Look at Majimaji! A plea for historical photographs in Tanzania (original) (raw)
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Archaeologies, 2015
This paper presents new insights on the Majimaji war, which is one of the least studied topics in Eastern Africa's colonial history. The Majimaji (1905-1907) was a large scale war of resistance against German colonial rule in Tanzania. This war started in the Lindi Region and spread rapidly to other areas of southern Tanzania. It was primarily a reaction to the exploitative nature of German colonial rule. The archival records that exist are biased toward German sources and information supplied by their African agents who wished to please the colonists and spare their lives. Although local oral histories on the war existed, this has been poorly documented or the accounts have been lost. In this circumstance, archaeology provides an alternative source of evidence about the Majimaji war. This paper presents the intellectual arguments that underpin this research. It explains why archaeology is still important to study popular historical events. Using archaeology, the Majimaji battle sites can be identified and documented so as to enhance understandings of the war and to fill in gaps that arise from the limitations of documentary archival records and oral histories. In addition, this research has elicited public awareness and perception of the battle sites and obtained new insights into how the memories of the war resonate in people's minds. Résumé: Cet article présente de nouveaux éclairages sur la guerre Maji-Maji, qui est l'un des sujets les moins étudiés de l'histoire coloniale de l'Afrique orientale. La guerre Maji-Maji (1905-1907) fut une guerre de résistance à grande échelle contre le pouvoir colonial allemand en Tanzanie. Elle commença dans la région de Lindi et s'étendit rapidement à d'autres régions du sud de la Tanzanie. Elle fut avant tout une réaction à l'exploitation du pouvoir colonial allemand. Les documents d'archives qui existent font la part belle aux sources allemandes et aux informations fournies par leurs agents africains, qui souhaitaient satisfaire les colons et
Atlas of an Empire: Photographic Narrations and the Visual Struggle for Mozambique
2020
This article engages with the historiography of the Portuguese empire with reference to Mozambique. It explores the impact of visual archives on existing debates and asks what difference photographs make to our interpretation and understanding of this colonial past. Deprived of their ‘historical rights’ by the requirements of the Berlin treaties that insisted on ‘effective occupation’, the Portuguese started to employ a complex of knowledge-producing activities in which photography was crucially involved. This article examines different photographic moments before and during the ‘Pacification Campaign’ that assured Portugal’s authority over the Gaza Empire in southern Mozambique in the 1890s, by official, commercial and missionary photographers. It identifies controversies over the small number of portraits of the Gaza king Ngungunyane that took on distinctive and disputed ‘other lives’ after their initial production. The realisation of how one image might be disassembled to generat...
Routledge eBooks, 2021
German colonisation of Tanzania was entrenched in the militia and a coercive apparatus that sought to both suppress local communities and dominate their territories. A network of institutions such as the boma, prison, askari, akida and chiefs were either set up or perverted to establish a colonial system of justice that destroyed the local authorities. This alien system legalised forced labour, imprisonment, detention in chains and corporal punishment kiboko (whip). It was this same over-reliance on corporal punishment that triggered more than 50 local wars of resistance against the German rule established between 1890 and 1908. Majimaji was one of these resistance uprisings that occurred in 1904-1908. To suppress these outbreaks of resistance, the Germans utilised prisons for the detention and execution of indigenous combatants that forms the focus of this paper. Memories of German colonialism in Tanzania associate prisons with incarceration, pain, execution and the systematic recourse to violence, which I argue represents cultural genocide that deliberately intended to destroy the lives and cultural identity of local communities. Following an archaeological survey, and according to ethnographic and archival sources, this paper reconstructs the history of penology in Tanzania, German recourse to colonial prisons to quench the Majimaji War as well as contemporary memories of mass executions and incarceration in southern Tanzania.
Photography, Exhibitions and Embodied Futures in Colonial Uganda, 1908-1960
Visual Studies, 2018
This article seeks to complicate our understanding of the relationship between the camera and colonial rule in Africa. Based on a case study of the Uganda Protectorate between the years 1908 and 1960, it argues that photography was in fact more deeply embedded within processes of imperial governance than we may have previously appreciated. It substantiates this claim by focusing not upon the more coercive practices of photography, or the more derogatory elements of certain kinds of photographic representation, but instead upon the political ‘work’ that photography did within this colonial society. It argues that photography here operated within a wider ecology of state-controlled media, which not only represented various ideal or model futures but actively encouraged African subjects to physically engage with them. As such, photography was a key technology of governmentality. The article will substantiate this argument with a particular focus on the Uganda Protectorate’s official Photographic Section, between the years 1947 and 1960.
