Colonial History
In 1885 Germany authorized the German East Africa Company to administer what had become a German colony in the division of Africa arranged by the European powers. The company's ineptitude led to the German government's assumption of administrative responsibilities in 1890. For the rest of the nineteenth century and much of the first decade of the twentieth, the German colonial authorities began the development of the territory at the same time that they dealt with African recalcitrance, including a major rebellion in 1906. By the time they had instituted unchallenged control only a short interval remained before the onset of World War I and the toss of the colony to British troops by 1917. In 1922 the mainland, now called Tanganyika, became a League of Nations mandated territory administered by Great Britain.
Meanwhile Great Britain had established a protectorate over Zanzibar (including Pemba and a coastal strip later ceded to the Germans). In principle the sultan continued to rule, but the British increasingly dominated administration and government finance. Despite their subordinate role in government and their growing dependence on Indian merchants and financiers, the Arabs, particularly the Omani elite, maintained their social status. That status was supported by the British who thought of Zanzibar as an Arab state through the colonial period, although Arabs constituted less than 20 percent of the population.
In the interwar period political, social, and economic development in Tanganyika proceeded slowly. The territory lacked easily exploitable natural resources, and much of its land was characterized by poor soils, uncertain rainfall, and tsetse fly, making it unsuitable for cultivation or herding. The considerable investment required for more rapid social and economic development was not forthcoming from Great Britain for a variety of reasons, including the depression of the 1930s.
The Tanganyika government, in part as a matter of principle, in part to cope with a shortage of personnel, instituted the system of indirect rule. The system entailed administration through traditional chiefs or their analogues on the assumption that as natural rulers they would be the appropriate channels not only for the maintenance of law and order, but also for gradually introduced change.
The demands made on chiefs by authorities, their in-creasing dependence on the regime for approval, and the use of chiefs to introduce unpopular measures (even more marked after World War II) led to distortion of the precolonial relations between chiefs and people, and chiefs gradually lost their legitimacy.
By the end of World War IL despite the slow pace at which the educational system had developed, a number of literate Tanganyika Africans, many of them working at lower levels in the civil service, had appeared on the political stage organized as the Tanganyika African Association (TAA). Local political agitation and organization had also begun in some rural areas, often set off by resentment of rules governing agricultural and herding practices imposed through and enforced by the Native Authorities (chiefs and their appointed subordinates). These resentments, coupled with antipathies accumulated over the years, and the political movements that grew out of them were to provide a significant basis for mass support for the nationalist party that emerged in the mid-1950s.
The TAA began to ask for elected representation at various levels and to protest the operation of a de facto color bar in most political, economic, and social relations. Resentment generated by the color bar was focused on European colonial authorities and settlers; part of it was turned against Asians, almost ubiquitous in the kinds of commercial enterprise and civil service positions to which Africans were beginning to aspire and often considered more remote than Europeans by Africans.
The colonial government responded to these manifestations of discontent slowly and attempted to carry out its own, sometimes uncertain, plans for development, predicated on colonial rule for a long period. The authorities emphasized growth in the educational system, continuing development in plantation agriculture and cash cropping by peasant smallholders, and road construction. They also intended a very gradual introduction of elected representatives in the Legislative Council and at local levels.
Closely associated with the notion of election was the notion of multi-racialism calling for the representation for both Europeans and Asians equal to that of Africans who vastly outnumbered them. This point of view, urged by the governor of Tanganyika from 1949 to 1958, was disliked by the ordinary African and was to provide a major issue for African nationalists. In July 1954 the TAA became the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under the leadership of Julius K. Nverere. Rejecting multiracialism (and tribalism) TANU emphasized the African nature of Tanganyika and called for African majorities at all levels of government.
It was the first African organization to indicate that independence was its ultimate goal, but it set no timetable for self-rule. Despite the obstacles the colonial authorities put in its way, TANU, sparked by Nyerere's leadership and eloquence, rapidly gained membership and support. By 1958 internal and external developments had opened the way to self-government, achieved in September 1960; independence quickly followed in December 1961.
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