As Brennan's title suggests, and his introduction explicitly states, Taifa is a combination of intellectual history and urban social history. It explores the changing intellectual and popular discourse (especially from the inter-war years onwards) around terms of social group identity such as ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in Tanzania while exploring connections between this discourse and the relationship between urban policy making, space, social structure and (especially ethnic, racial and national) identity in Dar es Salaam. One of Brennan's arguments, in keeping with those made by historians for other African cities, including Cape Town in the nineteenth century, is that ‘racial’ and other social group identities were not merely colonial or top down creations but were ‘mutually constituted’ by ‘multiple participants’, including those who came to see themselves or others as Africans, Indians, Arabs and Europeans.
This process in turn resulted from both ‘intellectual’ and ‘economic’ (material) inputs, with the former capable of its own separate trajectory from material factors in determining consciousness and identity, yet often (predictably enough) interacting with said material factors. This approach, one that some historians might describe as a ‘post-social’ historical understanding of ‘identity’ and ‘experience’, allows a degree of autonomy to human consciousness. At least occasional complete, rather than ‘relative’, autonomy was not quite conceded by the cultural materialism of the likes of E.P. Thompson, which emphasized of course a continual link between consciousness and social condition, while still being alert to the possibility (perhaps even likelihood) that material factors could have agency.
In terms of the latter, Brennan draws attention for instance, and significantly, to the impact of colonial urban policies in Dar es Salaam during World War II. In particular, he argues that the colonial government felt the need to support what they hoped would be a containable urban population through the reliable provision of modest rations in the form of food, clothing and housing. But racial categorization was used by the Tanganyikan Economic Control Board (staffed by Asians and Europeans, but not by Africans) in determining who would receive such rations and under what circumstances. Worthy recipients were those thought to be productively employed and therefore entitled to urban residence. Others, always from among those categorized as Africans, could be considered unproductive and thereby susceptible to expulsion from the city; and all Africans had to have their ration cards renewed on a weekly basis (compared to a month for ‘non-Africans’), a process that involved queuing for long periods in arduous conditions. As Brennan puts it, ‘Such racial humiliations … mocked rhetoric about shared wartime sacrifice.’
In addition, these rationing policies meant that particular ‘communities’ were supplied with supposedly suitable commodities for their cultural needs: thus for instance only wheat was supplied to Europeans and Asians, even though Africans had previously consumed the large majority of wheat in the city; in contrast, rice was given to those Asians, Arabs and Africans who supposedly ‘customarily’ consumed that food stuff. The consequence, Brennan argues, was an increase in both racial and ethnic consciousness, not least an African consciousness that spanned previous ethnic (or ‘tribal’) divides, and categorization (and stereotyping) of others in a city in which (as he has demonstrated in earlier chapters) there was a close potential correlation with ‘racial’ or ‘national’ labelling. This was thanks both to colonial policies of segregation and pre-colonial notions of inheritable difference in which there was a blurring of conceptual distinction between ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in the term Taifa of Brennan's title.
It is difficult to do justice to the complexity of Brennan's analysis of the interaction of ideological and material factors in explaining concepts and consciousness of race and nation in Tanganyika/Tanzania generally, and Dar es Salaam in particular, from pre-colonial times to a Nyerere and TANU (Tanganyika African National Union – itself a racially exclusive organization) ruled independent country. Yet, what the book also offers, and to my knowledge quite originally so, is both an analysis of African writing about, and consciousness of, race and nation among the TANU elite and at a popular level, as well as a bold discussion of African racism (some Africanist historians might prefer the term ‘counter-racism’) that transcended the colonial and post-colonial eras. As Brennan makes clear, such racism was opposed by Nyerere himself, but nonetheless had considerable purchase among TANU intellectuals and ordinary Tanganyikans/Tanzanians who frequently stereotyped and denounced others in racial terms: Indians/Asians, for instance, as unscrupulous profiteers, incapable post-independence of accepting the spirit of Tanzanian socialism (ujamaa). Moreover, such attitudes rationalized anti-Indian actions: whether anti-Indian riots or the nationalization of non-primary Indian properties in Dar es Salaam.
Such attitudes have parallels of course in the likes of Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians in Uganda or the anti-Indian riots in Durban, South Africa, in 1949. Both are briefly mentioned in Taifa, yet similarities and differences between them and events in Dar es Salaam are not explored in any detail. Indeed, one ongoing weakness of African urban history is the paucity of comparative understanding let alone detailed comparative studies: there are many parallels that could have been drawn with the history of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in South African cities, for example. But many Africanists, whatever region they specialize in, remain guilty of this lacuna. Brenner's study of Dar es Salaam is a very well-researched, insightful and important case-study that will help to make the writing of such comparative urban histories that much easier in years to come.
