December 20, 1906. 95 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, April 13, 1908. 96 For the duality of the assimilation and menace, see, Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”October 28 (1984): 125–133. 97 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, 07.02.1906. 210 chapter five

A reasonable colonial officer, whose district confronts him with cultural tasks, would never use methods of annihilation against those subject people under his protection, as has happened during the last rising in the south of East Africa. Here the natives were hunted and shot down until they were all dead or fled to remote areas and the Europeans [using irony: “die Herren Europäer”] who participated were rewarded with medals.98

Causes

The military targets and the course of the war suggest, as Marcia Wright postulated, multiple causes for participation. Additionally, in Ungoni there was regional differentiation. Maji Maji began in Ungoni, as elsewhere, with the introduction of the war medicine. Its adoption took two different courses in the Ngoni kingdoms, and it appears to have played a more important role in Mshope. The war was certainly not merely a case of delayed resistance, stemming from the missed opportunity in 1897–8 to oppose the imposition of German rule, as John Iliffe argued. Nor does Patrick Redmond’s explanation satisfy. Red- mond argued that the single cause of war in Ungoni was the ambition of the Wangoni to return to their glorious warrior past. This, however, was sabotaged by the divergent interests of the sutu, who found their position improving under colonial rule.99 In fact, this chapter contra- dicts Redmond’s assertion that sutu needed to be motivated to take up arms as they had “little to gain and much to lose.”100 The contrary was the case, for it appears that their most elevated goal in joining the war was to become Ngoni. Unfortunately, no direct evidence is available in recovering motivating factors at the time. Still, the course of the war and the shift in power relations in Ungoni on the eve of the Maji Maji

98 TNA G21/161 Bezirksgericht Dar es Salaam: “Die Kolonialarmee,” Frankfurter Zeitung 76, 1 (March 17, 1907): 7. The famine in Ungoni was also criticized in the Tägliche Rundschau, Kölner Volkszeitung, and Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung. The latter was published in Dar es Salaam; for a detailed discussion of its owner and edi- tor’s role in colonial politics after the war, see, Heike Schmidt, “Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal, Homosexuality and Sexual Crime in German East Africa.” In “Masculinity and Homosexuality in Germany and the German Colonies, 1880–1945,” eds. Daniel Walther and Clayton Whisnant, special issue, Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, 1 (2008): 25–59. 99 The British administration saw the reason in a mixture of resentment against German oppression and the reassertion of precolonial warrior power. See, for example, Philip Gulliver, An Administrative Survey, pp. 22f. 100 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni:,” p. 421. the maji maji war and its aftermath 211 war, during the conflict, and in its aftermath allow for an insight into divergent interests. The recovery of uncontested overlordship probably motivated many of the true Ngoni and Ngoni to rise, because rapidly, under the leadership of both nkosi, almost all Ngoni elders joined the war and initially co-ordinated their efforts.101 Yet, an analysis of the pattern of attacks reveals a more complicated picture. In Mshope, the first attacks were directed against tax collectors who represented the colonial state. With the exception of two mission educated converts, the other six of these men came from the coast. Surely, it must also have been known locally that the tax collectors were rewarded with ten per cent of the annual collection as their salary.102 Another African government representative particularly loathed was the former wali of Songea, Hassan bin Ismail, a former slave who had run away from Mataka, the Muslim leader south of the border.103 A sense of vengeance against collaborators thus probably also played a role. Nevertheless, in Njelu, the first attacks targeted the coastal trader Rashid bin Masoud. Subsequently the missions were attacked, and only later did the district headquarters come under assault. This appears to have been in part military strategy, in part personal revenge, and, as elsewhere, an attempt to rid society of unwelcome outside influence. In short, insurgency tactics did not clearly focus on the colonial state and economy, and did not only represent the interests of the Ngoni elite.104 It appears that the assault against Kikole, and later the complete destruction of Rashid’s second main settlement, Mang’ua,105 were acts of retaliation, and not only because Rashid bin Masoud, according to the former wali of Songea, had been offered but refused to takemaji . The secretary of theMaji Maji Memorial Committee, Shaibu Mkeso, a

101 One view on Mputa’s interest in the war was that he had hoped it would afford him an opportunity to rid the area of his political rivals. Interview with Laurenti Fusi Gama, Maji Maji Research Project 6/68/3/3/1: 2. 102 BArch R1001/234 Bezirksamt Ssongea: Bezirkschef Albinus, “Dienstreise im Bezirk Ssongea,“ Ssongea, November 15, 1904: 16. 103 BArch R1001/220 Bezirksamt Lindi: Ewerbeck, Lindi, October 23,.1901: 120, 122. 104 Napachihi contends that the missionaries, notwithstanding their best intentions to set themselves apart from the colonial state, were attacked as they were perceived as German collaborators. Napachihi, The Relationship, p. 159. This is hard to uphold as Mputa turned to the colonial court to find justice against Peramiho’s superior Leuth- ner, and Father Johannes Häfliger, at the time at Kigonsera, kept petitioning the boma on behalf of local communities. 105 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, December 25, 1905. 212 chapter five descendant of Nduna Songea, insisted that Songea opposed Rashid’s trade in slaves to the coast. Songea first complained toNkosi Mharule (1874–1889) arguing that the reduction in manpower was undercut- ting Njelu’s military power. When that had no effect, Songea staged a surprise attack against Rashid bin Masoud when he was travelling and robbed him of his goods, for which he had to answer to the Ngoni elders. Rashid went to the coast to complain to the German authorities, who gave him weapons. He in turn aided Engelhardt with his punitive expedition of 1897. After several skirmishes, the boma incident occurred which made the chiefs “surrender and leave the Ger- mans to rule.”106 Another account claims that when Rashid first settled in Ungoni, people from the Kigonsera area sold some of their slaves to him in exchange for consumer goods, but stopped the supply when they felt the demographic impact.107 (On Rashid bin Masoud, see also chapters by Mapunda and Becker in this volume.) Assigning responsibility for subjugation under colonial rule to Rashid is dramatic, and for several reasons this part of the account should be understood as a more recent interpretation of past events. First, Rashid was offeredmaji , an act which would have been unlikely had he been seen as an enemy. Second, the majority of slaves sold to the coast were women, not men, and Rashid bought at least some of them from the Wangoni, reportedly for an “incredibly low price.”108 In addition, the time gap between the appeal to the nkosi and the attack against Rashid indicates a fragmented narrative. Rashid’s status as local big man in controlling the caravan route certainly made him vulnerable towards Ngoni aspirations, especially those of Songea, who had become a warlord at that point. When the German colonial government first showed its presence in the area in 1897, Engelhardt noted many complaints against Rashid and his associates for blackmail, kid- napping, and other atrocities (“Vergewaltigungen”) which the German officer decided not to pursue in order to protect this coastal loyalist.109 Many of the attacks during the Maji Maji war were directed against caravans and traders. There are several possible explanations for this.

106 Interview with the Maji Maji Memorial Committee, Songea, March 28, 2001. 107 Severinus Hyera et al., “The Coming of the Arabs,:“ Our Past 8 (1970): 19f. 108 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Engelhardt, Ssongea, August 2, 1897: 208. 109 BArch R1001/288 Expeditionen der kaiserlichen Schutztruppe: Engelhardt, Ssongea, August 2, 1897: 208. the maji maji war and its aftermath 213

First and most plausibly, this was a reversion to earlier raiding patterns. Second, the caravans and traders might have been regarded as foreign and thus as unwelcome elements. Lorne Larsen (in this volume) points out that the stress of living along caravan routes had by the late 1890s led to a shift in settlement patterns. He suggested that the experience of food and water requisitioning, violence, and disease could have motivated revenge during the war. While this might have served as motivation in Ungoni, for example among Wandendeuli who were vulnerable to caravans travelling east of Songea, it is notable that the focus lay on looting goods rather than on the killings. This clearly was the case in the attacks on Rashid’s headquarters, on the Peramiho and Kigonsera missions, on the Booth farm, and on loyalist homesteads, where the rebels took cattle and other livestock. Within an hour of the attack at Peramiho, the warriors entered the church, confronted the remaining Christians and demanded church and all other property, as well as women and girls.110 In short, attacks during the Maji Maji war often resembled raiding rather than the attempt to defeat the enemy. This was the case especially after the Namabengo battle, which probably resulted from an attempt to assault the boma directly with an unprecedented level of military force. Still, it is important to remember that the 1894 raiding party from Mshope was allegedly three thousand warriors strong. This return to established patterns of warfare most likely was an incentive to many fighters who had benefited from war in the past. The fighting which lasted into 1908 attracted young Ngoni, true Ngoni and, in particular, sutu men who wished to prove themselves as warriors. Maji Maji thus provided them with an opportunity to enhance their status, something the government ban on raiding had precluded them from doing during the previous years. However, colonial counter- insurgency undercut established patterns of wealth redistribution as the war booty did not become available to wider society. Individual elite women such as Nkomanile probably also saw the early phase of the war as an opportunity to enhance their standing. She immediately seized the goods a trader from Songea had left in her charge when the war started. Finally, it is quite possible that the mass execution of

110 Napachihi, The Relationship, p, 171. Note that Napachihi’s reference to Wehr- meister does not support this account. 214 chapter five the Ngoni elders stirred some to seek revenge, though once famine gripped the area it is hard to imagine that many chose that option.111 In sum, different interest groups and individuals had a range of reasons for joining the rebels. The dividing line did not clearly run along Ngoni versus sutu. Rather, it was blurred by age and gender and the opportunities which the conflict afforded, especially to men. Some chose one side over the other because they could renegotiate their marginal position in society, either by joining the rebels or by being loyal supporters of the colonial administration. Thus the cause of the Maji Maji war in Ungoni is both specifically rooted in local power relations, and at the same time expresses in a more general sense young men seeking opportunities by distinguishing themselves in combat. The war certainly was anything but an anti-colonial war in any straightforward manner.

When Did the War End in Ungoni?

Historians such as Redmond have argued that the Maji Maji war in Ungoni was a short episode. In Njelu, they say, it lasted a mere four months and ended “because the sutu stopped fighting.” In Mshope the war lasted “some while longer.”112 This view can probably be attributed to the intensity and apparent success of Johannes’ counter-insurgency campaign. It is true that in the early months of 1906 a large part of Ungoni’s political and military elite was killed. Nonetheless, at that point the war was far from over. The deployment of large numbers of auxiliaries, mostly those of the trader Rashid bin Masoud in the vicinity of Songea, rendered rebel attacks near the district center imprac- ticable. But further out—no closer than three days’ journey from the town—military encounters did occur, although less frequently, because targets were more sparse. The fact that in 1906 the German colonial government co-opted young true Ngoni and Ngoni men by opening the opportunity for some of them to become colonial chiefs does not mean that fighting ended. There was a split in the elite. Surviving

111 Interview with the Maji Maji Memorial Committee, Songea, March 28, 2001. 112 Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni,” p. 421. Officially, the war in German East Africa ended on 18th February 1907 by imperial decree. “Allerhöchster Erlaß, betreffend die Anrechung der Jahre 1905, 1906 und 1907 als Kriegsjahre aus Anlaß des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Vom 14. Januar 1908,” Reichs-Gesetzblatt (1908): 13. the maji maji war and its aftermath 215 elders, such as Nkosi Chabruma, some Ngoni and true Ngoni, and numerous sutu warriors carried on with the fighting, both in Njelu and Mshope. Even as the mass executions of the Ngoni elders were underway, the insurgents pressed ahead. In March 1906 one thousand warriors were sighted on their way to Portuguese East Africa; in April Chabruma and some other leaders mustered two thousand warriors who entirely blocked the caravan route to the coast in the Kitanda area; and in May District Commissioner Richter reported “masses of rebels” in southern Umatengo, the area further west of Songea which had been a slave raiding area and from the late nineteenth century had been loyal to the Ngoni.113 It is possible that Omari Kinjala, the maji messenger, continued to administer maji in Ungoni for some time. After an abortive attempt to cross the Ruvuma River into Portuguese territory, he was captured by loyalists only in September 1906 in Ungindo, his home area, where he probably committed suicide as claimed by one of his sons who was with him at the time. According to other sources, he was killed by his Ngindo captors.114 Nkosi Chabruma had fled after the battle at Namabengo in Octo- ber 1905, but, according to Major Johannes, in December of that year he told his followers to plant food crops, as the war would start all over again in three months time.115 Some reports claimed that, hunted, injured, and abandoned by his followers, he crossed into Portuguese East Africa in June 1906, ending his involvement in the war.116 It later transpired, however, that this information was false. Chabruma had not been shot in the arm, as reported. More importantly, while he might have sought temporary refuge and even made his new headquarters south of the border, by October he was sighted only a three days’ journey from Songea with no less than five hundred warriors.117

113 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, March 11 and 20, April 13 and May 19, 1906. 114 TNA 16/37/29 Native Revolt of 1905 (Maji Maji), R.M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in Liwale District,” Songea (March 23, 1941), p. 52f. All accounts explain that he was captured and some say killed by Wangindo government loyalists. See, for example, Ebner, The History of the Wangoni, p. 149. Becker on the contrary claims that he was killed by Ngoni followers. Felicitas Becker, “Traders, ‘Big Men’ and Proph- ets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania,” JAH 45, 1 (2004)1: 19. 115 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, December 23, 1905. 116 Anonymous, “Aus dem Aufstandsgebiet,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 23, 32 (August, 11, 1906) 320. 117 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, October 5 and 14, 1906. 216 chapter five

He finally died the following year in Mataka’s area, probably killed by his brother Parangu who later negotiated with the German authorities his own return home and to political office. Even though in the past Mataka had frequently clashed with the Ngoni, he gave refuge to many. Earlier in the war, when two important leaders went to stay with him, District Commissioner Richter even went so far as to have Rashid send a messenger with fifty Rupees, trying to negotiate their surrender with Mataka. Amazingly, the governor’s office approved with a notation in the margin of the memorandum stating “good!”118 It was not until mid-August 1908 that the area of Gumbiro, the former residence of Chabruma’s mother and now of his successor, was declared fully pacified.119 The previous June District Commis- sioner Keudel had reported that the last rebel leader, the Bena leader Ngozingozi (Ngosingosi), was “eliminated,” again only two to three days’ journey from Peramiho Mission. The Germans had been particularly keen on capturing Ngozingozi. He had for some time fought side by side with Chabruma, and early in the war he had ambushed and killed Surgeon-Major Wiehe, his eleven askari, and six rugaruga, on January 6, 1906. He had allegedly tricked them by displaying the German flag. This attack caused some scandal because he looted not just the weapons, but also Wiehe’s remains. Ngozingozi was said to have ridden the doctor’s horse for some time; when he was shot to death in 1908, he was found to be wearing the doctor’s uniform but- tons and carrying a rifle studded with nails from the dead man’s shoes [on Ngozingozi and his battle with Wiehe, see also the chapters by Nyagava and Giblin in this volume].120

118 TNA G3/70 Vol. I Kosten für die Bekämpfung des Aufstandes im Süden des Schutzgebietes: Bezirksamtmann Richter an Gouvernement, Ssongea, February 23, 1906: 329. 119 PAA Peramiho Chronik Band 2/I, August 18, 1908. 120 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, January 27, 1906, Peramiho Chronik Band 2/I, June 4, 1908, anonymous, “Vom Ende des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika, ”Missionsberichte der Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der evangelischen Mission unter den Heiden zu Berlin (1906), pp. 406–13, Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Aufstand, p. 211. Other cases of looting Europeans also caused scandal such as when on August 14, 1905 the Catholic Bishop Cassian Spiss together with two Benedictine brothers, two sisters, and Africans accompanying them were killed on his way from Kilwa to Peramiho in the Liwale area. His mass kit was stolen and only reappeared in 1983 when a Benedictine father negotiated its return with the descendants of the assassins. Doerr, Peramiho, 1: 40f. the maji maji war and its aftermath 217

So far, the argument has been that Maji Maji as a military conflict did not end after a few months; while the geographic spread of attacks and their frequency changed, the war continued into 1908 in Ungoni. Moreover, the scorched earth tactics had long-term effects. While in some areas the shortage of food was already felt by the end of 1905, the two succeeding years saw the worst famine in Ungoni.121 The most severe famine year, 1907, is today remembered as nachinjala, the year of hunger.122 The famine most harshly impacted the central areas of both kingdoms. Once food ran out along with the goods used to barter for provisions in neighbouring areas, the response to famine was to pawn children into regions with better food supplies, namely Umatengo and Lake Nyasa to the west. Increasingly, families chose exile from the most affected areas, either temporary or permanently. In December 1907 missionaries at Peramiho, who by then began to receive caravans from the coast with supplies, handed out seeds to their converts. In Songea town, seed was in short-supply, and when available, traders sold it at a very high price.123 This aid, together with the easing of auxiliary activities and the radical decrease in the resident population, led to a recovery from food shortages in many areas by 1908, though some still suffered severe famine. The nutritional situation only fully stabilized around 1910, and it was only then that many of the exiles returned, mostly from Lake Nyasa and Portuguese East Africa, and also from the north. During the war, the population decreased by as much as three- quarters, by official estimates from eighty to twenty thousand.124 It is difficult to establish how this number breaks down into displaced survivors and death rates. Of the 75,000 official colony-wide war casualties on the part of the rebels—compared with only 15 Europeans, 73 askari, and 316 rugaruga on the part of the colonial government- 5,000, or more than sixteen per cent of the local population according to one missionary source, died of starvation in Ungoni alone.125 The dramatic accounts of the missionaries’ daily experiences support this.

121 PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, December 30, 1905. 122 Interview with Maji Maji Memorial Committee, Songea, March 28, 2001. 123 PAA Peramiho Chronik Band 2/I, December 31, 1907. 124 The chronicler cited the estimate by the district officer. PAA A/40 (b) Kigonsera Chronik, June 30, 1907. 125 Iliffe,A Modern History of Tanganyika, p. 200, Redmond, The Politics of Power, p. 136. 218 chapter five

In 1954 government sociologist Philip Gulliver found that “scarcely a single Ngoni family exists today that did not lose members either by execution or famine between 1905 and 1907.”126

Conclusion

The Maji Maji war lasted in Ungoni from September 1905 into the year 1908, and recovery only really began in 1910. While not its main purpose, the conflict presented a serious challenge to the colonial state. The warriors of Ungoni reverted to established patterns of warfare. They were supported by maji, especially in Mshope where it was indi- genised by the nkosi and distributed by local ritual experts. Insurgents forged an alliance which reflected different interests and proved to be powerful. The driving forces were both the Ngoni elders who initially began the war in both Ngoni kingdoms, and also the young men for whom the war provided an opportunity to prove themselves in battle, and to enhance their social and economic status. Despite the Ngoni experience in mobile warfare, the military initiative quickly shifted to the German side. This was due to three factors. First, the colonial army met sheer luck when they managed to surprise the large gathering at Namabengo and thus undercut any further attempt at large scale cooperation between the kingdoms. Second, the fact that coastal trader Rashid bin Masoud made his huge slave army available as soon as the war began also played an important role in quickly pacifying the immediate vicinity of the district capital, in taking thousands of women and children hostage, and in implementing the famine strategy. Third, Governor von Götzen happened to appoint a particularly ruthless officer, Major Johannes, who in collaboration with District Commissioner Richter and Rashid carried out the counter insurgency campaign. The result was great suffering throughout the region. Death, starvation, displacement, enslavement, forced labor, and humiliation dom-

126 Gulliver, An Administrative Survey, p. 1954. Some historians question the official figures, such as Gwassa, who claimed that up to 300,000 people, that is one third of the population in the affected areas, died in the war. Gwassa, “The Outbreak and Development,” p. 389. Iliffe agreed that the number might be this high.A Modern History, p. 200. For a recent discussion of the Maji Maji casualties, see, Ludger Wim- melbügger, “Verbrannte Erde: Zu den Bevölkerungsverlusten als Folge des Maji-Maji- Krieges, “in Becker and Beez (eds.), Der Maji-Maji-Krieg, pp. 87–99. the maji maji war and its aftermath 219 inated life into the years following the fighting. This is reflected in social memory today, as most elders claim not to have any knowledge of the Maji Maji war, only of njaa, the time of hunger, or of vita vya Mjerumani, the German war.127 As one elder explained in reference to the Germans, “They wanted to fight the Ngoni.”128 Thus, the deadly silence observed in 1907 still resonates in Ungoni today.

127 Interview with the Maji Maji Memorial Committee, Songea, March 28, 2001. 128 Interview with Mzee Kanisius Ngonyani Mshenge Daraja, an eighty-nine year old man, Namabengo, March 27, 2001. See also, interview with Mzee Mustafa Omari Njozi, an eighty-two year old man, Luhira, March 26, 2001.

CHAPTER SIX

REEXAMINING THE MAJI MAJI WAR IN UNGONI WITH A BLEND OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ORAL HISTORY

Bertram B.B. Mapunda

Introduction1

Th is is the fi rst attempt to use archaeology in the study of the Maji Maji War. Archaeology can be defi ned as the study of the past cultures through material remains. As such archaeology and history are very closely related as both are interested in the human past. However, one of their diff erences is time scope; archaeology is capable of prob- ing far deeper in time to the origins of culture and humanity over two million years ago and tracing human history all the way to the present, whereas history deals with the periods, going no further back than fi ve thousand years ago, for which written documents and oral traditions exist. It is therefore in the later period where history and archaeology complement one another and produce a better understanding of our past. It is on this viewpoint that this chapter is based. It employs archaeological techniques to verify, clarify, and supplement information used by researchers who have relied on historical methods alone in studying Maji Maji in Ungoni. Th is is not, however, the fi rst time archaeology and history have been co-applied for a common goal. Historical archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which shares time scope

1 I would like to express my sincere thanks to the administrators at regional, district and village levels for granting me permission to work in their administrative areas. I would also like to thank my assistants Shakila Halifani, Remida Ibrahim, Edwin Lyaya and Rahel Simon for their endurance. Sometimes we had to walk long distances on foot or ride on bicycles. Also included in the list of assistants is Osmunda Mbwala who acted as my contact person in Songea; thank you very much. I would also like to thank my colleagues of the history wing of the project for paving the way, making our task assume the role of follow-up and so relatively easy because we knew where to begin. Special thanks go to J. Giblin, J. Monson and Y.Q. Lawi for searching for funds which made the fi eld research possible. Th anks to I.N. Kimambo and Y.Q. Lawi for their suggestions and comments on the draft of the paper. 222 chapter six and methods with history, particularly the application of archival and oral sources. Peter Schmidt, for example, has successfully combined history and archaeology in studying the socio-technological transfor- mations that took place in northwestern Tanzania in the past three thousand years.2 Several reasons make the deployment of archaeology to Maji Maji War imperative. First, historical research has so far been pragmatically compelled to rely signifi cantly on oral histories as a principal source of information. Yet, none of the eyewitnesses of the War survives today. Our informants belong either to the second or third generations aft er war. But as we all know, the reliability of oral traditions diminishes with time, hence the need for crosschecking between disciplines to increase reliability and credibility. Th e second reason is that the tradition surrounding the Maji Maji War abounds with myth and symbolism which obscures reality and confuse truth with fi ction. Moreover, information on Maji Maji, like that of any other war, is marked by both embellishment and deliberate omission because both sides created accounts meant to maintain the morale of the fi ghters and supporters. When rewriting the history of Maji Maji, therefore, one needs to screen off myths and establish what exactly happened and what did not. As a discipline acquainted with the study of material cultural remains, archaeology’s unique service is to trace material evidence which can be compared with both oral traditions and archival sources. Th is paper is based on a research conducted from 2002–04 in Ungoni (Map 5), which today constitutes Namtumbo and Songea Districts. Specifi c locations studied include Kitanda in Namtumbo District and Maposeni, Mang’ua and Kikole in Songea District. Th e study involved interviewing local people in order to get in-depth information about the relationship between sites and the Maji Maji War. Th e sites were also physically visited to examine material evidence of events encountered in oral and written accounts. A one square meter test excavation was established at Kikole where surface materials were not informative enough. In the following section we examine these sites and consider how each was related to the Maji Maji War.

2 Peter Schmidt, Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in an African Cul- ture. (Westport, CT: Greeenwood Press, 1978). reexamining the maji maji war 223

Sites and their Contribution to Maji Maji War in Ungoni

Kitanda Located about sixty kilometers north of Songea, Kitanda may be considered the most important site in the history of the Maji Maji War for the Ndendeule, Ngoni, Pangwa and Bena peoples of the southwestern portion of the war zone. Kitanda was the gate through which the magic water from Kinjikitile Ngwale passed to these peoples. During the time in question, Kitanda was the residence of female nduna (subchief ) Nkomanile3 of Ngoni Mshope under nkosi Chabruma. According to historical sources, the magic water was brought to Kitanda in late August, 1905 by Omari Kinjala, a messenger from Ungindo. Aft er Nkomanile became convinced of the power of the maji she passed the information to her superior, Chabruma, who, although doubted the eff ect of the maji, subscribed to the cause of the war. He decided to use the water and ordered his people to do the same.4 Th us the Mshope Ngoni joined the multiethnic alliance against the Germans. From the Mshope territory the water went further south to Chief Mputa of the Njelu Ngoni and northwest to Upangwa and Ubena. Today, Kitanda is a medium size village, with a population of 7,000 people, most of whom are Ndendeule speakers. Th e village is quite isolated, surrounded by miombo woodland in all directions including the south, the direction of the road to Songea, Kitanda’s main outlet. As one passes Hanga Village on the way to Kitanda from Songea, one cannot believe that beyond what seems to be endless miombo woodland there would be a well established settlement of such a long history. Th e population is divided almost equally between Christians and Muslims. Th e two live harmoniously together, fully aware that they are ethno- historically one and the same people and that the religious divisions are recent, superfi cial and superimposed. For example, the author has observed that constructing a church at Kitanda is no less a Moslems’ activity as it is a Christians’ one; and the same applies for building a

3 Nkomanile (in some sources Mkomanile) literally means ‘the one scrambled for’. Oral sources are not certain why this female nduna was given this name. Th e popular story claims that she was very beautiful and so men fought for her. 4 Father Elzear Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni. (Ndanda-Peramiho: Benedictine Publications, 1987), pp. 137–8. 224 chapter six mosque.5 Th e land is fertile and dissected by several tributaries, some leading to the Ruvuma drainage system to the southeast, others to the Ruhuhu river basin to the southwest, while others join the Rufi ji drainage system to the north. Th e source of one of these tributaries is a small swamp, measuring about 500x300m and located almost fi ft een kilometers north of the village. It is from this swamp that the village has gotten its name, “Kitanda,” meaning “a small lake.” According to oral traditions, the original location of the village was close to the lake, and that is where nduna Nkomanile lived during the time of Maji Maji. Taking a lead from this information the author searched and located both the Lake (Plate 6.1) and Nkomanile’s residence (Plate 6.2 and Fig. 6.1). Th e latter is located about one kilo- meter north of the former. Th e two are found in the middle of thick woodland, along the periphery of the Selous game sanctuary. Here the lake is an important convergence point for game animals, especially during the dry season. Today, Nkomanile’s compound is conspicu- ously marked by an island of almost exclusive grass growth in an otherwise wooded area (Plate 6.2). Extrapolating from the mounds and other evidence visible at the site, one can say that the entire compound measured about 100 meters east-west by forty meters north-south with conjoined houses around the margin, leaving an open space at the center (Fig. 6.1). Th ere was one opening about the middle of the southern wall. Th e houses whose sites are evident today in the form of mounds seem to have been built in wattle and daub. Th ere is no obvious evidence for burning of the houses. Th e compound seems to have been deserted and it collapsed gradually owing to lack of care. Other cultural materials evident at the site are local potsherds (Plate 6.4). We need to note that what makes Kitanda unique is not only its status as a gateway for the magic water from Liwale, but also the identity of its leader, Nkomanile, who received the maji. Th is bold leader was a woman, the only one among all Ngoni nduna. Th is fact in itself war- rants further research. Th ere are various stories about how Nkomanile became Chabruma’s sub-chief. Th e best-known story claims that she was the wife of Omari Kinjala, the Ngindo messenger who carried

5 Fortuitously, my visit to the village in August 2004 coincided with the 50th anni- versary of Kitanda Parish, which involved the repair of the church, and culminated with brewing local beer and traditional dances. Christians and Muslims were completely fused in all these activities and even the guest of honor Arch-Bishop Norbert Mtega of Songea Arch-Diocese commended the harmony. reexamining the maji maji war 225

Plate 6.1. Th e Swamp (kitanda) from which the Name of the Village Comes Photograph by Bertram Mapunda.

