Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T08:13:13.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

European Attitudes and African Realities: the rise and fall of the Matolac chiefs of south-east Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Terence Ranger
Terence Ranger
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Successive Europeans in south-east Tanzania looked for an ethnically based political authority under whom to live or with whom to work. Bishop Edward Steere of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa predicted the existence of very large tribal and linguistic ‘nations’ when this turned out not to be so, the UMCA missionaries who had settled at Masasi sought anxiously for some influential chief who could be represented as heading an ethnic polity; first German and then British administrators over-readily assumed that the chiefs whom they installed as akidas did in fact represent such ethnicities; finally, in the late 1920s, the British instituted historical research prior to the establishment of Indirect Rule, which was intended to reflect the ethnic and political complexity of the region. This European preoccupation with ethnicity bore little relation to the actualities of the region, which from the nineteenth-century incursions of the Yao, Makua and Makonde had constituted a mosaic of small, autonomous and ethnically mixed groupings. Nevertheless, certain African adventurers were able to take advantage of the European need for allies to build up their power, to become recognised as ‘chiefs’, and ultimately to become regarded as leaders of ethnicities. This was the case with Matola I and Matola II of Newala who between them developed their polity from a very small scattering of huts to a large and prosperous paramountcy. Within the Matola polity various social and cultural processes were at work to produce a common sense of identity, but these processes had not fully eroded the marks of the varying ethnic identities of those who belonged or submitted to the polity. The Indirect Rule inquiries, therefore, with their fanatical emphasis upon ethnicity as the only legitimate base for political authority had the result of dismantling the Matola polity and thereby destroying the only effective local nucleus of political consolidation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 63 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Canon Robin Lamburn in a letter of 13 March 1978 offers a cultural rather than ethnic distinction between Yao and Makua, though perhaps one in which the contrasts have become sharpened by decades of Yao prestige. ‘I fully agree’, he writes, ‘that Yao and Makua came to refer rather to the type of life of the person rather than his true ancestry. The Yao - good houses, square or oblong, often with Arab doors, and walls that are higher in the middle than in the corners…hunters and fishermen; a long tradition of agriculture, chiefly maize, but more millet in the eastern parts, i.e. Masasi. Makua – no houses at all, no fields or agriculture, no hunting or fishing, only gathering from the forest, but good smelters of iron and smiths…I have not bothered to put quotation marks around Yao and Makua in the above, but you will understand that many Makuas became Yaos by adopting the agricultural way of life and building houses.’ I should take this opportunity to thank Canon Lamburn, Canon Donald Parsons and Bishop Hilary Chisonga for their hospitality, their readiness to give interviews, and for their comments by letter on the first draft of this article. They should not be held responsible, however, for its argument.

2 This rapid sketch of the Masasi district in the second half of the nineteenth century is drawn from three main sources. The first is the detailed reports and letters of early missionaries, from which a picture can be assembled very different from the formal UMCA version of reality. In a similar way, although the generalised account of the history of the region deduced from Indirect Rule inquiries is distorted and misleading, particular and detailed items of Indirect Rule ethnography are very useful. Finally, one has to be equally aware of the distorting function of local oral evidence, which has been shaped by all the processes described in this article. Nevertheless, when used with care I have found such oral material very helpful, particularly for the earliest stages of the Matola polity.

3 Heaney, R. M., A Memoir of Edward Steere (London, 1898), pp. 132, 326–9.Google Scholar

4 Maples, Chauncy, ‘The migration of the Masasi settlement’, Central Africa; A Monthly Review of the Work of the Universities' Mission, no. 9 (September 1883).Google Scholar

5 See particularly, Porter, W. C. to Steere, 29 March 1881Google Scholar; Janson, C. A. to Steere, 29 March 1881Google Scholar (USPG Archives, Westminster), file AI (lv), pp. 368–9, 651–5.

6 Steere, Edward to ‘Members of the Universities’ Mission', 1882Google Scholar, printed circular.

7 Maples's description of this first meeting is cited in a manuscript account of ‘Matola: a Yao Chief’, preserved at Masasi Cathedral in a file of ‘Documents of Historical Interest, 1861–1918’. The account appears to have been put together to commemorate Matola's death in 1895.Google Scholar

8 Machina, Daudi, ‘Newala’, Masasi Cathedral Archives; Annual Reports, UMCA, 1878, p. 25.Google Scholar

9 Maples, Chauncy to Steere, 16 October 1878Google Scholar, Central African Mission Occasional Papers, x (1879), 5.Google Scholar

10 Clarke, Herbert to Steere, , 8 October 1878Google Scholar, ibid.

11 Record of Ndendeule tradition made by Provincial Commissioner Turnbull, in 1928Google Scholar and entered in the Mtwara-Lindi Provincial Book, National Archives of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam.

12 Weule, Karl, Native Life in East Africa. The Results of an Ethnographical Research Expedition, transl. Werner, Alice (London, 1909), pp. 142–3.Google Scholar

13 Machina, Daudi, ‘Newala’Google Scholar, Masasi, Cathedral Archives.

14 Report by Maples, , 4 September 1881Google Scholar, Occasional Papers, xviii, February 1882.Google Scholar

15 Janson, C. A. to Steere, , 4 November 1880Google Scholar, USPG Archives, file Ai (iv), p. 303.Google Scholar

16 Maples, to Steere, , 4 December and 6 December 1881Google Scholar, USPG, Ai (ix), pp. 72–5.

17 Maples to Steere, ibid.

18 Maples, report of 13 June 1883Google Scholar, Annual Reports, UMCA, 1882–1883, P. 24.Google Scholar

19 Maples, report of 16 October 1882Google Scholar, Central Africa, no. 2, February 1883, pp. 21–2.Google Scholar

20 Maples, report, 25 January 1883Google Scholar, Annual Reports, UMCA, 1882–1883, PP. 27–8.Google Scholar

21 Maples, , ‘The migration of the Masasi settlement’, Central Africa, no. 9 (September 1883Google Scholar); Porter, W. C. to Farler, J. P., 3 February 1883Google Scholar, USPG, Ai (ix), pp. 76–7.Google Scholar

