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The notion of tribe lay at the heart of indirect rule in Tanganyika. Refining the racial thinking common in German times, administrators believed that every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. …
As unusually well-informed officials knew, this stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika’s kaleidoscopic history, but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his disciples erected indirect rule by ‘taking the tribal unit’. They had the power and they created a new political geography. This would have been transient, however, had it not coincided with similar trends among Africans. They too had to live amidst bewildering social complexity, which they ordered in kinship terms and buttressed with invented history. Moreover, Africans wanted effective units of action just as officials wanted effective units of government. Many Africans had strong personal motives for creating new units which they could lead. Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.
During the twenty years after 1925 Tanganyika experienced a vast social reorganisation in which Europeans and Africans combined to create a new political order based on mythical history. … The effort to create a Nyakyusa tribe was as honest and constructive as the essentially similar effort forty years later to create a Tanganyikan nation. Both were attempts to build societies in which men could live well in the modern world.
As unusually well-informed officials knew, this stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika’s kaleidoscopic history, but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his disciples erected indirect rule by ‘taking the tribal unit’. They had the power and they created a new political geography. This would have been transient, however, had it not coincided with similar trends among Africans. They too had to live amidst bewildering social complexity, which they ordered in kinship terms and buttressed with invented history. Moreover, Africans wanted effective units of action just as officials wanted effective units of government. Many Africans had strong personal motives for creating new units which they could lead. Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.
During the twenty years after 1925 Tanganyika experienced a vast social reorganisation in which Europeans and Africans combined to create a new political order based on mythical history. … The effort to create a Nyakyusa tribe was as honest and constructive as the essentially similar effort forty years later to create a Tanganyikan nation. Both were attempts to build societies in which men could live well in the modern world.
