Taifa

Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

James R. Brennan

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780821444177
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

1

Native and Non-Native

Colonial Urbanization and the Legal Foundations of Identity

In British Colonial Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, a person’s first legal identity was either native or non-native. While there was no one definition, in general “natives” were indigenous Africans, and “non-natives” were European and Asian immigrants. The legal ordering of colonial identities was thus first the mediation of relations between indigenes and immigrants. This chapter examines how legal identities and colonial administrative processes entrenched racial categories in interwar Dar es Salaam. The most important of these processes involved regulating interaction between “native” Africans and “non-native” Indians. Nominally intended to protect African “native” interests, the implementation of Tanganyika’s colonial laws revealed two competing visions for urban Africa. One championed urban growth driven by non-African commerce and capital improvements; the other pursued the paternalistic protection of Africans from non-African market forces. Urban life, however, ran well ahead of either vision, and a distinctly reactive and ad hoc character of governance emerged during these years. Although the main actors of this chapter are British officials, their work and debates provided contradicting visions of urbanization that Africans and Indians would appropriate and reshape to make claims on urban life.

This chapter investigates how colonial categorization shaped urban development. Legal and administrative categories of colonial rule have left lasting imprints on Africa’s subject population. The most influential author to stress this point has been Mahmood Mamdani, who argues that the legal-administrative complex of colonial states “framed and set in motion particular political identities,” which produced subsequent racial and ethnic identities.¹ Like Tutsis in Rwanda, Indians in East Africa were a middle-ground “subject race”; immigrants who enjoyed the partial fruits of “non-native” status without the full political power exercised by “non-native” Europeans. But the most important development was the colonial state’s initial inscription of “native” and “non-native” upon subject populations. “The greater crime of colonialism,” Mamdani stresses, “was to politicize indigeneity in the first place.”² Legal privileges only underlined the essential foreignness of “non-natives.” Popularly stigmatized, these middle-ground communities found themselves vulnerable to the inevitable Fanonist violence that accompanied decolonization.

This chapter argues that the colonial legal-administrative system was vital to the production of identities in urban Tanganyika, but—contra Mamdani’s uniform model—it was a system with multiple constituencies that forged competing sets of priorities. The path between colonial policy and internalized colonial identity was mediated by several factors, in particular the constant improvisation of colonial officials and the selective political appropriation of their colonial subjects. The resulting paths were rarely straightforward. In Dar es Salaam, the clearest physical inscription of colonial identity production lay in urban spatial planning. Following German precedent, the British colonial government divided the city into three zones, ostensibly based on economic activity but effectively legalizing racial patterns of residence. As we shall see, Dar es Salaam’s European, Asian (i.e., Indian), and African zones were formed by legal codes and administrative initiatives that sought to secure de facto if not quite de jure racial segregation. Yet, in practice, the power of the colonial state to specifically inscribe segregation and, more generally, ontological identity categories was limited by three principal factors. First, the state had limited resources to realize its visions; second, these visions were multiple and contradictory. Finally, colonial identity categories were selectively appropriated by colonial subjects themselves, who pursued political projects that exploited colonial contradictions in order to secure certain protections and to reject certain forms of authority. Legal-administrative categories were unavoidable tools of colonial bureaucracy. The goal of this chapter is to place the legal-administrative intent of urban policies in the context of the limited capacity of British colonizers to effect change. Though fundamental to the colonial project, “native” and “non-native” were not fully realized categories of colonial power, but instead a language of policy and administration used to justify and rationalize improvised action.

NATIVE/NON-NATIVE: THE POLITICS OF AN IN COMPLETE LEGAL PROJECT

The legal categories of native and non-native in British Tanganyika (1919–1961) represent standard imperial tools reforged in the language of international paternalism of the immediate postwar years. Originally an anodyne reference to one’s birthplace, the term “native” had transformed into a British imperial category used to describe non-European subjects during the nineteenth century. Coinciding with administrative challenges posed by Bengal and other post-American, non-Western possessions, “native” came to conflate birthplace, residence, and culture, and implicitly contrasted the cosmopolitan mobility of European non-natives with the relative immobility of non-European subjects.³ The term became a popular antonym to “non-native,” the legal category that represented “civilized” settlers, officials, and—on occasion—non-European immigrants. Native/non-native became the legal diptych through which the rules of interaction between territorial subjects and imperial immigrants were prescribed.

Tanganyika’s legal code was heavily freighted with paternalistic legislation ostensibly designed to protect indigenous people from foreign encroachment. The League of Nations Class B Mandate granted to Britain over ex-German East Africa in 1922 directed the new ruler to “respect the rights and safeguard the interests of the native population,”⁴ and this principle was enshrined in the major legislative acts of the early administration. Most important was the Colonial Office’s decision to ensure that Tanganyika, like West Africa, be “primarily a Black man’s country,”⁵ relieving itself of the volatile pressures that accompanied white settler political influence elsewhere in East and Central Africa. Subsequent laws were designed to prevent land commercialization, not only to avoid settler domination but also to avoid land speculation from Indians who enjoyed protection from legal discrimination under the mandate.⁶ Land and conveyance laws prohibited transfer of land between natives and non-natives without written government permission. The governor held all land in trusteeship for its inhabitants except those freehold areas (i.e., private land owned in perpetuity) previously alienated under German rule. All other land could be allocated to individuals only on the basis of time-fixed leases, the maximum being ninety-nine years. Credit restrictions prohibited non-natives from recovering native debt collateral to prevent Africans from selling or encumbering their land, their one principal asset.⁷ Horace Byatt, Tanganyika’s first British governor, promised to “discountenance the giving of credit to natives by refusing to the creditor any redress in the courts.”⁸ Taken together, these land and credit policies ideally bifurcated Tanganyika’s population between native producers living on communal lands and non-natives confined to either urban areas or commercial estates.