22 Maples, , ‘The migration of the Masasi settlement’.Google Scholar

23 Porter, W. C., ‘xyaA visit to Masasi,’, Central Africa, vol. ii, no. 13 (January 1884), pp. 14–16.Google Scholar

24 Maples, to Penney, W. H., 13 March 1883Google Scholar, USPG, Ai (ix), pp. 82–5.Google Scholar

25 Maples, to Penney, , 27 August 1883Google Scholar, USPG, Ai (ix); Annual Reports, UMCA, 1883–1884, pp. 30–2.Google Scholar

26 Maples, report of 1885Google Scholar, Annual Reports, UMCA, 1885–1886, p. 36.Google Scholar

27 Porter, W. C., 24 September 1890Google Scholar, Central Africa, no. 97, January 1891.Google Scholar

28 Interview with Parsons, Donald, Mtwara, , 25 August 1975.Google Scholar

29 ‘Matola: a Yao chief’, Masasi Cathedral Archives. The account of Matola's baptism and death was written by T. C. Simpson, priest in charge at Newala.

30 Simpson's views are included in the document noted above. See also Farler, J. to Travers, D., 4 February 1896Google Scholar, USPG, AI (vi).

31 Bishop, William to Travers, 24 September 1896Google Scholar, USPG, ‘Letters from Africa, Box I’, pp. 76–7.Google Scholar

32 ‘Tribal history and legends: Makua tribe’, Mtwara-Lindi Provincial Book.

33 ‘Tribal government: the Yao’, Mtwara-Lindi Provincial Book.

34 Weule, Karl, Native Life in East Africa, 53, 104, 109, 134–9.Google Scholar

35 Kalembo, A. K., ‘The Yao and the Maji Maji rising’, University of Dar es Salaam, Maji Maji research project, 1969, p. 4Google Scholar; see also Mchawala, Z. R. J., ‘Masasi documents’Google Scholar, and Nampauka, M. O., ‘Maji Maji research in Newala’.Google Scholar

36 Ranger, T. O., ‘The Apostle: Kolumba Msigala’, Modern Tanzanians, ed. Iliffe, John (Nairobi, 1973Google Scholar). The main sources for this account are: the log-books of Masasi Cathedral; the official and private correspondence of Frank Weston; correspondence to the UMCA by missionaries in the field; the family correspondence of J. F. C. Fixsen; oral interviews with African clergy and teachers. The log-books of Masasi Cathedral and other parishes are now held by the library of the University of Dar es Salaam. The rest of the archival material described in this note is held in the Archives of the USPG, Tufton Street, Westminster.

37 Interview with Canon Lamburn, Robin, Rondo, , 18 August 1975.Google Scholar

38 Hudson, E. C., A Central African Parish (Cambridge, 1914), p. 16.Google Scholar

39 Interview with Chisonga, Bishop Hilary, Masasi, , 20 August 1975Google Scholar; 21 August 1975; interview with Canon Parsons, Donald, Mtwara, 25 August 1975.Google Scholar

40 Interview with Canon Parsons. For the theory and practice of Christian adaptation under Lucas, see: Ranger, T. O., ‘Missionary adaptation of African religious institutions’, in Ranger, T. O. and Kimambo, Isaria (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (London, 1972), pp. 221–51Google Scholar; ‘Rituals of recession: missionary adaptation, indirect rule and the great depression in south-east Tanzania’, Past and Present (forthcoming).

41 Interviews with Hilary Chisonga and Donald Parsons.

42 Austen, Ralph A., Northwest Tanzania Under German and British Rule (Yale, 1968), 180–2.Google Scholar

43 Turnbull, A. M. D., ‘Tribal government: Makua’, 22 February 1928Google Scholar, Mtwara-Lindi Provincial Book.

44 Turnbull, , ‘Tribal government: the Yao’ 22 February 1928, Mtwara-Lindi Provincial BookGoogle Scholar; see also ‘Tribal history and legends: Yao’, Newala District Book.

45 ‘Tribal government: Yao tribe: schedule of Native Authorities’, 1928Google Scholar, Masasi District Book, vol. I.

46 This paragraph skirts a series of manoeuvres regarding Matola's role on the Native Authority Councils in Newala and Masasi, but these made no effective difference to the decline in his power. See ‘Indirect Control’, Newala District Book; ‘Native Administration. Masasi Native Council’, and ‘Masasi Headmen’, Masasi District Book; Annual Report, Province, Lindi, 1931, p. 5Google Scholar, Sec. 11679.

47 Ranger, T. O., ‘Rituals of recession’.Google Scholar

48 Interviews with Chisonga and Parsons. Makenzi was named after Bishop Mackenzie, first bishop of the UMCA. For Mpunga see D.O., Southern Province, to P.C., Southern Province, 13 March 1946Google Scholar, file 16/1/4, National Archives, Dares Salaam. D.O., Lindi, to P.C., Lindi, , 31 October 1937Google Scholar, Newala District Book, provides a savage criticism of the operation of the Indirect Rule system.

49 Ranger, T. O., ‘Continuities between rural development policies in colonial and post-colonial East Africa’, Institute of Commonwealth Studies Seminar, London, 1976.Google Scholar