At election time in African cities, space on the streets is taken over not only by party election posters, but also by posters instructing citizens on their rights and duties. Inspiring such posters is an assumption that the rights and duties of citizenship need to be taught, since colonial states and post-colonial regimes prior to the democratization movements of the late 1980s had failed to turn subjects into politically active citizens. Such an assumption is reinforced by studies of the institutional structure of the colonial state and its post-colonial successors. In his powerful 1996 indictment of colonial regimes, Mahmood Mamdani argued that whatever their rhetoric, colonial states combined a regime of citizenship rights for an urban minority with one of subjection to the arbitrary power of a chief for the rural majority, leaving their post-colonial successors with the legacy of authoritarian political cultures.Footnote 1
A growing body of scholarship has sought to challenge the sharp dichotomy between citizen and subject in colonial Africa which Mamdani erects. Writing with particular reference to Tanzania, Leander Schneider has argued that the state did not fail to recognize that Tanzanians were now citizens, rather ‘it appears that the state felt compelled to treat them as subjects precisely by virtue of their citizenship, which endowed them with a right to a “better life”.’Footnote 2 For Schneider, the binary opposition between citizen and subject which is central to Mamdani's interpretation risks obscuring both colonial and post-colonial blurring of boundaries. This analysis from the perspective of state practice is reinforced by studies of political discourse in the period. As perceptive critics pointed out, despite being called Citizen and subject, Mamdani's book had strikingly little to say about concepts of citizenship. For Frederick Cooper, the figure of the citizen served Mamdani merely as a convenient ‘foil’ for his ‘probing of the making of subjects’.Footnote 3 Cooper argued that in fact citizenship was at the heart of political argument and action in the late colonial period, particularly though not exclusively in French colonial territories in Africa, where Africans employed a language of citizenship to demand equality with citizens in metropolitan France.Footnote 4 In the process, as Cooper showed, the concept of citizenship was itself redefined.
Far from being a recent discursive innovation, then, a language of citizenship has been part of political discourse in Africa for a long time. The reason for this is that the twentieth century saw fundamental changes in the way in which political society was conceptualized in Africa. The rights and duties of the ruled, often discussed in terms of the rights and duties of citizenship, were of central importance in the remaking of political society. Neither clear nor unambiguous, the rights and duties of the people in relation to their rulers, and the relationship between rights-bearing citizens and non-rights-bearing subjects, has more often been contested and argued over than assumed, and can thus be approached as a question of intellectual history as much as a question of political history. This is particularly apparent once we move beyond Anglophone and Francophone discourse, and turn instead to the Swahiliphone world.
This article seeks to explore these questions, not by offering a general study of concepts of citizenship in twentieth-century Africa, but rather by proposing an intellectual history of one very specific concept, that of ‘good citizenship’, explored in one specific place, Tanzania. Through a close reading of three didactic primers, produced at critical turning points in the twentieth century, it examines the development of the concept of good citizenship in the colonial period and its subsequent evolution. It argues that colonial officials sought actively to create a new conception of citizenship, employing the Swahili word raia which had been used to mean ‘subject’ of a chief or king, but redefining it to promote the active qualities of good citizenship, echoing the formulation of new conceptions of citizenship in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. They did not draw a sharp dichotomy between citizenship and subjecthood in their writings, but rather understood citizenship as entangled with subjecthood. This language of good citizenship lived on into the new political context of the late colonial period and, crucially, it survived into post-colonial Tanzania, allowing space for a broad conception of citizenship and political society to persist even as new forms of patriotic citizenship defined by party membership seemed to place it under threat.
