Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War

Abstract

Maji Maji: Lifting The Fog of War. Edited by James Giblin and Jamie Monson. African Social Studies Series. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Pp. xii, 325; maps, photographs, index. $107.00.This excellent collection is a culmination of over a decade of new scholarship on the Maji Maji rebellion. Careful deconstruction of the interpretations of the earlier nationalist histories of the 1960s and 1970s, and of the assumptions embedded in much of the source material, whether African oral history, missionary writings or colonial reportage, allows the emergence of a range of new perspectives. These emphasize the confusion of local experiences in different parts of southern and eastern German East Africa, and the role of networks of communication and miscommunication- the fog of of the subtitle- that moved across and between the lines of African and colonial adversaries and communities, and shaped and even caused events on the ground. At the same time the editors make room for a greater variety of methodological approaches than earlier writing on the war allowed. This follows the trend of other recent revisionist works on African warfare and rebellion in the same period.1 The book opens with a very useful introduction by the editors, setting out the parameters of their new approach in contrast to older colonial and nationalist interpretations. The book is divided into five sections, the first of which is entitled Contexts of Communication, with two lengthy and closely argued chapters by Jamie Monson and Lome Larson.Monson finds that the centrality of mas medicine as stressed by both the nationalist historians and the Germans of the 1960s hides the multiple forms of medicine utilized in African communities. Mas has thus been variously linked to fertility, millenarian visions, witchcraft, warfare, hunting and the protection of villagers (p. 38). Its meanings cannot be reduced to a proto-national unifying element. Mas involved a movement of ideas incorporating rumor, stories, and symbolic language about alliances and divisions that German observers absorbed from African informants and distilled into a single narrative about the war, one that circulated in colonial intelligence and was later reproduced in the nationalist histories. Oral (African) and written (German) sources thus interacted with each other to create an explanatory construct that shaped the prevailing historiography (p. 48).Larson's discussion of the Ngindo is important both because of their central role in the revolt, and the lack of historical writing on the Ngindo and their vast homeland, now occupied by the Selous Game Reserve. Even the wide-ranging Maji Maji Research Project (1968) left them out! Ngindo territory in the north, close to the Rufiji River, as well as in the south, was central to the precolonial caravan system that linked the southern highlands and Lake Malawi to the coast. Ngindo also controlled the northern Bokero, Nandanga, and Ngarambe shrines. Larson situates the revolt of the Ngindo within the breakdown of a longer history of economic opportunity and success since the 1870s. The causes included the countless decrees (p. 97) and forced labor of the colonial state that ultimately disrupted Ngindo agriculture, hunting and forest pursuits, and a parasitical invasion of rubber collectors and porters into formerly sparsely populated areas.Section 2, Straddling Boundaries, considers two mobile groups, one on each side of the rebellion. Part of Thaddeus Sunseri's essay on African elephant hunters covers relatively familiar territory on the role of ivory in the late nineteenth-century economy of southern Tanzania. But an important point emerges. Elephant hunters were ideal war leaders because of their mobility and military skills, their tradition of political leadership, and because they had particular grievances: the colonial exclusion of Africans from elephant hunting and the establishment of game reserves. …