In defense of the Nyakyusa - Tanzanian people
Walusako Mwalilino, "Monthly Review," January 1994
The debate between Mahmood Mamdani and Basil Davidson in the Monthly Review of July-August 1993, which was sparked by Davidson's new book on Africa, The Black Man's Burden, requires an important correction. Both scholars present illuminating comments. My concern, however, is about one aspect only: the rectification of Nyakyusa history, of which both men seem to have insufficient understanding.
Davidson claims in his book that the Nyakyusa, who live in southwest Tanzania, as a tribe, were "invented" by European colonialism. He states: At first, the British set themselves to the work of inventing tribes for Africans to belong to; later, with possible independence looming ahead, they turned to building nation-states.(1)
Among such formed "new tribes," he goes on, were: the Sukuma and the Nyakusa [sic], [who] rose fully formed from the mysterious workings of "tradition." Not being worried by such workings, whatever Europeans supposed them to be, such coagulated clans and segments do not seem to have minded becoming "tribes"with exotic names. .but rather pleased about it.(2)
While I cannot speak for the Sukuma because of my unfamiliarity with their history, the origins of the Nyakyusa do not jibe with Davidson's historiography at all. His mistake is based on John Iliffe's book, A Modern History of Tanganyika, which, on the subject of the creation of African tribes, Davidson lauds as "exemplary" and "excellent."(3) But what does Professor Iliffe say that Davidson finds so.
The most spectacular new tribe were the Nyakyusa. In the nineteenth century their name described only inhabitants of certain lakeshore chiefdoms. Some German observers and early British officials extended it to embrace also the Kukwe and Selya further north, their culture being broadly similar. After failing to impose paramounts on this essentially stateless people, the British established a council of chiefs in 1933 and described it as the tribal system. Buttressed by distinctive culture, common language, and sheer isolation, the newly-invented Nyakyusa tribe soon became an effective political unit.(4)
In my opinion, this type of revisionist history is less than "exemplary" or "excellent." To start with, it's not true that in the nineteenth century the name Nyakyusa "described only inhabitants of certain lakeshore chiefdoms;" that they were a "stateless people;" or that they were an "invented" tribe. Let's consider the facts.
The heartland of the Nyakyusa is bordered by the Rungwe mountain in the north, the Songwe river in the south, and Lake Malawi in the east. Residents below the mountain, forty miles away from the lakeshore, also called themselves Nyakyusa. The whole area is now part of Mbeya Region, but the people still call their country Unyakyusa. The Songwe river forms the Tanzania-Malawi boundary; a smaller number of Nyakyusa live on its south bank, inside Malawi. The Nyakyusa are closely related to the Ngonde, of north Malawi, who occupy the river's south bank and stretching forty-two miles south on the lake's plain. The two groups speak the same language (with a minor difference in accents), although the Nyakyusa refer to their version as Kinyakyusa, while the Ngonde call theirs Kyangonde. And both groups pray to Kyala (God).(5) According to Malawian historian, Professor Owen Kalinga, the Nyakyusa settled in Rungwe valley between 1550 and 1650, a fact now supported by carbon dating.(6) The founders of the Ngonde nation settled in Malawi in 1600.(7)
Thus, centuries prior to the arrival of the British consul, Frederic Elton, in 1877, the first European to travel in Unyakyusa, the people had developed a political system of independent chiefdoms, without a central authority. Elton negotiated with Nyakyusa chiefs to be given men--porters--to carry his luggage en route to Zanzibar.(8) But what Elton didn't know then--and what Iliffe didn't know in 1979, and Davidson in 1992--is that the Nyakyusa, with their developed chiefdoms and sense of identity, had been living in Unyakyusa at least since 1650--a good two hundred years before their encounter with a white man! Indeed, anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, who conducted field research in Unyakyusa from 1954 to 1958, has said as much: "The Nyakyusa, when the Europeans reached them, were organized in small independent chiefdoms."(9) These chiefdoms were bonded together by their common history and Kinyakyusa language, and other cultural factors: rituals, customs, and conventions.(10) So the question arises: How could a people with this background have been "invented" by European colonialism?
Professor Iliffe is right, of course, to note that, "The common belief that colonialism imposed law and order on Africa needs always to be weighed against its tendency to disrupt the legal mechanisms of small societies.(11) This certainly applies to the Nyakyusa, whose form of governance was severely altered by colonialism.
The destructive process was begun by the Germans who were the first to colonize Tanganyika (now the mainland of Tanzania) in 1895, nine years after the Berlin Conference allowed European nations to partition Africa. Their task of influencing the Nyakyusa directly, however, proved difficult because the Nyakyusa had a system of chiefs of equal standing; whereas the Germans wanted a paramount leader whom they could use as a conduit. To overcome the problem, the Germans "introduced a paramount political authority among the Nyakyusa...in the persons of European officials.''(12) The Nyakyusa bitterly resented this alien set-up, which led to their confrontation with the Germans on December 2, 1897. The Nyakyusa say "five hundred"of their men were machine-gunned to death that day; while Germans say they killed "thirty to fifty" men.(13) This massacre ensured German rule over the Nyakyusa for the next twenty-one years--that is, until 1918, when Germany was defeated in the First World War.
