A paper I had to redo (due to data loss, on my new laptop of all things), this work - while hastily rewritten and rearranged - was one of my favorites to research. I hope you like it, or get something from it, maybe.
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Law and the Role of Religion:
Historical Explanations,
Constitutional Goals
and Contemporary Analysis
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Introduction
The role of religion in influencing a nation’s practice of law can vary grandly. This is made doubly so when a country’s history has a deeply religious nature – especially when its Constitution states that it is a secular state. Saudi Arabia, for instance, utilizes the centuries-old Islamic religious law of shari’ah in dictating the basic statutes of its legal structure and proceedings; other religions are treated harshly and effectively banned from public. For years, Argentinean legal policy was heavily influenced by outside Catholic influences and semi-religious political parties were openly persecuted by the forces of dictator Juan Peron until the ascension of reformist President Raul Alfonsin in 1983, prompting a secularization of laws and a non-religious reimagining of the country’s Constitution. While officially secular, the legal system of India has no definitive “wall of separation” which pushes apart religion and the state; thus, the state interacts with different religious organizations and centers on a consistent legal level. Finland deals with religion in a liberal fashion, expressing the legal importance of religious freedom while at the same time endorsing a special relationship with the Finnish Orthodox Church.
Through a display and analysis of these and other examples of religion’s impact on national law, especially in pertinence to a country’s Constitution, proper comparisons between states can be made and the reasons for why these differences have emerged may be examined properly.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Theocratic Courts
The starkest example of religion as indicative of the law’s treatment of an individual is Saudi Arabia, a staunchly conservative Islamic state which utilizes Sunni Islam-oriented Shari’ah law in determining the results of legal cases. The Saudi Constitution is, strikingly, the text of the Islamic holy book known as the Qur’an. This point alone is quite indicative of the role of religion in determining the judicial legacy of the state. The Hanbali fiqh of Shari’ah is put to use in Saudi courts as a means of determining, in a semi-inquisitorial way, the violations put forth by a suspect against the country’s religious law. Executed by religiously-trained judges with relatively little input from lawyers or defendants, Saudi courts use Islamic law as a means of regulating the private lives of the country’s subjects. Punishments are derived from sometimes centuries-old Islamic sources and are considered archaic or slanted by many, including international observer organizations such as the Human Rights Watch.
Saudi Arabia’s penchant for Shari’ah can be explained through an analysis of its formation and its intermingling with religious fundamentalists known as “Wahhabis”. Since the formation of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula had always been a place of conservative views due to the homogenous nature of peninsular Bedouin society and the isolation experienced by nomadic Muslims. The original Saudi state was a small tribal power in central Najd, a desert region of the modern nation, headed by Saudi patriarch Muhammad ibn Sa’ud. Sa’ud joined forces with Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, a religious fundamentalist imam who had been ejected from another settlement due to his extreme conservatism, and began to strike out against those Muslims they considered non-orthodox. After the movement was quashed by the Ottoman Empire, the Saudi state remained stagnant until the turn of the twentieth century when Sa’ud’s descendent Abdul Aziz ibn Sa’ud began to use Ottoman funds to rally those remaining Wahhabi forces to reassert their power over the Najdi region and eventually the western Arabian region known as the Hedjaz. Conservative Muslims from across the Arabian Peninsula joined the burgeoning state, promoting views which would later be codified into Saudi law. Ibn Sa’ud’s utilization of conservative Islam as a rallying point for jihad , and as a central pillar for the formation of a state, laid the foundation for the propagation of strict Islamic law in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
Those defendants within Saudi Arabia that are non-Sunni Muslims, such as the country’s Shi’ah Muslim minority or the sizeable number of non-Muslim foreign workers from both the West and Asia, are either afford a slight degree of religious autonomy in determining the results of less serious cases or must submit fully to Saudi Shari’ah courts despite their religious standing. In some cases, harsher punishments, from both the courts and the Saudi police, are dealt to non-Sunni Muslims. As seen in these examples, religion dominates the legal proceedings of Saudi Arabia despite the desires of those involved in the cases. Secular courts are utilized in only specific cases which tend to pertain to complaints against government policies and automobile accidents, issues for which the country’s generally archaic Islamic law has no proper statutes. Due to the strictness of the state’s enforcement of religion and Arab culture, traditional Bedouin gender roles are reinforced: women are legally exempt from voting or being in public without a written excuse from a male relative, and cuckolded men have the legal right to assist in deciding the punishment for their wives. Hanbali Sunni Islam law is applied in all cases in which it can be and secular legal proceedings are utilized only when there are no Shari’ah-oriented precedents.
The Republic of India: Officially Secular, Realistically Prescriptive
India presents a unique example of an interaction between a state which is technically secular and the many religious issues which it faces. The modern-day nation of India encompasses the birthplaces of multiple religions – Hinduism was effectively “founded” in India’s northeastern city of Varanasi, and Buddhism was doctrinally formulated nearby – and came to interact with others including Islam and Sikhism. While it was conceived as a secular state and was only reinforced in this by later amendments to its Constitution, religion continues to be much-discussed issue in the courts of India.
Prior to Indian independence, the interaction between foreign authorities and their very religious Indian subjects contributed to eventual Indian secularism. British colonial domination of the region led to the banning of certain religious practices such as Sati , prompting a public response that the statesmen who would eventually become India’s founders preferred to avoid. During the rise of Gandhi and Indian nationalism, the British policy of regarding separate religious communities in judicially different ways came under criticism and led to new calls for secularism. The sheer amount of influence from other religions in the country would make it difficult for any one religion to have proper “authority” within the government, which prompted India to emerge as a secular state. For others, religion functioned as a rallying point which anti-colonialists could call upon as a means of resisting the British attempts to stabilize their colony. Despite the proposed secularity of the state, religion continued to play a major role in its development and often took center stage in political and legal disputes. Events such as the partitioning of colonial India into the secular Republic of India and the starkly Islamic Republic of Pakistan, as well as conflicts over religiously-disputed regions between those two states such as Kashmir, support of this concept.