Plate 6.2. Grass Growth at What had been Nkomanile’s Compound Before the Maji Maji War Photograph by Bertram Mapunda. 226 chapter six

Likely opening

Opening

Key House mounds Grass growth 050 m Tree growth

Figure 6.1. Sketch of Nkomanile’s Compound as Seen in 2004 maji to Ungoni.6 Th e militants’ most important action was to extend the rebellion [sic] to the Ngoni, whose military prowess was engraved in Ngindo minds. For this they chose Omari Kinjala an Ngindo who had married Nkomanile, a female nduna of the Mshope chiefdom in Ungoni. Originally opposed to the rebellion, Kinjala was sentenced to death by the council but reprieved on condition that he carried maji to Mshope. By 26 August he had reached Ungoni’s eastern border. But this argument leaves questions unanswered. For example, we are told that Kinjala was a Ngindo, living in Ungindo. If he came to Ungoni with the specifi c mission of transmitting the magic water to that part of Tanganyika, how can he be claimed to be the husband of Nkomanile? Furthermore, one should note that although Iliff e states that Kinjala was married to Nkomanile, he also indicates that he was answerable to the Ngindo council and not to Chabruma. It is incom- prehensible that Kinjala, a ‘foreigner’, could have easily married a sub-

6 John Iliff e, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 173. reexamining the maji maji war 227 chief in Ungoni. Ebner’s explanation is also not clear enough to give us conclusive answers to these questions. According to him,7 Kinjala and Hongo came fi rst to King Chabruma and tried to win him over to their cause. Kinjala’s approach to Chabruma was facilitated by his wife Nkomanile, who was a Mngoni and ruler of the country of Kitanda (according to Graf von Götzen).” When these questions were posed to the local informants8 at Kitanda in 2004, they rejected the claim that Nkomanile was the wife of Kin- jala, saying that she was merely his host. However, because by the time of Kinjala’s visit Nkomanile was a widow, it is possible that he acquired a temporary status of husband. It is also possible that this story was a mere concoction or guess by Germans who tried to explain why Kinjala won acceptance and support from Nkomanile. (On this issue, see also the chapter by Schmidt in this volume.) According to local tradition, Nkomanile’s nduna-ship was not Chabruma’s deliberate decision, but rather a product of circumstance including her own leadership talents. Nkomanile inherited the throne from her husband, Pambuka Fussi. Prior to his accession Pambuka, a Mpangwa in origin, had been a personal servant to Chief Chipeta, Chabruma’s father. Because he was very loyal and honest to his master, Chipeta made him nduna of the eastern periphery of his territory by “giving” him both land to rule and a wife, by paying bridewealth for Nkomanile.9 Later Pambuka married a second wife, Kahwika. Nkoma- nile bore only one son, Kalivembele, who unfortunately did not have any child, while Kahwika had three sons, including Kutisa, the father of Hasan, one of our informants. Pambuka died two or three years before the Maji Maji War broke out in Ungoni. When Pambuka died, Kalivembele, his oldest son, was less than two years old. Customarily, an adult male relative would serve in his place

7 Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, p. 138. 8 Principal informants included Haji Mandwanga Luambano (82 years), Hasan Kutisa Pambuka Fussi, the step-grandson of Nkomanile (70 years), and Hamza Ngalipato (Kilondandile) Kahako (93 years). Each was interviewed separately: the fi rst two on August 20, 2004 and the last one on August 21, 2004. 9 It was customary for the Ngoni to make war captives their domestic servants and wives. When the masters became satisfi ed with their conduct of the male servants, they adopted them as sons. Th is was done by paying bridewealth for them. Henceforth the servant would adopt the master’s surname and would pass it on to his descendants. See Bertram Mapunda, “East African Slave Trade: Unraveling Post-abolition Slave Coverts in the Interior of Southern Tanzania,” Utafi ti: 5,1 (2004): 61–7. 228 chapter six until an heir to chiefship was old enough to rule. Because Pambuka was an adopted son whose origin was in Upangwa, far away from Kitanda, there was no such relative. Faced with this dilemma, Cha- bruma empowered Kalivembele’s mother, Nkomanile, to head the eastern ndunaship. Th e tradition further claims that Nkomanile had proven to have leadership talents even before her husband died as she oft en assisted him in court and in decision-making. Th is is said to be the main reason why Chabruma chose her as the only female nduna in Ungoni. By the time of Kinjala’s arrival in August 1905, Nkomanile was a widow, free to marry another man. Whether she married Kinjala is not clear. What is clear is that she hosted him in her capacity as nduna. For this reason, following the outbreak of Maji Maji in Ungoni, Nkomanile, the fi rst recipient of the magic water from Kinjala, was listed among the leaders most wanted by the Germans. Th ey caught and hanged her in 1906. Because Kalivembele, her son, was still young, his maternal uncle, Parangu, ruled as nduna on his behalf.

Maposeni Formerly the residence of Chief Mputa Gama, Maposeni is today a suburb of Peramiho, the main center of Catholic mission activities in southern Tanzania which was founded in 1898. In September 1905, Peramiho mission fell victim of an Ngoni attack. Th ey destroyed buildings, confi scated cattle and killed one missionary, Fr. Fransis- kus Leuthner. Th e priest was killed at Maposeni near Chief Mputa’s home.10 Evidently, there is no grave of Leuthner because his body was never buried. Th e popular account is that his body was thrown into water—either a swamp or a river. Accounting for the last hours of Leuthner, Ebner writes:11 Th e mission of Peramiho was attacked and plundered by the people of Mputa on September 9th on a Saturday at 7 o’clock in the even- ing . . . Some time later the buildings were set on fi re with the exception of the new carpentry shop which later was used as church immediately aft er the Maji Maji. Fr. Fransiskus attempted to fl ee in the last moment, but was caught by Kunwama (Kunywama) and Mberakulawira between the Ruwawazi

10 ‘Maposeni’ means ‘state house’ or chief ’s residence in the old Ngoni language. 11 Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, pp. 144–5. reexamining the maji maji war 229

river and the vegetable garden (kitchen-garden) of the mission and they tied his hands with his scapular. Th en he was brought to Maposeni with much shouting and yelling on the way. At Maposeni he was lodged for the night in a hut near the former mahoka hut which he had destroyed. He had to undergo many humiliations. . . . On the following day, Septem- ber 10th, Mputa told him that he intended to send him to Songea, but at the same time ordered the warriors who were to go with him to kill him on the way. . . . Having walked some distance one of the warriors stabbed him with his spear whereupon the other warriors did the same, then they cut off the head and left the body where it was, as was the custom in the time of war. One of the murderers was Muhammadi b. Mponda who was living near the Mission. He is said to have died the following day (according to the chronicle of Peramiho). Th e Wangoni said the same of the other man who had taken part in the murder. It is possible that Mputa ordered them to be killed in order to get rid of the witness of the murder and his responsibility in it. It was said that Mputa was angry with the murderers for killing the Father so near Maposeni, they should have killed him further away from this residence. Th en Mputa gave order to remove the body whereupon it was buried fi rst in the cave of a warthog which was in an ant-hill. Later on when the Wangoni saw that the war was lost they removed the corpse from that cave where it could have easily been discovered, and threw it elsewhere. In 1955 Abbot-Bishop Eberhard Spiess, the superior of the Peramiho mission center, erected an obelisk at Maposeni, about where Leuthner had been killed. Th is memorial, which bears inscriptions quoted here- under (in Swahili), is today, mistakenly, referred to as “Fr. Fransiskus’ grave.”

9 Septemba, 1905 ameuwawa hapa PADRE FRANSISKUS LEUTHNER OSB Mwenye umri wa miaka 39 baada ya miaka 16 ya Upadri katika mwaka wa nne wa kazi ya Mission R.I.P. “Mchungaji mwema anatoa uzima wake kwa ajili ya kondoo zake” Yoh. 10:11

Th is can be loosely translated as, 230 chapter six

9th September, 1905 killed here FATHER FRANSISKUS LEUTHNER OSB Aged 39 years aft er 16 years of priesthood in the fourth year of Missionary work R.I.P. “Th e good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” John 10:11

Th e story of Father Leuthner is important especially when it comes to accounting for the Ngoni destruction of the Peramiho mission. Both oral accounts and missionary documents at Peramiho maintain that the relationship between the Ngoni and the German missionaries at Peramiho was harmonious and friendly in the beginning, when Father Cassian Spiss was the superior of the mission center (1898–1902). In fact, in 1898 Spiss and the co-founder of the mission, Brother Lauren- tius Brenner, were well received by and exchanged gift s with Mputa Gama, who a year later became the chief of the Njelu Ngoni following the death of Mlamira Zulu. “As long as Fr Cassian was superior of Peramiho,” notes Lambert Doerr, “relations between the mission and the Wangoni leadership had been exceptionally good. Th is was largely due to the general approach of Fr. Cassian in his mission work, but also to his aff able and generous personality”12 In 1902, Cassian Spiss left Ungoni for Germany where he was subsequently appointed fi rst Vicar Apostolic of the newly erected Vicariate Apostolic of South Zan- zibar and at the same time named a titular bishop.13 His position at Peramiho was taken by Father Anselm Walter, who was superior for one year before Fr. Fransiskus took over. Although he was successful in conversion and supervision of schools, Leuthner was poor in diplomacy. One grand mistake, an error which had devastating social-cultural consequences, was his decision to destroy Ng’anda ya Nyasele, a sacred hut which Chief Mputa and the royal family in general used for worshiping ancestral spirits at Mapo- seni (Namakinga). Th e hut was under the care of the most senior of the royal wives who was called Nyasele. Prior to setting the hut ablaze,

12 Lambert Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 in the Service of the Missionary Church 1 (Ndanda-Peramiho: Benedictine Publications, 1998): 35. 13 Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 26. reexamining the maji maji war 231

Leuthner rebuked and reprimanded Chief Mputa in public. All of this was taken by the Wangoni and in particular by Chief Mputa himself as an attack on his royal dignity and authority. Th e next day Mputa went to the German administrator in Songea to complain. Th e authorities in Songea asked the mission to pay fi ft een rupees in compensation to Mputa, but Leuthner refused to pay.14 (On this incident, see also the chapter by Schmidt in this volume.) Th is was the beginning of a sour relationship between the missionaries and the chiefl y authorities in Ungoni. Immediately aft erwards, Mputa withdrew the permission he had granted to the mission to operate a school in Maposeni. Th en parents withdrew their children, leading to the closure of the school. “Th e Wangoni as a whole were no longer as receptive for the message of Christianity as they had been in the time of Fr. Cassian,” concludes Doerr.15 Cassian Spiss, who learned about the incident while visiting Peramiho in September 1903, was quite displeased. He gave Mputa three rupees in compensation for the amount which the chief had paid in tax for the shrine only a few days prior to its destruction. Although there is no evidence of intent to attack the mission aft er that, the poor relationship gave the Ngoni an excuse for doing so when Maji Maji War began in September 1905. Th is was the environment in which Leuthner was killed. According to oral sources, the body of Leuthner was thrown into water soon aft er it was removed from the path where he was killed, rather than being thrown into a warthog hole fi rst and later removed aft er the Ngoni suff ered defeat, as Doerr as well as Ebner say.16 Had the warthog story been true, the early missionaries who tried to trace the last moments of Leuthner would have identifi ed the anthill, and the obelisk would have been built there. Leuthner’s murder was carried under tight security and confi dentiality. In fact it is said that the two men who killed him were themselves also killed the following day. Fr. Ebner may be right when suggesting that they were killed to get rid of the witnesses. Very little information escaped to the public that could later be used to reconstruct the last hours of Leuthner. Equally, the story that the Ngoni removed the corpse from the warthog hole aft er they saw that the war was lost is not convincing. Th ere are two

14 Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, pp. 136–7 and Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 28–9. 15 Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 29. 16 Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 46. 232 chapter six dates upon which one can pin the label of Mputa’s defeat. Th e fi rst is November 9, 1905, when the German army under the command of Klinghardt attacked Maposeni and set the whole village on fi re, forcing Mputa and his people to take refuge in the Lupagaro Mountains to the west. Th e second January 13, 1906, when Mputa was captured by Rashid Masoud’s warriors on the lower Ruhira River and handed over to the Germans at Songea. In any case both dates must have seen the body already decomposed, making it diffi cult or pointless to move the body. It is more likely that the body was disposed off once and for all at the beginning. However, there are several questions which can be asked about the attack on the Peramiho Mission. Had Leuthner not destroyed the sacred hut, would Mputa have attacked the mission and killed the missionary? Had Leuthner paid the fi ft een rupee fi ne could the relationship have gotten back to normal? What would have happened had Leuthner escaped early enough along with his colleagues? Th ere is no straightforward answer to any of these questions. However, the Ngoni had never considered missionaries as enemies or a threat. Th at is why aft er destroying Peramiho they did not also destroy the Kigonsera Mission despite knowing that the other missionaries from Peramiho had found refuge there. Kigonsera was attacked only much later, in November and December 1905, when the Ngoni became “afraid the buildings might be used by the Germans as a camp or military post.”17 Th us the attack at Peramiho owes much to Leuthner’s imprudent decision to set ablaze Chief Mputa’s sacred hut.

Mang’ua Located fi ve kilometers south of Peramiho mission center, Mang’ua is one of several slave coverts hidden in the interior of southern Tanzania during the late 19th century. Established around 1890, Mang’ua, along with Ruanda, sixty kilometers further west, and later on Kikole, fi ft een kilometers to the east, were hubs of ivory and slave trade controlled by Arab traders from the Kilwa coast led by Rashid Masoud (see also the chapter by Schmidt and Becker in this volume).18 Other traders of ivory and slaves in the area included Mohamed Said, Mohamed Ali, Helejid Hemed, Nasor Amur, and Djelid Ali. A visit to Mang’ua in

17 Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, p. 147. 18 Bertram Mapunda, “East African Slave Trade.” reexamining the maji maji war 233

August 2002 revealed physical evidence for the presence of Arabs at the site, such as cultural fl ora commonly associated with Arab settlement including mango trees, kapok trees and a date palm. Also found were mounds of what had been structures associated with concentrations of local pottery and exotic materials such as Chinese porcelain and glass bottles. Moreover, the oral testimony from Zuberi Abdala- hamani bin Musa Mbambili, a seventy-fi ve year-old grandson of Musa Mbambili, an elephant hunter who worked for Rashid Masoud in the 1890s, confi rms the presence of Rashid Masoud at this site. Th e selection of Peramiho as the site of a Benedictine mission in 1898 was most likely infl uenced by the presence of slaves at Mang’ua.19 It was a common strategic practice among Christian missionaries all over eastern Africa and perhaps elsewhere to locate their centers next to slave markets where they could ransom slaves and easily convert them to Christianity. Th is happened in Mombasa, Zanzibar and Baga- moyo. Although the early records at Peramiho do not directly show this association, “it can be inferred that the very fi rst people to come and live at the young mission and to receive instructions were former slaves, mainly children, whom Fr. Cassian had ransomed at considerable expense—up to 40 rupees per head—from Rashid bin Masoud, an Arab trader, then living at Mang’ua.”20 Doerr further elaborates by citing Andreas Haule, one of the earliest Christians of Peramiho, who recalled in an interview during the 1960s that Fr. Cassian had liberated a total of about thirty youths in this way. Apparently the coming of missionaries caused discomfort to Rashid Masoud, particularly because of his trade in slaves. Conversely, as a Moslem, Masoud was viewed by the missionaries as a threat towards Christianization. Th is is made clear by Father Maurus Hartmann, who was the master authority behind Catholic mission work in southern Tanzania at the time. During his reconnaissance of Ungoni in 1897, which led to the establishment of Peramiho mission a year later, he made the following remark:21 Th e Kilwa-Arabs began to settle among the Wangoni in 1890 and have attracted others to follow them so that by now there are already three fully-fl edged Muslim villages. It is said that the Arabs are exercising very

19 Bertram Mapunda, “East African Slave Trade.” 20 Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 15. 21 Maurus Hartmann, quoted in Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 6. 234 chapter six

great infl uence upon the Wangoni which is not all advantageous for the German rule. For the present the Wangoni are not yet Islamic. However, it is high time that the Christian religion becomes active as soon as possible in order to save this promising people from the danger of Islam which would make it perhaps for ever inaccessible for Christianity. Apart from missionaries, Masoud was also under pressure from Litunu Fereji, an African trader from Usagara, northeast of Ungoni, who had won close friendship with Chief Mharule, then residing at Mbinga- Mharule. Stationed at Matomondo, only seven kilometers south of Mang’ua and also trading in ivory, Litunu was Masoud’s archrival and competitor not only in winning Ngoni friendship but also in commerce. Th us sandwiched, Masoud decided to shift residence to Kikole, about fi ft een kilometers to the east, in 1902 or 1903.

Kikole Kikole is located four kilometers southwest of Lyangweni village in Mpitimbi ward. Unlike Mang’ua, where no standing ruin is visible today, Kikole has several standing ruins. During its heydays, Kikole was a small village, essentially a camp, encompassing about fi ft een hectares and consisting of about a dozen brick structures, fi ft een mud ones and probably fi ft y or more wattle and daub huts. Th e brick and mud structures were confi ned to the northern-to-northwestern area, forming the core of the camp, which covered up to fi ve hectares. Th e other structures were located in the northeastern area, leaving the southern and southwestern part relatively open. Oral accounts hold that the core area was barricaded by means of a wooden fort. Th e high ranking individuals here possibly lived in semi-permanent houses, the mounds of which can be observed in the northeastern edge of the site. Th is is where the Arab traders lived with their local African wives or concubines. As is customary in Arab settlements, the place is marked by dozens of mango trees as well as two date palms (Plate 6.3). Th e ruins indicate that each house had about four to six rooms. Judging from the population density per household as practiced by Arabs in Dar es Salaam today, one can guess that each house hosted about fi f- teen to twenty individuals. If that is the case, the core area could have housed about 500–600 people at a time. Th e open ground to the south and southwest could have accommodated people of lower status, including slaves, porters, supervisors and mercenaries, also known as rugaruga, whom Masoud used whenever reexamining the maji maji war 235

necessary. He employed them, for example, when hunting for Chief Mputa, who went into hiding following his defeat during Maji Maji in 1906. Oral accounts are not fi rm about the social status of the area, but do confi rm that this was the area for people of low status.22 Th e rest of the area, which lacks natural forest but is scattered with mango trees, must have been fenced somehow, possibly using wooden posts and grass to contain would-be escapees. During its heydays Kikole could have accommodated up to 1,500 people. Direct descendants of Arabs (mulattoes) are present at the relocated village of Lyangweni. While some have left the village for better life in Songea town and other places, others have stayed there. One such person, a key informant in this project, is Jabir Salum, the son of Salum bin Hamis, Masoud’s assistant. Surface reconnaissance did not yield any exotic material that could confi rm the existence of wealthy Arab traders. Th ere was therefore a need to conduct a test excavation. A one meter square unit was established (Plate 6.4) which yielded a variety of imports, including Chinese porcelain, broken glass bottles, metal cups, glass beads, synthetic textile materials, and plastic objects as specifi ed in Table 1 below. It was therefore clear that the site had been occupied by Swahili traders.

Table 6.1. Materials Excavated in a 1x1 Meter Unit at Kikole: Frequency and Stratigraphy Level Local Import Daub Slag Glass Metal Bone Bead Plastic Other Total in cm pottery pottery A 0–10 16 1 1 1 7 1 27 B 10–20 24 18 4 7 53 C 20–30 149 43 10 6 1 12 6 227 D 30–40 208 4 10 3 18 3 11 17 4 gourd 278 2 textile E 40–50 110 9 1 6 4 gourd 130 F 50–60 80 1 8 15 1 1 7 3 116 G 60–70 60 32 70 9 1 tuyere 172 H 70–80 28 12 106 1 1 1 3 tuyere 152 J 80–90 9 16 28 53 K90–100 – – – – – – – – – – – Total 684 2 134 253 17 31 30 21 24 14 1208

22 Jabir Salum, pers. com., 2002. 236 chapter six

Plate 6.3. Date Palms at Kikole Evincing Arab Settlement Photograph by Bertram Mapunda.

As noted above, Masoud was not on good terms with his Ngoni neighbors, particularly the two paramount chiefs, nkosi Mputa and nkosi Chabruma. Apparently his choice of Kikole was for defensive purposes, as his camp was built at the foot of high knoll, Kikole, from which the name of the camp came. Th is is the highest spot in a radius of ten kilometers and he must have used it as a watchtower, although a reconnaissance at the top of the knoll did not reveal obvious evidence to that eff ect. Masoud’s misunderstanding with the Ngoni chiefs is said to have stemmed from two main issues: fi rst, he refused to pay tribute, popu- larly known as “hongo”, which during that time was a requirement for every trader; and second, he enslaved and sold Ngoni subjects. reexamining the maji maji war 237

Plate 6.4. Excavation Unit at Kikole (note density of cultural materials on the fl oor) Photograph by Bertram Mapunda.

While Chief Mharule and his successor, Mlamira, of the Njelu Ngoni had opted not to confront him on this matter, their successor, Mputa, seems to have been intolerant of slave trading, as was Chabruma. As early as 1891 Chabruma ambushed Masoud’s coast-bound trade caravan just south of Mount Matogoro and confi scated everything.23 Fol- lowing this event, Masoud became more cautious. He deployed patrols and abandoned the direct easterly route, using instead a more south- erly one. Immediately aft er the Maji Maji War broke out in September 1905, Mputa, who already had grievances with Masoud, used the war as a good excuse to attack him. He put him under siege for two days. But thanks to large stock of muskets and ammunition, Masoud withstood the attack and forced Mputa to withdraw. Th is gave Masoud an opportunity to escape and join the German side against the Ngoni. It is said that prior to his attack Mputa tried to persuade Masoud to ally

23 Chama cha Mapinduzi, Mkoa wa Ruvuma, Historia ya Mapambano ya Kujikom- boa Mkoa waRuvuma. (Peramiho: Chama cha Mapinduzi, 1980), p. 30 and Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, p. 126. 238 chapter six with him against the Germans, and besieged Masoud aft er he declined Mputa’s proposition.24 As an ally of the Germans, Masoud watched very closely Mputa’s hiding places. Finally, on January, 1906 he surrounded and captured him along the Ruhira River He took him to the German boma at Songea where Mputa joined several other captives who came to be executed by hanging on February 27, 1906. Masoud was also used by the Germans to identify Ngoni leaders who were involved in the war. He used this chance to denounce his arch-competitor, Litunu Fereji, whom the Germans hanged along with Ngoni leaders in February 1906.25

Conclusion

Th is chapter has attempted to merge tangible (material) and intangible (oral tradition) evidence in order to enrich the history of the Maji Maji War in Ungoni. Th e study has focused on four sites: Kitanda, Mapo- seni, Mang’ua and Kikole. Th ese are by no means the only important sites in the area; there are several others which deserve the same attention and could probably have yielded additional informative data. Examples include Namabengo, a site of a pitched battle, where it is alleged that about fi ve thousand warriors were gathered by Chabruma for the purpose of attacking the German boma. However, the Germans surprised them on October 20–21, 1905, killed many warriors and dispersed the rest.26 Other important sites include Chabruma’s residence at Usangira, and the Lupagaro Mountains, where Chief Mputa took refuge for two months before he was captured by Rashid Masoud’s men. Th e four sites discussed here have been selected as mere representatives of Maji Maji sites to demonstrate the contribution of archaeology in studying recent history.

