DEVELOPMENT IN EAST AFRICA 3 Cultural Shift in East Africa: Cultural (Im)materialities Biographies, Developments, DEVELOPMENT DEVELOPMENT IN EAST AFRICA Cultural Shift: Developments, Biographies, (Im) materialities 3 edited by Piotr Cichocki, Maciej Ząbek Development in East Africa Development in East Africa Cultural Shift in East Africa: Developments, Biographies, (Im)materialities edited by Piotr Cichocki, Maciej Ząbek Mkwawa University College of Education (MUCE), a Constituent College of the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) & Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Warsaw (Poland) Iringa – Warsaw 2018 © Copyright by Piotr Cichocki, Maciej Ząbek 2018 Reviewers: Prof. Hayder Ibrahim Ali Prof. Jacek Pawlik Proofreading by Iwona Handzelewicz Cover design by Grzegorz Sztandera ISBN 978-83-7401-639-1 Printed in Poland WDR, Włocławek CONTENTS Introduction – Piotr Cichocki & Maciej Ząbek ................................ 7 Part I DEVELOPMENTS Chapter 1 KAWONGA GERVAS AND WAKATI MALIVA East African Development: Language as a Forgotten Factor .... 31 Chapter 2 MAXMILLIAN J. CHUHILA Commerce or Food? Development Narratives of Maize Farming in Ismani, 1940s to the Present ............................................... 57 Chapter 3 MLOWE N.P. AND JUSTIN K. URASSA Formalization of Customary Land Rights on Rural Household’s Livelihood Outcomes: A Case of Handeni District, Tanzania ..... 91 Chapter 4 MACIEJ ZĄBEK Ujamma. Contemporary Discourse about Julius Nyerere Socialism ................................................................................. 143 Chapter 5 AMBILIASIA PENIEL MOSHA AND STEVEN KAUZENI Social Cultural Habits and Climate Change: The Untold Stories of Climate Preservation From Kilimanjaro ................... 167 Part II BIOGRAPHIES Chapter 6 ANNA CICHECKA Gender agenda and development in Tanzania ......................... 207 6 Contents Chapter 7 ANNA WIECZORKIEWICZ “Black women” as a rhetorical tool of persuasion ..................... 223 Part III (IM)MATERIALITIES Chapter 8 ASHURA JACKSON African Independent Churches as a Threat to the Survival of Historical Churches in Mbeya .............................................. 245 Chapter 9 MUSSA KASSIMU Foreign Religions and Wanyamwezi Traditional Religious Rituals; Influences and Absorption of African traditionalists’ Mind in the Third Millennium .................................................. 271 Chapter 10 PIOTR CICHOCKI African electronic music in church and beyond. Dialectic relation of religion and development ........................ 303 Chapter 11 ANTONIO ALEGRETTI The religious (and political) materiality of development among Christian Maasai in contemporary Tanzania ................ 325 Part IV VARIA Chapter 12 KLAUDIA WILK MHAGAMA Efficiency and utility of Polish Aid projects in Tanzania: Socio-cultural aspects of cooperation between local partners and external donors and its impact on development ............... 359 INTRODUCTION This collection of articles aims to bring closer the problem of current dynamic changes taking place in East Africa, something we may call cultural shifts, that actually incorporates transformations in every sphere of life from social, economic, through religious and linguistic to the rapid changes in environment and climate. A quick look at the table of contents proves that the collection is in the strict sense interdisciplinary, but the common ground for this meeting is founded by anthropological theory. By starting to investigate the problem of a cultural shift, it is adequate to trace the constellation of academic theories referring to that question. Among concepts that are most frequently used in academic debate and outside academia are development, glo- balization and modernization. In the course of the book we refer to them ambiguously: at the same time we use them as analytic tools and polemicize with them, criticize them and ask them un- comfortable questions. The good example is the concept of the development, very of- ten used in relation to African context, but not only by Africanists or anthropologists. The development is a paradigm for thinking and acting about and through an African state, a society or even a personal life of Africans. Moreover, the concept is not only an analytical tool used to describe processes but rather it became a persuasive political tool used to redefine and reshape social and economic life of individuals, communities and regions. The example of how this concept manifests on the level of individual 8 Introduction biographies comes from ethnographic fieldwork. Number of Tan- zanians and Malawians with whom we had opportunity to talk during our independent research projects planned or fantasized about their further lives similarly as they would write a