An observation of Indian laws pertaining to religion, as well as the Constitution of India, shows the interesting relationship that the supposedly secular state has with its multiple faiths. Officially dictated by the country’s Constitution is, once again, the secular nature of the nation: discrimination as a result of religion is prohibited, unfair legal considerations on a religious basis are strongly disallowed and Indian citizens are allowed to profess any religious belief they choose. As noted by Tahir Mahmood, however, the state reserves the right to initiate, codify and enforce legal statutes which promote “social reform” that may or may not affect religion. Narenda Subramanian of McGill University states that early Indian statesmen, in an attempt to quell potential religious unrest, had homogenized Hindu beliefs by transferring them into the legally-applicable doctrine that would become part of the Indian Constitution of 1950; this led to the adoption of multiple religious laws in determining the country’s family law, starting with the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. Other legal codifications of religious practices include the country’s Hajj Committee Act of 1959 and the judicial regulation of activities pertaining to Hindu and Islamic religious land trusts. “Secular” Indian civil law, too, is greatly affected by religion.
“Conversion to any religion other than Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or [Sikhism] is seen as a civil offense also under each of the other three Hindu-law enactments of 1956, resulting in loss of succession, guardianship, maintenance, and adoption rights. Thus, parents ceasing to be Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, or Sikh lose guardianship of their minor children, while convert wives and children are deprived of their right to be provided maintenance by their husbands and parents, respectively.”
India’s official secularity, an important method of preventing any one of the country’s many religious factions from gaining overt influence, is tempered by its need for a method of regulation of its many faiths. The country’s subsequent incorporation of multiple forms of religious law in determining family law and civil law is simply an extension of India’s attempts at secularizing, or in this case ecumenicizing, its legal framework.
The Russian Federation: Resurgent Religion and the State’s Response
Contemporary Russia has emerged as a result of historical religious extremes. For hundreds of years, Tsarist Russia was an effective confessional state: strengthened in religious authority as a result of the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Russian Orthodox Church came to heavily influence all aspects of the Empire and dictated its policy of forced multireligious orthodoxy. Muslim and Protestant congregations operated at the behest of state religious authorities who, in some cases, codified and redefined religious laws in a way which ensured the loyalty of otherwise troublesome groups to the Empire. In contrast to Imperial Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – a state which overthrew the Tsar in 1922 – was staunchly atheistic and actively persecuted members of all state clergies. Soviet authorities forcefully disbanded religious communities and regularly demolished places of worship in an effort to redirect its citizens to identity with and support the state. This complex legacy led to the establishment of the Russian Federation in 1991.
The Russian Federation is a secular state but has been known to respond to religious forces in ways reminiscent of tactics employed by both the Tsarist Russia and the USSR. The Russian Constitution, established in 1993, promotes a distinct policy of state non-interference in religious affairs and a purely secular position. Any discrimination based on religious preferences, legal or otherwise, is also prohibited by the Constitution. Factually, the system is quite different. After emerging from its Soviet Era, the Federation saw a “boom” in religious expression from non-Russian Orthodox factions such as Muslims in Chechnya and Evangelical Christians in European Russia. Fearing the loss of social cohesion promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church, the State Duma nearly passed legislation which would have legally limited the legitimacy of non-Orthodox faith communities which had not been in the Russian Federation for over fifteen years (an impossible task, considering the state had only existed for six years by this point) or subsets by banning “religious dissension” (a very broad term). The act, which gained huge support from European Russians and passed the Duma almost unanimously, was vetoed by President Yeltsin on July 22nd, 1997; despite the fact that it was in open violation of not only the Russian Constitution but also the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Man. The potential legal ramifications of the act’s passing would have severely undermined the Constitution’s secular intentions. Since this occurred, the state has gone on to criticize and restrict religious organizations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jesuit missionaries on the basis that their religion may destabilize the faith-related unity of European Russia. This is in direction violation of the Russian Constitution, as the state has acted out against religious minorities in a fashion the Constitution specifically restricts.
A place where the Russian Federation’s secularist mission has completely failed is Chechnya, an organ republic of the Federation in the northeastern Caucasus Mountains. Populated mostly by Muslims, Chechnya had once been a rebellious territory of Tsarist Russia that regularly fought against attempts by Imperial authority to control the region’s ecstatic religious practices. During the Soviet Era, the region’s stubborn Islamic subjects had been forced to migrate to Central Asia or Siberia in order to disintegrate any cohesive religious movement between former residents. From 1994 to 1996, separatist forces fighting for an independent Ichkerian Chechnya managed to secure state sovereignty by disabling Russian state apparatuses in the region and later repelling military forces sent against them. Brotherhoods of Sufi Muslims, groups indicative of the region’s Islam and are normally non-political, had assisted in turning away the Russians and did so without much difficulty. After several years of nominal sovereignty, the Second Chechen War broke out and the state was effectively swallowed up and dismantled by Russian authorities. In an attempt to dissuade such events from ever occurring again, the Russian Federation appointed former Ichkerian Chechens loyal to the state, such as current Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, to positions of authority. At the same time, Russia refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of moderate or Ichkeria-aligned figures due to their perceived penchant for Islamic extremism.
To stabilize the region and ensure order, these new statesmen have effectively ignored the legal statutes put forth by the Federation’s Constitution. Stating that the official mission is to “blunt the appeal of hardline Islamic separatists,” Kadyrov has enforced strict Shari’ah law and endorsed more conservative elements of Chechen culture. Harsh interpretations of gender roles and property law have been reinforced by these authorities and in many cases are more conservative than when the region had been under non-Russian control. By legally endorsing such things, and “[encouraging] men to take more than one wife, even though polygamy is illegal in Russia,” the Chechen Republic has generally abandoned the non-religious goals of the Russian Federation in order to ensure some sense of stability in the fragmented Caucasus republic. The government has turned a blind eye to Kadyrov’s actions, setting a precedent that may be followed in other parts of the country if there is truly no long-term reaction to his use of state-supported Shari’ah law.
Finland: A ‘Special’ Religious Relationship
Home to two state-endorsed churches, Finland is a former province of not only the Swedish Empire but also the Russian Empire. In 1917, Finland established its own independence; during World War II, the Baltic state fended off a Soviet invasion with the help of highly-skilled partisan guerrilla and sniper regiments. Prior to the state’s independence, every subject of Finland – as a province of the Russian or Swedish empires – had to be registered as either a member of the Finnish Lutheran Church or the Finnish Orthodox Church. The Act of Nonconformity was passed in 1889, allowing for other denominations such as the Baptists to gain state recognition. Finland’s subsequent exposure to multiple denominations of Christianity led to a historical policy of general religious tolerance. In contrast to this, Finland has maintained its two churches as state-supported apparatuses paid for mostly through tax revenue collected from members of the congregations. In opposition to this is Finland’s Constitution, which states that the nation does not treat any religious entity different than any other; the general message of the Constitution is that religious equality, as opposed to separation of Church and state, is the Finnish goal.