24 Doerr, Peramiho 1898–1998 1: 48. 25 Zuberi Abdalahamani bin Musa Mbambili, August 2002. 26 Ebner, Th e History of the Wangoni, p. 146. SECTION FOUR

REMEMBERING THE COMPLEXITY OF MAJI MAJI IN NJOMBE

Th ese chapters on the western-most portion of the Maji Maji region, Njombe, draw upon a particularly rich body of oral and documentary sources to consider how wartime decisions were infl uenced by complex and tangled streams of messages from regions further east. Nya- gava explores the circumstances which impeded intercommunication and alliance-building among the Bena-speaking people. Giblin stresses the intensity of contact between “rebels” and “loyalists.” Th e two chapters represent contrasting ways of contextualizing events, with Nya- gava placing Maji Maji within a prior history of regional rivalry among chiefs, while Giblin sets it in the more intimate context of kinship and gender. Th e two chapters share much in terms of common characters and events, and in their concern with memory and retrospective interpretation of Maji Maji. However, their diff erent styles of contextualization yield signifi cantly diff erent interpretations. Nyagava believes that a widely-shared desire to overthrow colonial authority was hobbled by the legacy of precolonial political divisions and the violent nature of German conquest. Giblin believes that only in particular circumstances did widespread resentment of German interference blossom into outright defi ance, and that the aims of defi ance were limited, falling well short of the complete expulsion of the Germans. Rather than attempting to reconcile these diff erent interpretations, we off er them as examples of the diversity of viewpoint which marked scholarly collaboration at all stages of the project which led to this volume.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WERE THE BENA TRAITORS?: MAJI MAJI IN NJOMBE AND THE CONTEXT OF LOCAL ALLIANCES MADE BY THE GERMANS

Seth I. Nyagava

Introduction

Th e tensions which led to the confrontation at Yakobi in present-day Njombe District between the Bena chief, Mbeyela Mkongwa, and the Germans in September 1905 can be traced back to regional rivalries which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In struggles for the control of the Southern Highlands, Njombe was caught between the Hehe, Sangu and Ngoni from the 1840s to the early 1880s.1 During the fi rst part of this era, southern Njombe was particularly vulnerable to raids from nearby Songea while Hehe and Sangu warlords were a greatest threat to northern Njombe. Later, in the 1870s, the Hehe took control of northern Ubena. Th ey pushed the Bena leader, Mtengela, into the Ulanga Valley following the Battle of Mgodamtitu in the mid 1870s, and in the same decade drove Merere of Sangu into Usafwa (near present-day Mbeya). Five years of Hehe campaign against the Mshope Ngoni from 1878 to 1882 ended with a peace of exhaustion, aft er which Ubena was partitioned. Peace was established on two conditions: fi rstly, the Luhudzi River was recognized as the boundary between the Hehe and Ngoni spheres of infl uence; and secondly, a Hehe bureaucracy replace the Sangu bureaucracy in parts of northern Ubena where the Sangu had established themselves previously. It was these struggles which forced Mbeyela to leave Ikilavugi in northern Ubena—that is, north of Luhudzi River—to settle in Nyikolwe in southern Ubena. When the Germans came they exploited these old rivalries. Aft er the German Imperial government took over administration of its east

1 On the regional situation, see Seth I. Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914 (Peramiho: Peramiho Press, 2000), pp. 51–80. 242 chapter seven

African territory from the German East Africa Company in 1891, Hermann Von Wissmann, who assumed administrative responsibilities, began to extend his authority inland. For this he needed allies, since German forces rarely exceeded two or three hundred African troops in any engagement.2 Old rivalries allowed the Germans to ally with one society against its rival or to support one group within a society to the disadvantage of its competitors. Th e outcome was a number of local arrangements between the European invaders and the groups in each region. Th is was certainly true in the Southern Highlands, where the Germans exploited not only rivalry between Sangu and Hehe, but also among the Bena of Njombe, as this paper demonstrates. Th e result was that when the Maji Maji War broke out in 1905, northern Bena did not join in fi ghting against the Germans. According to Makweta,3 aft er Mbeyela’s men gained a victory by annihilating the party led by Albert Wiehe at Nyikamtwe in January 1906, they launched aggression into northern Ubena, whose people they considered “stooges.” On their way to Mdandu, they are said to have killed anyone whom they met. Mbeyela’s people entered every house checking to see if there were any northerners hidden; forests and granaries were burned; villagers of northern Bena were harassed and chased, and their crops destroyed. Th e northern Ubena areas of Ukilavungi and Usovi were left bare. Furthermore, according to Ndik- wege,4 those who, in the eyes of the Bena “rebels,” did not participate in the rebellion were regarded as “traitors’ because they sided with the Germans. Th is paper attempts to link these earlier developments to what happened in Njombe during the Maji Maji Rebellion. It shows why the rebellion was fought by the Nyikolwe Bena under Mbeyela and his two sons. In so doing we want to affi rm that those who did not participate in the rebellion were not necessarily stooges or traitors. Rather, their lack of participation stemmed from the alliances which the Germans made with local leaders.

2 John Iliff e, Tanganyika Under German Rule, 1905–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969), p. 11. 3 J.M. Makweta. “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project [MMRP] 4/68/1/1. 4 M.S. Ndikwege. “Chief Merere and the Maji Maji Uprising,” MMRP 7/68/1/1. were the bena traitors? 243

Sangu and Hehe Ascendancy over the Bena

Because of the Hehe and Sangu struggles over Ubena, what took place during the German intervention was to a large extent determined by the nature of the relations which were established between the Sangu and Germans, on the one hand, and between the Germans and the Hehe, on the other. When the Germans came into Ubena, neither Sangu nor Hehe ascendancy had been forgotten. Th is history of Sangu ascendancy was later exploited when Germans restored the Sangu as rulers in northwestern Ubena.5 For in defi ning colonial administration units, the Germans had taken advantage of African leadership found in the areas. Th e Bena therefore suff ered a political partition originally caused by the power balance between the Hehe, Mshope Ngoni and the Sangu, and later perpetuated under colonial rule. Th at Ubena had been under Hehe and Sangu rule is confi rmed by several explorers. In 1877, Elton described Ubena as a sub-district of the Sangu,6 while Joseph Th omson, who traveled to the region in 1879, reported that northern Ubena had been incorporated into the Hehe empire with Uhenga as its regional headquarters. Th omson made blood brotherhood with Mamle, the provincial leader resident there.7 Elton and Th omson were followed by the French explorer Victor Giraud in 1883, from whose report we learn that Ubena was under Mkwawa.8 In 1885, Joachim Graf von Pfeil explored the Ulanga valley and surrounding areas.9 On January 3, 1886 he signed a treaty with the Bena mutwa, Mtengela, of the Ulanga valley on behalf of the Society for German Colonization.10 Other German explorers, including Wil- helm Arning, who made two expeditions in 1896 and 1897, also dealt with the political situation which Iliff e characterizes as “the politics of survival.” In the Southern Highlands” it meant a widening regional contest between Mshope, Usangu, Utemikwila (in Ulanga) and

5 Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1899), p. 13. 6 J.F. Elton, Travels and Researches among the Lakes and Mountains of Eastern and Central Africa (London: J. Murray, 1879 ), p. 327. 7 Joseph Th omson, To the Central African Lakes and Back, 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1968): 246. 8 Quoted in Wilhelm Arning, “Die Wahehe,” Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten [MDS] 10 (1897): 59. 9 Joachim Graf Pfeil. “Die Erforschung des Ulanga-Gebietes,” Petermann’s Mittei- lungen, 32 ( 1886): 353–63. 10 Reichskolonialamt, Deutsches Zentralarchiv, Potsdam [RKA], Nr. 265. 244 chapter seven

Uhehe.11 Alfons Adams in 1898 referred to the Lupembe (Mfi rika) and Ikilavugi, areas of eastern and northern Ubena, as provinces of Uhehe empire.12 Except for Nyikolwe and the Bena of the Ulanga Valley, the rest of Ubena was under the domination of its powerful neighbors when the Germans came.

The German Intervention and Varied Bena Responses

In the fi rst years of Imperial German government control, the initial task was the conquest of areas of resistance. Th e Hehe were among those who had resisted by routing a German military expedition under Emil von Zelewsky in August 1891 at Lugalo. Because this successful defi ance damaged German prestige and threatened to harden resistance, the question of what to do about the Hehe infl uenced all policy considerations in the central and southern regions. In March 1893, the second governor of German East Africa, von Schele, who believed in conquest, instructed von Prince, the fi rst military commander of Iringa, to pursue his policy. It is in this context that German intervention in Njombe can be understood.

Local Alliances

In 1893, German offi cials began constructing alliances aimed at encir- cling Mkwawa. Th eir fi rst ally was Kiwanga, the Bena mutwa in the Ulanga Valley who had succeeded his father, Mtengela.13 Mtengela had been defeated on the Ubena plateau in present-day Njombe by the Hehe and had consequently moved into the valley. Th is appears to be the second time that members of his Manga clan signed agreements with German offi cials, the fi rst one being in 1886.14 Th e Ger- mans believed that the family of Mtengela were the “Sultans” of the

11 John Iliff e, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 56–9. 12 Alfons M. Adams, “Uhehe und das Land bis zum Nyassa-See,” MDS 11 (1898): 246–50. 13 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 111. 14 “Verzeichniss der in der Interssensphäre von Deutsch-Ostafrika abgeschlossenen Schutzverträge,” Deutsches Zentralen Staatsarchiv, Merseburg, Rep. 120, G XIII, 20, nr. 51. were the bena traitors? 245

Wabena.15 Kiwanga met the Germans in Kilwa in 1890,16 and realized that he could use them to destroy Mkwawa. By May 1893, Ger- man troops launched their assault on Iringa from his capital.17 Later, Governor von Schele took advantage of alliance with Kiwanga to skirt Uhehe as he moved troops into Mshope Ungoni, Chabruma’s territory, to isolate Mkwawa before the Germans made their fi nal assault on his capital at Kalenga on October 30, 1894. Merere was the next German ally.18 He had lost not only his homeland, but also part of Ubena to the Hehe. Th e arrival of the Germans gave him hope of regaining his territory. He actively sought their alliance as early as 1891 when he sent his envoys to Bagamoyo to seek a German fl ag. In 1893, von Prince reached Usangu to aid him against his enemies. In this way the Sangu were able to regain northwestern Ubena which they had lost to the Hehe. In order to further weaken Hehe infl uence in Ubena, von Prince directed Merere IV to abandon his Usafwa headquarters and move to Igavilo to the north of present- day Ivanging’ombe in Ubena. Th is was where, in the past, the Hehe had established a strong garrison.19 At the end of 1893 von Prince, again in an eff ort to demonstrate the German presence in the former Hehe empire, led a military expedition through Ubena to Songea aimed at sealing off any support of the Hehe from the famous Ngoni warriors. Conscious of the insecurity of his position upon receipt of reports that the southern Bena and Ngoni contemplated joining arms against him, von Prince called on Merere to garrison Iringa and provide irregulars for the continuing struggle with Mkwawa.20 Meanwhile, Mkwawa was closely following these German movements and was worried. Because of these German maneuvers at his back, Mkwawa began to seek allies, too. But the long Hehe supremacy over

15 Tanzania National Archives, Regional and District Books, Njombe District Book, vol. II sheet No. 7. See also Gerald F. Sayers (ed.), Th e Handbook of Tanganyika (Lon- don: Macmillan, 1930), p. 156. 16 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 111. 17 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 111. 18 Lazaro Makidika, Mayale, August 10, 1975 and Lutangilo Nyudike, Ivanging’ombe, November 6, 1975. See also Iliff e, p. 111. 19 Alfons M. Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuze (St. Ottilien: Post Türkenfeld [(Ober- bayern], 1899), p. 87. 20 Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika, 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in the Southern Highlands (London: Clarendon, 1971), p. 70. See also Magdalene von Prince, Eine Deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1908), p. 75. 246 chapter seven his neighbors stood against him. Moreover, both von Schele and von Prince had warned Chabruma, the nkosi of Mshope, and other would- be Mkwawa allies against joining him. Neither were the Bena vatwa who had been forced out of their chiefdoms by the Hehe inclined to become allies of Mkwawa. For instance, Kahendza Gadau of the Mligo clan of Usovi in northern Ubena was living in exile in the Iditima forest of extreme eastern Ubena aft er being forced out of Usovi by the Hehe. Mtata, an Mhehe, had been put in Kahendza’s territory to rule.21 So Mkwawa had no allies to fall back on when in trouble. When he sought Mbeyela’s help, Mbeyela turned back Mkwawa’s emissaries and welcomed a German garrison at Mdandu in Ikilavugi. It was not until aft er the assault on Kalenga on October 30, 1894, that the German administration was to establish fi rm authority in Ubena with their Sangu allies. All the Hehe rulers were removed from Ubena. In Usovi, for example, Kahendza was reinstated aft er Mtata was removed.22 Th e Sangu were rewarded for their role in helping to defeat the Hehe by being allowed to re-establish their dominant position in the area north of Ikilavugi in present-day Ivanging’ombe division.23 Seeing the fall of Mkwawa, Mbeyela and his subjects realized that the white invaders were too strong to be resisted.24 Th is strength was further demonstrated when German troops passed through his territory in Nyikolwe on their return march from Songea. Th e Nyikolwe Bena accepted German rule, therefore, just as the rest of the Bena had done.25 Consequently Mbeyela was able to re-establish his authority in Ikilavugi through his son, Ngozingozi, while Kahendza Gadau was reinstated in Usovi. Lupembe continued to rule Mfi rika until 1898 while the Rivers Bena in Ulanga valley remained under Kiwanga, Mtengela’s son.

21 Shem Kihiva, Ngamanga, April 23, May 25, 26 and 28, 1975; Andrea Mpete, Itindiga, May 10, 1975; Ismael K. Nyagava, Mavande, May 11, 1975; Moses Kilatu, Igongolo, July 28, 1975; Tulinave Gadau, Igongolo, July 29, 1975. 22 Shem Kihiva, Ngamanga, April 23, May 25, 26 and 28, 1975; Ismael K. Nyagava, Mavande, May 11, 1975; Moses Kilatu, Igongolo, July 28, 1975; Tulinave Gadau, Igon- golo, July 29, 1975. 23 Menald Mkongwa (Uwemba, April–May 1966) in James D. Graham collection of oral traditions. See also RKA, Reichstag, Nr. 1054, Bl. 109–110. 24 Rev. Manase Mbakilwa, Kidugala, September 17, 1976. See also Menald Mkongwa, (Uwemba, April–May 1966) in James D. Graham collection of oral traditions. 25 Paul Gröschel, Amelye: Ein Lebensbild aus dem Benavolk in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner ev. Missionsgesellschaft , 1911), p. 16. were the bena traitors? 247

Th us the local administration established by the Hehe was removed by the Germans. Nevertheless, taxation and the banning of warfare and raiding symbolized subjection. Local leadership found its control of subjects weakening. Such weakening of authority, together with the indignities perpetrated by tax collectors (see the chapter by Giblin in this volume) and the harboring of tax collectors by missionaries, made some leaders in Ubena willing to rise up against German rule. Many of them, including Mbeyela, remained skeptical of the power behind German authority until the Maji Maji war broke out. In Njombe such skepticism was demonstrated by mutwa Lupembe of Mfi rika in 1898, when he opposed missionary Christian Schumann being used as an extension of colonial rule. His attempts to resist militarily the establishment of a mission, however, did not get support from his advisors. Meanwhile, von Prince prepared to suppress such opposition, replacing Lupembe with two “loyalists” from Iringa, Ngurukuru and Dumuluganga Lugenge. It is reported that the elderly Lupembe died in hiding in the Iditima forest in March, 1901. Simi- larly, in western Ubena Sanganya Mwangela’s opposition to the rein- statement of Sangu rulers was suppressed by the German military in December 1898.

Maji Maji in Njombe

According to some accounts, Mbeyela was supported in his decision to go to war in September 1905 by another leader named Danda, who ruled a section of Nyikolwe in southern Ubena. E.A. Mwenda informs us that one European and his servant were killed by people loyal to Danda. Another informant said that conspiracy between Mbeyela and Danda to kill, “any strange face coming from Songea” led to the murder of the tax collectors which began the war in Ubena (see also Giblin chapter in this volume). It was the harboring of a surviving tax collector by the Yakobi mission which prompted Mbeyela’s attack on the mission, according to this informant.26 Th ese sources suggest that some Bena responded violently against German rule even before the maji medicine reached Ubena.

26 Edward A. Mwenda, Mimeographed oral traditions (1963). 248 chapter seven

Aft er the battle of January 1906 at Nyikamtwe, where the German physician, Albert Wiehe, was killed, the Nyikolwe Bena under Mbeyela raided and destroyed villages in northern Ubena. Th is further isolated Mbeyela. However, his forces were not able to attack a number of areas, including Mdandu, where there were German soldiers. Other areas of Ubena beyond their reach were controlled by Sangu and Hehe leaders who were loyal to the Germans. Th ese areas included Mfi rika, where Ngurukuru and Dumuluganga Mwalugenge ruled. Th e area between Yakobi and Lupembe’s territory, which was ruled by a woman named “Saying,”27 did not join forces with Mbeyela either. In western Ubena the Sangu had been reinstated by Germans. Th ere was no way the Bena north of Luhudzi River could support Mbeyela under these circumstances. Initially, German missionaries feared Merere’s intentions when they heard that he was assembling his army, but were reassured by him that his troops would fi ght Mbeyela.28 At the same time the Germans were busy mobilizing their forces from Uhehe, Mfi rika, Usovi and Ikilavugi to help in the repression that followed. Th ese forces were to report either at Mdandu or Ilem- bula in northern Ubena, where Merere had sent some of his forces. Consequently, German forces grew stronger while those of the Maji Maji rebellion were becoming weaker as links between the anti- German forces became increasingly diffi cult to sustain. Th ere are a number of factors which account for this. In Songea, Chabruma’s people were isolated by German occupation. Mbeyela’s forces in Nyikolwe were not united, according to Ndik- wege.29 Mbeyela’s forces were further isolated from Mahenge because Kiwanga was on the side of Germans. Th us isolated, his two sons, Ngozingozi and Mpangile, escaped south into Upangwa by mid-March 1906. Ngozingozi’s movement to Upangwa is said to have been slow because he had a big following and a large herd of cattle. He had a strong bodyguard at the beginning of the fl ight but it had gradually dwindled as food supplies ran short. Meanwhile, the Germans had begun to suppress the rebellion. A military post was set up at Utengule, Mbeyela’s home village in Nyikolwe.

27 Ambalidze Sekinalilo, Yakobi, October 25, 1975. 28 Paul Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner ev. Missionsgesellschaft , 1911), p. 179. 29 M.S. Ndikwege, “Chief Merere and the Maji Maji Uprising,” MMRP 7/68/1/1. were the bena traitors? 249

Sixteen hundred Sangu fi ghters were stationed there.30 With this rein- forcement, the Germans began their suppression of rebellion, a process punctuated by small protracted encounters with the leaders of the rebellion in Nyikolwe and Upangwa. Aft er Mbeyela’s forces were broken and isolated, those who were caught faced heavy penalties. At Utengule no less than fi ft y men were sentenced to death and publicly shot in the neck while kneeling. Th ey were tied in groups of ten, facing two ditches which they had been forced to dig.31 Th e bigger ditch measured about 131 meters in circum- ference while the second and smaller ditch measured about fi ft y-fi ve meters. Th e purpose in all this was to capture Ngozingozi and Mpangile, the leaders of the rebellion in Ubena who remained at large. Tracking them down continued throughout 1907. In May 1908, soldiers under the command of a Nubian offi cer, Bushaushi Kinyokola, forced some Bena at Utengule to direct them to Upangwa where Ngozingozi was reported to be hiding. For fear of their lives they led Kinyokola and other askari to Ikonde, a thick forest with a meadow in the center. Ngozingozi and some of his followers used the only entrance to the meadow, leaving his bodyguard to patrol the forest. Some informants say that when the enemy arrived at Ikonde they found the bodyguards fast asleep. But others say that it was local men who fi nally decided to direct Kinyokola to Ikonde because of their severe suff ering. Ngoz- ingozi was shot dead by Kinyokola. Th e important thing to note here is that Ngozingozi, like many other rulers in Tanganyika, did not want to face a shameful and cowardly death at the hands of his enemies. Sens- ing his impending capture by Kinyokola, Ngozingozi quickly lift ed his muzzle-loader to take his life as Kinyokola approached, but Kinyokola killed fi rst. His body was carried to Utengule in a hammock where it was decapitated, his head boiled and fi nally sent off to Germany. During this period, the Germans employed a scorched-earth policy, destroying crops. “Submission was compelled by patrol warfare in which military engagements were secondary to seizure of food and

30 Ibrahim Mung’ong’o, Yakobi, October 25, 1975; Ambalidze Senyamule, Yakobi, October 25, 1975; Ambalidze Sekinalilo, Yakobi, October 25, 1975. See also Groschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 185. 31 Sadala Ngozingozi, Ihandza-Mdandu, May 30, 1975; Fr. G. Mwageni, Hanga Monastery-Songea, July 15–17, 1975; Tulawaguwutwa Samligo and Salayi Semanga, Igominyi, October 23, 1975; Group interview, Igominyi, October 23, 1975. See also J.M. Makweta, “Maji Maji in Ubena” and Groschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 214. 250 chapter seven e Bena leader Ngozingozi, with followers By Permission of Berlin Mission Society Plate 7.1. Th were the bena traitors? 251 destruction of crops.”32 Th e German military commanders as well as Governor Götzen believed that, “only hunger and want can bring about a fi nal submission. . . .” Götzen decided to create famine,33 which caused untold suff ering in the region. Th is is what forced some people to reveal where Ngozingozi was hiding.

The Aftermath of Maji Maji in Ubena

Th e death of Ngozingozi marked the end of the Bena resistance to Ger- man colonial rule. Th e search for him had caused untold suff ering and the deaths of many Bena and Pangwa by hunger, disease and ruthless soldiers like Kinyokola, who is singled out in accounts as one of the most cruel of the askari. Yet, Mpangile was still at large. On April 21, 1906 he had managed to slip through the German lines to Ubena. Th e Germans now decided to kill him. Some informants say that Gröschel at Yakobi pleaded with the German authorities to spare his life. But Kinyokola was sent to track him down in July 1908. Mpangile was hiding in the Isilu forest with his wife, brother-in-law and son, Mtaki. When Kinyokola found Mpangile at Isilu he ordered him to stand up and pledge loyalty to the Germans, but Mpangile refused. Kinyokola shot Mpangile, his wife and servant but his son’s life was spared.34 It was reported that during the repression 340 Bena were killed, while 1400 women and forty men were taken prisoner. Yet, the number of casualties and prisoners was probably much higher. On the Government side, only forty men were killed and no European lost his life. On top of this, cattle and other small livestock were taken as booty, as Gröschel witnessed.35 Gröschel believed that the exact number of those who died during the rebellion and the repression would never be known.36 In addition, there was the suff ering of the very sick, the disabled and all those who endured the repressive measures of the colonial forces. Askari like Kinyokola were said to be so merciless that, not only did

32 Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 193. 33 Quoted in Iliff e, A Modern History, p. 193. 34 Sadala Ngozingozi, Ihandza-Mdandu, May 30, 1975. See also Makweta, “Maji Maji in Ubena.” 35 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 190. 36 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 190. See also G.A. Götzen, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Auf- stand 1905/6 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1909), pp. 211–19. 252 chapter seven By permission of Berlin Mission Society Plate 7.2. Punishment Labor at Kidugala, Ubena were the bena traitors? 253 they amputate the arms of victims, but they removed their genitalia, especially those of men. Consequently the population decreased in southern Ubena due to wartime mortality and destruction of food. Farming was made diffi cult as no seed had been spared for the seasons which followed. Fear for the future forced most of the survivors to emigrate to more secure areas, as our informants in Yakobi confi rmed.37 Postwar famine in southern Ubena caused many people to die or to move north to Usovi, or even as far as Uhehe. Aft er the rebellion a memorial was erected at Yakobi to the Ger- man offi cer, Dr. Albert Wiehe, who had been killed at Nyikamtwe. Th e epitaph reads:

Dr. Albert Wiehe Stabsarzt in der Kaiserl. Schutztruppe 1903–1906 Geb. 9 September, 1867 Gefallen 6 January, 1906.