By studying the intellectual history of the concept of good citizenship through political education primers and Swahili-language newspapers, we can trace shifts in political thinking concealed by formal continuities of legal status or political structure. This attention to change offers not only a new perspective on the shifting discursive domains in which political engagement took place in colonial and early post-colonial Tanganyika, it also provides a useful case-study of the ways in which the making of the twentieth-century world involved processes simultaneously promoting the universalization of political concepts and their development in forms which were locally specific.Footnote 5
I
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, a distinctive conception of citizenship evolved in liberal intellectual circles. Concern about the state of the social fabric and the advancement of political rights ahead of political education provided the context for new thinking about the relationship between the state and the individual, thinking which drew on earlier Aristotelian conceptions of the polis as well as conceptions of the political community as an ethical or moral community in the writings of Hegel.Footnote 6 This mode of thinking was associated with T. H. Green and his students at New College, Oxford, but through the writings and work of the Charitable Organization Society of Bernard Bosanquet in the first decade of the twentieth century and the role of Alfred Zimmern and Gilbert Murray in the international organizations of the 1920s, its influence spread far beyond Oxford.Footnote 7
For Bosanquet, Aristotelian conceptions of citizenship defined by membership of the polis seemed to offer a counterweight to the excessive individualism of his time. He lamented the loss of a spirit of duty and service, writing that ‘the idea of citizenship, which was the first thing to the Greek, has almost ceased to be a controlling conception for us’.Footnote 8 In this analysis, freedom derived from membership of a political community, and the fulfilment of one's duties within that political community.Footnote 9 This was a vision of citizenship that had little to do with legal status or with political rights. This is perhaps unsurprising. In a context in which political rights were in the process of being extended across the population, but only gradually, and all women and most men were still excluded from the full political rights of citizenship, it made sense to develop a conception of citizenship based on modes of involvement in the public sphere other than the mere act of voting. As a result, as Julia Stapleton has argued, the ‘dominant liberal ideals of citizenship’ were ‘distinctive for being articulated primarily in moral rather than overtly national and even legal terms’, and had nothing to say about exclusions on the grounds of gender, race, or wealth.Footnote 10
This tradition of thinking helps us understand the intellectual world from which British officials arriving in Tanganyika from 1916 came. Some colonial officials may have been influenced by these debates; in any case, a conception of citizenship based on duties had obvious attractions in a colonial context. Yet, colonial contexts had existing conceptions of political society with which incoming governments had to work. Among Swahili speakers, a community which was rapidly increasing, partly as a consequence of German language policies in German East Africa, the word raia was employed to signify the position of subject, whether of a chief or, as in the case of Zanzibar, of a sultan.Footnote 11 Its political meaning too was fairly loose, as something like ‘commoners’ or ‘the people’, and it was broad enough to encompass a wide variety of political arrangements. In Zanzibar, according to Jonathon Glassman, the status of raia or subject was ‘the lowest common denominator of civic status, available to all who accepted the sultan's authority’, and this language was borrowed by colonial rulers in their own citizenship laws. As a result, ‘citizenship was defined, both in law and in common political rhetoric, as the status of being a “subject of His Highness”’.Footnote 12
German East Africa was occupied by the British during the First World War, and was formally handed to the British as a League of Nations Mandate in 1922.Footnote 13 Once possession of the colony had been won militarily and recognized diplomatically, British officials swiftly turned to the task of establishing and legitimating their role internally. While considerable attention has been paid to efforts under Donald Cameron to reform political structures through the establishment of a system of indirect rule, an alternative perspective is provided if we focus instead on the realm of political education in an emerging public space at the territory-wide level.Footnote 14 The colonial Swahili press, in particular the monthly periodical Mambo Leo, was one important weapon in this task, while short didactic texts, intended for use in schools and reading clubs, were another.Footnote 15 One such didactic text was a book published in Tanganyika in 1927, with the title Uraia, or Citizenship, and its professed aim was to teach its readers something about ‘the meanings and the duties of citizenship in the empire to which they belong’.Footnote 16Uraia was a short text, intended to be read by school students and those with an interest in the new ‘modern’ political systems in the process of being introduced in the League of Nations Mandate in Tanganyika. Its authors were Frederick Johnson and Stanley Rivers-Smith, the former a Swahili expert and the latter Tanganyika's first director of education, a post to which he had been appointed in 1920. The book set out an argument for modern political society and the state, against those who believed that government was a restriction on their freedom, and it did so by stressing the importance of government for progress and peace.
It was not unusual for colonial governments, and particularly their education departments, to publish didactic newspapers and books with titles like Uraia. Writing about Malaya, Anthony Milner has described as the ‘invention of politics’ the process by which colonial regimes introduced new concepts and new terms, and through which the colonial subject came to see himself as homo politicus.Footnote 17 Books such as Uraia can therefore be interpreted as typical of a genre by which colonial states sought to export the model of the modern colonial state. Yet, while this was a process that we can see in colonial states across the twentieth-century world, the precise form in which concepts were framed varied from context to context, and there is a clear East African background to both the form and the substance of the arguments made in Uraia.
Many of these arguments had been rehearsed previously in the pages of Mambo Leo, founded by Tanganyika's Education Department in 1923 with the explicit aim of educating King George's newest subjects about the political system which Tanganyika's British rulers were in the process of creating since taking control of German East Africa, and about the ‘imperial family’ to which they now belonged. Technically, Tanganyika was not a colony, but a Mandate of the League of Nations, and so they could only be considered King George's subjects in a fairly loose sense, but the legal technicalities of Britain's relationship with Tanganyika Territory did not greatly trouble the editor of Mambo Leo.
As soon as Mambo Leo was launched, a debate began in its pages over the meaning of the term ustaarabu, normally glossed as meaning ‘civilization’. Was ‘civilization’ associated with Islam, the coast, and urban living, as the etymology implied, or could it be claimed by those living inland who were not Muslim? The new colonial state wanted to argue that civilization was not linked to coastal urban life but was open to all, provided they adopted new practices of political membership.Footnote 18 So, in a 1925 editorial, Rivers-Smith, the author of Uraia, argued that civilization was something which pervaded every aspect of life, and was defined by serving others, one's country, and oneself. Anticipating the 1927 book, he suggested that since no word existed to encapsulate this meaning, he would invent the word ‘Uraiya’. He explained that ‘We are all subjects of the British Government, and each person knows that it is the task of a subject to obey all the Government's laws and to try as far as he can to help his country to prosper.’Footnote 19 This linguistic innovation was partly an attempt to create a political society which incorporated inland Tanganyika as well as the coast, Christians as well as Muslims, and which was based on loyalty to the crown and the prompt payment of taxes. Over the months which followed, a series of articles spelled out in more detail what good citizenship might entail and these articles formed the basis of the book Uraia.