As the legal category of “native” gained in significance, the legal category of “non-native” widened in membership. Previous German East African laws had classified Indians, Arabs, and Africans alike as “natives.” This classification had stimulated the formation of the colony’s first Indian political organization in 1914, which petitioned for the privileged “non-native” status enjoyed by Europeans.⁹ This desire for higher legal status only sharpened during and after the war. Under Article 7 of the mandate, all nationals of League of Nations member states were to receive equal treatment in Tanganyika, thus placing nationals of India, an original League member, at theoretical par with those from European states. Moreover, Indians were generally much wealthier than Africans, and thus expected to afford non-native house taxes instead of far cheaper native hut taxes for the revenue-hungry administration.¹⁰ Finally, between 1916 and 1920, the Colonial Office had been faced with demands from Indians in East Africa, Britain, and India to make German East Africa a colony of India as a reward for service in the First World War. Although Britain did not accede to this demand, it could not support legislation that made Indians legally distinct from Europeans in the conquered colony, as occurred in Kenya with significant political turmoil. With these various pressures in mind, officials in Dar es Salaam and London in effect “promoted” Indians from native to non-native status during the drafting of Tanganyika’s foundational laws.

Creating obstacles to protect “native interests” against non-native predations became a priority among a discernible faction of officials. Internal debates did not address how protectionist laws obstructed African commercial aspirations in Dar es Salaam; Africans themselves would be the first to raise this point. Rather, debate centered on which priority should guide urban development: improving public health, maximizing state revenue, or protecting the security of African tenure in and around Dar es Salaam. The notorious frugality of British rule was especially evident in Tanganyika, and often those policies that cost the colonial power the least and extracted the most from the colonized won out. Yet Dar es Salaam was also home to hundreds of British officials, and therefore costly public health projects often received favor, helped by strident support from the town’s small but vocal white business community.¹¹ Other officials embraced the mandate’s injunction to protect “native” interests against “non-natives.” In 1929, Indians accounted for 78 percent of non-native population of Dar es Salaam; non-natives overall accounted for 9,024 or 28.5 percent of the town’s 31,656 residents, with “native” Africans totaling 22,632 or the majority 71.5 percent.¹²

Although “native” and “non-native” constituted the principal terms of administrative debates, Tanganyika’s state project of identity categorization was incomplete in both intent and effect. Officials across East Africa were well aware that “native” was a shorthand for race that risked becoming absurd upon closer scrutiny and application, such as with manifestly ambiguous cases like Swahili, Somali, and Arab. Neighboring colonies had offered cautionary examples. In coastal Kenya during the 1910s, a politically reckless closer application of “native” and “non-native” categories was used to distinguish “Swahili” from “Arab” populations, politicizing those coastal identities for decades.¹³ In 1925 the Zanzibar government abolished the category “native” and replaced it with the category “African” in all but a few of its laws, which marked an early regional entrenchment of continent-based identity categories.¹⁴ Leading officials in Tanganyika, by contrast, resisted demands from lobbyists within the territory and across the empire who sought clarity and consistency. Rather than declaring constitutional definitions of who was or was not a “native,” they opted to decide ambiguous matters on a case-by-case rather than categorical basis. Two criteria were generally followed: in the handful of legal decisions, cases usually turned on one’s descent; in the far more numerous administrative decisions, cases usually turned on one’s mode of living or class. Arabs presented the most consistently vexing cases. Arabs numbered 581 in Dar es Salaam’s 1929 census, and were defined as “native” in some laws but “non-native” in others. Many strategically straddled these inconsistencies—claiming to be “native” Arabs to avoid paying higher “non-native” taxes, while claiming to be “non-native” Arabs to avoid being called out to labor on public works by local Native Authorities. Their numbers were deemed sufficiently small to avoid having to apply consistent categorization.¹⁵ In cases where decisions had to be made, class was the determining factor.

As law was open to international scrutiny and Tanganyika was an internationally mandated territory, its government was comparatively sensitive about giving appearances of legal discrimination. During the 1920s “native” had been a lax category of administrative convenience, but demands for closer definition stimulated by an obscure court case in Nyasaland in 1929 had moved the Colonial Office to clarify the designation throughout East and Central Africa. The legal status of mixed-race people reveals uniquely explicit discussions about this taken-for-granted category.¹⁶ Most officials in Tanganyika were keenly aware that, aside from its implicit but obvious universal exclusion of white Europeans, “native” was not a term of any racial precision. Rather, the language was, like so much else about colonial rule, improvised to accommodate the kaleidoscopic diversity of East Africa, particularly its coastal area. When considering a form of native administration for Dar es Salaam ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Native and Non-Native
• Chapter 2 Identity and Social Structure in Interwar Dar es Salaam
• Chapter 3 Posing the Urban Question
• Chapter 4 Continental Shift
• Chapter 5 Nationalist Thought, Racial Caricature, and Urban Citizenship in Postcolonial Tanzania
• Afterword
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index