All the Germans in the area gathered for the dedication, which was called “A Christian German Patriotic Memorial Th anksgiving.” Mis- sionaries Schumann, Hahn and Gröschel were decorated by the Ger- man emperor for the part they had played during the rebellion(see also Giblin chapter in this volume).38 For Mbeyela and his family, the war ended tragically. Mbeyela himself died in despair, while both his sons were killed. Another of Mbeye- la’s younger sons, Pangamahuti, was imprisoned at Songea. Aft er his return from prison, he was allowed to rule a section of Nyikolwe cen- tering at Igominyi. For fear of being killed or deported, some members of Mbeyela’s family changed their family names. Since the Germans did not want to see them in power again, they reduced their authority by giving away territory to families of rulers of Nyikolwe who had

37 Martin Mung’ong’o, Yakobi, October 24, 1975; Zebedayo Mung’ong’o, Yakobi, October 24, 1975; Ibrahim Mung’ong’o, Yakobi, October 25, 1975; Philip Mung’ong’o, Yakobi, October 25, 1975; Ambalidze Senyamule, Yakobi, October 25, 1975; Amba- lidze Sekinalilo, Yakobi, October 25, 1975. Note that the last two informants worked for missionary Gröschel as ayas. 38 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 224. 254 chapter seven By permission of Berlin Mission Society Plate 7.3. Postwar Celebration by Askari, probably at the Dedication of Memorial to Dr. Wiehe Yakobi were the bena traitors? 255 preceded Mbeyela, such as Mwalyavala (see also Giblin chapter in this volume).39 To replace some of the rulers who had been purged or killed during the German repression, new rulers from outside Nyikolwe (mostly from Lupembe, an area which had not taken part in the rebellion) were brought in. Th is explains how Masasi Mwampogole came to Nyikolwe.40 At the time of Maji Maji, Masasi was a senior leader at Lupembe in Mfi rika. He had not joined the rebellion. Th us at the conclusion of the fi ghting he was given much of Mbeyela’s territory and established himself at Utengule. But he had no hereditary claim to this territory and controlled only a limited area where he was able to impose his infl uence. In the end, the Bena were defeated by superior German fi repower. Th e Germans also took advantage of the political situation at the time of their intervention to isolate Mbeyela from the rest of Ubena. A few Bena observers have called the northern Bena who lived north of the Luhudzi River traitors. But a close look at the situation before Maji Maji gives us a diff erent interpretation. We are assisted here by a Ger- man missionary, Julius Oelke,41 who wrote a fi ctional account of Maji Maji based at least partly on oral accounts. Oelke described the situation faced by Ngozingozi on the eve of war. At the time, Ngozingozi ruled Ikilavugi in northern Ubena, When he summoned the notables of the area for consultations before he answered his father’s call to join him at Utengule, they argued against participation, saying that earlier wars had been lost despite the use of war medicine. Th e response of northern Ubena was not, therefore, betrayal. Rather, it was dictated by the conditions prevailing at the time. Crucial to this argument is the political background. Northern Ubena had been isolated from the south ever since they were incorporated into the Hehe sphere of infl uence aft er the war between the Hehe and Mshope Ngoni in 1878–82. Although northern Bena rulers regained their homelands aft er the Germans defeated the Hehe, the period between the German conquest of the Hehe and the outbreak of Maji Maji was so short that

39 Gröschel, Amelye, passim and “Mpangile (Mbeyela),” Missionsberichte (1901), p. 82. Mwalyavala was the son of Mkumuhidza, apparently with strong hereditary claims to Igominyi, an area near Yakobi. Th e Germans reinstated him to rule part of Nyikolwe with seat at Idunda. 40 J.M. Nyarusy, “Maji Maji in Ubena.”, MMRP 4/68/2/1. 41 Julius Oelke, Verborgene Gewalten: Ostafrikaner erleben eine Zeitwende (Berlin: Evangelische Verlaganstalt Berlin, 1957), p. 155. 256 chapter seven it was not possible for the northern Bena to consolidate their power and reestablish relations with southern leaders such as Mbeyela. More- over, the Germans allowed Merere to regained Ivanging’ombe, an area which he had lost to the Hehe. Consequently at the time of the rebellion this part of Ubena was still dominated by the Sangu who were German allies. In this same area there were also memories of the 1898 experience when a Bena attempt to get rid of Sangu control was suppressed by the German military. Hardly seven years separated that event, in which more than thirty Bena lost their lives, and Maji Maji. In Mfi rika, German control was exercised through Hehe loyalists.42 Turning to Mbeyela himself, we are tempted to say that his relations with other Bena rulers had been antagonistic, especially in those areas where he had deposed earlier rulers such as Chatanda, Kilasi, Mwalyavala and Danda. It is also said that aft er the decision to take maji had been made he decided to attack immediately without waiting to obtain support from other Bena. Th is may explain why Ngozingozi joined the rebellion only aft er the attack on Yakobi. Th en, of course, there was Mbeyela’s isolation from other parts of Ubena. Another factor was the German military presence in several important locations in Ubena, including Kidugala and Mfi rika. At both these stations the military commanders drilled their troops in an eff ort to demonstrate their military might, intimidating the Bena from uniting against the German invaders. Th is partly explains the dilemma of Yumbayumba Kiswaga during the rebellion. Yumbayumba Kiswaga, who ruled Maswamu, was related to Mbeyela. While his role in the rebellion is not clear, it is known that he was warned by Ernst Nigmann, the German military commander at Iringa, not to take part in the rebellion. Nigmann summoned him to Kidugala to deliver this warning. Yet, Yumbayumba Kiswaga may have paid only lip-service to the warning, for he is believed to have taken the maji. When the Germans discovered that he harbored some of Mbeyela’s followers, they arrested him and confi scated his cattle. Kiswaga himself was handcuff ed and marched to Iringa where he was made to carry heavy stones. He later died and was buried at Iringa.43

42 Francis Mwilipanga Lupembe, Lupembe (Mfi rika), October 16, 1975. See also Christian Schumann, “Lupembe,” Missionsberichte (March 1902), p. 150. 43 A.Z. Muhemedzi, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” MMRP 4/68/4/1. were the bena traitors? 257

In the fi nal analysis, German power triumphed in Ubena because of its exercise of military power. Th e message of German power was driven home by the execution of leaders of the rising. Nevertheless, in spite of their defeat, the Bena had challenged the Germans. What followed aft er this challenge was, therefore, a response to the “African initiative,” as Iliff e has argued.

CHAPTER EIGHT

TAKING ORAL SOURCES BEYOND THE DOCUMENTARY RECORD OF MAJI MAJI: THE EXAMPLE OF THE “WAR OF KOROSANI” AT YAKOBI, NJOMBE

James Giblin

Introduction: The Significance of Locality in the Study of Maji Maji

Virtually all historians of Maji Maji have asked why and how communities scattered across a vast region rose up against colonial authority. Often this question has led them to attempt studies which encompass much or all of the conflict area. Nevertheless, the historians who have worked these large canvases most carefully have recognized the importance of local “triggering factors.”1 They have usually assumed that these local circumstances provided the tinder which, when exposed to the spirit of rebellion and the maji medicine, ignited violence and hastened its spread across southern Tanzania. Yet there has been little detailed study of localities during the Maji Maji period. The closest scholars have come to the local scale are the studies of the sizeable areas covered by Lorne Larson and Seth Nyagava, whose decades of research are represented in this volume.

1 See Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Helsinki and Hamburg: Finnish Historical Society, Studia Historica 49 and Lit Verlag, Studien zur Afrikanischen Geschichte, 10, 1995), pp. 229–40, who uses the phrase on p. 238. Marcia Wright argued that historians should “give greater attention to the dynamics and interplay among the causes of [Maji Maji]: “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (eds.), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (Lon- don: James Curry and Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 124–42, quote from p. 139; John Iliffe began his “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,”Journal of African History 8,3 (1967): 495–512 by saying that “a crucial problem [in the study of Maji Maji] is to discover how the people were mobilized and organized for action” (p. 495), and in his chapter on Maji Maji in A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) spoke of how the spread of rebellion “depended on local circumstances and beliefs,” pp. 168–202, quote from p. 193. 260 chapter eight

This essay explores the “triggering factors” in one locality. It seeks to identify the circumstances which led one local leader to make war at the beginning of the Maji Maji period. Examining the local situation leads us to question the assumption that rebellion spread because the spark of prophecy and medicine ignited the tinder of grievance against colonial rule. As we scrutinize the local factors, our confidence in the fundamental premise of most Maji Maji studies—that determination to destroy colonial authority reigned widely throughout the Maji Maji region—weakens. Looked at from the perspective of one small locality, Maji Maji takes on a changed appearance. It looks less like a war prompted by common grievances, fought against a common enemy, and spread geographically by a succession of triggering events. It looks more like a multiplicity of very loosely-connected local conflicts, each of which was prompted by men of violence who opportunistically took advantage of the breakdown of colonial order to renew local rivalries. The setting of this study is Yakobi, a station of the Berlin Mission Society [BMS] in southern Ubena [present-day Njombe District] which was attacked by African forces in the early days of Maji Maji. Com- pared even to Larson’s Undonde area or Nyagava’s Ubena, Yakobi is a micro-setting. The population of the station and surrounding villages involved in the attack was no more than a few thousand. Yakobi was attacked by Mbeyela Mkongwa, a chief who, together with his sons, Ngozingozi and Mpangile, became the principal rebel leaders in Ubena. The key question about “triggering factors” in Ubena is why Mbeyela Mkongwa chose war. That this was the fundamental question was recognized both by the Europeans at Yakobi who knew Mbeyela, and also by the descendents of Mbeyela and other residents of the area who remain interested in the attack on Yakobi. Having no first-hand account of the deliberations which led Mbeyela to enter into rebellion, we have three ways of getting at the “triggering factors” in Ubena. The first has been utilized in this volume by Seth Nyagava, who considers how the history of pre-Maji Maji warfare and alliance-building influenced Mbeyela and other Bena leaders at the outset of Maji Maji. Turning from Nyagava’s perspective to the local history of Yakobi allows us to take two other approaches in this essay. One is to use written sources from Yakobi—primarily publications of the German pastor, Paul Grőschel—to reconstruct the interaction between the mission and Mbeyela which preceded the attack on Yakobi in September 1905. In addition, this essay also uses stories of the attack told by descendents of Mbeyela and other residents of the Yakobi area. At Yakobi, “war of korosani” at yakobi 261 the history of Maji Maji remains a source of debate. Yet, there is an interpretation of the attack which dominates, and it poses a direct challenge to the historian’s understanding of Maji Maji. By suggesting that the causes of Mbeyela’s attack were localized and not directly related to German colonialism, it offers an interpretation which many historians are likely to accept only with great difficulty. Thus the bur- den of this essay is to demonstrate that, given the present state of our knowledge, the local account is no less plausible than scholarly interpretations, and in fact is likely to be accurate. In so doing, the wider purpose here is to show that historians’ faith in the capacious perspectives of national and regional scale should not leave them deaf to the factual knowledge and interpretative insight found in local, unwritten accounts. The essay begins with an account of events at Yakobi during Maji Maji. It then turns back to preceding years, when Paul Grőschel established the mission, entered into contentious relations with German authorities and maintained an uneasy relationship with Mbeyela. The final section discusses the oral accounts from Yakobi, and suggests that their portrayal of “triggering factors” may lead us to an understanding of Maji Maji which, though unconventional, is faithful to the evidence provided by both published and oral sources.

The War of “Korosani”

The first act of war in Ubena occurred in early September 1905, immediately after warfare broke out in Songea. On September 3, hundreds of warriors of the Mshope Ngoni nkosi, Chabruma, were killed in a Ger- man attack on Uwerekwa. On that same day, the missionary Gröschel received two visitors, an official responsible for collection of the Ger- man tax and an accompanying soldier. “At midday,” wrote Gröschel, “the akida Sana bin Said and the askari Sadik came to our station from the tax post at Mbeyela’s to fetch the tax which had already been collected. I asked them . . . if they wished to stay overnight, so that I could finish the tax matter the next morning.”2 They spent the night at the mission, but the next morning they told Gröschel that they must depart immediately for Songea, because they had received word of

2 Paul Gröschel, Zehn Jahre Christlicher Kulturarbeit in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner ev. Missionsgesellschaft, 1911), pp. 142–3. 262 chapter eight rebellion. On September 6, Gröschel learned that followers of Mbeyela had ambushed and killed the tax collectors on the road to Songea. At this point began the events known in southern Njombe not as Maji Maji, but as the “Vita ya Korosani” or “War of Korosani,” “Koro- sani” being the local pronunciation of Paul Gröschel’s difficult surname.3 Over the two weeks following the killing of the tax collectors, rumors that Mbeyela wished to attack the Yakobi mission began to fly. Yet, attack came only after another incident which Mbeyela may have regarded as a provocation. On September 15, a hamlet near Yakobi called Lugala burned; Mbeyela dispatched emissaries to the mission to demand to know why this had happened. We do not know what Gröschel told them, although later he acknowledged his own responsibility: a grassfire set by the mission to clear a field of fire around the station had spread into the hamlet. By September 17, Gröschel considered the mission to be besieged. The attack finally occurred on Sep- tember 19. Taking refuge with his family and closest followers in his residence, Gröschel and about ten other residents of the mission fired upon the attackers, whom Gröschel estimated to number about two thousand, from the upper story of the house. After about an hour the attackers withdrew, leaving about thirty dead. Contributing to their decision to make a hasty retreat was a swarm of bees which, having been frightened from hives under the eves of Gröschel’s house by gun- fire, descended upon the attackers. The mission residents suffered no casualties. On the following day, a BMS colleague of Gröschel, Chris- tian Schumann, arrived from the Lupembe mission with a force of about three hundred men. Escorted by Schumann, Gröschel, his family and others withdrew to Lupembe. The destruction of the mission did not come until mid-November, however, when another rebel force sacked the mission and forced its remaining residents to flee.4 While Gröschel’s flight to Lupembe on September 20 concluded the “War of Korosani,” warfare was far from over for the residents

3 Brief accounts of the attack on Yakobi are found in Per Hassing, “German Mis- sionaries and the Maji Maji Rising,” African Historical Studies 3,2 (1970): 376–7, Marcia Wright, German Missionaries in Tanganyika, 1891–1914: Lutherans and Mora- vians in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971): 76–7, and Walter Nuhn, Flammen über Deutschost: Der Maji-Maji-Aufstand in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905–1906: die erste gemeinsame Erhebung schwarzafrikanischer Völker gegen weisse Kolonialherrschaft: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1998), pp. 95–101. 4 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 150–68. “war of korosani” at yakobi 263 of Yakobi and the followers of Mbeyela. For several months, Ger- man commanders, preoccupied with their campaign in Songea, made no attempt to regain control of Ubena. The situation changed after Mbeyela’s fighters massacred a German military party led by a physician, Albert Wiehe, at Nyikamtwe in January 1906. Following the battle at Nyikamtwe, Mbeyela’s forces launched raids throughout northern Ubena.5 Detailed testimony to the violence and plunder occasioned by these attacks was recorded by the University of Dar es Salaam’s Maji Maji Research Project in 1968. News of the Nyikamtwe massacre made the German commander in the western Maji Maji theater, Major Kurt Johannes, determined to crush the revolt in Ubena.6 He dispatched a detachment commanded by an officer named von Kleist to occupy Mbeyela’s home village, Utengule, in early February. Over the next nine months, von Kleist, assisted by auxiliary troops from Usangu, conducted many raids, capturing hundreds of suspected rebels and inducing thousands more to make formal surrender.7 When Gröschel visited Utengule in mid-1906 he found “thousands” of captives.8 To provision them, German patrols confiscated food from nearby villages, leaving them to face famine. The captives performed punishment labor. Gröschel, who returned to the ruins of Yakobi for the first time in May 1906 and reestablished permanent residence there a couple of months later, rebuilt Yakobi by employing gangs of men and women sent by von Kleist in weekly rota- tions to perform punishment labor.9 Thus it is not surprising that when Gröschel returned to Yakobi he found many people anxiously hoping that he would intervene on their behalf with the military authorities. “They are afraid,” wrote Gröschel, “to go to the European station at Utengule to surrender to the government officials. They would much rather die in the grass [the abandoned station and surroundings were now overgrown with high grass] than go to Utengule.”10

5 Seth I. Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914 (Peramiho: Peramiho Press, 2000), pp. 137–9. 6 “Bericht űber die Tätigkeit des Detachements des Majors Johannes vom 18. November 1905 bis 10 März 1806,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt 17 (1906), p. 606. 7 “Das Detachement Johannes vom Oktober 1905 bis August 1906,” Deutsch Osta- frikanische Zeitung 8,45 (10 November 1906) and “Das Expeditionskorps Johannes,” Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung 8,49 (8 December 1906). 8 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 199–200 and 202. 9 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 208. 10 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 198. 264 chapter eight

The height of brutality during this pacification campaign came on November 17, 1906, when, after a summary trial, Von Kleist ordered the execution of scores of Bena elders on a hilltop overlooking Mbeyela’s former residence at Utengule. Gröschel’s account implies that von Kleist acted in retribution, angered by suspicions that surrendered people living around the station were sending warnings of German troop movements to rebels still in hiding.11 Gröschel described the executions in this way:12 Some of the condemned tried to make a break through the surrounding ring of soldiers. But they only ran into bayonets and sank to the ground, already dead. The others were then led in groups of ten outside the boma [the small fort] to a large ditch. They were forced to kneel at the edge of the ditch, with soldiers standing immediately behind them. A sharp command, and the lifeless bodies sank into the ditch. This sentence was carried out before a large crowd as a deterrent. By this time, Mbeyela had died a natural death, His sons, Ngozingozi and Mpangile, fled south to the highlands of Upangwa [present-day Ludewa District], where they managed to evade their German pursu- ers until mid-1908, when they were hunted down and killed in the last action of Maji Maji. Gröschel came to believe that Mbeyela’s attack on Yakobi was the result of a conspiracy with Ngoni leaders intended to drive away the Germans and seize their wealth. He also believed that the maji medicine played a crucial part in hardening the resolve of Mbeyela to go to war. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Mbeyela’s attack on the tax collectors stemmed from the enormous resentment which tax campaigns had engendered over the preceding years (this point is taken up in the following section). Surely resentment of taxation and the abusive methods of the collectors was widespread throughout both Ubena and Songea. The enmity with which many residents of Ubena regarded the Ngoni, however (Ngoni forces had plundered Ubena and taken many captives there for decades),13 suggests that Bena leaders would have had little interest in placing themselves at risk on behalf

11 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 213. 12 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 214. 13 Edward A. Mwenda, “Historia na Maendeleo ya Ubena,” Swahili: Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 33,2 (1963): 104, 108, 110–11; J.M. Makwetta, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/1/1, p. 2. (Makweta has served as a government minister and member of parliament from Njombe for many years.) “war of korosani” at yakobi 265 of the Ngoni nobles. While Mbeyela had become a tributary of the Ngoni nkosi Chabruma, he had done so under duress to stop Ngoni raiding and gain protection against invaders from Uhehe and Usangu. Moreover, this was an unfavorable arrangement requiring Mbeyela’s people, as Edward Mwenda put it, to pay, “tax to Ungoni. The tax was paid in hoes, goats, and cattle.”14 Should an alliance with Chabruma have been successful in driving out the Germans, Mbeyela would have succeeded merely in exchanging one tax-collecting regime for another. Because it seems unlikely that Mbeyela would have entered voluntarily into a conspiracy with the Ngoni masters, we must ask when and how Gröschel came to believe that an alliance of Bena and Ngoni had led to the attack on his mission. Writing after he had taken refuge at Lupembe, Gröschel described several developments which in hindsight he believed to have presaged rebellion. These included messages of resistance which, he said, had passed among chiefs, particularly Chabruma and Mbeyela. These developments also included the arrival of several Ngoni men who sought employment at the mission in May 1905, for Gröschel now suspected that they must have been spies. Gröschel also felt in retrospect that the frigid welcome which he received on September 4 when he visited Igominyi, a village near Yakobi ruled by Mbeyela’s son, Mpangile, must have been another sign of impending rebellion. However, all of these suspicions appear questionable. If Chabruma had sent messages to Mbeyela urging an attack on Yakobi, Gröschel probably would have learned of them well before the attack, because the residents of Yakobi had many connections with Mbeyela’s people at Utengule. Gröschel apparently had no intimation of danger before Mbeyela’s killing of the tax collectors. Furthermore, there was no need to dispatch spies from Ungoni, for Mbeyela could have easily placed his own people at the mission; Gröschel would have been delighted by a chance to evan- gelize among them. Moreover, Mbeyela’s subjects had many relatives and friends at Yakobi from whom they could have learned everything they wished to know about the mission. Finally, the cold reception at Igominyi was more likely caused by the message which Gröschel delivered on September 4, for he had been sent by the tax collectors to tell the villagers to prepare their payments.

14 Mwenda, p. 108; also, Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914, p. 73. 266 chapter eight

Writing in retrospect, Gröschel believed that the most significant incident in the days before the outbreak of rebellion had been the arrival from Ungoni of a new medicine meant to bring unity among the Bena population.15 He believed that the medicine had ruined Mbeyela’s good judgment by intoxicating him with a feeling of invulnerability. In his published writings, however, Gröschel gives no sign that he knew anything about war medicine before the attack on the tax collectors. His first mention of “strange, mysterious medicine” comes only when, in narrating the events of September 19, the day of the Mbeyela’s attack on the mission, he says that African residents of the mission told him that followers of Ngozingozi had drunk this medicine.16 Yet, it is not clear when Gröschel actually learned of this spectacular new war medicine. Gröschel’s account appears to be a reconstruction written at Lupembe in early October. By then he was able to base it not only on what he had seen and heard at Yakobi, but also on an entirely fresh sources of second-hand information. These included the swirl of report and rumor which had reached Christian Schumann from Kidugala and other BMS missions as well as from the German headquarters in Iringa. By this time, the interpretation of the rebellion as a highly coordinated movement driven by the spread of the maji had already been widely diffused among the Germans. Gröschel leaves no doubt that news and rumor circulated without hindrance between Germans and Africans, and also between rebels and their Bena enemies. During his time at Lupembe, the missionaries were completely dependent on the “little birds,” as Gröschel referred to his Bena informants, for news of German troop movements as well as warnings of rebel activity.17 By no means was all of this circulating information correct. False rumor led to one of the cruelest incidents of the war in Ubena when a German patrol, hearing in December 1905 that Mpangile was hiding in a cave near the modern town of Njombe, assaulted it and caused many casualties, only to find that the cave harbored only terrified women and children.18 Sometimes the rumors were filled with the clichéd images which storytellers, striving then and now to convey the hideousness of warfare, apply to all wars; in this way Gröschel heard of implausibly vast numbers of human skulls littering

15 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 141–2. 16 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 157. 17 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 179. 18 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 172–4. “war of korosani” at yakobi 267 battlefields and roads.19 Individuals who were important in spreading news and rumor included travelers such as Abernego Mbwatila, a native of Kidugala who moved to Lupembe, where he worked for Schumann and joined the relief column to Yakobi. After the retreat from Yakobi he returned to his home in Kidugala. He may well have been responsible for spreading the story of the bees who dispersed Mbeyela’s fighters. Astonishing testimony to the “fog of war” is the fact that Gröschel apparently first heard of the bees only in Lupembe, when colleagues from Kidugala told him that the story circulating there was that Gröschel’s wife had been responsible for releasing the bees onto the enemy.20 When Abernego Mbwatila was interviewed by the Maji Maji Research Project in 1968, he spoke about the rumors of maji which may have influenced Gröschel. Uncertain rumors of a new war medicine circulated at Lupembe before the attack on Yakobi, said Mbwa- tila. “We began to hear about a person who was going round telling people to drink some medicine. People called this person Honga Said. We did not know where this man had come from. Probably he came from Ungoni.”21 Stories which linked Sayyid Said of Zanzibar and the maji medicine were told throughout the entire Maji Maji region,22 but whether their telling reflected close knowledge of themaji , or simply the rapid transformation of storytelling embellishment into cliché, is unclear. Gröschel’s colleague, Christian Schumann, may have unwittingly encouraged the spread of maji rumors through his warnings against the medicine, which themselves became the subject of storytelling. The Maji Maji Research Project interviewer at Lupembe heard that Schumann, “said to the Bena at Lupembe that if the latter wanted to see the strength of the maji they had better administer it to a dog or cow and shoot it with a gun and then observe the result.”23 The vague, second-hand nature of other accounts from Njombe about maji raises doubts about whether it truly reached Ubena, or whether Ubena merely heard rumor of maji spread by Germans as well as Afri- cans. Knowledgeable story-tellers such as a grandson of Mbeyela made

19 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 177 and 212. 20 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 162–3. 21 “The Background History of the Area,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/4/3, p. 9. 22 Iliffe,A Modern History, p. 169. 23 J.M. Nyarusy, “The Maji Maji Rising in the Lupembe Area,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/2/1, p. 1. 268 chapter eight no mention of maji.24 Others agree, if asked, that maji was taken by Mbeyela’s fighters, and may provide detail which appears to have been acquired through reading. For example, one elder at Yakobi whose mother witnessed the attack on the mission said that Mbeyela traveled to Songea to obtain the war medicine from a healer whose name he could not remember. Discussing this conversation later, a neighbor explained that the healer whose name his friend could not recall was “Kinjikitile.”25 The vagueness in discussion ofmaji contrasts with the precision and vividness of stories about the attack itself. The Maji Maji Research Project investigator who visited Yakobi in 1968, J.M. Makwetta, was similarly struck by the lack of testimony about maji, and concluded that the evidence of its use in Ubena was “thin.”26 Seth Nyagava agrees that “Mbeyela’s initial attack against Yakobi was not connected with the drinking of the maji.”27 Perhaps the most elaborate account of maji in Ubena is found in Edward Mwenda’s history of Ubena, which appears to have been based upon a mixture of written and oral sources. Mwenda casts doubt on the significance ofmaji in the “War of Korosani,” saying that it was not introduced from Ungoni into Ubena until 1906.28 Possibly a source of confusion is that Mbeyela is remembered for having used medicines, some of which he obtained from Ungoni, to discover witches and prepare his men for regional wars in the decades before Maji Maji.29 The fact remains, however, that had a new maji from Ungoni been the factor which “triggered” the attack on Yakobi, surely Gröschel and African witnesses such as Aber- nego Mbwatila would have heard detailed accounts of its distribution. No such accounts survived in their recollections, however. The story of the maji medicine nevertheless became gospel among BMS evangelists.30 To explain why it gained the status of unquestioned fact among them—and perhaps among other Germans in the war zone—it is helpful to consider carefully the situation of Paul Gröschel.

24 Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997). 25 Martin Mung’ong’o and Michael Myamba (Yakobi, November 23–4, 2000). 26 J.M. Makwetta, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/1/1, p. 4. 27 Seth I. Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914, p. 133. 28 Mwenda, “Historia na Maendeleo ya Ubena,” p. 114. 29 Mwenda, pp. 105, 109–10; M. Makwetta, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/1/1, pp. 1–2. 30 Their stories of themaji were brought together in the 1950s by a BMS missionary of a later generation, Julius Oelke, who wrote an elaborate fictional account of Maji Maji: Verborgene Gewalten: Ostafrikaner erleben eine Zeitwende (Berlin: Evangelische Verlaganstalt Berlin, 1957). See especially pp. 157–60. “war of korosani” at yakobi 269

Sincere and idealistic, but politically naïve and painfully aware of his own limitations as linguist and preacher (these points are taken up at greater length in the following section), during the crucial first three weeks of September 1905 Gröschel was wracked by self-doubt and indecision. Since establishing the Yakobi mission in 1899 he had worried about the attitude of Mbeyela’s sons, Mpangile and Ngozin- gozi. Their father, however, Gröschel had considered a sincere friend. The belief that Mbeyela valued his relationship with Gröschel also survived among Mbeyela’s descendents, though it may well be that Mbeyela saw Gröschel primarily as a source of imported goods and go-between with German officials.31 Gröschel’s account of the days between the murders of the tax collectors and the attack of September 19—days marked by increasingly urgent warnings of preparation for war in Mbeyela’s village—suggests that only with great effort could he bring himself to face the truth that Mbeyela might well be his enemy. Gröschel wondered why a man who for years had appeared to be his friend and sponsor now seemed poised to turn against him. Yet at the same time it cannot be said that Gröschel had unshakable confidence in Mbeyela. At a particularly evasive juncture in his account, Gröschel explains that after hearing of the murders of the tax collectors, he very nearly decided to journey to Utengule to warn him against war. Some unspecified “urgent obligations” prevented him from doing so.32 But what obligations could have been more pressing than an attempt to prevent war? Or was Gröschel dissuaded from visiting Utengule by fears for his own safety? It was this combination of fear and unwillingness to acknowledge that several years of evangelical labor had been built upon illusions and misconceptions about their African neighbors which made Gröschel and other missionaries susceptible to rumors of maji medicine. Rather than admitting to himself that Mbeyela’s decision to allow the establishment of the Yakobi mission was an entirely pragmatic move in a game of political rivalries, it was easier for Gröschel to believe that the medicine had placed Mbeyela under some sort of spell. This explained why Mbeyela had fallen under the influence of either his belligerent and unreliable sons, or perhaps foreign conspirators from Ungoni and

31 Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997); Elders of Yakobi (Yakobi, July 21, 2002). 32 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 144. 270 chapter eight further east. The rumors of a new war medicine provided a plausible explanation: Mbeyela had obtained a medicine whose intoxicating promise of invulnerability, triumph and wealth overrode his usually sound judgment. This brief account of the “War of Korosani” leaves us with considerable doubt that Gröschel was correct in assuming that the primary “triggering factor” at Yakobi was the delivery of new war medicine by Ngoni emissaries. Gröschel provided no specific information that he had seen or heard of the distribution of this medicine before the outbreak of war. His account does provide reason to think, however, that he was predisposed to believe rumors about the maji once he began to hear of them at Lupembe. While we find reason to doubt whether war medicine from Ngoni played an important role at Yakobi, at the same time we have seen that the political relationship between Gröschel and Mbeyela was delicate. In order to consider whether this relationship may have provided the “trigger” for war at Yakobi, we now turn back to the foundation of the Yakobi mission in 1899.