While the state’s relationship with its two major religious appendages may be unequal or preferential, the idea religion as contributive to judicial practice in Finland is largely unrecognized. The state funds its two churches, but allows citizens to exempt themselves from paying for them; religious education is a legal obligation for secondary school students, but they have the legal right to replace such classes with non-religious ethics-related courses. Unlike “secular” India and Russia, Finland does not utilize unconstitutional methods in maintaining the religious status quo of its nation nor does it use religious preference as a determinant in restricting what an organization may do. The twin churches of Finland have been steadily losing membership each year, as non-state-supported religious congregations have been gaining adherence. The state has not responded to this in any authoritarian or prescriptive way, allowing for both other religious groups and the country’s atheist community to grow in recent years. Populations of Muslims have begun to emerge to urban Finland, prompting the state to introduce non-Christian religious education into the state-funded educational system.
The popularity of social liberalism in Finland has been attributed as a reason behind the country’s policy of honest religious tolerance. Sexual and gender equality are actively addressed in state-funded churches, prompting organizations such as FreedomHouse to label Finland as one of the most religiously free and liberal countries in the world. Since independence, the country has promoted a policy of religious tolerance which has attracted members of foreign religious groups such as Muslims to the country; this is in great contrast to some European countries, such as France and Switzerland where religious minorities are sometimes faced with legal restrictions to their worship. State offices actively host ecumenical conferences between different religious groups, promoting cohesive social action across religious lines. Finland’s policy of religious tolerance is cyclical: as new religious communities are founded or migrate to the nation, ecumenical relationships between them and existing groups are founded and continuously propagate a cohesive religious atmosphere. This is, unlike the other “secular” states mentioned in this term paper, a sign of Finland’s success as a nation promoting religious tolerance.
Conclusion
The information drawn from the four nations mentioned in this report – Saudi Arabia, India, Russia and Finland – amount to explanations as to how the relationships of states, and their prior colonial or pre-state polities, with religion assist in the determination of religion’s role within the nation. The foundation of Saudi Arabia as a staunchly Wahhabist Islamic state garnered it support from ultra-orthodox Arabian Muslims who later solidified their beliefs through policy once the state came into being, leading to the legally-sanctioned oppression of non-Muslims and Muslims alike. The prevalence of religion in Indian society prompted an attempt at secularism, which later resulted in the state codifying and ecumenicizing preexisting indigenous religious law in an effort to accommodate its populations. Russia’s policy of secularism, stained with authoritarianism and a bent for conserving important aspects of Russian culture, led to the distinct legal oppression and subjugation of non-Russian Orthodox religious groups of which the state is wary. Despite its historical support of multiple state religious institutions, Finland successfully promotes a policy of religious tolerance with no existing religious legal preference due to the traditionally high prevalence of social liberalism within the state.
The states all contrast to each other quite grandly. Both Russia and Finland have had historical state support for religious entities, but Russia’s legacy of effective authoritarianism has prevented its secular mission from succeeding in the same way as ultraliberal Finland. India’s attempts at secularism despite a high prevalence of religion led to an ecumenical approach to law, while Saudi Arabia’s existence as an entity endorsed by conservative religious authorities effectively collapsed any attempt at secularism within its legal system. One of the few things that can be truly established from this analysis is that two influences – the historical role of religion, and the state’s use or misuse of religion – have the ability to dictate how a modern state may operate. The role of religion in Russia as a unifying aspect of culture and authority or a basis for gaining popular support and regional recognition as in Saudi Arabia, shows the important result of what happens when a nation utilizes religion as an apparatus of the state. In Finland and India, the state actively attempted to promote interreligious relations: India saw the hostile reactions to British attempts at banning or dictating religious behavior, while Finland was split between powers which endorsed their own religious views upon the eventually independent nation.
Religion is a powerful tool for a state to utilize, but has many negative consequences if used inappropriately. Russia and Saudi Arabia, two authoritarian polities with little consideration for religious minorities and futures bound with future trials pertaining to religion, are examples of this. India stands at a middle point, while Finland has ascended to a high point of religious tolerance. Responsibility in the use of religion, it seems, dictates the future of a state.
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Works Cited
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Crews, Robert. “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia.” The American Historical Review 108.1 (2003): 50-83.
Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
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All rewritten from scratch over the course of a few hours. Not bad.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tanganyika: In Colonial Africa, Europeans are Scary Folks - Specifically Germans
Here is a long-time-coming update - a paper I wrote for Colonial Africa, about the foundation of their colony in East Africa. Karl Peters is hysterically interesting, and evil.
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The colonial territory of Tanganyika, an entity which would go on to become a major part of the Schutzgebiet Deutsch-Ostafrika , was a direct possession of the German Empire from 1891 to 1919. Prior to European colonization of the region, Tanganyika was a region split not only between many minor tribal entities: the Sultan of Zanzibar nominally claimed the coastal region and further inland as his territory, and the region fell under the British sphere of influence. As a result of years of nominal trade activity as well as the unsanctioned gathering of treaties by nationalist explorer Karl Peters, the German government was supplied was some claim to present at the Berlin Conference. Within days of the Conference’s decisions being passed down, the Germans moved quickly to establish control over the lands which they had gained “control” over through the further establishment of treaties as well as the use of military expansion and subjugation. Despite the treading of the German Empire’s colonial ventures along the boundaries of both regional powers such as the Zanzibari Sultanate and international ones such as Great Britain, Germany was able to forge the foundations of an economically exploitative colony in what is modern-day mainland Tanzania. The conclusion of constantly-shifting territorial demarcation treaties, the quashing of widespread rebellions as executed through the severe methods of the military-minded “Prussian” colonial administration, and the constant evolution of the East African colonial government throughout such events allowed for Tanganyika to develop into an economically prominent, if socially and racially repressive, German colony.
