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Abstract
Tracing the modus operandi of textile traders in colonial Dar es Salaam, this article makes a case for viewing the availability and extension of credit in the form of textiles as a central aspect of traders’ lives. The versatility of textiles in the local context of Dar es Salaam not only contributed to their high demand, their use as the main medium of exchange and the basis on which credit was extended; it also shaped the local conceptualisation of entrepreneurship. For textile traders in colonial Dar es Salaam, it was of economic, social and cultural importance to always be both in debt and have others in debt to them.
Notes
1. Report on the District of Dar-es-Salaam District for the year 1923 by Senior Commissioner, Tanzania National Archives (TNA) library: ‘Provincial Commissioner’s Reports Dar es Salaam District, 1921–1930’; James R. Brennan and Andrew Burton, ‘The Emerging Metropolis: A History of Dar es Salaam, ca. 1862–2000,’ in Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, by James R. Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusufu Qwaray Lawi (African Books Collective, 2007), 13–75.
2. Fergus Chalmers Wright, African Consumers in Nyasaland and Tanganyika: An Enquiry into the Distribution and Consumption of Commodities among Africans Carried Out in 1952–1953 (London: H. M. Stationery Off, 1955).
3. For Tanzania, see Charles Stephen Kimei, ‘Tanzania’s Financial Experience in the Post-War Period’ (Ph.D. Thesis, Uppsala University, 1987); Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
4. Lendol Calder shows how the use of instalment plans was seen as a sign of moral decline even though it actually imposed discipline on consumers (Lendol Glen Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)).
5. In its original formulation, E. P. Thompson applied the concept of the moral economy to food riots in eighteenth-century rural England. Thompson argued that these rioters England were rational actors who aimed to re-establish a moral order by drawing on centuries-old customs and patterns of behaviour. The moral economy of provision established informal rules, which guaranteed the rights of lower-class people to be the first to buy grain at regulated prices. As large-scale merchants increasingly challenged the ways in which actors of the economy of provision traded commodities, consumers rebelled against high prices of grain during times of shortage. Thompson argued that rioters acted out long-established modes of behaviour to force farmers, millers and bakers to lower the price of grain and bread. Although riots were not led by institutionalised groups, they were characterised by clear rules of order in which outright theft was largely absent. Rioters understood themselves as re-establishing a moral economy of provision in which they had the right to buy grain and bread to low prices. Thompson himself considered the moral economy of provision to be no longer in existence as the logic of the market economy assumed hegemony at the beginning of the nineteenth century (E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’ Past & Present, No. 50 (1971): 76–136). For an example of the application of the concept to modern urban contexts, see Benjamin Orlove, ‘Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot,’ Cultural Anthropology 12, No. 2 (1997): 234–68. For a critique of the concept, see Janet L. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
6. Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
7. Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (Wisconsin: Currey, 1988); Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).
8. Gareth Austin, ‘Indigenous Credit Institutions in West Africa,’ in Local Suppliers of Credit in the Third World, 1750–1960, by Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1993); Abner Cohen, Custom & Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969).
9. Endre Stiansen and Jane Guyer, ‘Introduction’, in Credit, Currencies, and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective, by Endre Stiansen and Jane Guyer (Uppsala Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999), 1–14.
10. Robin Law, ‘Finance and Credit in Pre-Colonial Dahomey’, in Credit, Currencies, and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective, by Endre Stiansen and Jane Guyer (Uppsala Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999), 15–37.
11. Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, C. 1750 - 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 25–61, 120–67.
12. Calvin H. Allen, Oman: The Modernization of the Sultanate (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 2014).
13. Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 32; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 78–79.
14. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, 35–36.
15. Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 39.
16. Robert G. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890–1980 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 102.
17. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, 59–87.
18. Jonathon Glassman, ‘The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast,’ Journal of African History 32, No. 2 (1991): 277–312; Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001).
19. ‘La pratique du crédit est souvent citée par les sources européennes comme l’un des problèmes centraux dans les relations entre les marchands indiens et leur clientèle africaine’ (Franck Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam histoire d’une société urbaine coloniale en Afrique orientale allemande (1891–1914)’ (Ph.D. Thesis, 2008), 116).
20. E.g. Dar es Salam, November 27, 1902, TNA: G4/7: ‘Markthallen der Kommunalverbände. Bd. 1: 1903–1906’.
21. Excerpt from Frankfurter Journal, December 2, 1891, TNA: ‘G8/75: Westdeutsche Handels- und Plantagengesellschaft. Bd. I: 1890–1900’. See also Lutz J. Schwidder, Das Hamburger Kolonialhandelshaus Wm. O’Swald & Co. und die Einführung von ‘Techniken’ in die Kolonien 1890 - 1914 (Hamburg: Diplomica, 2004).