If the starting point of the Mambo Leo series was ‘civilization’, Uraia's starting point was an argument in favour of political society. While the authors of Uraia drew on existing terminology, they also argued that the form of political society created under British rule was something fundamentally new. This case was made particularly strongly in the second chapter, in an imagined dialogue between two speakers which hinges on different constructions of the pre-political state before European rule. Mzee bin Sikukale is called upon to talk first, his title Mzee, which signifies elder, and his name, ‘Sikukale’ or ‘Olden days’, indicating that his role in the dialogue is to speak up for the past. He recalls that when he was a child there was no ‘British Government as there is now, we lived as we wished’. In those days, anyone could travel where they wished, there were plenty of building materials, no forced labour on the roads, no tax, and no jails. There were no money worries, because, Mzee bin Sikukale claimed, there was no money. But this vision of a pre-colonial golden age was challenged by Juma bin Leo, the spokesman for the present.Footnote 20 He admits he does not have the knowledge of the past which comes with age, but he had learnt to read as a child and since then he had continued to ‘investigate the workings of the country, and the ways in which some countries develop and others go backwards.’ Juma bin Leo claimed that his older interlocutor had forgotten the bad elements of the past and remembered only the good. For people lived in danger in those days, and in constant fear. In theory, they might be able to travel where they wished, when they wished, but in practice the country was too insecure. True, there was no tax, but chiefs demanded money and labour. The conclusion of their debate was never in doubt. The old man admitted defeat, conceding that for all its inconveniences – taxes, laws, and prisons – the present was indeed better than the past.
This was an argument for political society as a guarantor of freedom through security, in contrast to the state of disorder which came before, according to which it is only in the form of political society brought by European rule that men are removed from the war of all against all and the risk of suffering violence, theft, and enslavement which that entails. This was not to suggest that there had been no government and no society before colonial rule. In the pages of Uraia, society is presented as natural, for ‘since the time of Adam, mankind has not been used to living alone’.Footnote 21 If sociability was natural, so too was authority. Everyone requires a government – a tribe has a chief, a family has a father, and even the animal kingdom has its rulers, Uraia observed. Yet, while authority is ubiquitous, not all government is good government, and the path to civilization lies with an enlightened government, which knows how to lead people who want to be led.
Uraia thus constructed an argument for political society and for the compatibility of freedom with submission to authority and in this respect reproduced arguments developed in the broad tradition of modern Western political thought born in the seventeenth century. But the title of the book was ‘Citizenship’, and with regard to the conceptions of citizenship developed in its pages, Uraia also had something in common with one specific group of thinkers, the seventeenth-century theorists of political society who developed the association of political society with security.Footnote 22 There are resonances in Uraia of the ways in which early modern theorists like Thomas Hobbes deliberately used the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ interchangeably, as a means, according to Quentin Skinner, of removing the term ‘citizen’ from the hands both of contractarian theorists of popular sovereignty and of republican theorists of citizenship.Footnote 23 In a similar vein, though in a text which is more explicitly didactic, Samuel Pufendorf's reflections on what made a good member of political society in his book On the rights and duties of citizenship led him to decouple the concept of the citizen from an association with political rights, and stress the duties that each owes to the state.Footnote 24 For colonial states, constructing political society without a contractarian moment and interested in creating subjects rather than citizens, the blurring of terminology was useful.
Nevertheless, while the argument about the novelty of political society was an argument of rupture and fundamental change, the broader argument about the nature of citizenship rested on a more nuanced balance between continuity and change. Uraia begins by saying that many readers would find its title strange, for it is not a word in current usage, ‘but some will be able to guess its meaning’. Many readers would know the word raia which was used in the past. The term raia had, as we have seen, long been used to signify political subjecthood.Footnote 25 In Uraia, Rivers-Smith explained the word raia as having once referred to ‘the person who was under the leader of a tribe or a country and who paid tax to that person’ though, the text continued, its meaning had changed slightly, ‘and we use it for a person who is under a particular state, such as a subject of the British state or a subject of the French state’. Yet, if the word raia was familiar, Rivers-Smith argued that the abstract noun uraia was nevertheless a new word, which ‘we have invented’. Its meaning was glossed as ‘the duties which a subject has to his country’.Footnote 26 Thus, whereas the status of subject had once been fairly passive, implying simply the fact of being under the rule of a chief or king, it now meant something more active, with an implied moral content. Citizenship is conceptualized here as characterized by the duties owed towards fellow members of a shared moral and political community.