The Seeds of Conflict: The Foundation of the Yakobi Mission

The Berlin Mission Society first established a presence in Ubena when it opened a mission station at Kidugala in 1898. The opportunity to settle at Kidugala grew out of the initiative of a local leader in a moment of wartime crisis. The BMS Lutherans, already established at Ikombe on Lake Nyasa, were invited to settle at Kidugala by Mwangela, a Bena leader in northern Njombe who was involved in conflicts with both Merere of Usangu and the German military. Apparently Mwangela hoped that the BMS would serve as both a counterweight against Mer- ere and an intermediary with the Germans.33 One of the four missionaries who settled at Kidugala in June 1898 was Paul Gröschel. Gröschel was just becoming accustomed to life in Africa, for he had reached Ikombe only in the preceding January. Despite his lack of training in medicine and the region’s languages, Gröschel spent much of his first year in Kidugala working with his fellow evangelists on a mass smallpox vaccination campaign.34

33 Wright, German Missionaries in Tanganyika, 70–1. 34 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 4–46. “war of korosani” at yakobi 271

By September 1899, the Kidugala missionaries had learned enough about local politics to appreciate that their ally, Mwangela, was a relatively minor figure. Probably through their contacts during the smallpox campaign with another chief, Ngozingozi, they came to realize that his father, Mbeyela, who lived well to the southeast of Kidugala, was much more powerful. If the example of Mwangela’s recruitment of BMS evangelists to act as intermediaries with the German military had not entirely convinced Mbeyela of the usefulness of having missionaries nearby, the service which they performed in vaccinating Ngozingozi’s subjects, who had scattered from their homes in fear of affliction, was probably persuasion enough.35 Thus even though Gröschel took a quick dislike towards Ngozingozi, whom he found imperious and demanding, the missionaries soon made an exploratory journey in Mbeyela’s direction. By October they decided that Chris- tian Schumann, should open a station in the highly fertile uplands of extreme eastern Ubena, at a location to which the missionaries applied the name of the chief who permitted their settlement, Lupembe. To Gröschel, Schumann delegated the task of establishing a station further south in the country of Mbeyela. Gröschel left Kidugala for Mbeyela’s country in late October 1899. Initially he camped at Igominyi, the village of Mpangile, another son of Mbeyela. However, the narrow ridges around Mpangile’s village left him unsatisfied with the site because they provided little room for a church and other buildings. By early November, Gröschel had learned of a more promising site on even terrain with a nearby stream as source of water. He was delighted to find it surrounded by stands of trees which would furnish excellent timber for construction. The discovery of this site was one of the crucial moments in the foundation of the Yakobi mission, yet Gröschel’s discussion of it in his memoir is uncharacteristically diffident. He writes,36 Oh, it was so very difficult, being so alone [for he was now separated from Schumann and his Kidugala colleagues], to find the right place for the station. Many large places, but even more small ones were considered. I was entirely satisfied with the location for this station which the Lord showed us. The woods in the vicinity, although not large in size, were full of fine trees with which a mission station could certainly be

35 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 42–3. 36 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 62–3. 272 chapter eight

built. I should think that in this land so vast but so poor in trees, they had been preserved for us by the Lord. Considering the importance of this moment in Gröschel’s evangelical career, not to mention its status as a turning point in a text whose narrative thrust is continually propelled forward by the actions of himself and his colleagues, the absence of human agency in this passage is striking. His diffidence disguises the fact that he seems to have had surprisingly little control over the creation of the Yakobi station, the crowning achievement of his life in Africa. Surely the inexperienced and language-challenged Gröschel had not discovered the site on his own. He had been led to it, and not merely by Divine inspiration. Almost certainly Bena residents of the area decided where the mission would be located, and then arranged with Gröschel’s African companions, Kinga and Nyakyusa men who had no familiarity with this part of Ubena, to have him guided to the place. What is not certain is whether the decision to guide him to this site was made by Mbeyela’s son, Mpangile, or by enemies of Mbeyela who lived in nearby villages. Our uncertainty on this point is unfortunate, for the placement of the station at Yakobi probably set in motion the train of events which resulted in its destruction in 1905. Perhaps another factor leading Gröschel—however unconsciously— to substitute Divine for human agency was that his experience of the moment was probably dominated by the dawning realization that he had blundered into complicated and possibly dangerous situation which he did not understand. At the moment when he would have most liked to command events, Gröschel realized that he was poorly prepared to navigate through the difficult political terrain of southern Ubena. Not only did he know no Kiswahili, but, as he acknowledged with humility and disappointment, he would continue struggling to attain simple conversational ability in Kibena for years after arriving in Yakobi.37 In his dealings with his Bena neighbors he depended very heavily upon the Kinga- and Nyakyusa-speaking mission employees who had accompanied (and indeed guided) him from Kidugala. More- over, in the beginning his interactions with his neighbors were quite restricted. He dealt with the chiefs, and with other men and women who worked for him, yet even with his workers his interaction was limited. His isolation led to deepening loneliness and depression through-

37 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 114–27. “war of korosani” at yakobi 273 out his first year in Yakobi. “Continual loneliness can be dangerous,” he would comment, “for both body and soul.”38 Gröschel’s spirits lifted when he married at the end of 1900 (ironically for evangelists who disapproved of the role played by African parents in choosing their children’s spouses, his marriage to the widow of another missionary was arranged by his BMS brethren) and brought his new wife to the mission. Yet, despite the arrival of his wife, who would be known at Yakobi by her Kinyakyusa name, Mwangasama, and the birth of their children, he continued to have very little success in integrating himself into the society of his neighbors. He realized that the chiefs had accepted his presence only because they hoped to gain from it political advantage and imported goods, particularly cloth.39 Gröschel learned only gradually how the objectives of local leaders had influenced the establishment of his mission. When he first arrived in southern Ubena and inquired about the prospect of acquiring land, he was told that all the territory belonged to Mbeyela.40 As he lived longer at Yakobi, however, he realized that the situation was more complicated. The political situation began to reveal itself to him when he was approached by a young, thirtyish “minor chief named Maljabala” and his elders. (The individual referred to by Gröschel as “Maljabala” and by other variants of the name was probably the same “Mwalyav- ala” mentioned by Seth Nyagava; according to Nyagava, he was one of several local chiefs who were “antagonistic” towards Mbeyela because he “had forcibly taken away” their lands).41 The elders, undoubtedly communicating through Gröschel’s Kinga and Nyakyusa translators, explained to Gröschel “that this land for a wide expanse all around was not really Mbeyela’s land, but instead belonged to Maljabala.” Mbeyela had taken this territory, they said, after being driven southwards by Merere of Usangu. “This was the reason,” they said, “for the bitter enmity between [Maljabala and Mbeyela].”42 Gröschel eventually realized that, far from enjoying uncontested suzerainty over southern Ubena, his sponsor Mbeyela was so tightly surrounded by enemies

38 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 73. 39 Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997). 40 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 54. 41 Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914, p. 147, and also pp. 114 and 141. See also his contribution to this volume. The other variants of the name used by Gröschel are “Malyavala” and “Maljavala.” 42 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 65–66. 274 chapter eight that even his cattle could not be moved around freely.43 He also realized that the land on which he built his mission was profoundly contested. In December 1901, he wrote that,44 About ten minutes from the station towards the west there is an old grave in a bamboo grove. A former, influential chief named Mwakunohedya rests there between the bones of his counselors. From time to time his descendents gather there. They now must bow before a foreign overlord, Mbeyela, when they bring the dead their sacrifice. Mwakunohedya evidently ruled a large country, but his kingdom collapsed with his death. The old “hereditary enemy” Mbeyela took possession of the land and built his own capital, Utengule, near the old capital of Mwakunohedya. Then the Germans came into the country. Mbeyela made himself appear well disposed towards the German authority. As a result, he was recognized as the chief or sultan of not only the whole of his own country, but also of this land as well. Gröschel had become caught up in the politics of ancestor veneration, or matambiko. The relationship between political authority and sites of ancestor veneration was highly sensitive, as well-documented events of the British colonial period would show. On at least two occasions Bena chiefs protested strenuously when the colonial government attempted to alienate the land on which they venerated their ancestors, and in one of these instances succeeded in preserving their claim to the site of matambiko. How Gröschel became involved in a similar situation is not clear. Possibly his original host, Mpangile, maneuvered to have Gröschel settle near the gravesite, anticipating that Gröschel would discourage its use as a place of veneration and thus deny his father’s rivals an important symbol of their claims to the surrounding country. On the other hand, it may have been a rival of Mpangile and Mbeyela who, whispering in the ears of Gröschel’s Kinga and Nyakyusa guides, managed to have the evangelist led to the site in hopes that his presence would lead to the establishment of a sizeable village around the gravesite and thus raise up its prestige and reputation. A village did grow up around the mission. At the outbreak of the Maji Maji war, Gröschel claimed to have 119 African Christians living at Yakobi (although only a handful were baptized) and another 260

43 TNA G9/11, letter of Paul Gröschel to the Government, Dar es Salaam (Mpang- ile, 6 May, 1900), folio 13. 44 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 89. “war of korosani” at yakobi 275 non-Christian African residents.45 Gröschel knew that few people were interested in his Christian message. Those who did appear for church services, he acknowledged candidly, were rarely motivated by religios- ity. “It would be a major self-deception,” he wrote, “to think that they come with a heartfelt desire for the message from Heaven, or with hunger and thirst for the Word of God.” Sometimes they might come to church, he wrote, because they were aware that, “in the event of disobedience, [the missionary] can call for his friend from Iringa [the German military post] to come with the black soldiers. Yes, they come because they regard me, a European, as a superior person, as a chief. And besides, [at the mission] there are so many new and novel things to see, including the foreigner himself.” While preaching, he found himself suspecting that his handful of apparently attentive listeners probably occupied themselves by wondering “how many clothes the European must have.”46 While many of the village’s residents were attracted to Yakobi by the prospect of finding employment, some also sought refuge from Mbeyela. Most of those who became Christians did so only after working at the mission and winning Gröschel’s patronage. As Gröschel commented, “it is not surprising that the first [converts] were those who lived in very close proximity to us as servants and workers.”47 Others were drawn to the Lutheran station by their hostility towards Mbeyela. One of them was Amelye, one of the first eight Bena Christians to be baptized at Yakobi in 1903. As Gröschel got to know Amelye well, he learned of the longstanding hostility between Amelye’s family and Mbeyela. Amelye told him that the land on which the station was built had been the property of his father, and that Mbeyela had seized it after a conflict in which Amelye’s father killed a brother of Mbeyela. Later, Amelye’s mother was ostracized by Mbeyela after a witch-finder whom he retained identified her as a witch.48 All this suggests that when Amelye gave Gröschel the impression that he had initially come to Yakobi merely in search of employment, he had probably concealed a deeper intention. Probably he had been sent there by his family as

45 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 168. 46 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 128. 47 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 129. 48 Paul Gröschel, Amelye: Ein Lebensbild aus dem Benavolk in Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Berliner ev. Missionsgesellschaft, 1911), pp. 10, 12 and 18. On Mbeyela and witch-finding, see also Gröschel,Zehn Jahre, p. 192. 276 chapter eight By Permission of Berlin Mission Society Plate 8.1. Constructing the House of Paul Gröschel at Yakobi “war of korosani” at yakobi 277 a way of firming up their relationship with Gröschel in anticipation of future trouble with Mbeyela. That Amelye was a relative of Mwa- lyavala, the thirty-something chief who had complained to Gröschel that Mbeyela had seized his land, is suggested by the fact that when Amelye decided to marry, he found a wife in Mwalyavala’s village.49 In a society where cousins were the preferred spouses, Amelye would likely have sought a wife among the daughters of his father’s sisters or mother’s brothers. The hostility between Mbeyela and his opponents who sought a close relationship with Gröschel endured up to the outbreak of Maji Maji. Indeed, it was this hostility which demarcated the line between fac- tions which historians working from a more encompassing perspective might regard as “anti-colonial rebels” and “collaborators.” When the war began, Gröschel would identify Mwalyavala as one of the three leading “loyalists” in the vicinity of Yakobi. Certainly the way in which the mission became caught squarely in the middle of conflict between Mbeyela and his enemies was one of the factors which generated friction between Gröschel and Mbeyela. A second source of friction was Christianity itself, for many relatives of Bena converts objected vig- orously to their adoption of the beliefs, clothing and deportment of Christians. Nevertheless, these frictions never interrupted the close connections which the residents of Yakobi maintained with their kin and friends in other settlements. Gröschel described the relations of fraught interdependence between the new Christians and their relatives by saying that the newly-baptized,50 have here at the mission no experienced Christians from among their tribesmen as their companions, from whom they can seek support and counsel. Virtually all of their close relatives, including their parents and siblings, are pagans, who cannot understand them and who often very maliciously remark that their relatives have given up the old way of life of the ancestors. Formerly this happened mostly in private, so that I wouldn’t notice attempts to pull relatives and friends who had accepted the Word of God back into the old ways. But now this happens openly and through compulsion. Gröschel offered an example of the tense relations between new Chris- tians and their kin:

49 Gröschel, Amelye, p. 21. 50 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, pp. 137–8. 278 chapter eight

Our Andzendile, who . . . is now the only Christian wife at the station, awaits at Easter time her first child. The grandmother of her husband wishes to be with here with her. But she wishes to do so only on condition that the young wife move for this period to her home. I didn’t refuse because at the station there is no other older, experienced woman, and the grandmother’s residence is very close by, so that my wife or I myself could be there at the decisive hour. Now [the birth was] much delayed, and in the pagan surroundings the valagudzi, the pagan witchdoctor, must be consulted and must help. Naturally I strong forbade this . . . Andzendile returned to the station. As this example suggests, relationships between the Bena Christians at Yakobi (Gröschel would baptize five more young men at Christmas 1904, and another five men, three women and one child in August 1905, on the eve of war)51 and their family and friends in neighboring villages remained intimate, thanks largely to women such as Andzendile’s grandmother. Indeed, it was the very desire of the converts’ relatives to remain close to them which caused the tensions experienced by Andzendile and other Bena Christians. As Gröschel would put it after Maji Maji, all of the Bena residents of Yakobi, “had very close relatives, often parents and siblings, in the ranks of the enemy.”52 Just as Gröschel’s efforts to build a Christian community drew him into a local political situation of unanticipated complexity, so too it drew him into conflict with the colonial state. The occasion of this conflict was tax collecting. After witnessing a tax campaign for the first time in July 1900, he wrote, “from the beginning I had refused to get involved with [tax collecting], but I became mixed up in it in a particularly anguishing way.”53 After soldiers collecting taxes took captive the two wives of a neighbor, Gröschel decided that he “must stand by the husband and help him to obtain justice.”54 Gröschel went to the camp of the military patrol and obtained the release of the women, who were being held in the camp by two young servants—“two nearly naked boys”—while the soldiers roamed the surrounding countryside looking for tax payers. The two boys were beaten by the husband of the

51 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 138. 52 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 168. Also Gröschel, Amelye, pp. 29–30. 53 TNA G9/11, Berliner Missionsgesellschaft, Bd.1 (1902–05), excerpt from Mis- sionary Gröschel’s Report for the 3rd Quarter, 1900 in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Missionare in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” 54 TNA G9/11, excerpt from Missionary Gröschel’s Report for the 3rd Quarter, 1900 in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Missionare in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” “war of korosani” at yakobi 279 abducted women and other villagers. Gröschel then addressed complaints about the “abominable and brutal ways in which people, and especially women and girls, are treated without good reason by the soldiers,” to both the military officers who administered Songea (the district in which Yakobi was located) and civil administrators in Dar es Salaam.55 The opaque quality of Gröschel’s writing about the July 1900 incident suggests that he did not have firm knowledge of the soldiers’ actions. While Gröschel seemed to imply that captured women were routinely raped by the soldiers, the soldiers may have used them to perform domestic chores such as cooking and collecting firewood. Some of Gröschel’s neighbors, however, suspected that the askari had quite different intentions when abducting the women. They thought that the askari were testing the missionary and his followers. Mpangile suggested that the soldiers acted with an “arrogant” manner in order to “bait” Gröschel and “see what the people of the Europeans would do.”56 If Mpangile was correct, the askari may have been following a practice common in the region at this time, for the Germans understood that chiefs frequently seized the women of their rivals, apparently as a way of challenging them.57 While we do not know the nature of the relationships between leaders and the women whom they captured from rivals, it seems likely that taking sexual possession of them was one way of asserting political dominance. Women of Yakobi once again suffered abuse at the hands of tax collectors in August 1901. On this occasion a delegation of BMS superiors, including a visitor from Berlin, were making an inspection tour of their stations in the region. After witnessing a disappointingly meager turn-out for the church services attended by the delegation on August 1st, Gröschel soon discovered why so few of his congregation had appeared to greet the visitors. “There was tax collection,” he wrote,58

55 TNA G9/11, letter of Paul Gröschel to the Government, Dar es Salaam (Mpang- ile, 6 May, 1900), folio 14. 56 TNA G9/11, excerpt from Missionary Gröschel’s Report for the 3rd Quarter, 1900 in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Missionare in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” 57 For a report of the victimization of women by local chiefs in southern Ubena at this time see “Der Bezirk Songea,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt, v. 16 (1905). 58 TNA G9/11, excerpt from Missionary Gröschel, “Weiter zu derselben Zeit des Jahres 1901,” in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Mis- sionare in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” 280 chapter eight

in Mbeyela’s area. This took place without European supervision, and through the injustice of the askari, and yes, cruelties were committed. The most hideous thing was that many women were held in the camp of the askari, where they were subject to all of their infamies. One member of the delegation described what they saw of the mis- treatment of women by soldiers commanded by a “black sergeant.” This account spoke more directly about the sexual abuse of women than had Gröschel in 1900:59 We took the opportunity to ascertain the names of the [abducted women]. About ten women were named as having been captured with whips and disgraced. Some of them we saw ourselves, including a girl, really only a child, and an old woman with gray hair, who had been assaulted by the four boys of the askari, one after another. Some men were left—at the moment I can’t give the number of weeks, but it was a matter of weeks—in slave yokes, from which they weren’t released even at night. Gröschel’s complaints, and surely his boldness in addressing them directly to Dar es Salaam, led to rapid deterioration of his relations with the German commander in Songea District, Lieutenant Albinus. Albinus retaliated by questioning the irregular status of the Yakobi mission (when Gröschel first moved into southern Ubena he may have been unaware that he had crossed a new district boundary).60 Albi- nus also charged that Grőschel frightened away villagers who wished to sell food to tax collectors and otherwise impeded military patrols from obtaining food in the vicinity of the missions; that he and other BMS evangelists tried to exercise authority over the askari, the Afri- can soldiers serving in the German military; that, by prohibiting the use of Kiswahili around the mission, he obstructed communication between villagers and the soldiers; that he encouraged village headmen under his control to flee tax collectors; and that he concealed the cattle of villagers by penning them in the mission cattle stall, so that they would appear to be mission property not subject to confiscation by the

59 TNA G9/11, excerpt from account by Missionary Klamroth of 6 October 1901 in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Missionare in Deutsch- Ostafrika.” 60 TNA G9/11, excerpt from Missionary Gröschel’s Report for the 3rd Quarter, 1900 in “Auszüge von Stellen aus den amtlichen Tagebüchern unserer Missionare in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” “war of korosani” at yakobi 281 soldiers.61 Albinus summed up these charges by asserting that Gröschel practiced “active obstruction” of government authority.62 While Gröschel’s scandalized outrage over the abductions was evidently sincere, the unarticulated subtext behind his complaints may have been resentment against interference by the military authorities and their askari. One source of his resentment was the refusal of the askari to acknowledge his moral authority as a cleric. More important, however, was the vulnerability of Gröschel’s own position in the hierarchy of political patronage in southern Ubena. If he failed to show an ability to provide protection against German authority, he risked losing his double status as both the client of Mbeyela and as the patron of his own neighbors and Christian dependents. Tax collecting threatened Gröschel’s status not only because of the abusive behavior of the soldiers, but also because the tax patrols seized wealth capriciously and in large amounts. During the tax campaign of mid-1900, Mbeyela lost about one hundred cattle from a holding estimated by Gröschel and Albinus to have been between two hundred and five hundred head.63 When Albinus visited Yakobi in April 1902, he concluded that Gröschel had attempted to aid his neighbors in keeping their cattle out of the hands of the tax collectors by penning them at the mission. Confronted by the officer, Gröschel did not deny that he had taken in the cattle. He said he had done so because the soldiers had occupied the homes of his neighbors, forcing the mission to offer them and their livestock refuge. Here Albinus clearly saw Gröschel struggling to fulfill his obligation as a patron while stopping short of outright defiance of colonial authority. Albinus recognized the difficulty of the missionary’s intermediary position within the political hierarchy. He knew that Gröschel could not exercise authority over Mbeyela, but he expected him to maintain control over his own dependents. For this reason he blamed Gröschel for failing to prevent heads of

61 See correspondence in TNA G9/11, particularly letter of Lieutenant Albinus (Songea, 29 July, 1902). 62 TNA G9/11, letter of Lieutenant Albinus (Songea, 29 July, 1902), folio 24. For his use of the term, Albinus was reprimanded by Governor Götzen: TNA G9/11, Graf Götzen to Lieutenant Albinus (Dar es Salaam, 6 October 1902). 63 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 60; “Der Bezirk Songea,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt, v. 16 (1905). 282 chapter eight nearby villages from fleeing as the tax collectors approached.64 Given Albinus’ first-hand familiarity with Gröschel’s situation, he must have known that the missionary’s position would be undermined if pressure from his tax collecting soldiers prevented Gröschel from meeting the expectation of effective intervention with colonial authorities which had persuaded Mbeyela to tolerate his presence in the first place. For this reason, Albinus’ willingness to ratchet upwards his quarrel with Gröschel (eventually it prompted intervention by both BMS headquarters in Berlin and the governor of German East Africa) suggests that military officials, far from regarding missionaries such as Gröschel as valuable allies in the common cause of establishing a colonial regime, instead saw them as a nuisance. From this account of the Yakobi mission, what do we learn about why Mbeyela decided to attack it? One possibility—that Mbeyela may have regarded the mission as a dangerous political intruder— seems to be ruled out. The combination of Gröschel’s political naivety and the delicacy of his political position appears to have prevented him from acting assertively. Gröschel knew both that he needed to maintain Mbeyela’s support by acting as a useful client, and also that many of his best friends and neighbors were opponents of Mbeyela. Such circumstances dictated caution and may have induced timidity. Gröschel’s Christianity, which led him to interfere with ritual life, healing and family relationships, may have made him morally abhorrent to Mbeyela. Yet, it does not seem to have provided a strong reason to destroy the mission, because Mbeyela knew that no more than a handful of Yakobi’s residents were anything but nominal Christians. On the other hand, Mbeyela recognized that Yakobi had become a center of local political dissidence. This may well have provided the primary motivation for his attack. Nevertheless, the many relationships of kinship and friendship between residents of Yakobi and his own people probably dissuaded Mbeyela from trying to annihilate the mission. He may have preferred other means, such as testing the nerve of Gröschel and exposing the witchcraft of his opponents, as he had once done with Amelye’s mother. Although Mbeyela showed willingness to challenge colonial power when he had the tax collectors

64 See correspondence in TNA G9/11, particularly letter of Paul Gröschel to the Government, Dar es Salaam (Mpangile, 6 May, 1900) and letter of Lieutenant Albinus (Songea, 29 July, 1902). “war of korosani” at yakobi 283 killed, in attacking Yakobi he was probably not attempting to eradicate the European presence. For while he may have wished to impose his political will on Gröschel and others at Yakobi, he had little reason to regard them as friends of the German government. Like other villagers, they had suffered the abuse of colonialaskari ; Gröschel himself had protested the methods of tax collectors. Mbeyela is likely to have regarded the Yakobi mission less as the vanguard of a vast colonial intrusion than as an annoying, but manageable, presence on the local political scene. For this reason, local interpretations of the “War of Korosani” merit close attention, for they, too, suggest the attack on Yakobi was a local affair rather than part of a great anti-colonial rising.

The Local Interpretation

After the war, the only memorial to the war of 1905–07 erected by the Germans in Ubena was placed at Yakobi (see also chapter by Nyagava in this volume). Its consecration on September 26, 1907, called a “Christian-German-Patriotic Memorial and Thanksgiving Celebration,” commemorated the war as a triumph over the enemies of Christian civilization, colonial order, and colonial improvement. The German military commander in Ubena, von Kleist, together with Gröschel, Christian Schumann, other German missionaries and a troop of askari, assembled before a “large crowd of natives, men, women and children” to unveil a monument to Dr. Wiehe, the military physician who had fallen at Nyikamtwe. (Although the memorial just in front of the entrance to Gröschel’s church was built in the shape of a grave and headstone, no body was buried underneath; apparently Dr. Wiehe’s body was never recovered from Nyikamtwe.) The German men, wearing fluttering ribbons awarded by the Kaiser, gave thanks to him and to their God. Then the crowd watched memorial salvos and an askari parade, listened to a brief address by von Kleist in Kiswahili, a language then little spoken in Njombe, and finally heard Schumann speaking in Kibena, probably to translate the soldier’s words.65 If the purpose of this service was to insure that the “War of Korosani” would be remembered as part of a great conflict over Christianity and colonialism, however, it was not entirely successful.