22. Already during the times of the caravan trade, European traders had adopted local practices and gave porters cloths as advances of salaries. Carl Velten wrote ‘Ich … gab den Trägern ihren Lohn, einem jeden 6 gora [Stück Zeug von 30 engl. Ellen] Zeug und 5 farbige Tücher. Sie fragten mich: “Wohin sollen wir dafür die Lasten tragen?”’ (Carl Velten, Schilderungen der Suaheli von Expeditionen v. Wissmanns, Dr. Bumillers, Graf v. Götzens, und Anderer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901), 1).
23. Geschäftsbericht der Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft zu Berlin über das Jahr 1900, TNA: G8/69: ‘Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, Bd. 4: 1897–1901.’ Translated from German by the author.
24. Tharia Topan was the most successful of these traders in mid- to late-nineteenth-century East Africa. Several European travellers including Henry Stanley reported how they bought goods including textiles to be used as gifts and trade in the interior from Tharia Topan (Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. 1 (Hamburg: Gradener, 1878), 63–64); see also Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam: Histoire d’une société urbaine coloniale en Afrique orientale allemande (1891–1914)’, 38–40). The nineteenth-century ivory and slave trade in East Africa were also often done through textiles and on the basis of credit, as several authors have noted (Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East-African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation Without Abolition in German East Africa, c.1884–1914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 35. Verney Cameron and Daniel Oliver noted that virtually every trader in the interior owed money to the Asian customs official in Zanzibar, a post Tharia Topan occupied in the late 1870s (Verney Lovett Cameron and Daniel Oliver, Across Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 24).
25. Bilanz-Brief, Dar es Salaam, December 31, 1909, Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 621–1/147, 18 Band 7: ‘O’swald & Co., Briefe von Dar es Salaam, 1910’.
26. January 31, 1914, Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 621–1/147, 18 Band 8: ‘O’swald & Co. 1914, Briefe von Dar es Salaam,’ 18.
27. January 31, 1914, Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 621–1/147, 18 Band 8: ‘O’swald & Co. 1914, Briefe von Dar es Salaam,’ 22.
28. January 31, 1914, Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 621–1/147, 18 Band 8: ‘O’swald & Co. 1914, Briefe von Dar es Salaam’, 4.
29. January 29, 1914, Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 621–1/147, 18 Band 8: ‘O’swald & Co. 1914, Briefe von Dar es Salaam’.
30. Colonial sources reveal a number of cases in which Asians acted as creditors for Europeans. Franck Raimbault notes that in the early 1890s, Khimji Jeram lent a Greek entrepreneur 5000 rupees. The goal was not so much to bring their European debtor in financial difficulty but to ensure access to their debtors’ social network, which could potentially be included in their market network (Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, 231 (part 3)). Gregory describes how a Punjabi Hindu in German East Africa became known as ‘The Bank’ because Germans regularly relied on him for loans when they failed to get any from banks (Gregory, South Asians in East Africa).
31. TNA: G35/3: ‘[Verwaltung der] Nachlässe [verstorbener Nichteuropäer]. 1910–1912’. Some people also owned slaves who were sometimes – but not always – manumitted at the occasion of the master’s death. When Dar es Salaam resident Mkarafu binti Bakari died in October 1911, Amana and her child Gundumu claimed that they were promised to be manumitted when her master died (Dar es Salaam, 26 October 1911, TNA: G35/3: ‘[Verwaltung der] Nachlässe [verstorbener Nichteuropäer]. 1910–1912’). The manumission was not automatic as the German colonial administration never outlawed slavery (Deutsch, Emancipation Without Abolition in German East Africa, c.1884–1914).
32. As a matter of fact, not only Dar es Salaam-based traders but Dar es Salaam residents more generally were perpetually indebted while simultaneously serving as creditor. Urban residents actively sought to create debt and credit relations rather than to avoid them at any cost. Debt and credit relations formed the basis for the membership in urban neighborhood communities, the organisation of trading goods and agricultural produce in and out of Kariakoo, and the creation of respectable urban identities, as I show in my dissertation, where I look at the Kariakoo neighbourhood in Dar es Salaam serves as a case study to examine how debt and credit shaped work and business, social and communal life, and people’s identities and subjectivities in urban Africa (Benjamin Brühwiler, ‘Moralities of Owing and Lending: Credit, Debt, and Urban Living in Kariakoo, Dar Ees Salaam’ (Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2015)).
