Civilisation under Colonial Conditions: Development, Difference and Violence in Swahili Poems, 1888–1907

ABSTRACT

For a global history of development, Swahili poems from the German colonial period are valuable sources as they help to question the diffusionist view of development discourses as colonial import. This article analyses how concepts of development (maendeleo) and civilisation (ustaarabu) figured in poems written by Swahili authors between 1888 and 1907. Going beyond a reading of these texts as pro- or anti-colonial, it shows the importance poets attached to urban infrastructural improvement. Poems were also informed by the self-image of the superior, urban, Muslim strata of coastal society (waungwana) in contrast to inferior non-Muslim inland societies (washenzi). Several poets suggested that inland societies should be disciplined, yet differences to coastal Swahili society were usually not couched in terms of temporality nor in terms of a civilising mission. Poets had to come to terms, however, with new power relations as a result of German conquest. While some authors openly criticised colonial violence, others also embraced colonial interventions in infrastructural and economic aspects – but still expressed nostalgia for the past. In sum, the poems constitute a transitional space in Swahili discourses on development, showing that these were not merely colonial imports but grew from multiple roots.

ABSTRACT IN KISWAHILI

Kwa historia ya maendeleo, mashairi ya Kiswahili ya wakati wa ukoloni wa Ujerumani yanasaidia kutilia shaka mtazamo kwamba dhana kuhusu maendeleo ziliingizwa kutoka nje wakati wa ukoloni. Makala haya yanachambua jinsi mashairi na tenzi yaliyoandikwa kwa Kiswahili kati ya mwaka 1888 na 1907 yanabeba dhana za maendeleo na ustaarabu. Tukiangalia zaidi ya kupinga na kukubali ukoloni katika matini haya, inaonekana kwamba waandishi wote wamethamini ubora wa miji. Matini haya pia yanaonyesha jinsi gani waandishi walijiona waungwana, yaani wanajumuiya wa kiislamu wa hali ya juu wa jamii za pwani, kulinganisha na jamii za bara waliwaona kama ni washenzi. Baadhi ya waandishi walipendekeza kwamba jamii za bara zinapaswa kuadibiwa, lakini tofauti kati ya Waswahili wa pwani na jamii za bara hazikuelezewa kama tofauti za kimuda. Pia hawakupendekeza hatua za kubadilisha jamii za bara kulingana na civilising mission ya wakoloni. Ingawa waandishi walilazimishwa kukubaliana na mamlaka mpya ya wajerumani, baadhi yao walikosoa kwa uwazi unyanyasaji wa kikoloni. Wengine walipokea njia za kikoloni katika miundombinu na uchumi, lakini bado walitamani siku za nyuma kabla ya ukoloni na aina mpya ya utii. Kwa jumla, makala haya yanaonyesha kwamba dhana za maendeleo Afrika Mashariki hazikuingizwa tu na wakoloni. Zimekua kutoka kwenye mizizi mingi.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• civilisation
• Tanzania
• colonialism
• poetry
• Swahili

Introduction¹

This article investigates how understandings of civilisation and development figured in texts by Swahili authors written during the period of German colonial conquest and rule in East Africa from 1885 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It analyses poems, most penned between 1888 and 1907, to understand how Swahili authors represented socioeconomic, cultural, infrastructural and political changes during the period of German colonial rule and how this was related to their views on civilisational differences. Both terms, development and civilisation, are not accurate translations of the concepts employed in these texts; they are used here as heuristic devices opening up questions about categories of social hierarchies and political interventions with which Swahili authors made sense of contemporary events and history. Analysis departs from the assumption that development, as a primarily Western construct, relies on (1) defining certain groups as more or less developed and (2) an historical narrative, usually teleological, in which organised interventions, often (though by no means always) by the state, are intended to bring about improvement in collective affairs (Pieterse 2010, 3). As this article will show, this understanding partially overlapped with views expressed by Swahili authors.

