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BOOK REVIEWS:
MUSLIM NATIONALISTS IN TANGANYIKA: The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924-1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika. By MOHAMEDSA ID. London: Minerva Press, 1998. Pp. 358. ? 1.99, paperback (ISBN 0-754IO- 223-8). KEY WORDS: Tanzania, colonialism, nationalism, Islam.
REVIEWER: JONATHON GLASSMAN (Northwestern University): SOURCE: The Journal of African History, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2001), pp. 164-166
In recent years historians of nationalism, like historians of science, have been turning to the stories of the losers. In studies of South Asia as well as Africa, authors such as Allman, Geiger and Mbembe have sought to escape the triumphalist trap of assuming that nationalist politics were shaped solely by the men who eventually took power.
A focus on historical dead-ends can illuminate the contingencies that shaped nationalism, and can also help explain many post-colonial political conflicts. Mohamed Said's book is one such study. Its title is misleading: relatively little is about Abdulwahid Sykes, a member of a prominent Dar es Salaam family, and the book fails to substantiate Said's claim that his hero 'founded a political party [TANU] and made a President [Julius Nyerere]'.[/I] Yet the title points to the author's general approach. Using a collection of documents preserved by the Sykes family, as well as the memories of informants drawn from the author's extensive network of personal contacts, Said tells the story of Tanganyika nationalism from the Sykes family's point of view. In doing so, he creates a valuable resource for the study of colonial Dar es Salaam (a place that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention), and makes a strong case that the prevailing literature on Tanganyika nationalism, much of which is centred on the figure of Nyerere, has underestimated the contribution of Muslim townsmen and needs to be reassessed. Private sources such as Said's are often available only to interested parties rather than disinterested professional historians.
To his credit, Said opens with a forthright statement of his connection to the Sykes family (this statement itself tells the reader much about the ties of neighbourhood that sustained nationalist politics in Dar es Salaam), and he makes his polemical agenda clear throughout.
Briefly, his argument is as follows. TANU was created by Muslim townsmen, led by the Sykes brothers, who envisioned the party in 1945 while serving in the Burma Infantry. The Sykeses recruited Nyerere late in the game and made him president of the new organization in a self-sacrificing ploy to encourage Christians to join the nationalist cause. The latter were essential to success because, having been favoured by the colonial regime, they dominated the ranks of the educated elite. But the Christians were unreliable nationalists because of their indoctrination by 'the Church' (Said often assumes that all Christians were Catholic), portrayed here as a highly effective tool of colonialism. After uhuru, TANU's new Christian leaders reneged on promises they had made to keep religion and politics separate, and together with the Church plotted to rid TANU of Islamic influence. By 1970, this conspiracy was complete: TANU had been effectively wrested from the hands of the people who had created it, and had become a tool of Christian power.
Needless to add, Said is a tendentious writer. Yet remarkably little of his argument is directly contradicted by standard accounts, and, although it is impossible to evaluate his sources (footnotes are few and not always useful), he presents some fascinating new material. He is most persuasive in the two-thirds of the book that discuss the period before independence. Said surely has a point when he chastises historians for having failed to note the Islamic factor in the nationalist politics of Dar and other towns. Also valuable is his focus on Muslim-Christian tensions within TANU and its predecessor, the Tanganyika African Association (TAA): indeed, such tension was noted by observers at the time but has since failed to capture the attention of historians who perhaps have been too accepting of official myths of nationalist unity. Yet these strengths are often vitiated by the book's combative tone.
Two over argued themes, in particular, come in conflict. On the one hand, Said wishes to convince his readers that the Sykes circle created the nationalist movement virtually single-handedly and, in its early phases, totally dominated it. In this regard, he presents Nyerere in the early 1950os as an utter neophyte, a cipher who was shrewdly manipulated by Sykes and his allies. (This depiction of Nyerere as 'a complete stranger' to nationalist politics is partly a function of Said's Dar-centred perspective.) On the other hand, he perceives the history of Tanganyika nationalism as a grand struggle in which the Muslim townsmen who created the movement fought each step of the way against the wiles of their Christian enemies. These opposing themes catch Said in some absurd contradictions, such as in his narrative of the 1953 contest in which Nyerere assumed leadership of the TAA, immediately before it was transformed into TANU. That narrative portrays Nyerere simultaneously both as Sykes's tool and as his arch nemesis.
But the most troubling aspect of Said's tendentiousness consists of his portrayal of a Manichean conflict between Muslims, depicted as uniformly dedicated nationalists since the days of Maji Maji, and Christians, depicted as unsteady collaborators. That such images are often contradicted by his own rich data is all the more cause for disappointment.
Said is at his most contentious in the book's closing section, entitled 'Conspiracy against Islam'. It would be difficult to refute the core of his indictment there: TANU's misguided efforts in the late I960s to quash autonomous Islamic institutions. (This sordid tale has been told with more convincing detail, albeit on a strictly local level, by Abdin Chande.) Yet in his determination to reveal TANU's plots to impose 'Christian hegemony', Said ignores the fact that these efforts were part of a broader move to control all institutions of civil society. Still, as a statement of perceptions that are widely shared by Tanzanian Muslims, perceptions grounded in two generations of historical memory, this discussion, and Said's entire argument, should not be ignored by anyone who cares about Tanzania's future.
NAWAKILISHA