Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T13:22:32.511Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘LET US SWIM IN THE POOL OF LOVE’: LOVE LETTERS AND DISCOURSES OF COMMUNITY COMPOSITION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY TANZANIA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2013

Andreana C. Prichard
Andreana C. Prichard*
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
*
Author's email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses a series of love letters exchanged between an African Anglican priest and a teacher-in-training before their marriage to investigate the relationship between the fashioning of the individual self, marriage, and community at the dawn of Tanganyika's independence. When seen through marriage's historical position as an institution central to community composition, these letters illustrate how the family – and the intimate process of building families – could become an alternate site of national imagination. These two young lovers understood their marriage as an explicitly political act of community composition, and cast themselves as characters in the drama of national imagination. In negotiating their twentieth-century marriage, Rose and Gideon became political innovators, selecting, producing, and testing the content and boundaries of the nation.

Keywords

East AfricaTanzaniapostcolonialmarriagekinshipliteracy
Type
Personal Affect and Postcolonial Nation-Building
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 103 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank T. H. Breen, Emily Callaci, Jonathon Glassman, Joshua Grace, Tessie Liu, Kathryn de Luna, Daniel Mains, Kenda Mutongi, and David Schoenbrun and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their many valuable insights; and also the commentators and audience members at the 2010 African Studies Association Annual Meeting, the 2010 ‘Emotions as History’ conference at the Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University, and the 2008 ‘Surprises in the Archives’ conference at the University of Galway for their helpful comments on portions of this article. Funding from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program and from various sources at Northwestern University supported this research.

References

1 Because of the intimate nature of this story I have used pseudonyms and changed immediately identifying details. In all cases, I have tried to remain faithful to the original nature of the names and have drawn replacements from those commonly used in the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa communities during the period. Attempts to contact Rose and her family were futile. Library St. Mark's Anglican Theological College, Dar es Salaam (LSMATC), Personal papers of Gideon Furahani (PPGF), G. Furahani, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, 1965. Original in English.

2 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, Korogwe, 1 Jan. 1962. Original in English.

3 Ahearn, L. M., Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barber, K. (ed.), Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, IN, 2006); Breckenridge, K., ‘Love letters and amanuenses: beginning the cultural history of the working class private sphere in southern Africa, 1900–1933’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26:2 (2000), 337–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, L. M., ‘Schoolgirl pregnancies, letter-writing, and “modern” persons in late colonial East Africa’, in Barber, Africa's Hidden Histories, 180–207Google Scholar.

4 Hanson, H. E., Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 9Google Scholar; Guyer, J. I. and Eno Belinga, S. M., ‘Wealth in people as wealth in knowledge: accumulation and composition in equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, 36:1 (1995), 91–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Geiger, S., TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 Askew, K. M., Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; Ivaska, A. M., Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar Es Salaam (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Said, M., The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924–1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

7 Cooper, F., Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 11–12Google Scholar.

8 Ivaska, Cultured States, 16.

9 Giblin, J. L., A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania (Oxford, 2005), 7Google Scholar.

10 Lal, P., ‘Militants, mothers, and the national family: ujamaa, gender, and rural development in postcolonial Tanzania’, Journal of African History, 51:1 (2010), 2 and 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Barber, ‘Introduction: hidden innovators in Africa’, in Barber, Africa's Hidden Histories, 5. See also Peterson, D. R., Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004)Google Scholar; and Thomas, ‘Schoolgirl pregnancies’.

12 Barber, Africa's Hidden Histories.

13 Barber, ‘Introduction’, 3; Thomas, ‘Schoolgirl pregnancies’, 191.

14 At most colonial-era boarding schools, for example, rules governing students’ communication with outsiders were strict, and pupils could generally expect school officials to read their letters. Thomas, ‘Schoolgirl pregnancies’, 191.

15 Mair, L., African Marriage and Social Change (London, 1969), 1Google Scholar; Thomas, ‘Schoolgirl pregnancies’, 190. When they were writing, Rose and Gideon were likely aware that their letters would be read only piecemeal by a headmistress or letter-carrier, be it a postal worker, family member, or friend. After Gideon's death, his family donated the letters as part of his personal papers to the Anglican Church of Tanzania.

16 LSMATC PPGF, G. Furahani, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, 1965. Original in English.

17 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Magila, 9 Mar. 1962. Original in English.

18 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Muheza, 9 Dec. 1962. Original in English.

19 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 23 May 1963. Original in English.

20 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 10 Jan. 1963. Original in English.

21 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 23 Aug. 1963. Original in English.

22 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, Korogwe, 12 Sep. 1963. Original in English.

23 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 21 Sep. 1963.

24 Dale, G., ‘An account of the principal customs and habits of the natives inhabiting the Bondei country, compiled mainly for the use of European missionaries in the country’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 25 (1896), 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Interview with Sister Phillipa Community of the Sacred Passion (CSP), Shoreham-by-Sea, 5 Sep. 2008; Interview with Rev. Maimbo Mndolwa, Dar es Salaam, 8 Jul. 2008.