Investigating the views expressed in these poems is valuable for a number of reasons. In the historiography of development (for an overview, see Hodge 2016), views of the colonised on development have rarely been addressed. While Western development discourses have been thoroughly examined, and criticised from a number of vantage points (see for instance, Decker and McMahon 2020; Engerman 2017; Escobar 1995, Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf 2014; Macekura and Manela 2018), we know very little about the perspectives of intellectuals, including authors of written texts, from Africa – especially regarding the period before World War I. In the case of Swahili-language sources from Tanzania, the concept of development (maendeleo) has been discussed for the British colonial period (Hunter 2014), but the link to Swahili notions of civilisation has rarely been made (important exceptions include Bromber 2003a, 2006). The problem is, in other words, that Swahili discourses of development – similar to readings of development discourses of other non-Western regions – either seem to come out of nowhere or are considered as exclusively European imports. Both views are misleading.

European colonial rule undoubtedly played an important role in spreading and shaping understandings of development. However, a view of development concepts as nothing but a colonial import “flattens intellectual history into one where Africans have little agency save to adopt colonial ideas”, as Jonathon Glassman (2021, 81) has pointed out regarding the related problem of historicising racial thought. Paying attention to Swahili authors’ views during the period of German rule as expressed in colonial newspapers (Krautwald 2021) or the texts examined here thus helps to resituate and broaden current global history debates about development by investigating the multiplicity, dynamics and various roots of these discourses. This adds to an understanding of how and why thinking in terms of developmental difference, stages and progress could spread so quickly; and how these concepts built on, complemented, or replaced established notions of “civilisation” in Swahili discourses.

This article shows how Swahili poems were shaped by their authors’ self-perception as waungwana, a term sometimes translated as civilised, but referring more concretely to a status of being free and culturally refined urban Muslims (Glassman 1995, xvii). This self-image of possessing civilisational qualities (uungwana) was mirrored by the negative image of the barbarian, savage Other – the (supposedly) infidel washenzi from East Africa’s upcountry regions who was seen as lacking these qualities. While this distinction was always up for contestation and even undermined in some texts, German colonial conquest shook the very foundations of some, yet not all, of these self-images. Swahili authors² had to come to terms with the subjection of all non-Europeans to colonial hierarchies, including those groups and individuals who had claimed a socially prestigious status in hierarchies established prior to German colonial conquest. In their poems, Swahili authors expressed this subjection, particularly in military and political aspects. They also upheld, however, their own notions of cultural and moral superiority.

For several reasons, the history of the poems and travelogues under review here can only be written as an entangled history (Werner and Zimmermann 2006). First, it would be misleading to render Swahili literary discourses of the German colonial period as isolated or “local” in an implicit contrast to a supposedly wider or even global outlook of colonisers. Many forms of cultural production, including poetry, were the product of a long history of historical exchanges between African populations and the wider Indian Ocean world, exchanges which were most intense along the Swahili coast. Second, the production, editing, publication, and translation of these texts were fundamentally shaped by colonial conquest and rule. Both in content and form, the Swahili texts under scrutiny here were products of encounters in a “contact zone”, defined by Mary Louise Pratt as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism” (Pratt 1991, 34). Third, within the narrow boundaries of colonial hierarchies, flows of conceptual borrowings went both ways (Decker and McMahon 2020). German rule partially depended on the co-optation of established distinctions between the “civilised” and “barbarians”. Educated urban Muslims, or waungwana, were the main recruits for the colonial civil service, and Swahili became the language of administration. German administrators, scholars and military officers in East Africa fused their views of both the racial distance between Africans and Arabs (including “Arabised” Swahili) as well as a civilisational distance between Muslims and non-Muslims with Swahili discourses of difference.

Despite such overlaps with colonial views, there were also important differences between Swahili authors’ concepts of civilisation and Western understandings of development. The Swahili equivalent to development, maendeleo, only began to be used regularly in Swahili-authored texts after the German colonial period which ended in 1918. In contrast to later discourses of development in Tanganyika from the 1920s onwards, earlier renderings of civilisation investigated here were marked by ascriptions of difference, yet these differences were not couched in terms of stages and a temporal gap between different societies (a key feature of Western notions of development) or a civilising mission. These elements were present in later decades, however. In other words: while many Tanzanian state administrators in the 1960s dreamed of “developing” groups within the country seen as “backward”, Swahili authors writing during the German colonial period attentively observed socioeconomic changes and political upheavals, but generally saw civilisational differences between coastal society and inland societies as static rather than as expressions of different civilisational stages on a timescale. Additionally, even poets who lauded German interventions and infrastructural improvements expressed concern about the violence of conquest and the damage colonial rule inflicted upon the social fabric of Swahili civilisation and identity.