This shared moral and political community within which duties were owed transcended the borders of Tanganyika, for Tanganyika was understood to form part of a wider imperial family. The British empire was presented as an example of enlightened government of a family of nations under one father figure. The flag, according to Uraia, serves to represent this unity, guaranteeing freedom and security. However, this is freedom as security, not freedom as political liberty; indeed, there is no theory of political rights pertaining to the individual within the book. The issue of elections is raised only towards the end of the book, where it is simply stated that in Britain there are some people, including the colonial secretary, who are elected by the people who live there, and that the parliament in London considers matters relating to Tanganyika Territory.
In presenting Tanganyika as part of a wider imperial family, Uraia owes a great deal to the traditions of late nineteenth-century liberalism which had, by the 1920s, become liberal internationalism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, ideas of a Greater Britain, employing metaphors of familyhood, though generally extended only as far as the white settler colonies, seemed, according to Duncan Bell, to offer an antidote to the perceived threats posed by globalization.Footnote 27 Metaphors of familyhood allowed for hierarchical and unequal conceptions of community. For Alfred Zimmern and Gilbert Murray, at the heart of the new imperial thinking of the interwar period and the intellectual work leading to the formation of the League of Nations, not only was political membership defined by obligations and duties rather than rights, the British empire was something more than simply a guarantor of political security. Rather, it was a moral community in which metaphors of familyhood could synthesize the contradictory dynamics of liberalism and paternalism.Footnote 28 For Zimmern, the empire consisted of ‘a large variety of communities at a number of different stages in their advance towards complete self-government’, united under a shared paternal king. This language of familyhood, and the construction of new organic ties in a period of rapid social change, is central to the vision of political society presented in Uraia, and speaks to a desire to balance progress with the maintenance of positive social relations. It also provided space for an understanding of political community defined in non-racial terms. A letter to Mambo Leo from a certain Saidi Kendwa rejected calls for non-Africans to go back to their places of origin, on the grounds that all those living in Tanganyika shared one father, King George.Footnote 29
Beyond Mambo Leo and Uraia, while the term raia continued to be used in conventional ways to describe the people as opposed to the chiefs, we can also see the term increasingly used both to describe the relationship between the people and central government, and to reflect on the qualities involved in being a good citizen. As an example of the former, a letter published in Tanganyika's first African independent newspaper Kwetu in 1938 which called on the government to improve conditions in Ilala referred repeatedly to the hopes which the raia had that ‘our Father the Government’ would act, while an attack on the Kilimanjaro chiefs and the local co-operative society appealed over the heads of the local authorities to the Government as ‘father of all raia’.Footnote 30 Another letter from Moshi, calling on the government to allow space for dissent without labelling all dissenters ‘agitators’, ended with the plea: ‘I am a humble raia under the Union Jack.’Footnote 31
The specific language of good citizenship appeared in the writing and speeches of colonial officials, and began creeping into the letters’ pages of Tanganyika's developing press. In January 1939, Kwetu republished a speech delivered by the former governor, Sir Harold MacMichael, which argued that the purpose of education was a broad one. It was not simply a means to the end of a good job and a high salary, but rather a means by which Africans could
acquire a wider wisdom and learn to be good citizens both of their own country and of the world performing their duties, whether in the home, or in the field, or in the office, each in his own sphere, men and women alike, unselfishly, to the best of their abilities.Footnote 32
It was also used by African editors and correspondents writing to the Swahili press. A short article in the independent newspaper Kwetu in December 1937 commented on the government's push to increase the rate of payment of poll tax. Its author reminded readers that ‘[h]e who does not pay tax is not a good citizen’.Footnote 33 This same link between paying tax and good citizenship reappeared in a letter to Kwetu in 1939, which attacked those who avoided paying tax and called on the government to take action against them, again on the grounds of good citizenship.Footnote 34
To summarize, in the interwar period, at the height of Donald Cameron's experiment with ‘indirect rule’ and before the reform efforts which would begin a process of extending political rights to colonial subjects, we can track changes in how political society was conceptualized. We can read the didactic texts of the interwar period as constituting an attempt to create a new model of political society in which citizenship was understood in relation to the state, and in which the concept of good citizenship played a central role. Colonial rulers had constructed an imagined political society which guaranteed security and offered progress rather than backwardness, civilization rather than barbarism. Freedom came through dutiful membership of this political society, rather than through the exercise of political rights. Yet, this also offered a language with which to appeal to central government above the head of chiefly authority, and a conception of dutiful citizenship which, as we shall see, developed further in the new political environment of the post-war world.
II
The language of good citizenship served the state well in an era in which it sought to create loyalty without granting political rights, but by 1945 pressure from below combined with shifts in global thinking about political society made such a position increasingly untenable. ‘Democratization’ became a global political language with which even colonial states had to engage, particularly in cases where, as was the case with Tanganyika, states were called to account in front of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. As a result, we see not an abrupt change but a shift in emphasis, towards a gradual incorporation of conceptions of rights into the concept of good citizenship, and we also see new forms of political participation leading to the development of the concept in new directions.