Before Tanganyika: Initial Interests and the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation
Prior to the arrival of the Germans, the Swahili Coast, and by proxy Tanganyika, were linked to a much larger economic system which spread throughout the sea to its east. From the east coast of Africa, trading was conducted through the Arab-led Sultanate of Zanzibar up along the Arabian Peninsula as well as across the Indian Ocean to locales such as the Indian subcontinent. Known for its focus on the slave trade, the Sultanate of Zanzibar was an economically notable state which utilized its human resources in producing crops such as coconuts and cloves for export. This practice, though lucrative, drew the ire of the anti-slaving British Empire which had begun to gain influence in the East African coastal region due to its proximity to their trade routes to India. European powers were not completely hostile to the Sultanate for its practices: the British Empire established a consulate in Zanzibar City in 1841, as did France in 1844 and the German Hanseatic League in 1859. Missionaries and explorers used the Zanzibari Sultanate as a staging ground for inland expeditions, leading to geographical discoveries such as Mt. Kilimanjaro and linguistic developments like the translation of Kiswahili, the region’s common language, from Arabic script into Latin.
The call of the Berlin Conference heralded an enormous change in the vague interest that European had toward Tanganyika. By the 1880’s and the first inklings of the Berlin Conference, Sultan Barghash bin Said al-Busaid of Zanzibar found himself privy to the collapse of his nominal control over the Swahili Coast and his territories further inland. Trade-oriented city states declared their sovereignty from his rule at the same time as the great expansion of the Nyamwezi leader Mirambo, a military figure referred to as “the Napoleon of Africa” by Henry M. Stanley . Well before the Berlin Conference, procolonialist German statesmen had suggested East Africa as a potential venture for the newly unified state and, although Germany had the past option of economically dominating the ailing Zanzibari Sultanate, the state’s leadership refused the task in order to avoid sparking hostilities with Great Britain.
The Partitioning of Tanganyika: Peters, Zanzibar, and Dar es-Salaam
While the German state may not have readily acted out in favor of colonialism, at least one of its subjects touted an opposing view. Dr. Karl Peters, a German explorer and founder of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation , ventured into the coastal and semi-inland regions of Tanganyika at his own expense and, in 1884, began to establish treaties with local leaders that guaranteed economic access and effective ownership of large swaths of land to Peters himself. The contracts signed between Peters and local rulers are considered vague and heavily slanted by modern scholarship – so much so that Peters’ actions prompt authors such as Helmuth Stoecker to refer to Peters, an open admirer of British imperialist tactics, as a “psychopathic…criminal.” Despite the underhandedness of Peters’ methods, his efforts paid off: the lands between Lake Tanganyika and the Zanzibari Sultanate, which went far south enough to brush against the borders of Portuguese Mozambique, were now his property according to his treaties . At the next year’s monumental Berlin Conference, Germany nominated Peters’ agreements with local chiefs as evidence enough for German interest in the region and gained the committee’s approval for their colonization of the region. Peters’ Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation became the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG) , which operated the colony on an adminstrative and economic level as a protectorate of the German Empire.
The borders of Tanganyika fluctuated greatly over the course of its early years as the DOAG interacted with local polities. The colonial administration began to put pressure on the Sultanate of Zanzibar to give up its coastal territories in order to ensure the survivability of Tanganyika as a colony and, with British help, the Sultanate was coerced into leasing its coast at unfair costs for very long periods of time to the DOAG. New territories were added to Tanganyika as a result of treaties signed by Clemens Denhardt and Karl Juhlke, both associates of Dr. Peters, from within the territory of the Zanzibari Sultan (much to his displeasure). This allowed for the colonial company to expand its role past the few trading posts it administered and, with the use of gunboat diplomacy from both Germany and Portugal, new territories were gained and new borders emerged every several months after the establishment of the colony. To enforce the growing authority of the DOAG, mercenaries were hired and used to enforce the company’s authority; heavy taxes were levied against coastal trading villages within the German sphere of influence, leading to levels of unrest.
By 1890, the borders of Tanganyika and the rest of Deutsch-Ostafrika had stabilized through a series of treaties with the British – who acted not only in their own interest, but also in the interest of their semi-vassal the Sultan of Zanzibar – such as the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, which led to the ceding of some German territories in exchange for more East African coast including Dar es-Salaam, the settlement which would come to act as Tanganyika’s colonial capital. As a result of these decisions, the German colony began to consolidate its power around a coastal city and acted economically while its greatest competitors – the Sultanate of Zanzibar and Great Britain – stood silent, either for inability to resist German efforts to usurp territory or unable to respond for diplomatic reasons .
The Abushiri Revolt: Unrest and Consequences
In establishing boundaries and cementing authority, the DOAG began to chafe against the coastal Arabs and inland Africans who had come under its initial colonial taxation. The colonial authority became known for its harsh treatment of local peoples in pertinence to human rights and religious practice. By 1888, these high levies and levels of mistreatment, as well as – according to Hatch – the German cooperation with the British effort to end the region’s prominent slave trade , led to unrest that became an open revolt. Helmuth Stoecker disagrees with Hatch’s assessment of the revolt and instead states that it had relatively little to do with German actions toward the slave trade, citing the participation of not only coastal Arabs but also inland tribal groups and urban aristocrats in opposing DOAG authority.
Led by the coastal Arab merchant Abushiri bin Salim, the “Abushiri Revolt” quickly spread across the southern portion of Tanganyika. DOAG agents were pushed out of their trading posts and villages and forced to flight from not only disgruntled city dwellers but also the thousands of Yao tribesmen who rallied against the German colonial presence. Characterized by German politicians as an “Arab rebellion” bent on collapsing the colony in favor of the slave trade , Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called for the spending of several million German marks and the appointment of Hermann Wissman, a veteran commander of mercenaries in Africa, to end the revolt; by 1890, the revolt had been quelled and Abushiri himself executed after being betrayed by local tribesmen.
