Gender, Family and Work in Tanzania

Colin Creighton, C.K. Omari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138729087
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351748063
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000. The essays in this volume explore the changing nature of family and gender relations in contemporary Tanzania. Particular attention is paid to the social construction of marriage and to the interplay of family life and gender relations with economic processes and forms of work. Many of the papers are based upon recent ethnographic and survey research; others provide a much needed historical perspective upon the change in family patterns and upon the ways in which gender and family relations are shaped by, and in turn help to shape, wider social institutions and processes.

1 Race, class and community in colonial Dar es Salaam: Tentative steps towards an understanding of urban society

John Campbell

This paper represents a tentative step towards a re-evaluation of the nature and development of urban society in Dar es Salaam, and in particular the relation between colonial urban policy premised on ‘race’ and the forms of urban social identity and social organization which developed. Very simply, the idea of ‘race’ was central to colonial thought and informed policy with regard to segregating and controlling urban Africans and Asians. This paper seeks to examine this discourse on ‘race’ by examining a diverse range of policy responses to the problem of the ‘urban African’ and, in turn, by looking at how policy was implicated in the experience and identity of urban colonial subjects resident in Dar es Salaam.

I begin by outlining the former German and British colonial administrations of Tanganyika, and discuss how such attitudes and ideas about race were spelled out in urban policy. Through consideration of a wide variety of archival and historical data, I examine the interplay between paternalistic colonial control over the African and non-native population, and key administrative and political problems which racialist policies contributed to. Section (ii) examines Administration efforts to police and/or control African migrants who were resident in Dar es Salaam. Section (iii) looks at problems inherent in racial segregation, and in particular the way segregation was pursued and implemented. Section (iv) brings the various strands of the paper together by looking at the nature of urban social life and asking how it was shaped by official policy. Finally section (v) offers some tentative conclusions about the evolution of Dar es Salaam.

Throughout the following discussion my intention is to analyse the impact of urban policy on the town’s population and to understand how urban Africans and Asians reacted to and were affected by colonial policy and its implementation in the period preceding independence. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and tensions between colonial policy and Tanganyikan society were sharpest in the cities where administrative authority was greatest. Even so, colonial control was not absolute and by default left space for urban Africans and Asians to contest, evade or accommodate authority.

‘Race’ and the official mind: Colonialism and the African

Commercial exploitation of the coast by the Deutsch Ostafrikanisch Gessellschaft (DOAG) in the early 1880s, and later by the German colonial administration, fuelled contradictions in the local political economy between the demands of settlers and the interests and well-being of a heterogeneous indigenous population. DOAG’s exploitation of Africans and African resources contributed to a series of sustained insurrections - the Bushiri Uprising and the Maji Maji rebellion (Iliffe, 1969; Glassman, 1995) - against German authority which shook colonial complacency even as settler perceptions and attitudes hardened towards non-Whites.

Glassman’s account of the period makes it clear that the so-called ‘conquistadors’ who acted as DOAG’s colonial agents set out ‘to intrude, by the parasitic extraction of polls, taxes, and enforced trading monopolies, on a commercial system in which they had no established stakes’, through systematic brutality, fraud, and chicanery (1995, p. 183). These men perceived their actions as anti-Arab and anti-British and saw their role as racially superior ‘whites’ who would be deferred to by Africans because of ‘the eternal status belli reigning between Negro and Arab’ (ibid, p. 185).