65 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 224. 284 chapter eight

Although some residents of Yakobi believe that the “War of Koro- sani” was part of the broader anti-colonial struggle called Maji Maji, an alternative explanation remains alive and well. It was recorded by the Maji Maji Research Project in 1968 and by me on separate occasions more recently.66 A team of researchers also heard this alternative interpretation on several occasions in 2002. This version has also appeared in at least one written account.67 These accounts say that that the “War of Korosani” occurred because Mbeyela or his sons wished to seize Mwangasama, the wife of Gröschel. Accounts differ as to whether it was Mbeyela, Ngozingozi or Mpangile who was the chief instigator. Some accounts add that Mbeyela or his sons wished to have light-skinned children with her. Jackson Makwetta, the Maji Maji Research Project investigator, summarized the different accounts which he heard in 1968 by saying,68 Mpangire wanted to marry Mwangasama, the wife of “Kolosani,” for the very reason that Mpangire had great desire for brown women and he hoped that by marrying her she could bear him a brown son who could inherit his title afterwards. Some say that it was Mbeyela himself who wanted to marry Mwangasama. In some renderings the story is coupled with firm assertions that the “War of Korosani” had little or nothing to do with Maji Maji, or “Hongo Hongo” as is also known in Njombe. Elders at Igominyi told me in 1994 that,69 The war occurred here because of a woman. It was not the war of an entire tribe, it happened only here . . . it wasn’t a national war [“vita ya kitaifa”]—“Hongo Hongo” was a national war . . . It happened right here when a few people decided to fight with one man. In writing elsewhere about this account I have emphasized its interpretative complexity. I have suggested that that this story, which can be understood to say that Mbeyela was driven by foolish impetuosity

66 J.M. Makwetta, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/1/1, p. 6; Elders of Igominyi (Igominyi, July 9, 1994); Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997); Martin Mung’ong’o (Yakobi, November 23, 2000). 67 Mexon Mung’ong’o, “Historia ya Usharika wa Yakobi” (Makumira: Chuo cha Theologia cha Kilutheri, n.d), p. 20. It is not mentioned in Seth I. Nyagava, A History of the Bena to 1914. 68 J.M. Makwetta, “Maji Maji in Ubena,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/1/1, p. 6. 69 Elders of Igominyi (Igominyi, July 9, 1994). “war of korosani” at yakobi 285 Photograph by James Giblin. Plate 8.2. The Church of Paul Gröschel in the 1990s 286 chapter eight to cause the destruction of his family and community, served as way of questioning the legitimacy of his descendents, who dominated the Native Authority chiefships in Ubena during the British period. I have also suggested that its distancing of “Korosani” from the Maji Maji war serves to resist the incorporation of Ubena’s past into national history, a strategy which reflects the unpopularity of TANU and the nationalist movement in rural Njombe from the mid-1960s onwards. In addition, I have argued that this story of a contest over a woman served to foreground the victimization of women during war, a theme which dominates oral accounts of late-precolonial and early colonial warfare in Njombe.70 Everyone who grew up in Njombe during the twentieth century knows that these wars—which first involved inva- sions of Ubena by forces from Uhehe, Usangu and Ungoni, and later involved the German wars of conquest in the 1890s—were marked by the desperate flight of villagers before advancing armies. Every- one knows that women were the primary victims of war, and that their seizure signified victory and their loss defeat. During Maji Maji, moreover, large numbers—perhaps thousands—of Bena women were carried off by the Sangu forces who served as the auxiliaries of the Ger- mans. Indeed, this account reminds listeners that the tragically ironic outcome of Mbeyela’s attempt to seize Mwangasama was that his own wives numbered among the women who were captured and taken into captivity by Sangu invaders at a later stage in the war. I now think that we can take a stronger position. The story of Mbeyela’s attempt to seize Mwangasama is more than an example of sophisticated grassroots historical interpretation. We can now say that it is as plausible and as faithful to our admittedly incomplete knowledge of the events of September 1905 as any account yet devised by historians. Nothing in the documentary sources suggests that the story is implausible. Just as the local story makes no claim that Mbeyela wished to destroy the mission or kill the missionaries, so, too, our documentary sources tell us only that a force advanced upon the mission, but withdrew quickly when it encountered resistance. The close

70 James L. Giblin, A History of the Excluded: Making Family and Memory a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), pp. 4–42, 47–8 and “Passages in a Struggle Over the Past: Stories of Maji Maji in Njombe, Tan- zania,” in Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings (eds.), Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 295–311. “war of korosani” at yakobi 287 personal relationships between the residents of Yakobi and the people of Mbeyela probably restrained both sides. A grandson of Mbeyela pointed out that one of Gröschel’s followers, having married a daughter of Mbeyela, refused to fire on his “brothers-in-law,” probably meaning all of the attackers.71 Nor did Mbeyela attempt to prevent the residents of Yakobi from retreating to Lupembe, and indeed a number of the villagers remained at Yakobi after Gröschel’s withdrawal. After the September 19 attack, Mbeyela forbade the plundering of the mission.72 As we have seen, moreover, the act of seizing the women of male rivals appears to have been a common method by which chiefs tested the will of their rivals; even the tax-collecting askari appear to have used it. The claim in some versions of the story that the attempted capture had a different motivation—to obtain a woman who would bear light-skinned children—may well have been an accretion added to the story in a later period when politics heightened racial consciousness. Indeed, some tellings of the story speak neither of sexual desire nor of desire for a light-skinned child.73 One of Yakobi’s elders, Martin Mung’ong’o, may have been more faithful to the original story in saying that Mbeyela’s aim of seizing Mwangasama was intertwined with his desire to obtain recognition of his political authority.74 Indeed, this is the implication of a curious remark made in 1968 by a veteran of the Lupembe column which relieved Yakobi the day after Mbeye- la’s attack. Abernego Mbwatila said that the attackers told Gröschel, “’Surrender, Kolosani. If you don’t we will capture your wife.’”75 The implied guarantee of security suggests neither that Mbeyela intended to destroy the mission, nor to seize Mwangasama at all costs. It makes sense only if his uppermost aim was to force Gröschel’s capitulation to his stronger will. The documentary sources certainly help to explain why Mbeyela would have wished to discipline Gröschel. Having heard that the Ger- man military was fully engaged in Songea, he may have decided that the moment was right to make sure that Yakobi would no longer provide a refuge for dissidents. Yet, this does not necessarily mean that

71 Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997). 72 Gröschel, Zehn Jahre, p. 163. 73 For example, Elders of Igominyi (Igominyi, July 9, 1994). 74 Martin Mung’ong’o (Yakobi, November 23, 2000). 75 “The Background History of the Area,” Maji Maji Research Project 4/68/4/3, p. 10. 288 chapter eight he intended to destroy the mission, or to drive away the European evangelists. Always tempering Mbeyela’s actions was the presence at Yakobi of the many relatives and friends of his own subjects. Just as the story suggests, Mbeyela’s aggression against Yakobi may have been driven entirely by local political concerns. Mbeyela may well have neither understood the danger in killing the tax collectors, nor intended to enter into a decisive struggle against colonial authority. Certainly the subsequent phase in the war, when he conducted raiding in northern Ubena, suggests that he was uninterested in rousing broad resistance against the German forces.

Conclusion

Much remains unknown about the “War of Korosani.” In particular, we cannot be identify with certainty the key “triggering factor” in Ubena—the considerations which led Mbeyela to attack the Yakobi mission. Among other things we would wish to know much more about how his sons, Mpangile and Ngozingozi, influenced the decisions which led to war. We can say, however, that taking the local perspective from Yakobi casts considerable doubt on the conventional narrative of Maji Maji. It provides good reason to doubt that Mbeyela became involved in a conspiracy with Ngoni leaders. While his killing of the tax collectors was clearly an act of defiance against the colonial state, we cannot be sure that by attacking Yakobi Mbeyela intended to drive away all Europeans. The numerous attacks on missionaries which occurred during Maji Maji has encouraged the view that the Maji Maji forces regarded missionaries and colonial government as two faces of the same intrusive alien force. Yet, the “War of Korosani” raises important questions about this assumption. The tension between Gröschel and German authorities before Maji Maji forces us to acknowledge that, however much missionaries and government may appear in retrospect to have acted in concert to promote colonialism (this view was expressed frequently in a workshop on Maji Maji held at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2003), there is much reason to doubt that this was the view of contemporaries. From the beginning, chiefs in Ubena exploited the differences between German officials and missionaries by using the evangelists as intermediaries. Nor did missionaries such as Gröschel regard themselves as acting in concert with government to achieve a “war of korosani” at yakobi 289 common colonial project. Indeed, it was the war itself which brought evangelists and colonial officials closer together, leading the missionaries to consider, in ways which they had not before 1905, how they might realign their own goals more closely with those of government. The patriotic celebration at Yakobi in September 1907 was a significant moment in this process of realignment. The evidence from Yakobi does not sustain the argument that Gröschel provoked Mbeyela into war by working with colonial officials to reduce the power of Bena chiefs. To the contrary, Gröschel seems to have entered Yakobi without a clear political agenda and occupied a niche in the political micro-environment created for him by political rivals. Gröschel depended heavily upon Mbeyela and his sons, and was never in a position to challenge them. What then provoked Mbeyela’s antagonism towards him? There are two possible explanations. The first is that Gröschel may have unwittingly allowed himself to be manipulated by Mbeyela’s rivals. The second is that Mbeyela may have regarded Gröschel’s ineffectiveness as an intermediary with military and civil officials either as disloyalty or proof that there was little to be gained from tolerating his presence. Consequently, Mbeyela may have become persuaded that Gröschel’s tendency to act as a magnet for the disaffected from Mbeyela’s own community made him a nuisance no longer worth tolerating. If Gröschel took actions which challenged the authority of Mbeyela, they would appear to have been the unintended result of entanglement in local rivalries. Similarly, we must doubt that the maji medicine played a part in the “War of Korosani.” From Yakobi there is a striking lack of direct evidence for the use of new war medicine. Gröschel may not have heard of new war medicine until after he evacuated Yakobi. We have seen, however, that the circumstances of the missionaries predisposed them to believe rumors of a new medicine. In accepting the view that rebellion had been inspired by the diffusion across the land of a particular medicine, Gröschel found a way of explaining betrayal by diverting attention away from his own political ineptitude. Themaji story put the blame on a circumstance which he could never have controlled—the influence of conspirators from Songea and further east. For Gröschel, the rumors of new medicine provided tangible evidence of conspiracy. All this leaves us with the unconventional story—the account of Mbeyela’s attempt to seize Mwangasama. When a group of university faculty and students visited Yakobi in 2002, we struggled with 290 chapter eight the apparent implausibility of attributing a seemingly clear-cut case of anti-colonial rebellion to a man’s desire for a light-skinned wife. In particular we considered the possibility that the story was the product of a Christian community’s wish to ridicule the backwardness and immorality of its enemies. As we have seen, however, the story is told not only by the descendents of Mbeyela’s enemies, but by his own descendents.76 An underlying source of our disquiet was the assumption that an act prompted by sexual desire must be personal and non-political. The story fascinated the students, and afterwards several wrote essays which thoughtfully came to terms with it. One of them, Erasto Malila, anticipated a skeptical readership by entitling his essay “Can You Believe That A Chief’s Lust Caused the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War?” He concluded, however, that the account might well be correct, as did another student, Oswald Masebo, who nevertheless found it an unsatisfactory “simplification of a more complex history . . . [which] camouflages complex relations.” Masebo decided that the story should be understood to reveal the most immediate or proximate cause, behind which stood a more satisfactory explanation involving the discriminatory and exploitive nature of colonialism. A third student, Irene Mkini, made a similar distinction between proximate and underlying causes. After describing “harsh German rule,” she observed that, “in Ubena we saw that the war broke out simply because the son of the chief wanted to marry a mzungu [European].”77 This essay has taken inspiration from the students’ effort to overcome the deafness to the local narrative which sometimes stems from reliance on the national perspective. Yet, it has chosen not to seek explanation by zooming out from the local to the national scale. Instead, it has taken advantage of the micro-scale to gain a more deeply textured understanding of local context. As a result, we find a way of resolv- ing the issue which our faculty-student group found disturbing in the oral accounts from Yakobi. We can now see that, in the generation of

76 Maynard Pangamahuti (Utengule, November 15, 1997). 77 The student essays about Yakobi were: Erasto Malila, “Can You Believe That A Chief’s Lust Caused the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War?,” Oswald Masebo, “Pen- etration of Christianity, Maji Maji War and the Local Response in Southern Ubena,” Irene Mkini, “Maji Maji War in Ubena at Yakobi,” John David Mayengo, “The Maji Maji War in Ubena: The Case Study of Yakobi,” and Tumpe Ndimbwa, “Research Report on Maji Maji Resistance: Study Done in Ubena and Ungoni of Southern Tan- zania.” Essays on other topics were contributed by Nives Kinunda, Steven Ndemba and Gasiano Sumbai. “war of korosani” at yakobi 291

Mbeyela, sexual desire and acts of political rivalry were probably not clearly separable. For Mbeyela and his rivals, the sexual possession of women and the use of armed force were both ways of asserting political superiority. Having understood that an attempt to seize the missionary’s wife would not have been the mere expression of purely personal male desire, we can now draw two conclusions. Not only is it likely true that Mbeyela attacked Yakobi to capture Mwangasama, but the attack was probably a carefully measured political act neither inspired by, nor directly connected to, the rising in Songea.

SECTION FIVE

THE AFTERMATH: MEMORY AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT

The diversity of regional and social circumstances revealed in previous chapters cautions us against assuming too readily that unity of purpose reigned among those who fought the Germans. It suggests that if Maji Maji was, as John Iliffe wrote, Tanzania’s “first collective political experience,” it became so only after the war through a retrospective process of memory and interpretation. In this final chapter, Felicitas Becker considers the aftermath of Maji Maji. She explains how the societies of southeastern Tanzania found new forms of interconnection after the war, particularly through Islam. She concludes with a fascinating example of oral storytelling about Maji Maji. Like oral accounts of Maji Maji discussed in several earlier chapters, the story presented by Becker does not rest easily alongside scholarly historiography. Its conflation of events challenges the nationalist tradition in Maji Maji historiography. Becker also examines the possibility that Maji Maji was the cause of southeastern Tanzania’s marked underdevelopment throughout the twentieth century. She carefully points out, however, that while scholars have sometimes contended that the economic and demographic catastrophe of 1905–07 retarded development in the region, its long- term impact is not easy to disentangle from subsequent events. As she shows, the economic policies of the post-First World War British administration were probably equally responsible for consigning the southeast to deep impoverishment and reliance on labor migration.

CHAPTER NINE

SUDDEN DISASTER AND SLOW CHANGE: MAJI MAJI AND THE LONG-TERM HISTORY OF SOUTHEAST TANZANIA

Felicitas Becker

Maji Maji continues to occupy a special place throughout the war region. While the First World War was similarly devastating, Maji Maji stands alone as an attempt to get rid of colonial occupation by violent means. By contrast, the subsequent history of this region has been quiescent. The region was not at the forefront of demands for colonial reform and independence. Economically, it sank to the status of a ‘Cinderella region’ within Tanganyika during the colonial period and has remained marginal ever since. Because it fundamentally changed political relations that had unfolded themselves over several decades beforehand, Maji Maji can be considered as the genuine end of the political independence of this region. Moreover, the war was devastating enough to lead some observers to suspect it of being a main cause of the quiescence that followed. Still, however necessary it is to show the devastating effects of this war, as a cause of subsequent events it should not exclude other factors. Just as research into the war has rightly emphasised that it had long and varied antecedents, and that many dynamics within the societies of the region came together to give it its strength, the after-effects of the war deserve similarly complex treatment. Focusing on the eastern half of the area affected by the war, the present chapter shows how Maji Maji interacted with both change and continuity. It shows, on one hand, that the ways in which people sought to cope with the aftermath of the war replicated older patterns. On the other hand, the difficulties of overcoming the aftermath were compounded by larger economic shifts attendant on colonisation and by colonial policy. At another level, religious movements in the decades after Maji Maji provide evidence of change as well as persistence of faith. Already during the war, the prophetic element represented a quest to renew society. This need for renewal continued after the war, as is evident both in the adoption of Islam and in the 296 chapter nine persistence of witchcraft eradication. At the same time, villagers treated Muslim practices in a way that allowed them to become part of a mental universe which pre-dated Islam. In effect, the Maji Maji War catalysed religious change (in some areas more than others), but it did not force a radical re-orientation. Rather, religious change occurred gradually in a world of which the heritage of Maji Maji was a part, intricately interwoven with many others. The mixture of obsolescence and persistence that characterised religious change is also mirrored in the way the war is remembered a hundred years on.

The Uprising in the Demographic and Environmental History of the Southeast

Maji Maji interacted with long-standing environmental and historical processes to affect the ability of people in Southeast Tanzania to control their environment. With the defeat in the Maji Maji War, the communities that had participated also ‘lost a battle with nature’.1 The military campaign was disastrous because the German army ‘lived off the land’, because the small ‘regular’ units—the largest battle in the eastern area considered here was fought by 76 askari—were supplemented by of predatory mercenaries, or rugaruga, and because it was meant to be destructive.2 There was no sanction against any sort of atrocity and German units even extended stays in insecure areas expressly in order to destroy crops. Opportunistic attacks by local rulers friendly with the German government, most notably Matola, the ruler of Masasi, added to the devastation. For villagers, the first way of surviving was migration. This could mean abandoning one’s village for the nearest thicket, or moving many miles to inaccessible areas, such as the Rondo plateau in Lindi and Mgende in western Liwale. In effect, civilians were caught between the wilderness on one hand, the army on the other.

1 John Iliffe’s phrase.A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 198. 2 The scarce information available suggests that in the Lindi campaigns, the number of mercenaries at least equalled that of regular soldiers. J Stenzler, Deutsch-Ostafrika. Kriegs- und Friedensbilde (Berlin, 1910), p. 44; Graf G.A. von Götzen, Deutsch- Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905–6 (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1909), p. 97. sudden disaster and slow 297

Hunger, in the wilderness or after fields had been abandoned or destroyed, was the largest threat to life.3 People from Lindi region sought safety from it on the cassava-rich Makonde Plateau.4 Others may have preferred servile status on Matola’s fields to starvation or migration to the coast, where labor was plentiful during this time. For many, however, the quest for safety became disastrous. Of Mwera people who went to Rondo, it is said that many “never came back”5 and on refugees to Mgende from Liwale, a German officer remarked that “they had gone to Mgende strong, with wives and children and their valued possessions. Almost dead of starvation they came back, having sold even their wives and children for food.”6 The disruption to agriculture did not end when military action ceased in 1908. Elephants returned to Matumbi and lions plagued survivors in their poorly built huts in the Lindi hinterland. Benedictine missionaries in this area claimed that the supply of some foodstuffs only came back to normal in 1912. In this year, too, labor became scarcer at the coast, suggesting that refugees now dared go back up country.7 The question, though, is how permanent a setback this was, and to what extent it was reinforced or mitigated by environmental conditions. Southeast Tanzania appears to have long been a frontier, open to immigration and not very densely populated. On his journey from Tete in Mozambique to Kilwa in 1616, a Portuguese traveller claims to have met hardly a soul while travelling through this area.8 Nineteenth- century travellers speak of unsettled, partly immigrant populations.9

3 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “Ngindo Famine Subsistence”, Tanganyika Notes and Records [TNR] 50 (1958), pp. 1–20. 4 Missions-Blätter: illustrierte Zeitschrift für das katholische Volk: Organ der St Benediktus-Genossenschaft für ausländische Missionen zu St Ottilien [Mbl] 11 (1907: 52–67. 5 Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP) 7/68/2/1. 6 Leutnant Johannes to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 31 July 1906, Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Berlin [B’arch] R 1001/700, p. 264. 7 Notes on a report by Lindi Bezirksamt, 23/29/3/1911, Tanzania National Archives [TNA] G1/39, p. 42. 8 Sir John Gray (ed.), ‘A journey by land from Tete to Kilwa In 1616’, TNR 25 (1948). 9 Sir J. Kirk, “Notes on two expeditions up the river Rovuma,” Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 35 (1865): 154–67; Georg Lieder, “Reise von der Mbampa-Bai am Nyassa-See nach Kisswere am Indischen Ozean,” Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten [MDS} 10 (1897): 95–142; Chauncy Maples, “Results of the exploration of the country lying between Lake Nyasa and the Indian Ocean, 1880–88,” Journal of the Manchester Geographic Society 1 (1885): 69–85. 298 chapter nine

The earliest available population figures, estimates rather than censuses, come from the German administration. In 1900, the Bezirksamtmann of Lindi district, which then included the Makonde plateau, was not sure whether to put population figures for his district at 100.000 or 200.000 people.10 In 1905, after a few relatively peaceful years, railway surveyor Fuchs quoted official population estimates of 100.000 for Kilwa district—which he thought too low—and 225.000 for Lindi and Mikindani.11 Rough figures like these make clear that the southern and eastern part of the region, which included the Makonde and Mwera plateaus, the Lukuledi valley and Masasi, was more densely populated than Liwale and Tunduru. Yet, even within the more densely populated areas, concentrations were very variable.12 The Makonde plateau was by all accounts the most densely populated part of the region by far.13 In part, population distribution reflected environmental and agricultural conditions. The most densely populated regions, near Lindi and on the Makonde plateau, were also the ones with the highest food security in large part due to cassava.14 On the whole, however, the area under consideration was not favorable for agriculture. Soils are sandy and rains fickle.15 Cattle was almost unknown, and livestock limited to goats and chickens. Unlike in the highlands further west, the use of mounds, manuring or irrigation is not reported from any-

10 Bezirksamtmann Zache in Gouverneur Liebert, Dar es Salaam, to Kolonialabtei- lung, Berlin, 3 March 1900, B’arch R 1001/1005, p. 206. 11 Paul Fuchs, “Die wirtschaftliche Erkundung einer Ostafrikanischen Südbahn,” Beihefte zum Tropenpflanzer 6, 4–5 (1905): 228. 12 Bezirksamtmann Engelhardt, Lindi, report, 14 April 1897, B’arch R 1001/288, p. 104; Stenzler, Deutsch-Ostafrika. Kriegs- und Friedensbilder, Berlin, pp. 51–57; Letter by Bishop Smythies of the UMCA, quoted in A.J. Clayton, “Christianity and Islam among the Makonde: A study of religious appropriation” (Ph.D. Thesis, Univer- sity of Manchester, 1994), p. 83; Bezirksamtmann, Mikindani to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 18 June 1895, TNA G 1/35, p. 54. 13 In 1930, the estimated population was 320,000 in Lindi and Mikindani, as opposed to 98,000 in Kilwa and Liwale: The Government of Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for Tanganyika Territory for 1925 ( London, 1926), p. 25. In 1953, Newala district on the western Makonde plateau was found to have the highest population density in the region: The Government of Tanganyika Territory,A Review of Development Plans in the Southern Provinc (Dar es Salaam, 1953), p. 9. 14 Chauncy Maples, “Masasi and the Rovuma District in East Africa”, Proceed- ings of the Royal Geographic Society 2 (1880): 338–53; esp. p. 345, Bezirksamtmann Engelhardt, Lindi, report, 14 April 1897 B’arch R 1001/288, p. 104. 15 Bezirksamtmann Zache, Lindi, Reisebericht, 23 January 1900, B’arch R 1001/220, p. 14. sudden disaster and slow 299 where in southeast Tanzania. The German invaders, despite the need to justify themselves to the public at home, did not describe this part of the colony as enthusiastically as the highlands of Ubena, Upogoro and Ungoni.16 Repeated drought-induced food crises in the colonial period and the much-observed adaptations, of the Makonde especially, to the scarcity of surface water, bear out the point.17 The lack of surface water constituted a problem in many parts of the region. People on the Makonde plateau regularly had to descend the plateau to fetch water at its foot, sources on the Mwera plateau tend to have bitter water, and in eastern Liwale wells were few.18 Colonial ‘agricultural officers’ and Benedictine missionaries were to find that agricultural conditions were not easy to change. Attempts to introduce cattle, for instance, were repeatedly frustrated by diseases, above all tsetse-induced try- panosomiasis. On the other hand, the history of the region before Maji Maji also influenced the distribution of its population. This is particularly true of the emptiness of Liwale, which was not simply an effect of water scarcity. Between ca 1860 and 1897, Ngoni raiders from the hills north of lake Nyasa and the Mahenge plateau raided in most years. The attacks continued into the German period. Again, migration was a fundamental way of avoiding these attacks, hence the concentration of people in places protected by escarpments and hills, such as Makonde and Ilulu Hill in Mwera district, and their dispersal from Liwale. The Ger- man geologist, Lieder, on a journey through the western reaches of Mikindani and Lindi districts in 1894, found that settlements near the Ruvuma river described by explorers earlier in the nineteenth century had disappeared, and that only the previous year villages north and west of Lindi had been abandoned after Ngoni raids.19 Eight years after Lieder, however, railway surveyor Fuchs crossed from Kilwa to

16 Compare the cautious tone of Zache’s report 23 January 1900, B’arch. R 1001/220, pp. 42–45 to description of Ubena in Deputy Governor, Dar es Salaam to Kolonial- abteilung, Berlin, 26 December 1893, B’arch R 1001/284, p. 4. 17 Pater Patrick Muehlbauer, “Wassermangel,” Mbl 44 (1940): 190–2. 18 Fuchs, “Die wirtschaftliche Erkundung,” discusses water problems; so does Gou- verneur Götzen in Götzen, Dar es Salaam to Kolonialabteilung, Berlin, 21 December 1901, R 1001/220, p. 107. 19 Georg Lieder, “Zur Kenntnis der Karawanenwege im Süden des deutsch-ostafrikanischen Schutzgebietes’” Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgiebeten [MDS] 7 (1894): 277–82, esp. 278–9. While this account is unlikely to be correct to the detail in an area where place names were a constant source of misunderstandings, it is accurate enough in its references to concrete events and places to be given credence. 300 chapter nine

Songea, and did not claim to have spent a single day in uninhabited pori.20 It appears that people were as swift to come back as they had been to remove themselves. Some had probably never left, but led an invisible, roving existence in the bush. The same readiness to disappear and reappear would be in evidence after Maji Maji. The war-plagued history of this region in the decades before and after Maji Maji adds to the difficulty of estimating the effects of the uprising, and warns against isolating the effects of this one war. It is difficult to distinguish the effect of mortality caused by Maji Maji from migration. In 1917–8, only five years after the situation had normalised itself following the Maji Maji War, the First World War compounded the loss of population and environmental control. Although this time the inhabitants of the region were not supposed to be the opponents, the presence of the two armies, which fought each other in the region between September 1916 and November 1918, can be compared to those of Maji Maji. Local people did not wait to see whether the armies were friendly; they fled, abandoning their fields.21 Even where relations between local people and the army were not blatantly predatory (as they often were, surely for the German army),22 the troops were always hungry and considered it a useful stratagem to destroy food stores they did not need or could not take, to prevent their opponents using them. Local insurgencies in German-held areas, supported by the British, were answered with the destruction of villages by Ger- man troops.23 The Maji Maji War, then, was part of a sequence of disasters. On one hand, the effects of these disasters were bound to accumulate. On the other, to some extent the inhabitants of the region had learned to cope with them, above all by migration. There is no reason why, with the end of warfare after the First World War, the situation should not have stabilised. As it turned out, it did so only in parts of the region. The reasons for these different outcomes must be sought in the subsequent decades.

