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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
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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

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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

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

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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.

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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