The Ngoni in Western and North-Western Tanzania: Historical Context, Geographical Spread and the Nature of Their Involvement in the Region
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The Ngoni in western and north-western Tanzania: Historical context, geographical spread and the nature of their involvement in the region By Yusufu Lawi Introduction It is a well-established fact that within about a single generation – from 1825 to 1858 a group of African people who identified themselves as abaNguni migrated from what is now the Republic of South Africa via Thongaland in southern Mozambique and across the Zambezi River to Lake Victoria in present-day Tanzania. In the course of this movement, the abaNguni (hereafter the Ngoni) interacted vigorously with various peoples they found in the regions and areas they traversed. This movement is a prominent historical phenomenon in the African continent, first because of the vast territory it covered within a single generation and secondly on account of its political, economic, social and cultural impact on the regions and peoples it involved. Because of their widely acknowledged ferocity and continental significance, Ngoni migrations have attracted a great deal of scholarly interest, especially from historians working on southern, central and eastern Africa. Prior to the publication of the first professional histories of Ngoni migrations, European travellers, missionaries and colonial administrators throughout Africa included in their diaries and reports anecdotal and historical accounts on the Ngoni and their activities. Being one of the territories involved in the Ngoni’s movement of the nineteenth century, mainland Tanzania (hereafter Tanzania) is well represented in scholarly writings on the migrations. In their totality, these publications provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the movement and its socio-economic and political impact. However, there are other issues that are worth considering on the context, nature and extent of Ngoni activities in Tanzania. Three of these are of particular interest in the present discussion. The first relates to the historical contextualisation of the advent of the Ngoni in Tanzania. The country’s mainstream historiography shows 199 200 The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 8, Part 1 that the coming of the Ngoni to western and north-western Tanzania coincided with profound and rapid transformations in the region during the nineteenth century. Although the authenticity of this portrayal is not to be doubted, questions arise on the claim that the arrival of the Ngoni constituted one of the two exogenously propelled forces, the other being the caravan trade that linked some coastal and interior societies. This is worth discussing further, especially in light of the pan-regional character of the Ngoni’s movement in Africa and the questions that arise from the use of post- independence country borders to frame the historical processes that took place before the borders came into being. Accordingly, this chapter will consider, among other things, a different way of contextualising the coming of the Ngoni to Tanzania. The second issue, which is far more extensive in scope than the first, has to do with the notable geographical limitation in the coverage of the history of the Ngoni in Tanzania. A perusal of the literature reveals that most of it focuses on the present-day Songea District and the neighbouring areas in southern Tanzania. Yet it is known that the nineteenth century Ngoni migrations, wars and settlements in eastern Africa also involved areas in the southern highlands as well as the western and north-western parts of the country, such as Sumbawanga, Ujiji, Kigoma, Tabora and Shinyanga, and the shores of Lake Victoria in the extreme north. The objective here is therefore to shed more light on the nature and extent of Ngoni involvement in these areas. In particular, this chapter focuses on the western and north-western parts of Tanzania, because there are as yet no detailed studies on these regions as far as the history of Ngoni migrations and settlements in this part of Africa is concerned. The third issue arising from the extant literature has to do with contradictions in the sources used to reconstruct the history of the Ngoni in Tanzania. While this is a common problem in historical research, the rate of occurrence of such contradictions in historical works on the Ngoni in north-western Tanzania is relatively high and therefore needs to be addressed. Thus, this chapter sets out to make a meaningful contribution on the context, nature, extent and significance of Ngoni migrations, wars and settlements in what is today western and north-western Tanzania. The historical context Prominent historians of Tanzania have tended to frame the story of Ngoni involvement in this part of Africa largely on the basis of the country’s post-independence boundaries. The tendency is especially explicit in Juhani Koponen’s book entitled People and Production in Late Pre-colonial Tanzania. He maintains that the advent of the Ngoni in Tanzania and the caravan trade were two externally driven phenomena that played a major role in transforming a number of societies in the country during the nineteenth century. He writes: Caravan trade was not the only outside force interfering in the endogenously propelled development of Tanzanian societies during the 19th century. The Ngoni in western and north-western Tanzania 201 Another one, with major consequences in the southern parts of the country, was the irruption of the people who became known as the Ngoni.1 Koponen provides a brief discussion on the Ngoni in Tanzania in connection with the major economic, political and social transformations that happened during the period. He gives due recognition to the agency of what he calls ‘endogenously propelled’ forces, but is categorical in stating that the arrival of the Ngoni marked an external intervention into the ongoing local dynamics of change. Similarly, in his chapter in the book edited by Kimambo and Temu, Andrew Roberts discusses the involvement of the Ngoni in Tanzania within the framework of external forces that influenced historical change in the country during the nineteenth century. His opening statement on this theme is preceded by an argument on the importance of the ivory trade and slave trading in the area at the time and is immediately followed by an emphatic statement that the newly arriving Ngoni were ‘another external factor of great significance’.2 Other prominent historians of Tanzania are less emphatic in externalising the Ngoni factor, but their framing of the story is fundamentally similar to those by Koponen and Roberts. John Iliffe, for example, begins his account of the Ngoni in Tanzania with a brief statement on the exogenous origin of the Ngoni, arguing that ‘the Ngoni were originally refugees from the Mfecane which convulsed southern Africa early in the nineteenth century…’.3 This is followed by an illuminating discussion on the political and economic processes the Ngoni found in full swing among the societies they encountered in this region and how the newcomers influenced these processes. This approach to understanding the advent of the Ngoni in Tanzania is justifiable in the sense that the respective authors are addressing historical processes in a defined geographical space and that the Ngoni, who entered this space in the nineteenth century, obviously came from outside it. The geographically based framing of the story of the Ngoni in present-day Tanzania also draws its validation from the nationalist historical paradigm that had dominated African historiography for a while. Among other things, the paradigm encouraged the framing of African people’s histories on the basis of the boundaries of the post-colonial political entities called ‘countries’ or ‘nations’. It might be added that this tendency is consistent with the seemingly progressive political ideology that often informs history writings by post-colonial scholars. If nation building was the main preoccupation of progressive African politicians and liberal scholars from the 1960s, it is understandable why country- based historical analyses were dominant in that period. Yet the methodological and political limitations of the nationalist paradigm have long been acknowledged and well-articulated. While this chapter does not intend to engage in a substantive 1 J. Koponen, People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania: History and Structures (Helsinki: Finish Society for Development Studies, 1988), 76. 2 A. Roberts, ‘Political Change in the Nineteenth Century’, in I.N. Kimambo and A.J. Temu (eds), A History of Tanzania (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 68. 3 J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanzania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 54. 202 The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 8, Part 1 critique of this paradigm, it dedicates some space to reflection on a particular aspect of the paradigm, namely scholars’ tendency to use post-colonial country boundaries to frame their analyses of historical processes in the pre-colonial period. In the first place, it is obvious that such framing limits the actual geographical space covered by these historical processes and understates their broader historical significance. In other words, such an approach inevitably results in partial coverage of the processes and an underrepresentation of their significance. Incidentally, this is best illustrated by the history of the Ngoni in eastern Africa. It is well-known that when some groups of Ngoni people first arrived in Tanzania, they encountered other dynamic and transforming communities and societies. Many of these societies were themselves