The eventual end of the Abushiri Revolt led to major changes in Tanganyika. Wissman’s use of Sudanese mercenaries to fight Abushiri’s rebels had expanded upon his arrival to include the auxiliaries of smaller groups of local people. By the end of the conflict, several African rulers had begun to fight alongside the Germans; in the next few years, those chiefs would be afforded positions within the colonial government in a form of limited self-rule. Another major change came as a result of the DOAG’s failure to contain the Abushiri situation. This lapse in ability drew the ire of the German government, which saw the stability of Tanganyika as a matter of their own national prestige. The German government thus took state control of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation in 1891, consolidating its former territories – including Tanganyika – into the general Deutsch-Ostafrika administration. A final major change to take place after the Abushiri Revolt was the new emphasis on social promotion of the coastal people, who were mostly Afro-Arab Swahili people, through the use of a state-supported hierarchal system which employed maakida and majumbe to enforce German authority.
The Mkwawa Revolt: A Short Response to Early Administration
After the appropriation of Tanganyika into the German state’s colonial administration, a less major revolt conducted by the joined Hehe and Bena tribal confederations occurred. The Hehe and Bena had already been involved in fighting against German authority, as they had acted militarily against German coastal interests during the Abushiri Revolt. This particular unrest, though, was spurred on due to the perceivedly slanted preference afforded to the coastal peoples as opposed to the inland Africans who were largely removed from the emerging colonial power structure. The harshness of the colonial administration in achieving its goals – namely, complete economic productivity at the cost of the colonial subject’s well-being – led to the joining of the Hehe and Bena groups into a single resistant force against German forces in Tanganyika.
United by a leader known as Mkwawa in 1891, the unified Africans fought a prolonged guerrilla-style war against encroaching German colonial forces which lasted until 1898 despite the general surrender of a larger part of the tribal alliance in 1894. Mkwawa’s end came when he was betrayed by his forces after a new series of losses and, after being cornered by the Germans, committed suicide rather than submit to to the Europeans. His forces attempted to fight on, still displeased with the racist method in which they were being ruled, but were crippled in their efforts by the arrival of the rinderpest which decimated their herds and introduced a famine that would not be reduced in severity over the next few years.
The Maji-Maji Rebellion: Deutsch-Ostafrika’s Greatest Challenge
New methods of administration and governorship continued to gain unfavorable responses from the African colonial subjects of Deutsch-Ostafrika after the close of the Mkwawa Revolt. In 1898, the colonial administration – a body organized and run by former Prussian military governors, harsh in their methods and sometimes known for their overt racism - issued the “hut tax“, a demanded payment which punished those unable to afford it with forced labor. Financial matters were made more difficult with the appropriation of African lands for use by immigrants from Germany , who the colony readily accepted and incorporated into the hierarchal colonial framework – much to the chagrin of the readily-abused Africans. Yet another tax was levied against inland Africans, this time by the Afro-Arab maakida colonial forces who resided in higher social and administrative positions than any inland Tanganyikan. This left the Africans with less economic stability and assisted in the furthering of the idea that the colony would always possess a racist bent against African self-determination or accomplishment.
Taxation and suffering increased as the officers of Deutsch-Ostafrika began to solidify their goals as little more than purely economic. Within a short time, the colonial administration clarified that the hut tax had to be paid in colonial German marks, not in livestock or crops; this led to the effective dissolving of local product in Tanganyika, as colonial subjects were forced to sell their animals and produce at severely reduced prices to meet with strict colonial deadlines for the tax. When combined with the preexisting famine as a result of the rinderpest, this new hut tax plunged many colonial Africans into abject poverty and eventually forced labor as they were unable to consistently pay the high levy. The Africans were subsequently put to work on properties owned by German settlers, exacerbating the already tense racial situation in Tanganyika.
The simmering situation boiled over in July of 1905 when unrest broke out once more. The local Kilwa people grouped together into a confederacy, actively disassembling German authority through the destruction of colonial government outposts and the slaying of German settlers perceived to be government agents. According to the work of Prothero, this revolt was quite different from the others which had formerly occurred in Tanganyika: smaller tribes and villages unified into huge unions of African rebels, easily dwarfing the sizes of those groups which had acted against Germany in the past, and the Germans were actively blamed by the Africans for their unfair governance. John hatch disagrees, however, and states that the union of other groups such as the Ngoni into the main Rebellion did not occur in time, and the end result was to be expected even at the beginning of the conflict.
The Maji-Maji Rebellion, named for the maji used by its participants, was thus a striking out of inland Africans against not only Germans but also coastal Arabs and Africans who were viewed not only as general aliens to the region but also as oppressors and as instruments of the colonial government. According to John Hatch, Arab colonial agents were literally chased out of colonial settlements settlements in the Matumbi Hills by groups of African subjects .
The German response to the initial breakout of the Maji-Maji Rebellion was summarily brutal. Initially, colonial authorities commited wholesale slaughters of populations in response to similar actions by fighters among the rebels. Upon the spread of the rebellion to Dar es-Salaam, German authorities utilized the still young technology of machineguns in turning away the resistance, dispelling the myth of the maji and causing massive casualties. A scorched earth campaign was then conducted by the German forces, killing off the grand majority of the region’s cultivatable herds and crop goods. This came, as formentioned, at a time when the inhabitants of Tanganyika had already beens subject to the rinderpest as well as the forced underselling of the majority of African herds and the appropriation of African resources and land for the use of German settlers and colonial outlets. The result was a widespread famine which impacted not only the inland Africans but also those on the coast. Numbers of the African death toll varies: older sources such as Prothero list numbers as high as 120,000 casualties while more contemporary scholars like Khapoya claim that the number was closer to 75,000. Groups which were in regions that had seen much action during the Rebellion were hit the worst: the Pangwa tribesmen of Lake Nyasa had been reduced from approximately 30,000 people to less than 2,000 by the end of the Maji-Maji Rebellion.
German Response and Reform
The response of the German public to the conduct of colonial authorities in the Maji-Maji Rebellion led to a scandal and cries for a fairer form of colonialism. An investigation into the matter by the German government led to the exposure of gross misgovernment by colonial military officers which further shocked mainland Europe.