Swahili Poets and German Colonial Rule

Swahili poetry reflected the maritime, mercantile, and Muslim character of coastal culture and was thus a vital part of Swahili identity. The Swahili coast comprised a string of towns and their dependent villages from present-day Somalia via Kenya, Tanzania to Northern Mozambique. Although heterogeneous in many ways, and shaped by their interactions with ethnic groups along the coast and in its immediate hinterland (Gearhart and Giles 2014), communities were connected through various Swahili dialects, commercial trade networks extending far into the Indian Ocean world and sporadic political alliances (Glassman 1995, 29). Sharing a language and cultural traits marked by literacy and Islam, members of these communities valued poems as a source of prestige and status as well as a sense of history and identity.

Texts, both performed and written, were closely connected to displays or challenges of political authority (Saavedra Casco 2007, 31, 43–44). Two genres of Swahili poetry that have emerged as particularly rich sources regarding historical events and categories of difference are utenzi (pl. tenzi, a form of narrative poetry) and shairi (pl. mashairi, poems following a specific form which were often used to praise rulers).³ The emergence of both genres dates back to the seventeenth century, or perhaps earlier, when religious subjects and Islamic epic narratives were localised in terms of language and content (Saavedra Casco 2007, 56). Since Arabic was only known by members of the ulama, the learned strata of Swahili Muslim communities, the shift to Swahili paved the way for a popularisation of poems. The increasingly secular historiographical poems were rooted in Muslim historiographic traditions of epic poems about Muhammad and chronicles, and also retained their name, habari. Importantly, utenzi poetry – both of religious and secular orientation – claimed to narrate, in the words of a poet, “a true story, don’t think it’s a joke” (2.A/6:⁴ cf. Saavedra Casco 2007, 36–37).

The notions of civilisational superiority contained in the poems reflected hierarchies vis-à-vis both non-Muslim coastal communities and inland societies established well before German colonialism. As early as the sixteenth century, if not earlier, civilising processes were imagined in Swahili discourses in response to external sources. Swahili elites claimed Shirazi descent (referring to the Persian town of Shiraz) and thought of the Shirazi as original founders of Swahili towns (Spear 1984). Urbanity, Muslim faith, literacy and refined manners became pillars of claiming a superior status of civility (uungwana) in contrast to inland societies’ supposed barbarism.

Political allegiances along the coast shifted frequently. The Portuguese colonial presence along the coast from 1498 to 1798 shaped societies, but so did regional dynamics and the presence of Arab actors. Since the eighteenth century, some Swahili poets composed openly political works “inciting people to rebel against the Arab overlords … or to defend their particular cities against attacks” (Mulokozi and Sengo 1995, 76; Mulokozi 1975, 130). With the increasing presence and political significance of Omani merchants, a growing plantation economy and the slave trade as well as the establishment of the Zanzibar sultanate in the nineteenth century, urban elites’ claims of civilisational superiority gravitated increasingly towards the notion of ustaarabu, etymologically referring to “Arabness” (see also Hemedi bin Abdullah (1914) 1952, 82). Wastaarabu was thus another term that could denote civilisation with reference to strategic appropriations of markers of Arabness.

Both shairi and utenzi poetry also came to comment on German conquest and colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1884, the German East Africa Company (DOAG), a chartered colonial company, acquired territories which were eventually subsumed under the term “German East Africa”, including the continental part of present-day Tanzania (that is, without Zanzibar), Rwanda and Burundi. Colonial conquest and claims of authority quickly provoked resistance. In 1888/89, several groups along the coast put up strong military resistance against the DOAG’s claims of authority, often emphasising their “Arabness” to mobilise political alliances and tap into hierarchies of prestige and status. The German government interpreted the war as an “Arab uprising” (Araberaufstand) and took over the administration of the colony from the overwhelmed DOAG.