The chauvinism and racism implicit in the practices of DOAG agents became more explicit through the actions of growing numbers of settlers many of whose livelihoods were based on farming and a tenuous control over African labour. Iliffe’s analysis of German rule makes it clear that settlers continually demanded land concessions and greater control over African labour from a colonial administration reluctant to acquiesce for fear of spurring renewed insurrection (1969). The bitterness between the settlers and the administration over this issue was expressed in growing calls for the establishment of a ‘white man’s country’ (i.e. policy conducive to further European settlement and the advancement of white economic interests) coupled with the espousal of virulent racism towards Africans and non-natives. Pipping-van Hulten’s (1974) examination of the colonial press for the period makes it abundantly clear that settlers articulated their interests in the language of racial difference and white superiority: thus the notion of a ‘black peril’ impeding white interests arose from a perception not only of ‘the horrors of miscegenation’ but also from the alleged lack of respect Africans had for whites due to the influence of the ‘Hossennigger’, the ‘Kulturneger’ or the ‘Kolonialneger’ or any African not under the control of a settler (the latter two were Africans who travelled and lectured in Europe; ibid., pp. 21-6). The administration of justice, handled by largely independent district officers utilising separate courts for Europeans and Africans, relied heavily on corporal punishment to control the native population; for example in 1911-12 authorities imposed approximately 5,900 floggings, in addition to 11,000 cases of imprisonment, 16 executions, and over 3,500 fines (UK, 1916, p. 21).

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I the situation was one of limited enfranchisement for German nationals through advisory bodies in Dar es Salaam and Tanga municipalities. As noted elsewhere, the German administration introduced far reaching changes to Dar es Salaam which had been a small, sleepy coastal village of 3-5,000 people (Campbell, 1990, p. 154). Most notably, systematic changes were made in land tenure with the declaration of crown ownership over land not already privately owned, and through land transfers by ad hoc land commissions (Iliffe, 1969, p. 127). In effect not only was a system of private property in land introduced, it was based upon a ‘racial’ division of the municipality which expropriated¹ African land and, via a division of the town centre into 46 distinct lots, established the basis for racial residential segregation. As Anthony has noted in relation to plans to create a segregated European city,

Various inferences may be drawn ... the most obvious is that Africans had no place in it as residents, although any labour required to realize the elegance of the architectural plan would depend upon Africans (1983, p. 69).

In this fashion the entire waterfront was acquired for port development and administrative use and, in addition, land for the establishment of a distinct and racially segregated commercial or Indian Bazaar area and for African residence was also obtained (the latter two races could not own but only lease rights in land). Through the subsequent introduction of building and zoning regulations, the basis was established - though not fully realised until later - for a racially segregated city. To this basic urban structure was added a political administrative system based on direct rule through an appointed Arab ‘Liwali’ and ‘akida’ or headman.

German town planning called for strict segregation based on distinct and physically separate residential zones for ‘Europeans’ (I), ‘Indians’ (II), and ‘Africans’ (III), whose separation was maintained by controlling land allocation and/or the development of a ‘cordon sanitaire’ - or as the British called it, a ‘neutral zone’ - to enforce segregation. However, World War One erupted before the Germans were able to fully implement this scheme.

While in certain respects British racial attitudes towards natives and non-natives probably differed only in degree from their German predecessors, the mitigating factor was to be Britain’s responsibility under the League of Nations mandate which required the Territory to be administered in the best interests of the native population. In contradistinction to German interests in realising economic benefit from Tanganyika, the British pre-occupation seemed to be ‘how best to administer the colonies, and with the minimum of expense and involvement’ (Fage, 1967, p. 696). The outcome of these conflicting pressures was the adoption, for towns, of direct rule and of German plans for urban development.

The end of the war in 1917 was followed by several years of economic stagnation during which the British administration gradually began to assess the situation in the Territory and to formulate policy. Among the first issues addressed in relation to Dar es Salaam, which was in poor physical condition, was whether the issue of racial segregation should be decided before town planning could commence. In 1920, despite protestations from the Land Officer that segregation ‘appears to be impracticable’, the Chief Secretary argued that while ‘we cannot adopt the principle of racial segregation as such for that would lead us into a position where we should be in conflict with the terms of the Treaty and the Mandate’, nevertheless ‘we can ... ensure proper segregation in actual practice by means of Building and Township Regulations. For example ... we can require him [the ‘Asiatic’] to build ... a house which would not suit his methods of life’.²