A new series of didactic texts began to appear which served to create a new vocabulary for a new era. In 1944, the vice-principal of Makerere College in Uganda published a book which he called Thoughts on African citizenship. It was an unashamedly political intervention, and he made no apology for his belief that ‘Africans must and will govern themselves’ and that this step was ‘in the interests of the white, as much as the black, races’. Tellingly, where Uraia had referred to the ‘meaning and duties’ of citizenship, Batten began his book with a discussion of the rights and duties of citizenship.Footnote 35 This innovation, the introduction of an idea of participatory government in which citizens could claim rights as well as fulfil duties, was central to the post-war moment.Footnote 36 After 1945, the colonial state and its officials sought to answer criticism of its legitimacy by offering a vision of the state which was based on new forms of participation. In his book, Batten described the changes which ‘have led educated men in many parts of Africa to demand from the British Government a clear promise to grant self-government to certain colonies at a very early date’.Footnote 37
Once again, didactic texts were employed to reshape attitudes to the state, alongside new technologies such as radio programmes. The introduction to a published version of a series of ‘Talks on Citizenship’ first aired on Dar es Salaam radio explained that
This series of talks is being published to try and help you to understand how Tanganyika is governed, what Government does, and how it does it. This is very important, because we believe nowadays that the best government only happens when all the people take part in the ruling of the country – that is, when all the people in the country help to make the laws and agree together what is the best way to spend the country's money.Footnote 38
The talks employed the structure of a dialogue between ‘Radio Teacher’ and ‘Peter’, which began with Peter asking why government and its associated laws, policemen, and taxes were necessary. Radio Teacher's answer was simple:
If we were all good people – if everyone was unselfish, not quarrelsome, always good-tempered, and if we were all as careful of other people's rights as we are of our own, then of course we shouldn't need any laws; there would be no stealing or murdering, no quarrelling about land and so on. But unfortunately we aren't all good people, are we?’Footnote 39
Tanganyikans had demanded greater participation in government, and this was now possible, particularly through elected councils which in some places became important sites of political activity, notably in Sukumaland, Bukoba, and Kilimanjaro. Yet colonial officials believed that participation in a spirit of public service had to be taught, and that the teaching of citizenship was central to this process. A report to the 1948 Provincial Commissioners’ Conference lamented a perceived absence of a sense of citizenship, and a preference for material advancement rather than public service.Footnote 40 Similarly, Batten's book argued that self-government would depend on recognizing both the rights which flowed from membership of a self-governing community and the duties incumbent on members of that community which served, in his words, to ‘limit the rights enjoyed even by free men’.Footnote 41
The figure of the Sukuma Chief David Makwaia, one of the first African members of Tanganyika's highest consultative body, the Legislative Council, after the Second World War, both epitomized the growing potential for African participation in government, and, in his public pronouncements, reflected the continued emphasis on good citizenship as the fulfillment of one's duties within a community. In his New Year message to readers of Mambo Leo, he wrote that leaders and those who are led had a shared aim, that of progress for Africans. That meant being good citizens, which he defined as being characterized by honesty, patience, and a strong work ethic.Footnote 42 The following year he returned to the theme. In January 1950, he was studying at Lincoln College in Oxford, and he wrote about the differences he perceived between Tanganyika and Britain. First amongst those was, he wrote, that ‘almost every person knows his responsibility to serve the country and to be a good citizen’.Footnote 43
If David Makwaia used the language of good citizenship to educate his fellow Tanganyikans, the same language could also be used by Africans seeking to take advantage of the new opportunities for political participation available after 1945. It was adopted by new political associations to legitimize their participation in the system, aware as they were that their documents would be read not only by potential members but also by chiefs and colonial officials. In 1945, the Mwanza branch of the African Association stated that it did not exist to oppose government laws or orders, but rather to protect good relations between colonial subjects and the government by ensuring that if an issue had to be raised with the government it would be done collectively, rather than on an individual basis. Their intention was, they argued, ‘to learn good citizenship’ and to represent the interests of Africans to the colonial state.Footnote 44
While a language of good citizenship could offer a means of engaging with new structures of political participation, it was also used to build alternative models of political community from below, drawing on diverse local traditions of political authority.Footnote 45 The language used by one post-war political association, the Kilimanjaro Chagga Citizens Union (KCCU) in north-eastern Tanganyika, founded to campaign for an elected paramount chief in 1949, was reminiscent of that found in Batten's book. They styled themselves as ‘free men’, and played on the argument that the raia should have a greater role in local government, their role increased at the expense of the chiefs. Like the African Association, they claimed that one of their core aims was to teach ‘good citizenship’.Footnote 46
But beneath demonstrations of loyalty and claims that they were primarily responding to the state's call for commoner participation in politics, the KCCU were trying to reshape both the boundaries of political community and the rules of engagement. The first sign that they might be engaged in a slightly different project from that of the colonial state is found in the form which their imagined political community took, for theirs was a language of ‘Chagga’ rather than ‘Tanganyikan’ citizenship. In the mid-1950s when nationalism was on the march and seemed unstoppable, they began to talk in terms of a ‘Tanganyikan’ future, but they still believed that this should be based on a series of Citizens’ Unions organized locally and defined in terms of membership of an ethnic rather than a national political community. Underlying their political project was a moral concern, a belief that trust had broken down and needed to be restored. To this end, they called for the reintroduction of ‘traditional’ oaths, bringing them into conflict with the Lutheran church of which many were members.Footnote 47 While models of democratization and the arguments of the nationalist party envisaged a more egalitarian society, theirs was a hierarchical and gendered vision of society, in which elders provided for the young, and politics was a male activity, conducted by elder men who met at night to eat meat and discuss political affairs. They were repeatedly criticized by the colonial state and by other local leaders for claiming that only those with membership cards could claim full Chagga citizenship.Footnote 48 While their focus was on an ethnic political community, nationalist politicians also proposed a link between a specific form of political membership and citizenship. By the late 1950s, organizers working for the nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), frequently described the membership dues they collected as being akin to taxes and sought to provide social services, such as schools, which the colonial state was failing to provide.Footnote 49 While the party leadership sought to dissociate themselves from claims made at the grassroots that possession of a party membership card conferred special privileges, it was clear that such ideas were widespread at the local level.