33. Johann Ludwig Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London: Trübner and Co., 1882), 171.
34. Glassman, ‘The Bondsman’s New Clothes’.
35. Fair, Pastimes and Politics.
36. Der Kaiserliche Bezirksamtmann, Pangani, February 20, 1903, TNA: G4/7: ‘Markthallen der Kommunalverbände. Bd. 1: 1903–1906’.
37. For how colonial officials in Uganda struggled to collect taxes paid in commodity currencies, see Karin Pallaver, ‘“The African Native Has No Pocket”: Monetary Practices and Currency Transitions in Early Colonial Uganda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 48, No. 3 (2015): 471–500.
38. At the turn of the twentieth century in German colonial Dar es Salaam, there were about seven shopkeepers, who exclusively focused their business on pawnbroking. Various other Asian shopkeepers were involved in pawnbroking, but they were officially registered as shopkeepers. In 1928 in British colonial Dar es Salaam, there were eight licensed pawnbrokers. They were legally allowed to provide loans for three months with interest of 6 cents per shilling per month. The Dar es Salaam pawnbrokers claimed in 1930 that each one of them attended to about 300 to 400 customers on the first day of each month (Letter by Kaiserlicher Bezirksamtmann Londau, Dar es Salaam, June 30, 1904, TNA: G1/29: ‘Handel und Gewerbe im Allgemeinen, Bd. 2: 1901–1906’; Letter by Brett, Provincial Commissioner, Dar es Salaam, to the Chief Secretary, May 5, 1928, TNA: 12,230/Vol. I: ‘Pawnbrokers, Registration of’; Letter by the Pawnbrokers of Dar es Salaam, represented by W. Dharsee, Dar es Salaam, March 31, 1930, TNA: 12,230/Vol. I: ‘Pawnbrokers, Registration of’).
39. E.g. letter by Kaiserlicher Bezirksamtmann Londau, Daressalam, July 30, 1904, TNA: G1/29: ‘Handel und Gewerbe im Allgemeinen, Bd. 2: 1901–1906’.
40. Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language, 171.
41. A government committee reported in 1937 that ‘a large number of businesses in Dar es Salaam are run by the owners themselves with the help of relatives and dependents’ (Report of the Committee appointed by Government to enquire whether the Interests of Shop Assistants are sufficiently and adequately protected by the Shop Assistants (Employment) Ordinance, March 2, 1937, TNA: 25,080: ‘Shop Assistants Employment Ordinance, Amendments to’).
42. See also Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, 128–29.
43. Shirin Walji gives an example of a family that was able to expand a small shop in Kariakoo with the help of the Tanganyika Ismailia Co-operative Society (Shirin Remtulla Walji, “A History of the Ismaili Community in Tanzania” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1974), 169). In 1951, the Ismailia credit society in Dar es Salaam had a membership of 1795 people and gave a total of 39,364 pounds as loans to members, mainly for trading purposes (TNA library: ‘Report on Co-operative Development For the Year 1951’). In 1953, the renamed Diamond Jubilee Investment Fund was reported to have provided loans to Ismaili Khojas active in retail trade, and loans to members stood at 38,223 pounds (TNA library: ‘Report on Co-operative Development For the Year 1953’).
44. Claiming membership in an African neighborhood in Dar es Salaam was certainly more difficult for shopkeepers of Asian descent as they were entangled in long-standing discourses portraying them as bloodsuckers and exploiters. Already, at the end of the late nineteenth century, the British described Asian shopkeepers in East Africa as bloodsucking shopkeepers (Richa Nagar, ‘The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold’, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa and the Middle East xvi, No. 2 (1996): 65).
45. For Dar es Salaam in the German colonial period, see Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, 128. For East Africa in the German and the British colonial periods, see Gregory, South Asians in East Africa, 102–8. Even in upcountry towns like Mahenge, Asian shopkeepers supplied goods on credit to African traders during the interwar period (Larson, ‘A History of the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, ca. 1860–1957’, 358–359). A Mahenge merchant named Abdulgan Gulamali made clear that a certain ‘Yusufu Mkumba works as a shopkeeper in his own name. He buys the goods on credit at my shop [“Mali anakopa kwangu”] so he is not my clerk’ (Letter by Abdulgan Gulamali, to the District Officer Mahenge, August 22, 1930, TNA: ACC 461/5/4: ‘Market and Trading Correspondence’, translated from Kiswahili by the author). Like many other local traders, Yusuf Mkumba was not an employed agent selling things and goods on commission but an independent trader who bought his goods from his supplier on credit.