The following years until 1907 were marked by wars of conquest which were first fought on the coast and later increasingly moved inland. Similar to colonial projects elsewhere, German rule depended on the co-optation of at least certain groups among the colonised. After 1889, German decision-makers incorporated coastal political titles, delegating Swahili administrators as akida and jumbe (headmen) to preside over and exact taxes from East African communities. Many Germans shared assumptions of the superiority of Muslim coastal culture over inland societies, some even adopted Swahili categories of difference such as the derogatory term washenzi in their writings and bureaucratic practices (Paasche 2016, 38; Pesek 2005, 221–222; Wimmelbücker 2005). Thus, despite their clearly hierarchical character, colonial encounters led to an entanglement of discourses rather than a stabilisation of separate discursive circuits (Glassman 2021, 95).

Some 84 armed conflicts between local societies and German troops occurred between 1888 and 1905, both along the coast and in the interior of the vast territory. Colonial troops set whole cities and villages ablaze, executed opponents in public rituals, kidnapped women and children, and employed scorched earth tactics that caused famine. An estimated 250,000–300,000 persons died in the Maji Maji War between 1905 and 1907 alone. Several Swahili authors chronicled these events, showing understanding for the motives of inlanders’ resistance against economic and political oppression but condemning the means of the insurrection as resistance also targeted Indian businessmen, Arabs and other groups (Pike 1986; Wimmelbücker 2005). While German colonial rule transmuted from “military despotism” (Wirz 2003, 12; cf. Koponen 1994, 114–116) to civil administration in 1907, the historical experiences of violent conquest and subjection continued to shape popular memories and attitudes along the Swahili coast. When World War I broke out in 1914, European struggles for imperial predominance in East Africa unleashed a new wave of violence and hardships, ending the period of German colonialism in the region and paving the way for British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

The manuscripts of most of the poems examined here were originally collected by the German linguist Carl Velten and re-compiled and translated in a recent collection (Miehe et al. 2002). Velten and other scholars, such as Carl Büttner, were deeply involved in the German colonial project as missionaries, administrators or teachers at institutes such as Hamburg’s Colonial Institute (Kolonialinstitut) or Berlin’s Seminar of Oriental Languages (Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen) which prepared Germans for colonial service. An enhanced understanding of local culture was to augment colonial control and efforts of Christianisation; the texts were also meant as means of instruction at colonial institutes (Saavedra Casco 2007, 78; Wimmelbücker 2009, 33). The administration’s pragmatic decision to declare Swahili as the colony’s official language (besides German) in lower levels of administration and primary education boosted its status as a lingua franca and lent further impetus to study – and change, for instance in terms of “de-Arabising” Kiswahili vocabulary and introducing the Roman script – coastal Swahili language and culture (Mazrui 2007, 24–26, 94–95; Mazrui and Mazrui 1995, 36–41).

The colonial contact zone’s power asymmetries and constant threat of violence had a profound impact on the selection of genre and topics. Colonialism spurred the ongoing secularisation of the poems’ contents and even “impelled the emergence of new genres and subgenres” (Mazrui 2007, 26) such as travelogues and ethnographies (Geider 1992; see also Kahyana 2018). Between 1889 and 1907, the period in which most of the works examined here were composed, poems contained fewer references to Islam (in comparison to poems written prior to German conquest) and praised or condemned German rule. While Velten or Büttner claimed to publish authentic texts free from European influences, they actively requested the submission of manuscripts via circulars or personal letters, occasionally paying a small fee, or simply went to places where stories and poems were told (Velten 1903, v; Wimmelbücker 2009, 33). Some anonymous authors criticised such instances of German nosiness and the absorption of the coast’s “valuable knowledge” (6.C/2; Miehe et al. 2002, 95). When Velten asked in a Swahili circular letter for riddles, proverbs, narratives and poems, one poet’s response entailed an open critique of such practices: “You want entertainment, at the expense of your subjects” (Mazungumzo mwataka, na riai kupitikia, as quoted in Pike 1986, 216; cf. Velten 1903, v).

