Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria: Abakaliki during colonial times (1905–1960) (review)

Abstract

related to the Ngoni penetration and later Maji Maji struggles than to Mkwawa and the Hehe hegemonic expansionism that is characteristic of the pre-colonial history of northern Njombe. It is due to this omission that A History of the Excluded fails to explain in convincing detail the Maji Maji struggles in southern Ubena – especially so for the battles at Yakobi Mission and the Nyikamtwe (the Valley of the Skull). The same is true of the downplayed role of the military school of the Wanyikongwe so well described by Ndembwela Ngunangwa in Indigenous African Education (1988). Narratives of the descendants of people who fought those battles could have provided a more rounded picture of the Bena’s early colonial resistance and social history. The theme of ‘exclusion within incorporation’ permeates the book. It is argued that Njombe District was ‘marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy’. Under the two colonial regimes the district provided migrant labour for the mines and plantations, while being effectively excluded from ‘agricultural markets, from access to medical services, from schooling – from all opportunity . . . to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labour’ (p. 1). One would like to query whether the creation of a labour reserve in Njombe devoid of other development initiatives was really an act of exclusion or one of incorporation by ‘proletarianization’. I would argue this was an attempt at ‘proletarianization’ of a district that proved abortive. Colonial capitalism penetrated, but did not significantly alter, the traditional familyoriented, resource-based, subsistence-level ‘peasant mode of production’. By remaining with their land and other ‘means of production’, the peasantry had an ‘exit option’ within the so-called ‘private family sphere’ which they pitched against the local development goals posed by the state, both colonial and post-colonial. These doubts notwithstanding, the author(s) have done an excellent job in reconstructing and describing the process of social change from the perspective of struggling individuals. The result has been an illuminating social history of a group of people that would later come to form a dynamic middle class in a locally sourced political economy in Tanzania. It is a worthy present by one of the authors to a nation that has given him a wife.