In accordance with its colonial failures, Germany immediately established a colonial office in Berlin, under the direction of Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg, which would revise and change the Empire’s colonial policies in East Africa. A distinct reformist, von Rechenberg put into effect sweeping changes as early as 1907 – the year the Maji-Maji Rebellion formally ended – such as the enforcement of more egalitarian methods of dealing with African colonial subjects and a promotion of African agricultural development with incentives for growing cash crops such as cotton. Also announced was a total ban on forced labor of African subjects, but this did not apply to public works projects for the colonial state. Military forces and colonial police would be bolstered by local auxiliaries, including sons and family members of local African chieftains, in order to further stabilize the colony and assist in the potential normalization of race relations.
von Rechenberg’s reforms were met with resistance from those Germans with a strong presence in Tanganyika. The Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft , the colonial company which had once ruled Tanganyika, was still quite prevalent in its economic activities and had established virtual monopolies over not only the region’s plantation economies but also had sway within the colonial administration. The DOAG was thus apprehensive about the reforms, which would place more economic power in the hands of the Africans who were generally outside of their own power structure. In addition, his acts were subsequently protested by German settlers in Tanganyika who claimed the new preference toward Africans disallowed their own economic productiveness. These complaints eventually led to von Rechenberg’s resignation. The impact of his work persisted, however, and the colonial administration he had reformed stayed in effect for the rest of Germany’s tenure in the region.
Conclusion
Repression and productivity are the two terms which best come to describe the process by which Tanganyika shifted from a barely defined treaty in the hands of a fierce nationalist explorer to the substantial colonial polity afforded to Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Local influences such as the Zanzibari Sultanate were pushed aside and marginalized in order to cement claims to the region, and peoples were suppressed via both machineguns and hut taxes. Famine seemed like a regular occurrence in German East Africa, in all cases brought on by the abuses of the colonial government. Ultimately, the economic productivity of the colony shone through as worth the trouble of constant rebellions – responses to the racist, repressive German method of colonial military government which killed untold thousands in the name of profit. Despite the additions of local people and new hierarchies throughout its existence, the German effort in Tanganyika would never achieve any form of the publicly-demanded egalitarian treatment. The colonial government, as short-lived in the grand scheme of Africa as it was, will always represent a panicked and violent period.
Works Cited
Hatch, John. Tanzania: a Profile. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972.
Khapoya, Vincent B. The African Experience: An Introduction. New York: Longman, 2010.
Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Prothero, G.W. (editor). German African Possessions (Late). New York: Greenwood Press, 1920.
Stoecker, Helmuth. “German East Africa 1885 – 1906,” in German Imperialism in Africa: from the Beginnings until the Second World War, edited by Helmuth Stoecker, 93-113. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Stoecker, Helmuth. “German East Africa 1906 – 1914,” in German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War, edited by Helmuth Stoecker, 148-160. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Yeager, Rodger. Tanzania: An African Experiment. Boulder: Westview Press, 1982.
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There you go!
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The colonial territory of Tanganyika, an entity which would go on to become a major part of the Schutzgebiet Deutsch-Ostafrika , was a direct possession of the German Empire from 1891 to 1919. Prior to European colonization of the region, Tanganyika was a region split not only between many minor tribal entities: the Sultan of Zanzibar nominally claimed the coastal region and further inland as his territory, and the region fell under the British sphere of influence. As a result of years of nominal trade activity as well as the unsanctioned gathering of treaties by nationalist explorer Karl Peters, the German government was supplied was some claim to present at the Berlin Conference. Within days of the Conference’s decisions being passed down, the Germans moved quickly to establish control over the lands which they had gained “control” over through the further establishment of treaties as well as the use of military expansion and subjugation. Despite the treading of the German Empire’s colonial ventures along the boundaries of both regional powers such as the Zanzibari Sultanate and international ones such as Great Britain, Germany was able to forge the foundations of an economically exploitative colony in what is modern-day mainland Tanzania. The conclusion of constantly-shifting territorial demarcation treaties, the quashing of widespread rebellions as executed through the severe methods of the military-minded “Prussian” colonial administration, and the constant evolution of the East African colonial government throughout such events allowed for Tanganyika to develop into an economically prominent, if socially and racially repressive, German colony.
Before Tanganyika: Initial Interests and the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation
Prior to the arrival of the Germans, the Swahili Coast, and by proxy Tanganyika, were linked to a much larger economic system which spread throughout the sea to its east. From the east coast of Africa, trading was conducted through the Arab-led Sultanate of Zanzibar up along the Arabian Peninsula as well as across the Indian Ocean to locales such as the Indian subcontinent. Known for its focus on the slave trade, the Sultanate of Zanzibar was an economically notable state which utilized its human resources in producing crops such as coconuts and cloves for export. This practice, though lucrative, drew the ire of the anti-slaving British Empire which had begun to gain influence in the East African coastal region due to its proximity to their trade routes to India. European powers were not completely hostile to the Sultanate for its practices: the British Empire established a consulate in Zanzibar City in 1841, as did France in 1844 and the German Hanseatic League in 1859. Missionaries and explorers used the Zanzibari Sultanate as a staging ground for inland expeditions, leading to geographical discoveries such as Mt. Kilimanjaro and linguistic developments like the translation of Kiswahili, the region’s common language, from Arabic script into Latin.
The call of the Berlin Conference heralded an enormous change in the vague interest that European had toward Tanganyika. By the 1880’s and the first inklings of the Berlin Conference, Sultan Barghash bin Said al-Busaid of Zanzibar found himself privy to the collapse of his nominal control over the Swahili Coast and his territories further inland. Trade-oriented city states declared their sovereignty from his rule at the same time as the great expansion of the Nyamwezi leader Mirambo, a military figure referred to as “the Napoleon of Africa” by Henry M. Stanley . Well before the Berlin Conference, procolonialist German statesmen had suggested East Africa as a potential venture for the newly unified state and, although Germany had the past option of economically dominating the ailing Zanzibari Sultanate, the state’s leadership refused the task in order to avoid sparking hostilities with Great Britain.
The Partitioning of Tanganyika: Peters, Zanzibar, and Dar es-Salaam
While the German state may not have readily acted out in favor of colonialism, at least one of its subjects touted an opposing view. Dr. Karl Peters, a German explorer and founder of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation , ventured into the coastal and semi-inland regions of Tanganyika at his own expense and, in 1884, began to establish treaties with local leaders that guaranteed economic access and effective ownership of large swaths of land to Peters himself. The contracts signed between Peters and local rulers are considered vague and heavily slanted by modern scholarship – so much so that Peters’ actions prompt authors such as Helmuth Stoecker to refer to Peters, an open admirer of British imperialist tactics, as a “psychopathic…criminal.” Despite the underhandedness of Peters’ methods, his efforts paid off: the lands between Lake Tanganyika and the Zanzibari Sultanate, which went far south enough to brush against the borders of Portuguese Mozambique, were now his property according to his treaties . At the next year’s monumental Berlin Conference, Germany nominated Peters’ agreements with local chiefs as evidence enough for German interest in the region and gained the committee’s approval for their colonization of the region. Peters’ Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation became the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG) , which operated the colony on an adminstrative and economic level as a protectorate of the German Empire.