Reading the texts as expressions of an unqualified and seemingly homogeneous “Swahili thinking”, echoing colonial efforts to get “into the mind of the ‘savage’” (Mulokozi 1975, 128), is as ahistorical as it is simplistic and misleading. Although some manuscripts were unsigned and biographical information on many authors is scarce or lacking, it is safe to state that the composers whose poetry and travelogues are discussed here were all male followers of Islam expressing feelings of belonging to coastal society.⁵ While women were very active in the composition and recitation of poems in general and are until today considered the “custodians and makers of the best Swahili poetry” in exclusively female genres such as wedding songs and chants for spirit cult dances (Saavedra Casco 2007, 58), their works have rarely been written down and were not recorded by foreign scholars during the German colonial era. The male authors represented some of the coast’s most educated people of their time who (with at least one exception⁶) entertained personal relations with officials such as Velten (Miehe et al. 2002, 89–95). Despite their high social standing as educated men, the poets did not necessarily represent themselves as well-off in their works. Mzee bin Kidogo bin Ilqadiri, for instance, told his audience that he still lived “in a shabby house” (3.A/34). Another author classified himself as being among “the poor people” (sisi mafakiri) who had been oppressed by the rich prior to the arrival of the Germans (7.O/95; cf. 1.E/626; Miehe et al. 2002, 87; cf. 7.L/30).

The authors expressed differing attitudes towards German colonial rule, depending on when the text was composed and to what extent they were involved with colonial institutions. For several decades since the 1970s, many poems were interpreted as belonging to either “resistance” or “eulogistic” poetry (Miehe et al. 2002, 91; 6.A). Reading the poems through the lens of such dichotomous political categories severely limits our understanding, however. Relations between Swahili poets and German scholars were fluid and many-faceted and cannot meaningfully be captured in terms as crude as resistance, on the one end of the spectrum, and “bootlickers”, as the Tanzanian writer and literary scholar Euphrase Kezilahabi put it in the 1970s, on the other (Kezilahabi 1973 as quoted in Miehe et al. 2002, 87; cf. Mulokozi 1975). While some poets⁷ actively participated in the armed resistance against the Germans, the same individuals could also entertain personal relations with German scholars or administrators at a later stage. Velten is mentioned in several poems – for example as a translator during the hearing of leaders of the coastal war which led to their execution (3.A/21), or as a friend who promised a fine watch in exchange for a poem (2.D/17, 24–27; Velten 1907, 442). Some of the authors served as administrators (liwali) along the coast or in the interior. Others were employed in Germany (Bromber 2004). Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari al Shirazi, for instance, taught both at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg and the Seminar of Oriental Languages in Berlin (Velten 1903, V; Wimmelbücker 2009). Hence, it is not surprising to find many favourable portrayals of German rule and individuals – though these also contained irony, ambiguities and criticism (Miehe et al. 2002, 44; Saavedra Casco 2007, 87). The ambiguity becomes clear in poems, many of which focused on towns. Poets shared ideals regarding just rule and urban grandeur, pointing out how rulers made – and were made by – great cities.

Urbanity, Improvement and Colonial Violence in Swahili Poetry

A comparison of two historically informed eulogies for the rulers – one of which praises the Omani Sultan and Zanzibar Town and one of which is a eulogy of the German Kaiser and the capital Berlin – exemplifies how poets conceived of urbanity as a central marker of civilisation and political authority. The first poem was composed by Hemedi bin Abdallah in the wake of the the coastal war in 1888/89, when the German presence in East Africa had been pushed back to a few isolated fringes along the coast and the outcome of the conflict was far from clear. In the poem, Hemedi bin Abdallah reveals that he was personally involved as a magician on the side of Abushiri, the Germans’ fiercest opponent in this war (Iliffe 1979, 93–96). The poem was, contrary to most of the other works collected by Velten, not submitted to and certainly not written for the Germans (Saavedra Casco 2007, 159). The eulogistic part concerning Sultan Khalifa under consideration here is but a small fraction of this epic poem on the coastal war against the German invasion. Hemedi bin Abdallah renders the German motive for conquering the East African coast as an imagined sequence of events: The German ruler (the “Sultan”) receives notice from his nervous advisors (“scholars and monks”, 1.E/47) that Europe would soon be torn by a devastating war. The advisors urge the “Sultan” to conquer the Swahili coast to have a safe place to live. The ruler then calls upon experienced merchants and travellers to tell him about the ruler of the Swahili coast and German sailors are then represented as relating their impressions of the awe-inspiring town of Zanzibar.⁸

The second poem is an anonymously composed eulogy of German rule, the Kaiser and his capital Berlin. It was written in 1894, six years after Hemedi bin Abdallah’s account of the coastal war, and imagined the Kaiser’s town by Swahili standards. The following juxtaposition highlights how these two poems represented the characteristics of a benevolent ruler’s awe-inspiring capital city. Despite the contradicting political implications of the poems and the different towns portrayed, the central elements of urban magnificence are rendered in strikingly similar ways.

