In recent years, the literature on colonial history has increasingly addressed the phenomenon of “mediators between cultures”. Thus, a number of biographies have already appeared, including in German, on African missionaries, mercenaries, or – as in the present example – African bureaucrats in colonial service. Native teachers, interpreters, servants, assistants or linguistic informants would make worthwhile subjects for historical research.
In the book discussed here, Eckert does not limit himself to “simple” biographical sketches of his actors, but rather integrates his subject into a broader framework, namely the process of developing a nation-state in East Africa on the European model. Such a political model is apparently becoming obsolete in the “Dark Continent” nowadays, however. The future of the nation-state, the author notes in his introduction, is “in many respects uncertain” (p. 1). In fact, this view coincides with the published and discussed opinions of various other experts in the field, who – despite viewpoints that differ in the details – proceed from the assumption that in Africa, wars, crises, and violence are evidence of a social upheaval in the course of which whole societies are reinventing themselves, and the nation-state is therefore disintegrating. Eckert quite correctly comments that “Prophets may be able to predict where this voyage will end, but historians cannot” (p. 3).
The author explains the intentions of his book against this background. He hopes to contribute to an understanding of the emergence and development of the territorial nation-state using the example of the formerly German, and later British, colony of Tanzania between 1920 and 1970. He focuses his analysis of an impressive number of archival sources and a substantial secondary literature on those Africans who initially held positions in the colonial state apparatus and then, after national independence from the British colonial power, inherited the legacy of the European colonial rulers. In so doing, he examines the interactions between the institutions and the pillars of state authority.
The author avoids the pitfall of studying the autochthonous bureaucracy or individual bureaucrats as objects of sociological interest. Instead, he attempts in a relatively brief space, and keeping as close to the sources as possible, to present a political history of Tanzania over a period of some fifty years, centered on African civil servants and (colonial) state structures. After all, African administrative employees assumed a central role in the colonial order and acted as mediators and translators between the colonial rulers and the colonized population. This position afforded them, at times, substantial room for manoeuvre as well as certain opportunities to overstep the relatively narrow bounds of their official duties.
And Andreas Eckert would not be Andreas Eckert if he did not take the opportunity of such an extensive monograph to direct our attention to debates and approaches in the recent historiography on Africa and colonialism, and to assess and confront them with empirical material from his own field of research, while stressing that he chooses not to take a position in these academic debates. He regards three research fields as particularly relevant: authority and bureaucracy, the colonial state and colonialism, and actors and elites.
Despite the, at times, extremely detailed research, he never fails to take adequate account of global developmental processes in the period in question, and deploys a variety of historical methods, including the use of oral history sources. Consequently, the book represents a successful marriage between area studies and global history. The professor of African history at Berlin’s Humboldt University convincingly demonstrates thereby that the historiography on Africa is neither methodologically nor thematically exotic, although it does have specific characteristics which he clearly enumerates and discusses.
Eckert has divided his revised Habilitation thesis into five chapters, each with a number of sub-chapters. The first complex introduces theoretical aspects of the subject and describes sources and the like. After a brief overview of the German colonial period in East Africa, the second complex, which is divided into five sub-chapters covering the period from 1920 to 1940, begins with a detailed presentation of the doctrine and practice of the indirect rule favoured by the British administration. Eckert addresses the difficulties that arose, for this centuries-old pattern of rule could no longer be applied in the presence of certain population groups, especially those that existed outside the traditional communities – in this case the groups he mentions are rural capitalists and the urban underclass. The third complex treats the period of decolonization and colonial development initiatives, that is, the years from 1940 to 1960. Here the focus is on political changes in British colonial policy.
The fourth main chapter is devoted mainly to the biographies of several African bureaucrats and thus has a scholarly value in its own right, not least for the relatively young historiography on Tanzania, for the author combines a detailed knowledge of the history of this East African country with an analysis of European sources. The fifth and final substantial complex provides insights into the place of the new Tanzanian nation-state in an international order shaped by the Cold War and East–West competition. The author then examines certain central ideological and political projects characterized by such terms as “Ujamaa”, “Arusha Declaration”, or “one-party democracy”.
Concluding reflections, acknowledgments, an appendix with important lists of archival sources and a bibliography as well as a detailed index confirm the book’s high scholarly value.