The borders of Tanganyika fluctuated greatly over the course of its early years as the DOAG interacted with local polities. The colonial administration began to put pressure on the Sultanate of Zanzibar to give up its coastal territories in order to ensure the survivability of Tanganyika as a colony and, with British help, the Sultanate was coerced into leasing its coast at unfair costs for very long periods of time to the DOAG. New territories were added to Tanganyika as a result of treaties signed by Clemens Denhardt and Karl Juhlke, both associates of Dr. Peters, from within the territory of the Zanzibari Sultan (much to his displeasure). This allowed for the colonial company to expand its role past the few trading posts it administered and, with the use of gunboat diplomacy from both Germany and Portugal, new territories were gained and new borders emerged every several months after the establishment of the colony. To enforce the growing authority of the DOAG, mercenaries were hired and used to enforce the company’s authority; heavy taxes were levied against coastal trading villages within the German sphere of influence, leading to levels of unrest.
By 1890, the borders of Tanganyika and the rest of Deutsch-Ostafrika had stabilized through a series of treaties with the British – who acted not only in their own interest, but also in the interest of their semi-vassal the Sultan of Zanzibar – such as the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, which led to the ceding of some German territories in exchange for more East African coast including Dar es-Salaam, the settlement which would come to act as Tanganyika’s colonial capital. As a result of these decisions, the German colony began to consolidate its power around a coastal city and acted economically while its greatest competitors – the Sultanate of Zanzibar and Great Britain – stood silent, either for inability to resist German efforts to usurp territory or unable to respond for diplomatic reasons .
The Abushiri Revolt: Unrest and Consequences
In establishing boundaries and cementing authority, the DOAG began to chafe against the coastal Arabs and inland Africans who had come under its initial colonial taxation. The colonial authority became known for its harsh treatment of local peoples in pertinence to human rights and religious practice. By 1888, these high levies and levels of mistreatment, as well as – according to Hatch – the German cooperation with the British effort to end the region’s prominent slave trade , led to unrest that became an open revolt. Helmuth Stoecker disagrees with Hatch’s assessment of the revolt and instead states that it had relatively little to do with German actions toward the slave trade, citing the participation of not only coastal Arabs but also inland tribal groups and urban aristocrats in opposing DOAG authority.
Led by the coastal Arab merchant Abushiri bin Salim, the “Abushiri Revolt” quickly spread across the southern portion of Tanganyika. DOAG agents were pushed out of their trading posts and villages and forced to flight from not only disgruntled city dwellers but also the thousands of Yao tribesmen who rallied against the German colonial presence. Characterized by German politicians as an “Arab rebellion” bent on collapsing the colony in favor of the slave trade , Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called for the spending of several million German marks and the appointment of Hermann Wissman, a veteran commander of mercenaries in Africa, to end the revolt; by 1890, the revolt had been quelled and Abushiri himself executed after being betrayed by local tribesmen.
The eventual end of the Abushiri Revolt led to major changes in Tanganyika. Wissman’s use of Sudanese mercenaries to fight Abushiri’s rebels had expanded upon his arrival to include the auxiliaries of smaller groups of local people. By the end of the conflict, several African rulers had begun to fight alongside the Germans; in the next few years, those chiefs would be afforded positions within the colonial government in a form of limited self-rule. Another major change came as a result of the DOAG’s failure to contain the Abushiri situation. This lapse in ability drew the ire of the German government, which saw the stability of Tanganyika as a matter of their own national prestige. The German government thus took state control of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation in 1891, consolidating its former territories – including Tanganyika – into the general Deutsch-Ostafrika administration. A final major change to take place after the Abushiri Revolt was the new emphasis on social promotion of the coastal people, who were mostly Afro-Arab Swahili people, through the use of a state-supported hierarchal system which employed maakida and majumbe to enforce German authority.
The Mkwawa Revolt: A Short Response to Early Administration
After the appropriation of Tanganyika into the German state’s colonial administration, a less major revolt conducted by the joined Hehe and Bena tribal confederations occurred. The Hehe and Bena had already been involved in fighting against German authority, as they had acted militarily against German coastal interests during the Abushiri Revolt. This particular unrest, though, was spurred on due to the perceivedly slanted preference afforded to the coastal peoples as opposed to the inland Africans who were largely removed from the emerging colonial power structure. The harshness of the colonial administration in achieving its goals – namely, complete economic productivity at the cost of the colonial subject’s well-being – led to the joining of the Hehe and Bena groups into a single resistant force against German forces in Tanganyika.
United by a leader known as Mkwawa in 1891, the unified Africans fought a prolonged guerrilla-style war against encroaching German colonial forces which lasted until 1898 despite the general surrender of a larger part of the tribal alliance in 1894. Mkwawa’s end came when he was betrayed by his forces after a new series of losses and, after being cornered by the Germans, committed suicide rather than submit to to the Europeans. His forces attempted to fight on, still displeased with the racist method in which they were being ruled, but were crippled in their efforts by the arrival of the rinderpest which decimated their herds and introduced a famine that would not be reduced in severity over the next few years.
The Maji-Maji Rebellion: Deutsch-Ostafrika’s Greatest Challenge
New methods of administration and governorship continued to gain unfavorable responses from the African colonial subjects of Deutsch-Ostafrika after the close of the Mkwawa Revolt. In 1898, the colonial administration – a body organized and run by former Prussian military governors, harsh in their methods and sometimes known for their overt racism - issued the “hut tax“, a demanded payment which punished those unable to afford it with forced labor. Financial matters were made more difficult with the appropriation of African lands for use by immigrants from Germany , who the colony readily accepted and incorporated into the hierarchal colonial framework – much to the chagrin of the readily-abused Africans. Yet another tax was levied against inland Africans, this time by the Afro-Arab maakida colonial forces who resided in higher social and administrative positions than any inland Tanganyikan. This left the Africans with less economic stability and assisted in the furthering of the idea that the colony would always possess a racist bent against African self-determination or accomplishment.