The British then took over Tanganyika, as mandated by the League of Nations, and introduced indirect rule among the Nyakyusa. They "created new Native Authorities under [a white] District Commissioner and [who was] superior to the chiefs. The traditionally independent chiefs were grouped together in eleven court districts." (14) But unlike the Germans, the British paid to newly-appointed higher chiefs. Iliffe quotes a paramount chief who, "shortly after his invention in 1926" (and here the word "invention" is quite appropriate), thanked British authorities in writing, saying, "You have given our country back to us." (15) Iliffe somehow thinks this is how the Nyakyusa tribe was invented for the first time; he forgets that the newly invented chief had his own reason for thanking his new masters: he was on their payroll!
Iliffe further quotes a Nyakyusa person telling anthropologist Monica Wilson (wife of Godfrey Wilson): "Before you Europeans came,"--meaning, the British colonial administration--"the chiefs like Mwaipopo were not awe-inspiring, they feared the commoners very much .... It is you Europeans who have created chieftainship and awe."(16) Again, Iliffe fails to realize that, implicit in the man's statement is the admission that prior to the coming of European colonial rule the Nyakyusa had a democratic system which did not allow for a big chasm between the chief and the commoners. A chief was easily accessible to the people; this eliminated the need for the people to be in awe of him. Only a corrupt or dictatorial chief had a founded reason to fear the commoners.
I also disagree flatly with Iliffe's assertion that the European "effort to create a Nyakyusa tribe was...honest and constructive.''(17) To repeat, the Nyakyusa tribe was not "invented" by European colonialism; rather, it was the victim of colonialism. The problem with Iliffe and Davidson, is this: they fail to make a distinction between the centuries-old origins of the Nyakyusa tribe and the imposition of new colonial institutions-- failure which leads them to confuse the two.
As for Professor Mamdani, he also makes the mistake--although not as serious as Davidson's---of gullibly accepting, in passing, Davidson's historiography about the Nyakyusa. At no point in his long critique of Davidson's book does he question the author's accuracy about the Nyakyusa. Indeed, Mamdani's apparent lack of knowledge about the Nyakyusa is further revealed when he spells their name as "Nyakusa" (MR, p. 39), thereby repeating the typographical error in Davidson's book (p. 100), from which he quotes.
In conclusion, the scholarship of Africa cannot truly advance if experts, no matter how liberal or progressive, take lightly--to say nothing of distorting, trivializing, or denigrating--the history of some African tribes, and particularly if those tribes are small and appear to be insignificant. The history of the Nyakyusa, although they are a small tribe, still deserves a better reading and interpretation.
NOTES
1. Basil Davidson, The BlackMan's Burden (New York: Times Books, 1992), pp. 11-12.
2. Ibid., pp. 100-101.
3. Ibid., p. 101 and p. 328 (note 1).
4. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 331-332.
5. Godfrey Wilson, The Constitution of Ngonde (Livingstone: The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 1939), p. 37. Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship Among the Nyakyusa (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p.4.
6. Owen J.M. Kalinga, A History of the Ngonde Kingdom of Malawi (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1985), p. 53. Monica Wilson, "Reflections on the Early History of North Malawi," in Bridglal Pachai (ed.), The Early History of Malawi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 140. '
7. Owen J.M. Kalinga, op. cit., p. vii.
8. J.F. Elton, Travels and Researches Among the Lakes and Mountains of Eastern and Central Africa (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1968; 2nd edition), pp. 317-340.
9. Godfrey Wilson, op. cit., p. 8.
10. Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983; reprint).
11. John Iliffe, op. cit., p. 296.
12. Godfrey Wilson, "The Nyakyusa of South-Western Tanganyika," in Elizabeth Colson and Max Gluckman (eds.), Seven Tribes of Central Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1951 ), p. 284.
13. Marcia Wright, "Nyakyusa Cults and Politics in the Later Nineteenth Century," in T.O. Ranger and I.N. Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 168.
14. Godfrey Wilson, "The Nyakyusa of South-Western Tanganyika," op. cit., p. 284.
15. John Iliffe, op. cit. p. 324.
16. Ibid., p. 328.
17. Ibid. p. 324.
I should very much like to see communism tried for awhile before we give up civilization as a purely pathological phenomenon. At any rate, it can hardly produce worse results than capitalism. --George Bernard Shaw.
Walusako Mwalilino is a journalist and former Associate Officer in the department of Political and General Assembly Affairs at the United Nations. He is a contributor to The oxford Companion to Politics of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
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