20 Fuchs, “Die wirtschaftliche Erkundung.” 21 August Hauer, Kumbuke: Kriegserlebnisse eines Arztes in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Ber- lin, Deutsch-Literarische Institut, J. Schneider, 1935), p. 212. 22 Hauer, Kumbuke, p. 220. 23 Charlotte und Ludwig Deppe, Um Ostafrika, (Dresden: E. Beutelspacher & Co., 1925), p. 307. sudden disaster and slow 301

Maji Maji and the ‘Peasantization’ of the Southeast

Lindi region, which includes the ‘outbreak area’ of the Maji Maji rebellion near Kilwa as well as the foci of the rebellion in Liwale, is now at the bottom of the Tanzanian league tables for indicators of economic and social development. Mtwara region south of Lindi is only slightly better off. Both regions do badly with regard to Gross Domestic Prod- uct as well as education, health and child mortality. Roads into and within the region are notoriously poor. Among teachers and administrators alike, postings to the Southeast are unpopular. For all these reasons the region has been described as a ‘periphery’ within Tanza- nia.24 It is beyond doubt that the after-effects of the Maji Maji War have contributed to this situation. German settlers and officials in this part of the colony themselves suggested that colonisation was failing at the end of the German period. The German district officer in Lindi stated that: the more intelligent natives have become aware how the Government has to make economies everywhere . . . this provokes comparisons of Ger- man colonisation with that by other cultured nations . . . Lindi and envi- rons have always been centers of open and covert hatred and resistance by old elements against European rule . . . no improvement is discernible in their own lives, and they are bitter.25 Again during the development euphoria of the late 1940s missionaries and administrators spoke of the quiescence, the lack of ‘progress’, that characterized the region.26 The newly independent government in 1961 tried to deal with it by introducing schemes to aid the ‘Cinder- ella region’.27 Subsumed in the 1970s under the host of ‘villagization’ programmes, these schemes have since re-surfaced as support for what is now called the ‘Mtwara Development Corridor’, an attempt at cooperation with neighbouring Mozambique. Are all these schemes, then, faltering attempts to overcome the heritage of Maji Maji?

24 On the present situation in the Southeast, see Pekka Seppälä and Berta Koda (eds.), The Making of a Periphery: Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 1998). 25 Bezirksamt, Lindi to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 26 March 1911. TNA G 1/39, p. 1. 26 E.g. Lindi District Annual Report, 1948, TNA 16/11/260, p. 113. 27 Press release, unpaginated, 27/10/64, TNA 593/PRO/10. 302 chapter nine

The attempt to make the population losses and advance of wilderness caused by Maji Maji the cornerstone of an explanation of this situation is spoiled by the simple fact that demographic developments in the region after Maji Maji varied wildly. The one area that went into long-term demographic decline after Maji Maji was Liwale. Rod- erick Neumann has described how official policy towards the region favoured animals, elephants especially, over its human inhabitants. The misery created by rampant crop-raiding animals and the entrench- ment of sleeping sickness would eventually provide the justification for kicking cultivators out of the Selous Game Reserve altogether.28 For the region as a whole, the emptying of Liwale meant that it was cut off from the highlands north of Lake Nyasa and the Mahenge area, with which it had so vividly interacted at the time of Maji Maji. The gazetting of the Selous Game Reserve in 1947 eventually entrenched the status of a backwater that the region had acquired over the preceding decades. Still, in the other parts of the region the inter-war period brought stability, recovery from the earlier population losses and the beginning of a population growth that continues to the present. On the other hand, economic changes between 1907 and 1945 indicate that the marginality of the southeast developed from its poor position in the colonial peasant economy, made more difficult by insensitive colonial policies. Situated along some of the most active trade routes for slaves and ivory at the end of the pre-colonial period, the region had been center stage in the precolonial economy.29 It now had to fit into a colonial economy centred on the production and

28 The existence of sleeping sickness in Liwale was noticed by the British administration in 1924. In the following year, a serious outbreak led to 82 deaths by June. Kilwa district, Annual Report, 1924, TNA 1733/7. Another serious outbreak was noted in 1927/28. Provincial Commissioner, Lindi to Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 1 October 1928; Provincial Commissioner, Lindi to Director of Medical Services, Dar es Salaam, 16 March 1929, TNA 12698, vol. 1, pp. 1–4. After that, the illness abated or administrative attention waned until 1938, when another outbreak revived the discussion of population concentration: .Southern Province Annual Report, 1939, TNA 16/11/170, p. 15. With the exception of the river valleys in western Liwale, though, the way of life thus destroyed was not so much that of settled cultivators who had carved a stable niche out of the wilderness, but that of people who after decades of persecution had learned to live, as it were, with one foot in the wilderness. To this day it is said in Liwale that ‘it would be unwise not to have forest nearby . . . there is food in the forest’. 29 Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975). sudden disaster and slow 303 export of agricultural commodities, with village cultivators depending on crop sales for their access to cash. The status of the southeast as a backwater became entrenched during the initial two and a half decades of British rule. Changes in the economic geography of the region illustrate the transition. When asked in 1902 which long-distance route should be the first to be made into a permanent road in the southeast, German officials were clear that it should be the one from Songea to Kilwa, as it was the most heavily used.30 Their choice reflected the status of Kilwa as the largest hub in the long-distance trade network. At the time, the town was rich. A survey of religious donations and foundations, conducted by the German administration in 1897, put the value of various mosques, houses and plots dedicated to charitable purposes in Kilwa at about 50.000 Rupees.31 Fifteen years later, when the British administration took over, there was no thought of building a Kilwa- Songea road; the only major road built in the British period led from Lindi to Songea. It was a change that reflected the shift of economic interest from the sources of slaves (who in the late nineteenth century often originated from or were traded via the Ngoni frontier to Kilwa) to the sources of peasant produce (which was more plentiful in the hinterland of Lindi) and migrant labour, which came from the western districts of Tunduru and Songea. In this process, Maji Maji had an important catalytic effect. The slave trade had been in decline for a few years before the rebellion. In particular, Kilwa’s heyday was over with the suppression of slave exports, as the plantations in its vicinity had poor soils.32 Still, the traders of the town had maintained their prosperity thanks to plantation produce and a boom in the trade in wild rubber from Liwale and Mahenge. The rebellion paralysed the rubber trade and caused large losses of money advanced to traders. It also devastated some plantations and directed the produce of others from trade into feeding the

30 Militärstation Songea to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 15 January 1902. TNA G 1/37, p. 1. 31 Bezirksamt, Mikindani to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 30 September 1897; Bezirksamt, Lindi to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 28 February 1898; Bezirksamt, Kilwa to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 25 September 1897, TNA G 9/39, pp. 6–7 and 17. 32 Reports by agricultural officer Schroeder, Kilwa to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, TNA G8/19, passim, esp. Jochen Schroeder to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 21 Sep- tember 1893, TNA G 8/19, pp. 47–55. 304 chapter nine armies. Hundreds of traders lost their goods when they were pillaged or abandoned them.33 After the war, one of Kilwa’s largest traders, Rashid bin Masoud, had to be bailed out by the German government with the help of the German East African Company, in return for the support he had given to the German campaign in Songea. His debts ran to about 10,000 rupees. The resumption of the rubber trade from 1908 was not enough for Kilwa’s traders to rebuild their fortunes before plantation-produced rubber from southeast Asia destroyed the market for the Tanzanian product in 1912. The German East African Company began to encroach on their plantations.34 By the time British administrators settled in, Kilwa town and region were in a sorry state. The District Commissioner stated in 1923 that ‘the merchants are continually in litigation, mostly over debts incurred in the [First World] war.’35 In the same year, an ‘inordinate number of property offences’ was reported from the town, as the inhabitants fought over the remnants of irrecoverable wealth. Many people turned to petty occupations, such as digging for gum copal,36 fishing for sar- dines, or dagaa (a women’s occupation),37 or selling stolen coconuts.38 In the absence of a slave labor force, the old slave plantations could only be used for coconut, while the large extent of private land ownership prevented the establishment of sisal plantations in the vicinity. When a district officer in Kilwa was asked to make one of the remaining cannons in the town available for a museum in Dar es Salaam in 1931, he commented that it was like stripping the last jewels off a corpse.39 Kilwa, then, exemplifies the disintegration of the precolonial economy. Its situation was particularly difficult because its western hinterland, Liwale, was at the same time suffering the effects of policies particularly unfriendly towards peasants. Elsewhere, peasant produce

33 All these effects are reported in TNA G3/72, ‘damage reports’, passim. 34 On the German-East African Company in the Southeast, see Norbert Aas, Kolo- niale Entwicklung im Bezirksamt Lindi (Deutsch-Ostafrika): deutsche Erwartungen und regionale Wirklichkeit (Bayreuth: Bumerang, 1989). 35 District Annual Report 1923. TNA 1733/14. 36 District Agricultural Officer Sutherland, 15 March 1930, Kilwa district books, vol. 1, sheet 3. 37 District Agricultural Officer Sutherland, 29 October 1930, Kilwa district books, vol. 2, sheet 2. 38 Provincial Commissioner, Lindi to Secretariat, Dar es Salaam, 20 February 1930: rules enacted by the Native Authority of Kilwa. TNA 19224. 39 District Commissioner, Kilwa to Secretariat, Dar es Salaam. TNA 16/37/31. sudden disaster and slow 305 now became the mainstay of the export economy. But export statistics for what became the Southern Province between the world wars40 show that peasants here still depend on grain and oilseeds, which had already been the dominant peasant produce before the First World War.41 These were bulky, low-value commodities that quickly became unprofitable when transport costs were high. Already in the German period, European settlers had complained bitterly that the lack of transport made it impossible to market their crops profitably. Yet plans to build a ‘southern railway’ never came to fruition. When transport by lorry became a viable alternative to rail and porterage in 1927–8,42 the province had one major road, from Lindi inland via Masasi to Tunduru, which in 1933 was described as ‘terribly bad’.43 Transport costs drove producer prices down. In Masasi, only half way across the province, an amount of grain that sold for Sh 6/= at the coast fetched only Sh 1/= in 1934.44 Further west, in the districts of Masasi and above all Tunduru, migrant labor became a necessity in order to pay tax. After taxes were raised in 1925, it was impossible for people in these regions to obtain sufficient cash by selling grain on the coast. In 1931, the Provincial Commissioner stated that about 4000 men had left Tunduru in 1930 for work on the coast.45 This was about one man in two, considering that in 1920, Tunduru had a total 7.864 taxpayers, i.e. ‘able-bodied men’.46 This migrant labour contributed to an agricultural crisis that took on famine proportions repeatedly between 1928 and 1938.47 Depending

40 For 1924–32, TNA 21695, appendix; for 1936–39, Southern Province Annual Report 1939, annexure 5, TNA 16/11/170. 41 Breakdown of exports for 1938–39 by ports, in Southern Province Annual Report 1939, annexure 4, TNA 16/11/170; various district annual reports, TNA 1733/1–15. 42 On the beginnings of motorized transport in the region, see Missionsecho (1928), p. 35. 43 Minutes on food relief expenditure, 10 March 1933, TNA 21695, p. 25. 44 Provincial Commissioner, Lindi to Secretariat, Dar es Salaam, March 1934, TNA 19365, p. 78. 45 Provincial Commissioner, Lindi (Grierson) to Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 25 April 193, TNA 19365 vol. 1, p. 160. 46 Lindi District, Annual Report 1919/20, TNA 1733/1, p. 2. 47 Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for 1926, pp. 41–42; Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for 1926, pp. 41–42; Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for 1928, p. 73; TNA 19365, passim. E.K. Lumley, Forgotten Mandate. A British District Officer in Tanganyika (London: C. Hurst, 1976), pp. 54–9, has an account of this famine and the controversy with the Tunduru district officer, who steadfastly denied its existence. In 1930, an enquiry concluded that famine conditions had already obtained for two years in the district, and commented, “The truth of the matter is that the Tunduru 306 chapter nine on grain for both food and cash income,48 vulnerable households faced starvation after poor harvests. Foodstuffs were on sale near the locations where people went hungry, but those who lacked food also lacked the money to buy it. The administration had to step in—ferrying back to Masasi, as food relief, grain that peasants had early carried to the coast on their backs in order to obtain tax money.49 Other parts of the region, too, suffered food shortages. These troubles were costly. In 1928–9 £ 7,203 were spent on famine relief in Southern Province. In 1932, the cost of relief measures in Masasi and Tunduru combined amounted to £ 4500.50 Tunduru needed relief again in 1935.51 Attempts to introduce cotton as a cash crop failed, in spite of a flurry of enthusiasm in the 1920s.52 In 1930, the District Agricultural Officer in Lindi had a fairly shrewd idea about why it failed: “Popula- tion, land and climate permit of a great increase [in cotton production] . . . but the relation between the wealth created by, and the labor involved in cotton cultivation is such as to set a limit to effort and thus to production.”53 Moreover, said this same officer on another occasion,54

district has, if I may put it so, been slowly falling to pieces economically for the last three years.” 48 The prices per ton can be calculated from the trade statistics in the annual reports for Tanganyika Territory. Tanganyika Territory, Annual Reports for 1927, p. 44, Annual Report for 1928, p. 38, Annual Report for 1929, p. 39, Annual Report for 1930, pp. 46–47, Annual Report for 1931, pp. 49–50, Annual Report for 1932, pp. 46–47, Annual Report for 1933, pp. 49–50, Annual Report for 1934, pp. 63–64, Annual Report for 1935, pp. 62–63, Annual Report for 1936, pp. 61–62, Annual Report for 1937, pp. 66–67, Annual Report for 1938, pp. 67–68. According to these statistics, the unit value of the main export products of Southern Province lay between about a fifth (for beeswax) and a fiftieth (for grains) of that of coffee. As these statistics were intended to reflect export earnings, they were calculated on world market prices. The prices paid to up country producers would have been considerably lower. 49 Provincial Commissioner, Lindi to Secretariat, Dar es Salaam, March 1934. TNA 19365, p. 78. 50 Provincial Commissioner Grierson to Chief Secretary, 19 September 1932, TNA 19365, p. 15. 51 Provincial Commissioner Kitching to Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, 16 June 1936, TNA 19365, p. 112. 52 Lindi District, Annual Report, 1920/21, TNA 1733/5. Lindi District, Annual Report 1924, TNA 1733/94; Lindi District, Annual Report, 1925, TNA 1733/10; Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam to Provincial Commissioners, 8 September 1926, TNA 16/15/8 vol. 1, p. 1; Mikindani District Agricultural Officer to Senior Agricultural Officer, Lindi, 20 January 1930, TNA 16/15/8, p. 31. 53 District Agricultural Officer Latham to Secretariat, Dar es Salaam, 14 September 1929, TNA 16/15/8, vol. 1, p. 19. 54 District Agricultural Officer Latham, Lindi to Southern Province ginnery owners, 17 July 1936, TNA 16/15/8,, vol. 1, p. 122. sudden disaster and slow 307

One of the criticisms of cotton marketing from the native point of view is that at most markets their produce is dumped on the scales, they are given a piece of paper with some figures on it, told to empty their cotton in a shed, and then queue up for payment. Not until they get the cash in their hands do they really know what they are getting for their produce and then it is too late to protest against weight or price or anything, for their cotton is already mixed with that of a hundred others. The business is rushed and they are treated like cattle at a fair. As with the tax hike in 1925, insensitive policy, in this case the imposition of buying monopolies, compounded the agricultural problems of the peasants to make cotton not worth their while. On the other hand, tax collections in southeast Tanzania were poor. They had been chequered throughout the 1920s. With the onset of the world economic crisis in 1930 tax collection collapsed, and stayed at rock bottom for the next four years.55 Administrators blamed the inhabitants rather than economic conditions. “I feel it is necessary to grab ‘what we can while we can’ . . . We must instil a ‘tax sense’ in the native and I feel that privation is one of the methods”, wrote a district officer in 1934, referring to the practice of relieving peasants of their hard-earned cash at cotton markets the moment they obtained it.56 Moreover, the depression took particularly long to pass in the southeast. While elsewhere a note of relief was sounded in 1935, the Provin- cial Commissioner in Lindi reported that “Economic conditions have not altered materially . . . the province has experienced another disappointing year.”57 In 1937, Southern Province was the only province in the country where tax rates were lowered, to become the lowest in the country.58 Partly because of these poor results, the central administration responded with increasing disinterest to the economic problems of the southeast. Figures on the cost of famine relief were produced to suggest that the province had received so much money in food aid that it could not reasonably expect much by way of investment—especially as it brought in so little in taxes. With little money available, central government followed the ‘St Matthew’s principle’—he who hath shall

55 Statistics from 1932 annual report, TNA 16/11/77; Minutes of a meeting in Lindi of the Provincial Commissioner, District Commissioners and Secretary for Native Affairs, 10 March 1933, TNA 21695, pp. 23–26. 56 Acting District Officer, Masasi to Senior Agricultural Officer, Lindi, 9 August 1934, TNA 16/15/8, vol. 2, p. 183. 57 Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for 1935, p. 10. 58 Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report for 1937, p. 52. 308 chapter nine be given—and concentrated its interest in regions where peasant agriculture involved higher value, more profitable, goods. Considering how differently cotton production developed in Cen- tral and Lake provinces, which had a railway link to Dar es Salaam, the negative effect which the Maji Maji War had on plans to build a southern railway may constitutes one of the most severe consequences of the uprising for the economy of the region. But the geography of the economic troubles of the inter-war period does not correspond exactly to the damage caused by the Maji Maji war. The districts of Masasi and Tunduru where famine was now most costly had suffered relatively little in the war. The Makonde plateau, where taxation was particularly difficult, had barely participated. On the other hand, those parts of western Lindi district that had been at the forefront of the uprising were now not particularly famished and very rarely attracted the attention of administrators. Only in Liwale had Maji Maji become the beginning of the end of a way of life. Elsewhere, the population losses it had caused were but one of many problems, and one that gradually began to set itself right. On the other hand, with many other rural parts of Africa, southeast Tanzania experienced the negative effects of routine colonial policies that reduced certain areas to “labor reserves.”

Maji Maji and Religious Change

Among the many facets of society affected by Maji Maji was religion.59 The following pages concentrate on it. They argue for a nexus between religious movements and a quest for the reform of social relations in the face of the changes wrought by commercial integration and colonialism. This approach enables us to place the religious after-effects of the war in context. It has been suggested that Maji Maji precipitated religious change by causing disenchantment with the beliefs that

59 Gilbert Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji”, in Terence Ranger and Isaria N Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion(Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1972), pp. 202–17, Thaddeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanza- nia)”, Journal of African History, 38 (1997): 235–59; Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji. The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania,” Journal of African History, 39 (1998): 95–120; Felicitas Becker, ‘Traders, Big Men and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion, 1905–07.’ Journal of African History 45 (2004): 1–22. sudden disaster and slow 309 had so spectacularly failed in it,60 or because the prophets of the maji themselves introduced elements of Islam. Both of these suggestions are half true, yet misleading. There was disenchantment, but it was not directed against the aspects of indigenous religion most in evidence in the war. There were conversions to Islam in the run-up to Maji Maji, but the subsequent spread of Islam in Southeast Tanzania owes little to these converts. As with the transformation of the villagers of the region into peasants, many of the conditions for religious change subsequent to Maji Maji were already set before the war occurred. Thus Maji Maji became a stage in, rather than primary cause of, long-term changes. Religion in southeast Tanzania faced challenges well before the Maji Maji War because the societies of the region were in flux. The German colonisers were the latest addition to a long line of Yao traders, Makua hunters, Ngoni raiders, Zanzibari settlers, coastal traders and others more who had made their presence felt in the course of the nineteenth century.61 Oral accounts from Lindi district identify German rule as already the second enzi or empire to touch the region, after Arab rule. The expansion of long-distance trade and Zanzibari hegemony had created opportunity for members of the stateless societies in southeast Tanzania who were in the position to set themselves up as intermediaries. On the other hand, it contributed to the persistent warfare and insecurity that characterised the late nineteenth century by providing markets for weapons and slaves. Already before the imposition of Ger- man rule, the inhabitants of southeast Tanzania knew that they were increasingly susceptible to outside influences, as the memory of Arab rule shows. At the same time, the literature on the beliefs surrounding Maji Maji reminds us that it was an important aim of indigenous religion to offer protection not only against wild animals and witches, but also against invaders and eventually against bullets. Dawa, or medicine, such as the maji, was often the means to provide such protection, but it required expert handling. People who had the power to control others were supposed also to be able to command these protective powers; if not in person, then by recourse to specialists called waganga,

60 Iliffe,Modern History. 61 The most comprehensive account of this interaction is still Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa. 310 chapter nine Photo by Felicitas Becker Plate 9.1. The German boma at Lindi in 2004 sudden disaster and slow 311 or healers. In an age where the power of rulers increasingly depended on commercial relations, which were often exploitative, this protective religious role was thrown into question. External resources and influences challenged the established roles of leaders and healers. In the events that led to the outbreak of Maji Maji, healers such as Kin- jikitile assumed the role of leaders, seeking to reconcile two aspects of leadership connected by religious belief but increasingly disassociated in practice. Simultaneously, they sought to assert the capacities of the medicines they used against the technology of the colonisers, insisting on the validity of their own methods and knowledge. The attempts of the healers who produced themaji failed, but subsequent developments show that their aim did not lose its importance. The issue of the spiritual responsibility of individuals for the well- being of society resurfaced only a few years after the war in connection with the so-called “Mecca letter affair.”62 The letters predicted the end of European rule and the coming of judgement day, and called upon Muslims to dissociate themselves from non-believers and live pure, pious lives. Lindi was the first place in German East Africa where they came to the notice of the authorities, but the letters spread far inland and caused a stir in, for instance, the new garrison town of Iringa.63 Iringa, like other areas where the letters reached, was outside the Maji Maji zone. Still, their message echoed that of in Maji Maji: it promised deliverance from European rule and a better future if only the recipients of the message abided by its rules.64 In contrast to Maji Maji, there was no mention of warfare and the message was very clearly cast in Muslim terms. But like the maji, the letters promised deliverance from the present political predicament and a new kind of citizenship unfettered by European rule in a universal Muslim polity.65 As with Maji Maji, the fulfilment of millenarian hopes depended partly

62 See Iliffe, Tanganyika under German rule 1905–1912, pp. 189–99; B.G. Martin, ‘The Qadiri and Shadili brotherhoods in East Africa, 1880–1910’, in B.G. Martin,Mus- lim brotherhoods in nineteenth century Africa, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 152–76. 63 Bezirksamt, Iringa to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 10 September 1908. TNA G9/46, p. 87. 64 Bezirksamt, Kilwa to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 7 January 1913. TNA G 9/48, p. 85; Lindi Bezirksamt to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 12 January 1909. TNA G9/46, p. 161. 65 This is similar to the idea of citizenship under the Zanzibar sultanate which emerged during Maji Maji. The expectation of the coming of the Sayyid’s government is mentioned in ‘Die Reise des hochwürdigen Herrn Bischof Thomas Spreiter nach Matumbi und Kwiro’, Mbl 13 (1909: 51–66, 81–87, 97–123. 312 chapter nine on the behaviour of the recipients of the message, with an emphasis on avoidance rules: sexual and other taboos for the Maji, avoidance of contact with Europeans for the letters. One German officer learned about the letters when his girlfriend “gave notice.”66 The affinity between themaji and the letters is supported also by the fact that the Mecca letters were received and discussed mostly not among coastal Muslims, but among Africans of poor background and little formal education; in other words, people like those who had done most of the fighting in the rebellion. On the other hand, the dissimilar- ity that lies in the unambiguously Muslim message of the letters is also significant. While the Muslim elite of the coast had lost its material power to their German overlords (a fact that again became very evident during the Mecca letter affair, when German authorities in Lindi incarcerated members of the Zanzibari Rumaliza dynasty),67 Islam became more important as a source of ideas with which to figure out the new political dispensation. The career of the Mecca letters among people who were recognizably Muslim, but not part of the Muslim elite, signals a rapprochement between indigenous thought and Islam.68 Islam could authorize claims and expectations similar to those of the maji. The defeat of themaji had not done away with the millenarian aspirations that had accompanied it. It had not stopped people thinking that there was a need to reconstruct the polity. This quest for reconstruction did not proceed at the expense of those elements of indigenous religion that had been most visible, and arguably most misleading, in the Maji Maji War, namely medicine and healing. In recent interviews on Maji Maji, collected almost a hundred years after the events, the maji medicine is rarely dismissed as an impossible proposition. The fact that it is not reconcilable with textbook science is of little import to informants and many people believe that it worked in some instances, or that it could have worked if handled better.69 If informants speak of maji as a superstition, this is to acknowledge that it is in conflict with religious, not scientific, concepts. The claim the Maji was a fraud—a fairly common opinion—

66 Bezirksamt, Kilwa to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 7 January 1913, TNA G 9/48, p. 85. 67 Report on Mecca letter affair, 11 November 1908, TNA G 9/46, p. 103. 68 Lindi Bezirksamt to Gouvernement, Dar es Salaam, 12 January 1909, TNA G9/46, p. 161. 69 For example, Jamaldini Rashid Majoe, Rwangwa, September 3, 2003 and Mzee Issa Makolela, Rwangwa, September 3, 2003. sudden disaster and slow 313 Photo by Felicitas Becker Plate 9.2. The Prison at Lindi where Maji fighters were held 314 chapter nine does not imply that it could not have worked. Rather, it is a judgement against the people who produced and spread it.70 The conviction that there are powerful substances whose use demands a privileged knowledge is very much alive, and with it the assertion of the knowledge and capabilities of healers. Clearly, the defeat of the maji has not lead to a questioning of the notion of medicine per se. The witchcraft cleansing movements which recurred in southeast Tanzania throughout the twentieth century, meanwhile, provide plenty of evidence of the persisting influence of healers.71 Movements large enough to attract the attention of administrators occurred in every decade from the 1920s to 1960s. For the early decades after independence, the record is obscure, but they appear to have enjoyed a recrudescence since the 1990s. While the differences between the movements are significant, they do share important features. The most salient one is the association of all of them with the name of an individual healer, whose name often became synonymous with the movement: ‘Ngoja’ in the 1920–30s, ‘Nguvumali’ in the 1950s, ‘Kingwandu’ in the present time. Regarding Ngoja, administrators appreciated that he was posing a political challenge:72 Politically such a movement is highly undesirable from the hold which these unscrupulous natives obtain over the popular imagination, to the detriment of the influences of the chiefs and headmen whose prestige it is essential should be fostered in the early days of Native Administration.

