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Thorfinn Stainforth Dr. Zachernuk Colonial Africa - Short Essay October 18, 2002

Maji Maji - Revolt against German Rule? It is not accurate to say that the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905-07 was a mass movement of Africans against the German colonial government. Although there were certainly rebellions and violent attacks against the German presence in what is now Tanzania during this period, it is an oversimplification to say that the rebellion was simply a mass movement in reaction to the German presence. There are two principal reasons why: The Maji Maji rebellions were one part of a complicated series of wars that had been continuing in the region for decades, if not centuries before, and the rebellion cannot be seen as a monolithic African reaction to German rule. There were many different demographic and regional groups involved in rebelling against the Germans; each with their own reasons for doing so. By the 1890s, Germany had established a colony in what is now Tanzania. They had a relatively weak hold on the colony, but they did maintain a system of forts throughout the interior of the territory and were able to exert some control.1 Their hold on the colony was weak, so they resorted to using violently repressive tactics to control the population. They began levying head taxes in 1898, and relied heavily on forced labour to build roads and accomplish various other tasks. In 1902 the governor also decided to force villages to grow cotton as a cash crop. Each village was charged with producing a common plot of cotton. The Headmen of the village were left in charge of overseeing the production; a position that left them vulnerable to criticism and rage from the population. The use of regular villagers, who had other things to do, to produce cotton was extremely unpopular across Tanzania. In many places the villagers simply refused to work the land, or refused payment. These German policies were not only unpopular, they also had serious effects on the lives of Africans. The social fabric of society was being changed rapidly. Gender and social roles were being changed to face the needs of the communities. Since men were forced away from their homes to work, women were forced to assume some of the traditional male roles.2 Not only that, but the fact that men were away strained the resources of the village and the peoples’ ability to deal with their environment and remain self sufficient. These effects, combined with Germany’s violent forays into the area combined to create a lot of animosity against them amongst the people of the future Tanzania. However, their specific grievances against Germany were not common to all. They differed by gender, geographical location, and social position, depending on how the German policies affected them. Another aspect of German policy was their varying relations with different tribes and alliances. In order to assert their authority in Tanzania, the Germans had embarked on a number of wars. Although they had a strong technological advantage over all of the African armies, they still needed and sought the help of one tribe while fighting another. Germany did not commit enough resources or men to protect all of their Tanzanian interests successfully. Therefore, they “entered into the local politics of alliance, attempting to manipulate them to their own advantage.”3 However, the German military did not fully understand the complexities of local politics, and as in the case of the HeHe territories in Wanging’ombe’s administrators being removed without thought to the German obligations in the case, they upset many allies by disregarding these commitments. This case, and others like it contributed to growing irritation among their allies. However, here again, the complaints of any given African or group of Africans against the German regime was quite different from any other’s. In 1905 a drought threatened the region. This, combined with the animosity to German agricultural and labour policies, led to open rebellion against the Germans in July. In August of that year there was a major attack, involving 8000 men, against Mahenge.4 The resistance to the Germans spread from the Southwest across the colony. The rebellion apparently began as a direct result of orders to cultivate cotton. The speed with which it crossed the area and united the disparate tribes of the region led many nationalist historians to believe that the uprising was nationalistic in nature. They believed that there was some sort of common bond emerging that would unite the different peoples of Tanzania to a united future, by defeating the Germans and expelling them from the country. However, this does not properly reflect the disparate motives of the rebels. It is a reflection of mid-20th century nationalism. As is evidenced by the eventual break-up of the unified rebellion into individually fighting tribal groups, there was no true unity amongst the various groups except of convenience. G. C. K. Gwassa wrote in 1972 that “a crisis of resentment against German rule and of frustrated desire to rise up against it had become widespread by 1903-04. The crisis was resolved by the emergence of an ideology which offered solutions to the problems of unity and morale.”5 By drawing on common religious beliefs, he claimed, the peoples of Tanzania had been able to create a common national belief that would unify them, allowing them to expel the Germans from their home. He believed that the various rebel groups combined a belief that their ancestors, through the maji water, would protect them from German bullets; there was a strong military presence in the maji rituals. The argument that these religious ideas were held in common between the various Tanzanian groups, allowing them to unite, holding a common ideology, perhaps heralding the existence of a new nation, would suggest that there was a common mass rising against the Germans, except that according to more recent research the commonality of this belief has been exaggerated by Gwassa. Thaddeus Sunseri’s inquiries into the maji religion have revealed a different reality than was exposed by Gwassa. Sunseri has determined that, “most descriptions of protective medicines, including those used to substantiate the Majimaji tradition, are divorced from the view of a war medicine.”6 The professor has determined that most often women used the water as either an agricultural aide, to bring rain, or to enhance fertility. The water was used quite differently across the Rufiji basin, where the medicine came from, and was not actually associated with battle. It was used frequently during the time of the rebellion since the rebellion coincided