Taxation and suffering increased as the officers of Deutsch-Ostafrika began to solidify their goals as little more than purely economic. Within a short time, the colonial administration clarified that the hut tax had to be paid in colonial German marks, not in livestock or crops; this led to the effective dissolving of local product in Tanganyika, as colonial subjects were forced to sell their animals and produce at severely reduced prices to meet with strict colonial deadlines for the tax. When combined with the preexisting famine as a result of the rinderpest, this new hut tax plunged many colonial Africans into abject poverty and eventually forced labor as they were unable to consistently pay the high levy. The Africans were subsequently put to work on properties owned by German settlers, exacerbating the already tense racial situation in Tanganyika.
The simmering situation boiled over in July of 1905 when unrest broke out once more. The local Kilwa people grouped together into a confederacy, actively disassembling German authority through the destruction of colonial government outposts and the slaying of German settlers perceived to be government agents. According to the work of Prothero, this revolt was quite different from the others which had formerly occurred in Tanganyika: smaller tribes and villages unified into huge unions of African rebels, easily dwarfing the sizes of those groups which had acted against Germany in the past, and the Germans were actively blamed by the Africans for their unfair governance. John hatch disagrees, however, and states that the union of other groups such as the Ngoni into the main Rebellion did not occur in time, and the end result was to be expected even at the beginning of the conflict.
The Maji-Maji Rebellion, named for the maji used by its participants, was thus a striking out of inland Africans against not only Germans but also coastal Arabs and Africans who were viewed not only as general aliens to the region but also as oppressors and as instruments of the colonial government. According to John Hatch, Arab colonial agents were literally chased out of colonial settlements settlements in the Matumbi Hills by groups of African subjects .
The German response to the initial breakout of the Maji-Maji Rebellion was summarily brutal. Initially, colonial authorities commited wholesale slaughters of populations in response to similar actions by fighters among the rebels. Upon the spread of the rebellion to Dar es-Salaam, German authorities utilized the still young technology of machineguns in turning away the resistance, dispelling the myth of the maji and causing massive casualties. A scorched earth campaign was then conducted by the German forces, killing off the grand majority of the region’s cultivatable herds and crop goods. This came, as formentioned, at a time when the inhabitants of Tanganyika had already beens subject to the rinderpest as well as the forced underselling of the majority of African herds and the appropriation of African resources and land for the use of German settlers and colonial outlets. The result was a widespread famine which impacted not only the inland Africans but also those on the coast. Numbers of the African death toll varies: older sources such as Prothero list numbers as high as 120,000 casualties while more contemporary scholars like Khapoya claim that the number was closer to 75,000. Groups which were in regions that had seen much action during the Rebellion were hit the worst: the Pangwa tribesmen of Lake Nyasa had been reduced from approximately 30,000 people to less than 2,000 by the end of the Maji-Maji Rebellion.
German Response and Reform
The response of the German public to the conduct of colonial authorities in the Maji-Maji Rebellion led to a scandal and cries for a fairer form of colonialism. An investigation into the matter by the German government led to the exposure of gross misgovernment by colonial military officers which further shocked mainland Europe.
In accordance with its colonial failures, Germany immediately established a colonial office in Berlin, under the direction of Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg, which would revise and change the Empire’s colonial policies in East Africa. A distinct reformist, von Rechenberg put into effect sweeping changes as early as 1907 – the year the Maji-Maji Rebellion formally ended – such as the enforcement of more egalitarian methods of dealing with African colonial subjects and a promotion of African agricultural development with incentives for growing cash crops such as cotton. Also announced was a total ban on forced labor of African subjects, but this did not apply to public works projects for the colonial state. Military forces and colonial police would be bolstered by local auxiliaries, including sons and family members of local African chieftains, in order to further stabilize the colony and assist in the potential normalization of race relations.
von Rechenberg’s reforms were met with resistance from those Germans with a strong presence in Tanganyika. The Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft , the colonial company which had once ruled Tanganyika, was still quite prevalent in its economic activities and had established virtual monopolies over not only the region’s plantation economies but also had sway within the colonial administration. The DOAG was thus apprehensive about the reforms, which would place more economic power in the hands of the Africans who were generally outside of their own power structure. In addition, his acts were subsequently protested by German settlers in Tanganyika who claimed the new preference toward Africans disallowed their own economic productiveness. These complaints eventually led to von Rechenberg’s resignation. The impact of his work persisted, however, and the colonial administration he had reformed stayed in effect for the rest of Germany’s tenure in the region.
Conclusion
Repression and productivity are the two terms which best come to describe the process by which Tanganyika shifted from a barely defined treaty in the hands of a fierce nationalist explorer to the substantial colonial polity afforded to Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Local influences such as the Zanzibari Sultanate were pushed aside and marginalized in order to cement claims to the region, and peoples were suppressed via both machineguns and hut taxes. Famine seemed like a regular occurrence in German East Africa, in all cases brought on by the abuses of the colonial government. Ultimately, the economic productivity of the colony shone through as worth the trouble of constant rebellions – responses to the racist, repressive German method of colonial military government which killed untold thousands in the name of profit. Despite the additions of local people and new hierarchies throughout its existence, the German effort in Tanganyika would never achieve any form of the publicly-demanded egalitarian treatment. The colonial government, as short-lived in the grand scheme of Africa as it was, will always represent a panicked and violent period.
Works Cited
Hatch, John. Tanzania: a Profile. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972.
Khapoya, Vincent B. The African Experience: An Introduction. New York: Longman, 2010.
Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Prothero, G.W. (editor). German African Possessions (Late). New York: Greenwood Press, 1920.
Stoecker, Helmuth. “German East Africa 1885 – 1906,” in German Imperialism in Africa: from the Beginnings until the Second World War, edited by Helmuth Stoecker, 93-113. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Stoecker, Helmuth. “German East Africa 1906 – 1914,” in German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War, edited by Helmuth Stoecker, 148-160. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Yeager, Rodger. Tanzania: An African Experiment. Boulder: Westview Press, 1982.
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There you go!
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