70 This is particularly evident in interviews from Mnero, a location within rebellious Mwera country but close to the border with Liwale: interviews with Mzee Xaveri Karlo Makota and Thadeo Kadume, Mnero-Ngongo, September 13, 2000 and Mzee Saidi Bakari Matupulango, Mnero-Kipara, September 23, 2000. 71 In response to a measles epidemic in Newala, it was reported that, “Visango are being held to find out who those witches are who are killing the children” (‘visango hujifanyia wapate kuwajua wale wachawi wanaoua watoto’): “Habari za mikoani,” Mambo Leo (November 1928; Lorne E. Larson, “Witchcraft Eradication Sequences among the People of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, Tanzania,” Paper presented at the History of African Religious Systems Conference. Limuru, Kenya. 1974; Hasani bin Ismail, Swifa ya nguvumali. The Medicine Man, ed. and translated by Peter Lien- hard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959). In 2003, a court case was pending against one witchcraft eradication expert in Lindi for causing public strife, while “cleansed” inhabitants of the village where he had been arrested complained that due to the arrest their neighbours had been allowed to keep their witchcraft implements. 72 Mahenge Province, Annual Report, 1928, TNA 11680/74. Quoted in Larsen, “Witchcraft Eradication Sequences.” sudden disaster and slow 315

Medicines invariably have played an important part in witchcraft cleansing, both as evidence of the real threat posed by witchcraft and as means to enforce future abstinence from it. The presence of the book religions and the objections of science never imperilled the notions of witchcraft and its control. Rather, some movements incorporated the notion of God, while modern medicine has supplied a different way of validating it, by speaking of it as a ‘vaccination’ against the use of witchcraft.73 Thus the persistence of the notions of healers and medicine does not make them remnants of a past world-view lost in a contemporary landscape. Rather, the best explanation for their persistence lies in their adaptability. They have changed and absorbed new influences not least under the influence of the book religions. The Quran has become established as a source of medicine and Mus- lim practices have entered into witchcraft cleansing, while the most important taboos now are the Muslim prohibitions on foodstuffs.74 Here we pass to the consideration of religious change after Maji Maji, and especially to the subsequent spread of Islam. In the years following the war, Islam spread quickly. The First World War obscures the record for the 1910s, but it is clear that by the end of this war, Islam had entered an expansionary phase that continued at least until independence.75 Why the Maji Maji War should have contributed to it is less clear than it seems, given that people in southeast Tanzania were apparently not looking for an alternative to the indigenous religious notions employed in the war. Religious innovation after Maji Maji did not proceed by dismissing the notions present in the rebellion, but by adding to them. In fact, the evidence that Islam was implicated in the spread of the uprising, or spread along with the maji, is problematic. For both the Mwera and Liwale regions, contemporary reports say that large numbers of people demanded a form of Muslim “baptism”

73 For Muslim elements, see Larson, “Witchcraft Eradication Sequences” and Hasani bin Ismail, Swifa ya Nguvumali. Recent Muslim reform movements are more averse to witchcraft eradication. The analogy with vaccination was used in Mingoyo Village, one of the sites of the 2002 witchcraft eradication campaign. 74 Lorne Larson, “Witchcraft Eradication Sequences.” On the use of Quranic magic, see Mambo Leo (August 1925); Interviews with Mzee Juma Nahodha II, Ruponda November 23, 2000 and Mzee Musa Saidi Nambarika, Nkowe, November 21, 2000. 75 Mbl 40 (1936): 217–9, 39 (1935): 137, 46 (1951): 122. 316 chapter nine along with initiation into the use of maji before joining the war. The following quote concerns Liwale:76 I acted in concert with my mentor and carried out mass conversions at a pool. . . . We were inundated with work and had to escape to get our meals. The people were panic-stricken and raised an outcry whenever a preacher stopped work. . . . It was conversion through intoxication, not real conversion. However, these conversions may have been motivated primarily by a desire to deal with an immediate threat, rather than an appreciation of the Muslim religion. Still, it appears that they outlasted the war. In 1908 Thomas Spreiter, Bishop of the Mission Benedictines and successor of Cassian Spiss, who had been killed by Ngindo insurgents in 1905, found that many people in Liwale insisted that they were “Mus- lims, not Ngindo.” The phrase is revealing: for people in this region, being Muslim had in effect become an alternative to being Ngindo, at a time when “Ngindo” signified association with the failedmaji of the war. More broadly speaking, conversion to Islam at the time of the war underlined the determination of some of the insurgents, for instance in the Matumbi Hills, to acquire citizenship in the expanding society of the coast. Still, Ngindo Muslims today do not take Maji Maji as the starting point of the history of Islam in this region. Rather, they describe the coming of Islam as the result of the cumulative efforts of local elders, a family of immigrant traders from Somalia who had settled in Liwale town, and young men who went to the coast to study Islam and became teachers on their return to the villages. In their pursuit of powerful knowledge, they resembled the prophets of the maji, but they were no longer insurgents. Rather, they contributed to an internal debate within their societies as they sought to come to terms with the unfathomable powers to which they were increasingly exposed.

The Present in the Past: Remembering Maji Maji

In understanding the religious aftermath of Maji Maji, the insistence of present-day informants that the maji might have worked is an

76 A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott, “The Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo speaking Peoples” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cape Town, 1956), pp. 484–5. sudden disaster and slow 317 important example of the persistence of religious notions evident in the war. This, however, does not mean it is an accurate judgement; many historians would tend to suggest the opposite. This is only one of many conundrums present in the oral record of the war, especially in more recent accounts. The oral record provides insights, however, into both the persistence and the obsolescence of notions present in the rebellion. While it also reflects the increasing distance in time, the difficulty of remembering and the many factors that have intervened to shape memories, it demonstrates the persistence of certain long- standing notions in imbuing the past with meaning. The successive generations of oral accounts of the uprising start with the mostly anecdotal information collected and paraphrased by missionaries and colonial administrators from the 1930s to the 1950s.77 In 1967–69, the Maji Maji Research Project of the University of Dar es Salaam interviewed witnesses of the rebellion in Matumbi and Umwera. Since 2000, I and other scholars in several parts of the region have included questions on Maji Maji in historical interviews.78 A comparison of newer and older interviews highlights how politic the narrators have been. The accounts given to the colonial administrator Bell emphasised the role of a handful of individuals, the majumbe or village headmen of Liwale, who reportedly forced commoners into battle. They minimized the role of “ordinary” Liwaleans. Meanwhile, the accounts collected by African students of the University of Dar es Salaam in 1967–9 are much more prone to stating popular resentment against European rule as a motive for the uprising. The comparative lack of mention of this factor in accounts collected by a European in 2000 and 2003, conversely, may partly be attributed to the identity of the interviewer. Moreover, the salience of anti-colonial sentiment in interviews from the 1960s reminds us that informants’ accounts are informed by the public discourses of their day. However partisan, the interviews from the 1960s were mostly still eyewitness accounts. This is no longer true of the more recent ones. Interviews collected now come from a gray area between individual

77 For the region considered here, most importantly R.M. Bell, ‘The Maji Maji Rebellion in the Liwale District’, TNR 42 (1950): pp. 38–57. 78 The results of these interviews have informed Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji”, and Becker, “Traders, big men and prophets.” The following paragraphs are based on about eighty interviews collected in 2000 and 2003 dealing with Maji Maji among other topics. Interviews cited are examples that express a point particularly clearly. 318 chapter nine recollection, passed on to family members, and oral traditions re- worked and re-told to conform to present-day norms. Their inac- curacies can be bewildering. In the testimonies I collected in Lindi and Rwangwa districts from 2000 to 2004, two points particularly caused confusion. The first was the conflation of different wars into one, combining Maji Maji with the Ngoni wars or even with the First World War. The other was the question of whether Maji Maji was a war among Africans or a war against Europeans.79 Quite a few informants insisted that this war pitted Africans against each other. Some reasons can be adduced for these contradictions. In the first instance, they simply exemplify the fallibility of memory. The conflation of different events and mis-statement of chronology that occur in these records are characteristic of oral transmission. Moreover, the different stances taken betray differences in knowledge and in the individual experiences passed on by earlier generations. The insistence of some informants that Maji Maji was a war among Africans probably reflects the grim realities of the war. African soldiers did most of the fighting on the German side. Moreover, the claim makes sense as a reference to the major attack launched by the “loyalist” Matola against his rebellious Mwera neighbours.80 That said, some of the spurious claims in the recent interviews also reflect an on-going effort to re-work memory to reflect issues of concern in the present day. For instance, in recent accounts some of the most cohesive explanations for the war are ones that make reference to family ties, a much-used metaphor for understanding the social and political life of the villages. In both Ubena as in Liwale, it is said that the desire for a European wife prompted a local leader to go to war with the Europeans.81 The following example of a historically hope- lessly inaccurate, but nevertheless revealing, interview provides evidence of yet another on-going concern of villagers, namely to assert the value of their own experience as a vantage point for appreciating the history of their country. It concerns the careers of the two most

79 An example of the former stance is Bi Tekla Abdallah Ngajuwe, Mnacho-Chim- bila, August 31, 2000, and for the latter Mohamed Kawambe, Mnacho-Nandagala, September 3, 2000. 80 The claim that Maji Maji was a war among Africans occurred often among informants in Mnacho, a location close to Matola’s sphere of influence. 81 For Ubena, see chapter by Giblin in this volume; for Liwale, see interview with Mzee Chande Hassan Kigwalilo, Liwale October 11, 2000. sudden disaster and slow 319 noted Maji Maji leaders among the Mwera in the Lindi hinterland and was given by Jamaldini Rashid Majoe in the town of Rwangwa, on 3 September 2003. Prompted by a question not about Maji Maji, but about his ancestry, Mzee Majoe stated that:82 A long time ago my grandfather, whose name was Mzee Matoroka, lived here. Mzee Matoroka had a shemeji (sister’s husband) called Mzee Mamba . . . Unfortunately in 1914 war broke out. This was the war of the Germans and the English. The English set up camp [here] in Likangara, over there—and the Germans set up camp up there in Nanguto . . . They fought [each other], but this war was being run by those two elders, Mzee Matoroka and his shemeji, Mzee Mamba . . . These two men persuaded both sides. They go to the English and say [the Germans] are there, and they go to the Germans and tell them the same thing [about the English]. So the war went on but eventually the Germans were driven out of Likangara by the English . . . the war ended at Mahiwa . . . And they [Mamba and Matoroka] arrived there . . . there was a woman, a European nurse in the hospital there, called Regia. This Regia had remained [while] the other Europeans had run away to Lindi. [She sat in an elevated place] and shot at people with her pistol. Really people were scared and dying there. But they didn’t know what was killing them. The two elders understood that there was a person somewhere trying to finish them off, so they climbed up to where she was. She tried to shoot them but the bullets would not enter their bodies . . . They went right up to her, grabbed her and stabbed her to death . . . Matoroka and his in-law went away taking the bell of the mosque, eh, of the church with them; they brought it here to Rwangwa in order to make hoes out of it. Unfortunately it was not possible to make hoes . . . it turned into nothing but bullets. After the war had calmed down, they came to look for Mzee Matoroka and Mzee Mamba to take them with them to hang them in Lindi because of their intrigues to change the war so that it would be known where the Germans were and where the English. This is followed by a long story about futile attempts to hang or shoot the two men. Hangman’s ropes tore; bullets fell off their skins. They could only be killed using machetes on their own instructions. Mzee Majoe said that the two elders are still remembered in initiation ceremonies, where the initiates are confronted with their effigies as part of their introduction to their own history. Majoe’s account makes many typical and some idiosyncratic mis- takes. It is typical in conflating Maji Maji and the First World War,

82 Jamaldini Rashid Majoe, Rwangwa, September 3, 2003. 320 chapter nine in suggesting that the maji worked at least for Mamba and Matoroka, and in producing an account of the executions that insinuates that the two men had not lost the powers conferred on them by their medicine even after they were arrested.83 On the other hand, the long story of the ‘nurse with her gun’ is an attempt to vindicate his ancestors by giving a valid reason to the killing of this woman, who in actual fact was an unarmed nun from the Benedictines’ convent in Nyangao. The narrator, then, is concerned to make these two local war leaders, however pointless the war in his version of events, morally acceptable by the standards of the present. The insistence that Selemani Mamba and Saidi Matoroka between them led on both the British and German armies, moreover, also serves rhetorical aims. It puts the two local elders at the centre of historical events. Here, Majoe’s agenda meets that of many informants who insist that Maji Maji was a war among Africans. The claim may unduly exonerate colonial oppression, but at the same time it re-es- tablishes local people as the makers of their own history. Similarly, the anti-colonial aim of the rebellion may be described as directed not only against colonial rulers, but against any sort of rulers, as in the words “hawakupenda kutawaliwa,” or “they [our forebears] did not like to be governed.”84 The opposition against colonial rule, then, is not necessarily framed in nationalist terms. Rather, informants assert a sort of parochial patriotism. In this regard, present-day attitudes may be closer to those of a hundred years ago than they were at the heyday of nationalism in the 1960s. This assertion, however, is not free of ambiguity. Ancestors are often described as significantly more powerful than their descendants, inhabiting a world in which rain dances, sacrifice, medicines and prophecy can be expected to work as a matter of course.85 On one hand, this description asserts that society in the past was cohesive, ordered and capable of dealing with the challenges it faced. On the other hand, given the history of colonial domination, the ancestors with all their strength were not able to safeguard the independence of

83 Similar embellishments occurred in interviews with Mzee Issa Makolela, Rwangwa, September 3, 2003, and Mzee Mohamed Kawambe, Mnacho-Nandagala September 3, 2000. 84 Mzee Ali Juma Ali Ngani Malibiche and Juma Ali Malibiche, Ita, October 8, 2000. 85 Interviews with Mzee Ibrahim Nassoro Bakari Kimbegu, Rwangwa November 18, 2000 and Shehe Ali Hassan Mnajilo, Mnacho-Ng’au, November 20, 2000. sudden disaster and slow 321 the villagers. Above all, their strength is no longer of practical use to their descendants. The mighty ancestors inhabit a netherworld, while their present-day descendants have to get by without their abilities and confidence. The evaluation of the past is complicated by the open questions of the present.

INDEX

African soldiers in German military. See Gwassa, Gilbert, 3, 13–14, 19, 33, 36 askari. Alliances, among African peoples, Hassel, Th eodore von, 99, 107 62–63, 265; between Africans and Healing. See medicine. Germans, 244–47 Hongo (snake spirits), 80–81, 84–85 Askari, 202, 204, 249, 278–81, 283, 296, Hongo Said, 27, 267; and as “Sahidi,” 59 318; and Christianity, 163–64; and Hunting: European, 118, 131. See also families, 168–72; and honor, 151, Ungindo, hunting in 154–55, 160; and Islam, 161–68, 178; Hussein, Ebrahim, 16–17, 18–19, 27 and masculinity, 151, 172–77; and rugaruga, 175; and slavery, 168; Ifakara, 6, 106, 114 brutality of, 155–59, 206, 251–53, 280; Iliffe, John, 14–15, 33 during Maji Maji, 156–59; numbers Islam, 104–105, 200, 213–14, 233–34, of during Maji Maji war, 150 n. 4; 295–96, 315; and askari, 161–68, 178; Sudanese background of, 167, 173; Mecca letter affair, 311–12 wives of, 168–72 Ivory hunting and trade, 119–122, 124–26, 129–30, 139; African tech- Bokero, 39, 44, 46, 55, 68, 80, 84–85, niques of, 137; and political authority, 200 n. 57 123–26, 133, 139; and use of medi- Bushiri rebellion, 128–29 cines in, 137–38; custom of ground tusk, 126, 132–33, 137; German regu- Chabruma, 8, 26, 52 n. 58, 61–62, 78, lation of, 130–36, 145–47; prices, 126, 92, 140, 143, 192 n. 28, 194–95, 197, 129, 135, 136 n. 76. See also Ungindo, 199–200, 215–16, 223, 227–28, hunting in 236–38, 246, 261, 265 Colonial rule. See Alliances, between Jamaliddini, Abdul Karim bin, 17, 117 Africans and Germans; Askari; Johannes, Major Kurt, 18, 196, 197 German colonialism in East Africa; n. 47, 199, 206, 207, 209, 215, 218, Götzen, Graf G.A.; Ivory hunting and 263 trade, German regulation of; Maji Maji war, German military in; Kibasila, 20, 53, 117, 123, 139 Taxation and Tax Collection, by Kidugala, 256, 267 Germans; Ungoni, German colonial Kikole, 7, 190, 203, 211, 222, 232, rule in; Wildlife reserves 234–38 Kilwa, 5, 6, 11, 17, 103, 303; estimate of Dar es Salaam, 6 population, 298 Kinjala, Omari, 14, 26, 38 n. 15, 47, 78, Elephant hunting. See Ivory hunting and 91, 108–11, 139–41, 187, 196–99, 215, trade 224–28 Kinjikitile Ngwale, 6, 14, 17, 24, 35, 46, First World War, 300, 318–19 65, 138, 268 Kisongera, 7, 195, 203, 232 German colonialism in East Africa: Kitanda, 9, 25, 92, 182, 197, 223–28 beginnings of, 128–29, 242, 244–47 Kolelo. See Bokero Götzen, Graf G.A., 12, 21, 37 n. 10, 59, 77, 118, 131, 143, 183, 206, 218, 251 Leuthner, Father Francis, 203–04, Gröschel, Paul, 20–21, 59, 251, 260, 228–232 262, 268–83, 289; political position in Lindi, 7, 144, 296, 311–12; estimate of Njombe, 281–82, 289 population, 298 324 index

Litunu Fereji, 234, 238 Milo, 7, 59 Liwale 55, 56, 58–59, 316–17 Mkomanile. See Nkomanile. Lupembe, 57, 244, 246–48, 255–56, 262, Mkomanire. See Nkomanile. 266–67, 271 Mkwawa, 243–46 Mohoro, 6, 17, 22, 24 Mahenge, 6, 8, 80, 248; attack on 107 Mpangile, 9, 21, 248–49, 251, 260, Maji Maji Research Project (MMRP), 3, 264–6, 271–72, 274, 279, 284 15, 29 n. 65, 33–35, 77, 140, 142 Mshope (kingdom in Ungoni), 73, 140, n. 27, 185, 267, 284, 317 188, 190–91, 193, 195, 200, 202, 213, Maji Maji War: as cause of decline 223, 241, 243, 246 of slavery, 303–04; as cause of famine, 297; as cause of regional Ndendeule. See Wandendeule marginalization, 301–03, 308; askari Ngamenye, 142 in, 156–59; chronology of, 5–8; Ngarambe, 46, 55, 68, 104, 109, 138 demographic and environmental Ngindo. See Ungindo. effects of, 297, 300, 302; elephant Ngoja bin Kimeta, 110, 314 hunters in, 139–143; German military Ngoni. See Ungoni. in, 28–29; historiography of, 10–15, Ngozingozi, 9, 216, 246, 248–49, 251–55, 33–36, 259 260, 264, 266, 271, 289 Maji medicine, 10, 22, 46–47, 107, Njelu (kingdom in Ungoni), 73, 130, 103–104, 196, 199, 200, 212, 215, 226, 141, 186, 188, 190–91, 193, 199–202, 247, 256, 264, 266–70, 289, 309–14, 223, 230, 237 316; and Christianity, 65–68; and Njombe, 7, 11, 20–21, 38, 57, 241–42, Islam, 67–68; and modernity, 63–69; 247; Maji Maji war in, 247; post-Maji historiography of, 35–38; stories of, Maji war famine in, 253; Wahehe 48, 50–56, 61. See also Ungindo, maji in, 241, 243, 245, 248, 256; Wangoni medicine in in, 241; Wasangu in, 241, 243, 245, Makunganya, Hassan Omari, 11 248–49, 256, 267, 286 Maneromango, 6, 8, 20, 53 Nkomanile, 25, 92, 108, 181–82, 187, Mang’ua, 232, 234 197–99, 213, 223–24, 226–27, 238 Mapanda, Abdallah, 47, 55–56, 72, 78, Nyangao, 7, 320 91, 103, 105, 109–10, 117, 139, 141 Nyikamtwe, 242, 248, 263, 283 Masasi, 6, 7, 23, 73, 296 Masculinity, 184, 189–90. See also Peramiho, 7, 8, 195, 203, 228, 230, 232–33 Askari, and masculinity Population before Maji Maji war, Masoud, Rashidi bin, 26, 52, 73, 190, 298–300. See also Ungoni, 203, 207, 211–12, 214, 216, 218, demographic impact of Maji Maji 232–38, 304 war in Matumbi. See Umatumbi Mbeyela Mkongwa, 241–42, 246–48, Rufi ji River, 5,6, 37, 46, 81, 86, 117–18, 253, 255–56, 260, 262, 271, 273, 282, 123, 125 284, 287–88 Rugaruga, 175, 207, 224, 296 Mbunga confederacy, 72, 86–87, 106–07, Rumor, 39–40, 41, 55–60, 266–67, 130, 141–42 269–70 Medicine, 38, 42–44, 47, 81–83; and shrines and ritual centers, 43–46, 58, Schumann, Christian, 54, 57, 59, 247, 79–81, 84–85, 88, 104–05, 109. See 262, 266–67, 271, 283 also Ungindo, medicine in; Ungindo, Selous Game Reserve, 302 shrines and ritual centers in Slavery, 191–92, 207, 212, 233–34, Merere, 23, 62, 65, 241, 245, 248, 256, 236–37. See also Sutu; Women, and 273 slavery, 168–70 Mgende, 9, 43–44, 78, 296, 297 Smallpox, 83–84, 94, 270 Millenarianism, 104, 311–312; and Snake spirits. See Hongo Islam 104 Somanga, 6, 49 index 325

Songea, 7–9, 26, 38; executions at, 66 188–90, 198, 210, 213–14; origins of Songea Mbano, 47, 188–89, 193, 200, Wangoni, 187; post-Maji Maji famine 208, 212 in, 217–18 Spiss, Bishop Cassian, 6, 56, 216 n. 120, Upangwa, 248, 251, 264 230–31, 316 Usangu, 26, 62, 65 Sutu (slaves in Ungoni), 188–90, 198, Utengule (in Njombe), 18, 248–49, 255, 210, 213–14 263, 269; mass executions at, 264 Utete (in Ungindo), 89, 106 Taxation and Tax Collecting, by Uvidunda, 8, 45 Germans, 95–96, 100, 195, 211, 247, Uzaramo, 25, 27, 123–25, 139–140 261, 264–65, 278–82 Trade routes and long-distance trade, Vidunda. See Uvidunda 79, 87–89, 91, 93–94, 181, 190, 235 Wabena. See Njombe. Ubena. See Njombe. Wahehe. See Uhehe; Njombe, Wahehe Uhehe, 26 in Ulanga, 15, 87, 241, 243 Wandendeule, 72, 92, 187, 213 Umatumbi, 6, 8, 11, 22, 49, 50–51, 297 Wangindo. See Ungindo Undonde, 74, 76, 91, 95, 101; Maji Maji Wangoni. See Ungoni; Njombe, War in, 108–110 Wangoni in Ungindo, 25, 37, 61–62, 130, 141; “War of the Pumpkins,” 11 agriculture in, 74, 78, 81, 88, 89–90, Wasangu. See Usangu; Njombe, 97–99, 101; German colonial rule in, Wasangu in 92, 95–103; healers in, 79–81, 113; Wazaramo. See Uzaramo historiography of, 76–77; hunting in, Wiehe, Albert, 216, 242, 248, 253, 263, 81; identity in, 72–74, 76, 316; Islam 283 in, 104–105; Maji Maji War in, 106– Wildlife reserves: creation of by 110; maji medicine in, 103–104; Germans, 133–35; expansion of, 145 medicine in, 81–83; rubber gathering Witchcraft cleansing and eradication, and trade in, 90, 93, 96, 98, 100; set- 45, 110–14, 314–15 tlement patterns in, 74, 79, 86, 89–91, Women: and slavery 168–70; and 112–113; shrines and ritual centers in, tax-collection, 278–81; and war, 286; 79, 81, 84–85, 88, 104, 109; territorial as wives of askari, 168–72. See also limits of, 72–73, 78; women in, 76, Ungindo, women in 101–102 Ungoni 26, 66, 141, 184–85, 190, 309; Yakobi, 7, 21, 24, 59, 202, 241, 247, 251, Benedictines in, 194, 195, 203–04, 253, 260; attack on, 262; foundation 228–233; demographic impact of of mission, 270–73; growth of, Maji Maji war in, 217–18; German 275–76; monument to Wiehe at, 283 colonial rule in, 191–96; German Youth, 93, 107, 214 violence in, 208–09; historiography of, 185–87; Maji Maji war in, 201–09, Zanzibar, 26–27, 51, 120–21, 125, 267, 215–17; Ngoni relations with sutu in, 309