Very similar attitudes were held about Africans. For example, in 1920 the Dar es Salaam urban population was described as ‘mixed’, one in which ‘tribal customs had broken down’.³ Disparaging the local ‘Swahili’ for the absence of ‘family life’, promiscuity, etc., the report notes that ‘[t]he native of Dar es Salaam is innately a liar, intriguer and petty conspirator. It is difficult to find honesty of character ... and where all are tainted with the same evil it is difficult ... to ascertain with a moderate degree of probability the true position’. An early decision taken by the administration was that only bonafide urban residents were to be allowed to remain in town - at least 4,000 ‘with no right or no employment’ were forced out in 1919 - and that African and Asian residents would be segregated and controlled through the imposition of German racial zoning plans.

The administration’s concern with the so-called ‘mixed’ or ‘detribalized’ urban African, a concern that was to last until independence, had two intertwined and mutually contradictory strands, control and taxation. In the early days receipts from the hut and poll tax were vital to colonial revenue which meant the administration felt it necessary to control Africans to ensure the payment of tax and to direct migrant labour to work on European plantations, in government service, or for private employers (Shivji, 1986). Since colonisation had brought into being a network of towns, urban areas were seen as centres in which primarily Europeans and Asians had a right to reside. Seen in this light, references to ‘mixed’ urban populations together with a reliance on repatriating ‘undesirable’ urban migrants was an expression of the failure of the authorities to control properly the ‘African’, and especially African women, whose true place was in the village.

Race, justice and the police in Dar es Salaam

German interests in opening the interior to trade, in combination with coercive controls over African peasants to obtain agricultural labour, had the effect of integrating peasants into the colonial economy. One important aspect of this process of underdevelopment was its influence on patterns of urban development such that minor trading centres were linked to a growing number of administrative centres -containing missions, hospitals, schools, etc - and, via a growing network of roads and railways, to Dar es Salaam (Soja and Weaver, 1976). Control over cheap African labour was the basis of the entire system: labour made plantations profitable and built the colonial infrastructure and the African poll tax met Administration costs. The integration of peasants into the cash economy not only made Africans dependent upon cash, it also provided the basis for commodity markets which the Administration encouraged Indian traders to exploit.

Plantations and colonial towns, mostly located on the east coast, were the major sources of wage employment for Africans who faced labour contracts premised on low wages and bad living conditions designed to exploit a system of short-term, circular male labour migration. The administration of law must, therefore, be seen against the backdrop of labour migration channelled to the coast and to a growing network of minor settlements and townships which, in the case of the latter, were governed by a District Commissioner and a non-elected town council (von Sperber, 1970, p. 39).

Until the mid-1950s Dar es Salaam town council was dominated by the Administration and unelected officials, and its work was largely concerned with collection of the house tax, maintenance of public health, and the provision of infrastructure. In addition there was an unelected native advisory council whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Family and gender relations in Tanzania - inequality, control and resistance
• 1. Race, class and community in colonial Dar es Salaam: Tentative steps towards an understanding of urban society
• 2. Monogamy, polygyny, or the single state? Changes in marriage patterns in a Tanzanian coastal village, 1965-94
• 3. Kinship in the urban setting in Tanzania
• 4. Forest livelihoods: Beekeeping as men’s work in Western Tanzania
• 5. Divided patriarchs in a labour migration economy: Contextualizing debate about family and gender in colonial Njombe
• 6. ‘My daughter ... belongs to the government now’: Marriage, Maasai and the Tanzanian state
• 7. Gender inequality, poverty and food insecurity in Tanzania
• 8. Democratisation of social relations at the household level: The participation of children and youth in Tanzania
• 9. Renovating the modern home: Gender, marriage and weddings among professionals in Dar es Salaam
• 10. Born to be less equal: The predicament of the girl child in Tanzania
• 11. Two models of co-operation: Development institutions and market sellers in Tabora
• 12. Gender relations in a traditional irrigation scheme in Northern Tanzania