The concept of good citizenship, then, showed itself flexible enough to incorporate ideas of rights as well as duties, yet it could also be used as a starting point from which to imagine alternative conceptions of citizenship, focused on loyalty to a group or community not synonymous with the state. The development of these discursively related but analytically separable conceptions would, as we shall see in the next section, have important consequences for the political culture of the immediate post-colonial period.
III
Independence in 1961 meant that colonial subjects were now Tanganyikan, and, after 1964, Tanzanian, citizens. Subjection to a monarch in London was replaced with a new bond to an elected president in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 50 For some, this meant the term raia was now inappropriate. In a letter to the newspaper Ngurumo in 1965 entitled ‘The word raia’, a certain Joseph Mwiru asked why this term was still in use. His understanding was that the term raia indicated subjection to an individual person, but now that Tanzania was a republic a different word should be used.Footnote 51 In spite of such objections, as we shall see, the term continued to be used in the independent state, for it still served a particular function – but it did so alongside a new conception of patriotic citizenship.
The post-colonial state inherited the legacy of the late 1950s, in particular the expectation that independence would mean freedom from all government and state power, not just from colonial government. Just as the colonial state had employed primers and political education to educate its subjects about the advantages of political society, so did the post-colonial state. To this end, the new state sought to redefine the modern state not as a colonial imposition sitting on top of society but as a willed construction by the people and for the people.
As independence approached, Tanganyikan nationalist politicians together with members of the colonial service increasingly turned from opposing state power to stressing that state power would continue after independence. In January 1959, the local TANU branch in Tanga province explained that ‘Free people are good citizens’, going on to spell out the duties required of a good citizen, foremost among these duties the prompt payment of tax.Footnote 52 Others stressed the duty of voting. In a column on the ‘Secrets of democracy’, Solomon Eliufoo, a loyal member of TANU who briefly served as president of the Chagga, lamented the failure of many people to turn out to vote, arguing that while it was perfectly acceptable for individuals not to join a political party or to be actively involved in politics, voting was a duty incumbent on every citizen.Footnote 53
New primers were produced which likewise stressed the interplay between rights and duties. A new book appeared in 1963 called Raia na serikali yao, written by Hilary Michael Ruanda. Just as Eliufoo argued that government officials were now legitimate, so Raia na serikali yao sought to argue that the modern state was not simply a colonial imposition which would not outlast the end of colonial rule. Ruanda claimed that many people misunderstood the nature of government, seeing it as an external force which acted upon them rather than an institution which they built themselves.Footnote 54 In the introduction, he argued that ‘every raia, of whatever country, who casts his vote to elect the Government or who pays his tax to the Government, builds that Government’.Footnote 55 It followed that it was the duty of all citizens to understand the nature of the government under which they lived.
