Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0363/03634.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 35KB | 560 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03634}
$Pretitle{262}
$Title{Tanzania
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{tanzania
groups
area
early
bantu
iron
peoples
century
political
african}
$Date{1978}
$Log{Wood Carving*0363401.scf
Figure 2.*0363403.scf
}
Country:     Tanzania
Book:        Tanzania, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Wood Carving: Wood carving from a Nyamwezi Chief's throne.]

     The union in 1964 of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to form the United Republic
of Tanzania joined two entities whose connections before the nineteenth
century had been few and whose political, social, and economic systems in the
precolonial and colonial eras were quite different. Moreover there were
overwhelming differences in size between the two islands constituting Zanzibar
and the land mass of Tanganyika. Their populations in the mid-1970s-roughly
15.5 million for the mainland and about 500,000 for Zanzibar-indicate the
proportions at the time of union and earlier.

     Early in the second millennium A.D. Zanzibar was one of a number of
coastal and insular city-states oriented to the Indian Ocean trade, Islamic in
culture, and inhabited by a mixed, largely Afro-Arab population. The mainland
had been peopled over a very long period by a number of groups that were
different linguistically, culturally and, in some respects, physically. By the
second millennium, however, Tanganyika's population was composed chiefly of
groups speaking Bantu languages, using iron implements, and relying on
agriculture (supplemented by hunting, gathering, and fishing) for subsistence.

     The arrival and mixing of groups on the mainland continued through the
nineteenth century. In the course of this process each amalgam evolved its own
social and political institutions. Bantu (and non-Bantu) groups were, however,
generally characterized by relatively small-scale political units. Even when
such units were linguistically and culturally similar a sense of ethnic
identity encompassing all of them emerged very slowly.

     By the late eighteenth century Zanzibar became the seat of an Omani
dynasty, and by the early nineteenth largely Arab-owned clove plantations
dependent on slave labor dominated its domestic economy and that of Pemba. Not
long after, trading links (including the slave trade) between Zanzibar (and
its dependencies) and various groups in the mainland's interior were firmly
established, directly and indirectly affecting the economies and politics of
mainland societies.

     By mid-century European traders had established themselves in Zanzibar,
but the chief official presence was that of the British who were there to stop
the sale of slaves to Europeans. Except for a few explorers the only Europeans
on the mainland before the 1880s were missionaries, Roman Catholic and
Protestant, of diverse origin. Substantial success in converting Africans was
not to occur until the twentieth century, however. An ancillary but important
task, that of bringing Western education to Africans, was also begun and
became a major mission responsibility throughout the colonial period.

     In 1885 Germany authorized the German East Africa Company to administer
what had become a German colony in the division of Africa arranged by the
European powers. The company's ineptitude led to the German government's
assumption of administrative responsibilities in 1890. For the rest of the
nineteenth century and much of the first decade of the twentieth, the German
colonial authorities began the development of the territory at the same time
that they dealt with African recalcitrance, including a major rebellion in
1906. By the time they had instituted unchallenged control only a short
interval remained before the onset of World War I and the loss of the colony
to British troops by 1917. In 1922 the mainland, now called Tanganyika, became
a League of Nations mandated territory administered by Great Britain.

     Meanwhile Great Britain had established a protectorate over Zanzibar
(including Pemba and a coastal strip later ceded to the Germans). In principle
the sultan continued to rule, but the British increasingly dominated
administration and government finance. Despite their subordinate role in
government and their growing dependence on Indian merchants and financiers,
the Arabs, particularly the Omani elite, maintained their social status. That
status was supported by the British who thought of Zanzibar as an Arab state
through the colonial period, although Arabs constituted less than 20 percent
of the population.

     In the interwar period political, social, and economic development in
Tanganyika proceeded slowly. The territory lacked easily exploitable natural
resources, and much of its land was characterized by poor soils, uncertain
rainfall, and tsetse fly, making it unsuitable for cultivation or herding. The
considerable investment required for more rapid social and economic
development was not forthcoming from Great Britain for a variety of reasons,
including the depression of the 1930s.

     The Tanganyika government, in part as a matter of principle, in part to
cope with a shortage of personnel, instituted the system of indirect rule. The
system entailed administration through traditional chiefs or their analogues
on the assumption that as natural rulers they would be the appropriate
channels not only for the maintenance of law and order, but also for gradually
introduced change. The demands made on chiefs by authorities, their increasing
dependence on the regime for approval, and the use of chiefs to introduce
unpopular measures (even more marked after World War II) led to distortion of
the precolonial relations between chiefs and people, and chiefs gradually lost
their legitimacy.

     By the end of World War II, despite the slow pace at which the
educational system had developed, a number of literate Tanganyika Africans,
many of them working at lower levels in the civil service, had appeared on the
political stage organized as the Tanganyika African Association (TAA). Local
political agitation and organization had also begun in some rural areas, often
set off by resentment of rules governing agricultural and herding practices
imposed through and enforced by the Native Authorities (chiefs and their
appointed subordinates). These resentments, coupled with antipathies
accumulated over the years, and the political movements that grew out of them
were to provide a significant basis for mass support for the nationalist party
that emerged in the mid-1950s.

     The TAA began to ask for elected representation at various levels and to
protest the operation of a de facto color bar in most political, economic, and
social relations. Resentment generated by the color bar was focused on
European colonial authorities and settlers; part of it was turned against
Asians, almost ubiquitous in the kinds of commercial enterprise and civil
service positions to which Africans were beginning to aspire and often
considered more remote than Europeans by Africans.

     The colonial government responded to these manifestations of discontent
slowly and attempted to carry out its own, sometimes uncertain, plans for
development, predicated on colonial rule for a long period. The authorities
emphasized growth in the educational system, continuing development in
plantation agriculture and cash cropping by peasant smallholders, and road
construction. They also intended a very gradual introduction of elected
representatives in the Legislative Council and at local levels. Closely
associated with the notion of election was the notion of multiracialism
calling for the representation for both Europeans and Asians equal to that of
Africans who vastly outnumbered them. This point of view, urged by the
governor of Tanganyika from 1949 to 1958, was disliked by the ordinary African
and was to provide a major is