46. These credit arrangements between shopkeepers and hawkers also existed in upcountry Tanganyika, where ‘A small merchant carrying only a small stock in his shop may have a dozen hawkers touring the country with thousands of rupees worth’ (Letter by the District Political Officer to the Secretary of the Administration, April 26, 1919, TNA: AB.121: ‘Hawkers’).
47. Salum Ramadhani Kusa Elikeni, interview with the author in Kiswahili, Kigogo, Dar es Salaam, May 26, 2013. See also Philemon Mbaganile, interview with the author in Kiswahili, Gerezani section of Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam, May 17, 2013.
48. Wanguonguo were an early form street trading, which has become much more widespread nowadays. Itinerant traders in Dar es Salaam are now referred to as wamachinga, which is a Kiswahili-ised version of the English ‘marching guy’ (Colman Titus Msoka, ‘Informal Markets and Urban Development: A Study of Street Vending in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’ (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2005)).
49. This is somewhat similar to the osomaalo Peel described in J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom: 1890s–1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), 152–59.
50. Letter by the Kaiserliche Gouverneur, Dar es Salam, May 22, 1900, TNA: G3/67: ‘Beschaffung des laufenden Bargeldbedarfes [für die Gouvernements-Hauptkasse zu Dar-es-Salaam, insbes. von Bankhäusern in Indien], Bd. 1: 1891–1900.’ TNA: G3/68: ‘Beschaffung des laufenden Bargeldbedarfes [für die Gouvernements-Hauptkasse zu Dar-es-Salaam, insbes. von Bankhäusern in Indien], Bd. 2: 1900–1903.’ TNA: G3/69: ‘Beschaffung des laufenden Bargeldbedarfes [für die Gouvernements-Hauptkasse zu Dar-es-Salaam, insbes. von Bankhäusern in Indien], Bd. 3: 1903–1910’.
51. Graeber debunks this myth created by Adam Smith and others (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011)).
52. Deutsch, Emancipation Without Abolition in German East Africa, c.1884–1914, 51, fn 205.
53. Letter by R. W. Taylor, Currency Officer, Dar es Salaam, to the Secretary, East African Currency Board, London, June 2, 1922, TNA: AB.925: ‘German Currency’.
54. Report on the Origin and System of Paper Currency, Its Issue, Circulation and Redemption in German East African, From 1st January 1905 to 6th June 1916, TNA: AB.925: ‘German Currency’.
55. M. J. Borcawen, Chairman of The Planters Association, T.T., Tanga, to the Chief Secretary, April 2, 1925, TNA: ‘AB.203/Vol. II: Currency Board’.
56. Annual report on Dar-es-Salaam District for 1922 by F.W. Brett, Senior Commissioner, TNA library: ‘Provincial Commissioner’s Reports Dar es Salaam District, 1921–1930’. Letter by S. S. Davis, Currency Officer, Dar es Salaam, to the Secretary, East African Currency Board, London, September 2, 1920, TNA: ‘AB.202/Vol. I: Currency Board’.
57. Letter by E. Bellevue, Secretary, East Africa Currency Board, January 10, 1941, TNA: 25,775/Vol. II: ‘Impounding of Counterfeit Currency’.
58. Annual Report for the Kauli Sub-District 1925, and Annual Report for the Kigoma District 1925, TNA: AB.57: ‘Annual Report 1925, Kigoma District’.
59. April 11, 1939, TNA: 25,775/Vol. I: ‘Impounding of Counterfeit Currency’.
60. Extract from a minute by H.E. the Governor, August 18, 1931, TNA: 10,138: ‘Marketing of Produce, System of’.
61. Letter by South Eastern, Lindi, December 30, 1931, to the Provincial Commissioner, TNA: 10,138: ‘Marketing of Produce, System of’.
62. n. d. [1932?], TNA: 10,138: ‘Marketing of Produce, System of’.
63. TNA: AB.46: ‘Annual Report, Tabora District, 1925’.
64. James Brennan has argued that credit and debt relations between Asians and Africans contributed to the racialisation of identities in colonial Dar es Salaam (James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), 47–84).
65. Franck Raimbault, who mentions credit and debt relations in German colonial Dar es Salaam, writes with respect to the use of the Kiswahili language, ‘il n’est guère possible d’analyser la situation avec les catégories racialo-géographicques en usage dans les sources. … On ne peut donc pas tenir un discours général sur les relations entre les Africains et les marchands indiens. Les marchands installés depuis des décennies dans la région connaissaient cette langue [Kiswahili] et les coutumes locales. Ceux qui résidaient à Dar [es Salaam] depuis les années 1860 ou 70, avaient développé des relations sociales étroites avec la population, notamment les chefs locaux’ (Raimbault, ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, 140).