While colonial texts had tended to stress that political society was natural, but that the type of political society which they were building was something new and modern, Ruanda's text instead emphasized outright continuity. Government was not a colonial imposition, it had existed since long before the arrival of the Arabs or the Europeans. Therefore, ‘government is not something which has appeared suddenly, dreamt up by white people, or just a fashion of modern civilization’.Footnote 56 But while government was not an innovation, types of government could vary, and for Ruanda an independent government, in which citizens were not ruled over but rather shared in their government, was fundamentally different from a colonial government. Ruanda argued that Africans had been protected ‘under the colonial flag not because we were human beings with freedom and equal rights, but because we served our colonial masters’, and thus the experience of being colonized was akin to slavery, since to be ruled was shameful.Footnote 57
For Ruanda, the fact that government was natural and was constituted from the bottom up meant that the behaviour of citizens was particularly important. Government began in the household, he suggested, so that bad children in a family grew up to become bad members of a clan and finally bad citizens of a nation.Footnote 58 In an independent state, citizens had both rights and responsibilities, yet Ruanda suggested that many citizens forgot about the responsibilities they owed, such as paying taxes and looking after the roads, and remembered only the rights they received from government. In fact, rights and responsibilities were inseparable.Footnote 59
Throughout his short book, Ruanda stressed the importance of co-operation, both between citizens and their fellows, and between citizens and government. This language of good citizenship continued to inform the broader Swahili public sphere too, as a way of conceptualizing positive community relations. Building the country meant working together. In 1960, a female community development officer, R. L. Ngowi, asked in the pages of the district newspaper of the Chagga Council Komkya ‘What is citizenship?’, and concluded that a person could be either a good or a bad citizen, and that a good citizen was one who helped those in difficulty, and who acted for the good of the country.Footnote 60 The duties of citizenship were not incumbent only on men, but on everyone, male and female, young and old. To illustrate her point she told a story of passengers on a bus which had become stuck in the mud. Onlookers offered to help, but only in return for payment. They had forgotten that ‘unity is strength and division is weakness’, and that not fulfilling the duties of citizenship meant that the country would not progress, but would go backwards.Footnote 61
One particularly important duty of the good citizen was the task of volunteering to build the nation. A letter published in the same newspaper which criticized those who failed to turn out for volunteering work argued that participating in voluntary work was important, and was a way of fulfilling ‘our citizenship duties’. For, this correspondent continued, a ‘good citizen’ (raia mwema) is one who fulfils his or her duties.Footnote 62 The editor agreed, and in a note printed underneath the letter added that ‘Building the nation is the responsibility of all’.Footnote 63 The definition of good citizenship as understanding one's duties to the nation reappeared in a letter about education, which argued, against those who saw education as simply a route into a good job, that the purpose of education was in fact to create good citizens. As for the definition of who were good citizens, they were ‘those who know the duties they owe to their country and to their nation’.Footnote 64
But the good citizen had a new companion, for the birth of an independent state also saw the the development of a new conception of patriotic citizenship, the roots of which we saw at the end of the colonial period. An early sign of this development came in the sphere of vocabulary, and the introduction of a new term into the nationalist lexicon at independence. This was the term mwananchi, or ‘child of the country’, which came to serve as a term to characterize ‘patriotic citizenship’, in contrast to simple political membership. The figure of the mwananchi was a moral construction as much as a political one. As Andrew Ivaska has shown, the ideal citizen was rural rather than urban, rejecting the ‘decadent, unproductive and emasculating’ city in favour of hard work and nation-building in the countryside.Footnote 65 In the context of post-colonial racial politics, the figure of the mwananchi also relied on racial distinctions. While citizenship laws used the term raia, and TANU in its public pronouncements tried hard to adhere to a policy of multi-racialism, the status of being a true mwananchi, or son of the soil, tended, as James Brennan has shown, to be limited to those of African descent.Footnote 66
The way in which the term mwananchi was used in public political discourse made clear that this involved a particular form of commitment to the political community and that the term implied the duty of actively building the nation.Footnote 67 While the two terms, raia and mwananchi, were at times used interchangeably, a distinction was increasingly drawn between the attributes of a raia and a mwananchi. Thus, for example, the 1965 Report of the Presidential Commission on the Establishment of a Democratic One Party State describes TANU as the party of all wananchi ‘through which any citizen (raia) of good will can participate in the process of Government’.Footnote 68 A speech by a local divisional secretary to his team of divisional executive officers and village executive officers in 1965 brings out the contrast between active, nation-building wananchi and passive raia more explicitly. The divisional secretary apparently told the wananchi in his audience that they should not fear ‘the raia out there in the villages, particularly when they go to collect taxes’.Footnote 69
While on one level, this ‘nation-building’ language, typical of post-colonial Africa, was more inclusive than the cultural conceptions of citizenship which began to take hold across Africa from the 1980s and which claimed that only true autochthons, often ethnically or locally defined, could exercise social and political rights, it contained its own exclusions, and its implications were not lost on Tanzanians.Footnote 70 For, increasingly, it seemed that even at the high political level of official rhetoric, full citizenship was being defined in terms of active party membership. If this was true at the high political level, it was true to an even greater degree at the local level. In the summer of 1964, a surge of letters appeared in the Catholic newspaper Kiongozi, a rare example of a national Swahili-language newspaper without party affiliation, complaining of discrimination against those who could not produce party cards. Yet, in seeking to combat the sense that citizenship might become the preserve of holders of TANU membership cards, it was to the book we started with, Uraia, that correspondents turned.