25 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Magila, 10 Nov. 1967. Translated from Swahili.

26 Kenyatta, J., Facing Mt. Kenya: the Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

27 Ivaska, Cultured States, 204.

28 Ibid. 10.

29 See C. M. Eastman, ‘Codeswitching as an urban language-contact phenomenon’ and Swigart, L., ‘Two codes or one? the insiders’ view and the description of codeswitching in Dakar’, in Eastman, C. M. (ed.), Codeswitching (Philadelphia, 1992), 1–17 and 83–102Google Scholar.

30 Topan, F., ‘Tanzania: the development of Swahili as a national and official language’, in Simpson, A. (ed.), Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford, 2008), 257Google Scholar; Whiteley, W. H., Swahili: The Rise of a National Language (London, 1969; repr. Hampshire, UK, 1993), 61Google Scholar.

31 Whiteley, Swahili, 61.

32 Topan, ‘Tanzania’, 257; Whiteley, Swahili, 61.

33 Mkilifi, M. H. A., ‘Triglossia and Swahili-English bilingualism in Tanzania’, Language in Society, 1:2 (1972), 197–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Eastman, Codeswitching, 10; Blommaert, J., State Ideology and Language in Tanzania (Köln, 1999), 160Google Scholar.

35 Eastman, ‘Codeswitching’, 1–2; Topan, ‘Tanzania’, 258.

36 Mkilifi, ‘Triglossia’, 210; Eastman, ‘Codeswitching’, 5.

37 Topan, ‘Tanzania’, 258; Eastman, ‘Codeswitching’, 5; Whiteley, Swahili, 99.

38 Topan, ‘Tanzania’, 257.

39 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, no location given, 20 Apr. 1966. Original in English and Swahili; Whiteley, Swahili, 99; Topan, ‘Tanzania’, 259. This insistence also held true for people in Mkilifi's study, Mkilifi, ‘Triglossia’, 203.

40 Mkilifi, ‘Triglossia’, 203.

41 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, Korogwe, 21 Dec. 1962. Original in English.

42 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, New Hall, 22 Aug. 1964. Original in English.

43 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Moshi, 1 June 1964. Original in English.

44 LSMATC, PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 30 Sep. 1964. Translated from Swahili.

45 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Mpwapwa, 29 Aug. 1964. Original in English.

46 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, New Hall, 22 Oct. 1964. As with his other handwritten notes, this appears to be a rough draft with strike-throughs in the original. Original in English.

47 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Magila, 17 Jul. 1965. Translated from Swahili.

48 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Magila, 25 Feb. 1966. Translated from Swahili.

49 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Muheza, 27 Oct. 1965. Translated from Swahili.

50 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Muheza, 15 Dec. 1967. Translated from Swahili.

51 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Korogwe, 28 Mar. 1968. Translated from Swahili.

52 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Muheza, Feb. 1968.

53 LSMATC PPGF, in Personnel File of Miss R. Limo, PF9 UTSK1077 (PFRL), letter from J. Rwechungura, Regional Education Officer, Tanga Region, Ref. No. 579/UTS/K 1077/20, 12 Feb. 1968. Originals in English.

54 LSMATC PPGF PFRL, letter from O. Walter, Bunbuli Hospital, Lutheran Medical Centre, 31 Apr. 1968. For a discussion of anxiety and mental illness in letters by another African young woman, see Marks, S., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington, IN, 1987)Google Scholar.

55 C. Burns, ‘The letters of Louisa Mvemve’, in Barber, Africa's Hidden Histories, 89.

56 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, location unspecified, n.d. From context, likely 1966.

57 M. Mndolwa, electronic communication with the author, 26 Jan. 2009; Interview with Sister Phillipa CSP, Shoreham-by-Sea, England, 7 Sep. 2008. Thank you to one of this journal's anonymous reviewers for this insight.

58 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, Nyala, 11 Aug. 1968. Translated from Swahili.

59 LSMATC PPGF, letter from R. Limo, Korogwe, 1 Aug. 1968. Translated from Swahili.

60 Colonial officials, African men, and families were often concerned not just about the potentially declining morals of urban, mobile, or educated women, but also that their new roles and mobility would take them out of the home and render them incapable of fulfilling ‘proper’ duties. For more on this, see Thomas, L. M., Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar; Geiger, TANU Women.

61 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, Nyala, 11 Aug. 1968. Translated from Swahili.

62 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, location unspecified, 14 Aug. 1968. Original in English; parenthetical comment in original.

63 Neil Kodesh refers here to the works of Terence Ranger and others whose scholarship deals with the ‘invented’ nature of ethnicity, language, law, and religion. Kodesh, N., ‘Renovating tradition: the discourse of succession in colonial Buganda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34:3 (2001), 511–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Thomas, Politics, 5.

65 LSMATC PPGF, letter from G. Furahani, location not specified, 21 Mar. 1968. Translated from Swahili.

66 Ivaska, Cultured States, 5.