develop- mental plan. Furthermore, similar observations from the fieldwork illustrate how communities or local institutions address to and organize according to the notions of development. Most of ora- tions of traditional authorities in public or semi-public occasions were related to a development as more or less hypothetical but always desirable future. But developmental is not only, or even not mostly, discursive. It is rather an element of effective, embod- ied, shared imagination of powers, hierarchies and prosperities. As above mentioned examples suggest, we propose the perspec- tive on the cultural shifts that reflects their local diversifications and negotiations. We argue that specifically ethnographic methods, with their focus on unmediated experience play a crucial role in understanding the phenomenon as multilayered rather than uni- versal and homogenous. Due to ethnographic methodology, we – and most of the authors from this volume – had an opportunity to observe and understand contradictions, multifariousness and spottiness of shifts and changes, that are often seen as monolithic and leading one universal way of life in the spacious and diverse continent and region. This book has been organized into three sections, each of which contains the set of interrelated articles. The division reflects some theoretical orientations in modern African studies, but even more, the categories of institutions and experience of everyday life in East Africa. We have proposed three points of view: throughout the already discussed concept of the development, through the perspective of biographies and narrations on the body, then through the scope of (im)materiality. Introduction 9 The first part presents papers that focus on what is usually discussed, within the public debate on the issues of development of states and economies. Their configuration, however, addresses the intersection of economic, political and environmental issues. We have no doubts that dynamics of these relations is essential to regional and state politics in the region, putting the environmental problems as central actor in the composition of the social1. The second point of view – connected with eponymous bi- ographies and narrations – is driven from methodological ori- entation on the individually embodied experience. By these we want to stress the importance of cultural shifts as seen from the perspective of the embodiment on individuals. One of the leading attempts of the problematization of the embodiment in today’s anthropology is the gender theory. It is arguable through reading of current African studies2, that the gender theory applies to both the reinterpretation of what was and is African society from one side, and a deep change, that eventually may bring the cultural shift from postcolonial structures from the other. The perspective of the biography, especially in relation to women experience and their struggles in colonial and post-colonial social settings, ques- tions the official historical discourse and suggests that cultural shifts we focus on, might be multidirectional. The example of this multi-directionality comes from modern history of independent Tanzania. As literature informs3, the ideological and economic reforms – establishment of Ujamaa, suahilization and generally development of African socialism – was parallel to puritanism in 1 B. Latour, Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy, Cam- bridge 2004. 2 African gender studies: theoretical questions and conceptual issues , ed. O. Oyěwùmí, Houndmills – Basingstoke – New York 2005. 3 A.M. I v a s k a, Cultured states: youth, gender, and modern style in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Durham 2011. 10 Introduction spheres of attirement and behaviour of Tanzanian women. The state ideological control over women’s bodies was implemented under the ideology of Africanness freed from western corrupted influences. The more present struggles of women, who aim to broaden the space of political and personal agency, prove that the previous reform supported only part of Tanzanians in their de-colonial aspirations. The last part of the book concerns phenomena of the religious realm, understood, however, not only from the perspective of beliefs and systems, but also as networks set by people, material and immaterial elements. We decided to define it by the concept of (im)materiality, referring to the anthropological literature on religion, that highlights the importance of a material component and an embodied experience of a ritual, a faith or a morality4. To be exact, the mentioned authors stressed the ‚materiality’ of the religion (and the art). By adding ‚im’ to the ‚materiality’, we like to highlight the importance of mediated and technologic5 elements in network established