We can see this if we look at a letter from a certain Hommisdas Mlowezi Kasomangila, of Migongo Village in Kasulu. He complained that people were being arrested and beaten if they were without a TANU card. Even women were being mistreated. In calling on local councillors to act to stop this behaviour, he called on the story of Mzee Siku Kale. He said that Kasulu risked turning into a second Congo, and that the absence of peace was such that people were recalling ‘that story of “Mzee bin Sikukale and Juma bin Leo”’.Footnote 71 He called for change, so that ‘the people’ (raia) could live in peace.
This letter was one of many along similar lines which appeared in the pages of Kiongozi in the summer of 1964, letters which often accused TANU Youth Leaguers of denying access to services to those without TANU cards.Footnote 72 The editor responded sympathetically with a wider commentary on Tanzania's developing political culture. He drew attention to accounts from readers across the country complaining about the behaviour of some TANU leaders. ‘These people claim’, he continued,
that they have been forced to become members of TANU, that is, that they must have a party card in order to be permitted to live the normal life of a citizen, for example, without a card they are not permitted to send their crops to market and to sell them, others are prevented from receiving medicine in hospitals unless they have a party card.Footnote 73
This editorial provoked a swift response from the TANU newspaper Uhuru, attacking Kiongozi, but Kiongozi defended its duty to speak up, on the grounds that it was essential that TANU in its role as the government ‘should hear the cries of all its children’ if leaders were behaving badly, for otherwise the ‘ordinary citizens’ would begin to believe that excluding them from access to services was indeed the government's intention.Footnote 74
We can see the same appeal to a wider conception of citizenship in another example of post-colonial Tanzanians trying to make space for political dissent. In an autobiography written around 1967 the Tanzanian nationalist Lameck Bogohe recalled his time in preventive detention in 1965, and reprinted a letter he had apparently written while in custody to the minister for home affairs. In it, he wrote that: ‘I am a member of TANU. I will remain a devoted member of TANU forever. I am also a devoted citizen (raia) of our honourable Government of Tanzania and its laws.’Footnote 75 In the remainder of the text, he stressed the ways in which virtuous citizens should play a role in the government of the country. In this case, too, we see an attempt to widen conceptions of citizenship beyond the party as a counterweight to a more restrictive conception of political membership.
By the mid-1960s, therefore, two conceptions of citizenship co-existed in Tanzania: on the one hand, the concept of patriotic citizenship, of loyal wananchi, committed to building the nation, and, on the other, the concept of the raia, or member of the Tanzanian political community. This latter concept once again served as the ‘lowest common denominator’ of civic status as in nineteenth-century Zanzibar, but now had the potential to serve as a powerful counterweight to more exclusive notions of citizenship.
IV
While the institutional structures of colonial Africa drew sharp divisions between subjects and citizens, Africans and non-Africans, rural and urban dwellers, these structures co-existed with a shared discursive space within which colonial officials and African writers reflected on the meaning of citizenship and subjecthood in the modern world: a form of interaction and activity which cannot be properly captured either by an Anglophone imperial history or by national histories viewed in isolation from their imperial and global context. The participants in this debate were not the passive recipients of new political thinking, they were involved in its development. Exploring this intellectual history contributes to our understanding of Tanzanian political culture in the twentieth century. It reminds us that the history of reflecting on the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the nature of political society, did not begin with the nationalist movements of the 1950s, but had a much deeper past. This proved important because it ensured that even as political space was closed down in the period after independence and dissent came to be interpreted as disloyalty, older discursive traditions meant that there was still room for a looser conception of citizenship, less tied to party membership.
There are also however wider lessons with implications reaching beyond Tanzania. The relative breadth of the term raia invites us to investigate a history of shifting conceptions of political society in ways which include but are not limited to struggles for political rights. Such struggles form only one part of a much larger history of how authority is legitimized and the relationship between individual and community understood, even if in colonial and post-colonial contexts these questions are often subordinated to the more pressing one of how to secure freedom.
Moreover, exploring the term raia in context offers a counterweight to narratives of the twentieth century which focus on the export of Western concepts and institutions to the colonial world as a pre-prepared package. These narratives have led to an understanding of post-colonial states and their institutions of participation as, in Ruanda's terms, institutions ‘dreamt up by white people’ and imposed on the world. Yet, as historians of global intellectual history have taught us, we should look more closely at the ways in which apparently familiar concepts were being employed in practice. Considering the notion of ‘good citizenship’ in the Swahili public sphere provides one example of the ways in which a concept introduced in a didactic text could become a mode of reflecting on political society in ways which went far beyond its original intent, and in turn spark new innovations. Concepts might have been introduced into the public sphere by colonial officials, but they were incorporated into a local context and were developed in ways specific to that context.
Finally, for students of the contemporary world, this historical case-study, based not on the conventional sources of legislative councils and colonial office circulars but on the remnants of alternative textual worlds, serves as a pertinent reminder that conceptions of citizenship necessarily always take historically specific forms. Finding out more about these modes of conceptualizing politics in the past might offer lessons for our understanding of practices of citizenship in the present.