with a period of drought, that had likely sparked the rebellion in the first place. Not only this, but Sanseri suggests that the use of water medicine may have been inspired by the Christianity of the Germans, the very people it was being used against; yet more evidence that there was no original Tanzanian nationalism except a common opposition to Germany. There was no common ideology, yet there was certainly division amongst the various African tribes involved in Maji Maji. The elders of the Uluguru mountains tell of the kugawania nchi, or the great war of dividing up the country. This was a civil war between many of the different tribes. However, the Maji Maji rebellion is considered to be a part of this war amongst tribes. This means that the German influence is considered to be just one among many, and that they cannot be considered as a common enemy by all of the peoples of Tanzania. Indeed, Joachim von Pfeil, an important German official of a major company described one African leader as “consciously ‘using’ the Germans: with cunning tactics (schlaue Politik) he thought to use me, and through me to make the superiority of the whites serve his own purposes.”7 This means that some of the Africans were working with the Germans against their ‘fellow Tanzanians.’ As mentioned earlier, the Germans entered into a variety of alliances with Africans. They entered as a single player amongst a field of conflicting interests. Although the Germans exercised a great deal of power, they were by no means all-powerful. They were played off against others, and they returned the favour on occasion. Their arrival did not spark a sudden disunity or unity. Indeed, “in the southern highlands, there were complicated alliances between the Hehe, Sangu, Ngoni and Bena as they fought to establish and protect their emerging territorial polities in the 1860s and 1870s.”8 The Germans then, were actors like any other in the complex politics of late nineteenth century Tanzania. One factor that detracts from the thesis that Maji Maji was a unified mass movement is that different types of people experienced the rebellion, and participated in it, very differently. Women, for example, had a very different experience of the rebellion than did men or chiefs. Since men were required by German authorities to work either on cotton cultivation or on some other form of labour for many days of the year, women were forced to take on some of the roles that men had previously held. They were forced to guard the fields from scavenging animals and give up some tasks that they had previously held in order to make up for the short fall in labour. Sometimes Germany’s forced labour orders would be indiscriminate about who should be drafted into labour, so women as well as men wound up doing the same work. This was looked upon as an insult to men's manhood. Africans found, “ that communal fields were grievous not only because they constituted forced labor, but also because they broke down established patterns of patronage and social and gender hierarchies.”9 Some men may have been motivated to join the rebellion because of the loss of prestige and authority that women's greater role involved. Women would have been partly motivated to join the rebellion to regain real control over their crop production, and to be freed from some of their new responsibilities which they were not prepared to take on. Another group taking up arms in the rebellion were the jumbes, or headmen. These men obviously resented German rule for taking their place as senior decision makers. The Germans made them appear to be responsible for many of the German policies, such as the cotton plantations. Since they were responsible for organizing the cotton cultivation the Germans were able to deflect some of the blame onto these headmen. The jumbes were also seen as impotent to stop the devastating German changes which were leading to social disruption and hunger. Many jumbes may also have been personally apalled by the changing social norms which they were responsible for protecting. They were motivated to rebel against German authority for very different reasons than women did. Yet another, previously overlooked cause of Maji Maji was the famine that accompanied it. Repeated famine may have led to Maji Maji, and again is a cause that does not necessarily indicate a common ideology or unity, simply common hunger. German policies had a detrimental effect on the food supply of the area. Again, a major problem for the population were the German forced labour policies which removed a significant portion of the labour supply to work on cash crops, which they did not get paid to harvest, leading desperate women, or men in some cases, to start “decreasing field sizes; farming poorer land nearer to the huts; rotating labor-intensive and vulnerable crops, such as rice and corn, out of the farming system; and favoring drought and predator resistant crops, especially cassava.”10 That however, was not the only regressive policy of the German administration. They also imposed restrictions on hunting and brush clearing which led, naturally, to an increase in the number of scavenging animals such as wild pigs. The eventual restriction of beer also limited peasants’ ability to raise large parties of people to help destroy these pests. These sorts of agricultural policies were designed without long term, or perhaps even short term consequences in mind. Germany’s agricultural policies so upset the balance of traditional agriculture that it ensured famines would be much more frequent than they had been in the past, guaranteeing the frustration and enmity of the population. The German colonial policy in what is now Tanzania caused such a variety of problems for its various inhabitants that revolt was nearly inevitable. Yet the variety of problems faced by such a range of different people meant that any revolt was bound to be fractured. Though there was some appearance of unity, certainly at first, there was no single guiding philosophy or goal in the Maji Maji revolts. Neither were the revolts a straight forward attack on German rule. German rule was assimilated into the politics of the area and played a complex role in the various alliances at play there. It is wishful thinking that leads historians to think that there was a unity of purpose, goal or ideology in the movement. The women who participated in the movement had different objectives even from the men or jumbes of their social grouping. One tribe had different grievances than others. Though there are commonalities between the various groups fighting in Maji Maji, their alliance was one of short term convenience, so quickly split that it can hardly be called the beginning of a new nation.