The Paro Manene Project: Exhibiting and Researching Photographic Histories in Western Kenya
International Handbooks of Museum Studies (ed. Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy), Vol. 4: Museum Transformations (ed. Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips), pp 311-335., 2015
This chapter is an extended reflection on the museological issues surrounding a series of photographic exhibitions, titled Paro Manene (a Luo phrase that roughly translates as ‘reflecting on the past’), organized and curated by us in Nyanza Province (western Kenya) during February 2007. The chapter discusses a number of critical issues that emerged from this project, such as: who has the authority to curate community exhibitions from Western archives?; how are ongoing relationships between Western museums and local communities and organisations to be managed?; how do such experiences modify the notion of ‘visual repatriation’, frequently used in the museological literature?
This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended " social archive " of this collection , by exploring the range of relationships through which these image-objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals something of a " concealed " archive of meaning within this collection, one which is indicative both of wider cosmopolitan imaginaries that were at play in the British Empire during this period, and of the official view of the new Uganda colony as an inclusive , even collaborative, social project. A focus on the social agency of the postcards themselves then reveals how these meanings became later " overwritten " , to produce a more recognizable semiotics of colonial representation and power. In a review of the field conducted shortly before his death in 1997, Alfred Gell noted that contemporary writings in the anthropology of art had become preoccupied with aesthetics and, in particular, with the attempt to " define the characteristics of each culture's inherent aesthetic, so that the aesthetic contributions of particular non-Western artists can be correctly evaluated, that is, in relation to their culturally specific aesthetic intentions " (1998: 1–2). While not finding anything wrong with this project per se, Gell argued that the approach was nevertheless too embedded in the
Theorising the Majimaji – Landscape, Memory and Agency
Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies
The Majimaji was a war of resistance against German colonial rule in Tanzania which occurred between 1905 and 1907. The war is largely known from historical sources which include the German observers of the war, African historians and Africanist historians. Very few archaeological researches inform the Majimaji war. Although the materiality of the war exists, the landscape and memories of the war create a potential database for archaeologists. This paper theorizes the Majimaji war from landscape, memory and agency perspectives. In a broad sense, the paper delineates concepts that define conflicts and the landscape of conflict; agency as a broad theoretical framework on which the paper is grounded; and the processes of memory, memorialization and the creation of the war memorials.
Photography as Absence: Implicit Histories (Africa, Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)
Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, 2023
Photographic material can sometimes pose an overwhelming and distorting presence, especially when it comes to the writing of history. Some of the first visual recordings of African social worlds via photography would long serve as a model for images of the continent. This phenomenon has only been reinforced by recirculations of images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intended as a counterpoint, this article will contemplate a paradoxical history of photography by considering it based not on its presence but on its very absence. A work of history supported by photographic and written sources from the years 1870 to 1910, this contribution focuses on photography as absence, as disappearance, and as erasure. This implicit history focuses on various essential phenomena that characterize the (non)production of photographic images of African social worlds in the age of colonial expansion. It first deals with the key question of the material destruction of old photographs of Africa. For a variety of reasons, an entire part of what was photographed is now either lost or in the process of becoming lost. One of the long-standing major effects of this has been a double erasure of African photography pioneers, who are poorly represented or underrepresented in institutional archives and have been deprived of historiographical attention; in many cases, their history remains to be written. The article then raises the question of refusals to pose and potential refusals to take photographs. We will see several scattered traces of such evasions of photography. The problem of self-censorship and the very restricted circulation of certain images, particularly those threatening the stability of colonial narratives, will also be studied at this juncture. Finally, the article will take a closer look at the photographs taken by Alex J. Braham. This individual, a district agent in Ogugu (southern Nigeria) for the Royal Niger Company at the turn of the twentieth century, was an eager photographer. His personal album contains several shots of a secret ceremony that he took without the participants’ knowledge, having hidden with his camera in a tent. This example of concealment (not of the image but of the photographic act itself) is also one of the possible manifestations of the invisibilities that have played a major part in forming and deforming photographic imagery of Africa.