More clever than the devil: ujanja as schooling strategy in Tanzania

Abstract

This article explores the concept of “cleverness” as it is employed by Tanzanian youth to improve their likelihood of succeeding in school. It analyzes the Swahili term ujanja, which combines cleverness, opportunism, and deception, while it also illustrates an educational anthropologist’s ongoing process of familiarization and defamiliarization with this culturally salient concept over many years of fieldwork and engagement with key participants. Specifically, the study draws on interviews with youth participating in a longitudinal study on Mount Kilimanjaro and an extended life history interview with a close friend and research assistant. The interviews reveal the strategies used by some youth to evade peer pressure, thwart sexual advances, and cultivate relationships with school sponsors. The article concludes with a call for greater use of life history methodologies in the study of complex cultural concepts like “cleverness” and of textual forms that elucidate the emotional complexity of narrator/interpreter relationships.

Keywords:

• cleverness
• life history
• secondary schooling
• social mobility
• Tanzania
• ujanja

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used throughout this article for people and places, with the exception of my son, Gus, and the major regions and cities in Tanzania. All interviews cited in this article were conducted in Swahili and recorded using a digital voice recorder. The recordings were transcribed by a bilingual Swahili-English research assistant, whose first language is Swahili, or by me, a fluent but nonnative speaker of the language. We translated “faithfully” the interviews from Swahili to English; nevertheless, I recognize the difficulty inherent in translation as acknowledged by Gadamer: “The requirement that a translation be faithful cannot remove the fundamental gulf between the two languages. However faithful we try to be, we have to make difficult decisions” (1989/2006, p. 387). These “difficult decisions” were made through a process by which my research assistant and I read each other’s translations and discussed any differences of opinion in the translations until we reached consensus. In two cases, including Amina’s, the interviewee read the transcription and made changes, which were incorporated into the final version of the text. Although all of the research participants in the longitudinal study were invited to read the transcriptions and/or translations of their interviews, only three of the 20 focal youth opted to do so. However, Amina and another long-term research assistant have played an important role in validating the findings because I have had numerous discussions with them over the years about my interpretations of these youth’s lives, and about their interpretations of mine.

2. The terms ujanja, mjanja, and wajanja (plural of mjanja) were used by the youth in this study and are found in the literature reviewed in the following section. However, Amina, upon reading an earlier draft of this manuscript, suggested I use the term mwerevu, which means clever, sharp, or smart, because it has a more positive connotation than mjanja. She noted that in some contexts, mjanja can mean mlaghai – a cheat or a liar – and this is not the negative meaning conveyed in the examples to follow. Despite Amina’s insights, I have decided to use ujanja and its variants because this was the term uttered in the interviews, and there is a relevant literature discussing its multiple meanings that I seek to explore in this article.

3. My thanks to Lesley Bartlett for her insights and encouragement, to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study, especially Nikhil Anand, for their critical commentary on this project, and to the participants in this study, first and foremost Amina, for their time and trust. I would also like to thank the Fulbright Program for supporting me as a Fulbright Scholar in Tanzania in 2006–2007 and the University of Minnesota’s McKnight Presidential Fellows program for its support of fieldwork in 2012.

4. The mainland of Tanzania was known as Tanganyika until it merged with the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba to become Tanzania in 1964. It was governed as a British Trust Territory following World War I, when German “protectorates” like Tanganyika were transferred to other European powers.

5. Although the state covers the cost of K-12 education in the USA, see Brandt (2001) for an enlightening discussion of the historical significance of literacy sponsors for generations of Americans and the unequal access to the institutions that have served in this role owing to class, race, and gender disparities.

6. Women and men in Tanzania are commonly referred to by the name of their first-born child, whether it is a boy or a girl. Thus, Mama Eric refers to Eric’s mother, and Baba Gus in the following sentence refers to my husband and Gus’s father.