Table

Ideal	1.E Utenzi wa Vita vya Wadachi	1.D Utungo wa Habari ya Mrima
	Kutalamaki Mrima 1307 A.H.	Unknown author (1894)
	Hemedi bin Abdallah (ca. 1891)
Greatness of the	Bwana nakupa khabari	Na nti yake Berlini
city	biladi ya Zinjibari	aliyo kutamakani,
1.D/3	kwa kula haufikiri	mji huo kwa yakini
1.E/138	wapita biladi pia.	umejaa matajiri.
Beauty of the	Mji wake umepambwa	na mji wake wa yule
buildings	na uzuri wa majumba	anaujenga kwa kweli,
1.D/8	…	na majuba mbalimbali
1.E/130		yamezinga mdawari.
Fortification	Mji wake umejengwa	kuta alivolizinga,
1.D/12	umerakibu mizinga	buruji zote mizinga;
1.E/126	…	…
Population	…	watu walivokutana
1.D/15	na kaumu wamezinga	kana kundi la mnana
1.E/126	kama taka za majaa	waona giza mtana
		kwa kuwa nyingi jifiri.
Warships	Na nyingapi manuwari	…
1.D/12	zilizoko Zinjibari	na bahari inasonga
1.E/129	kusifu watahayari	manowari zi tayari.
	kwenda mno wapotea..
Decoration and	Mjiwe umetakata.	mji ameuzaini
cleanliness	una siraji zameta.	kwa mapambo ya samani
1.D/10-11	…	na nyumba ya sultani
1.E/132, 184		kuisifu sikadiri.
	Nyumba yake Maulana
	yupi asiyeiona	kwa yote yamerimeta
	kwa pambole mzayana	huzani ila nyota
	na ilivyo safidiwa.	taa zinele na kuta
		jisi inavonawiri.
Ideal	1.E The German Conquest of the	1.D Poem about Events at the Coast
	Swahili Coast, 1891 A.D.	Unknown author (1894)
	Hemedi bin Abdallah (ca. 1891)
Greatness of the	Bwana, let me inform you,	And his capital city is Berlin,
city	about the town of Zanzibar,	this is where this king resides,
1.D/3	whenever I think of it,	and this city is in fact
1.E/138	it surpasses all other towns.	full of rich people.
Beauty of the	His town is graced with the	And the town of that King
buildings	beauty of its buildings.	is really well built,
1.D/8	…	with buildings of various kinds
1.E/130		they have covered all the town.
Fortification	And the city is built [with a wall]	How he surrounded it with a wall,
1.D/12	on which cannons are mounted	with cannons placed on its towers
1.E/126	…	…
Population	…	The number of people that meet there
1.D/15	and masses of people surround it	like a flight of Golden Weaver
1.E/126	[the wall]	changing daylight into darkness
	as many as leaves	due to such a gathering.
Warships	And how many warships are	…
1.D/12	there on Zanzibar?	and the ocean very close to it
1.E/129	It would shame you to tell	where warships are ready waiting.
	for you would lose count.
Decoration and	His town is clean.	He has adorned the city
cleanliness	It shines with bright lights.	with valuable decorations
1.D/10-11	…	and the King’s palace
1.E/132, 184		is beyond my description.
	The Sultan’s palace,
	who can fail to notice it,	The whole palace appears glittering
	with its beautiful adornments	you may take it to be a certain star
	and how it is orderly kept.	and lamps cover all the walls
		and how wonderful they shine!

The grammar of urban grandeur, encompassing military and aesthetic qualities, thus transcended political alliances and informed poems of significantly different outlook. Later poems described a number of changes after the war that had an immediate impact on the lives of the coastal population. In the 1890s, the urban population was affected by disasters such as a cattle plague (1893–95) and the protracted drought of 1897–98 which, combined with a locust plague, made ‘a clean sweep of maize and rice fields’ along the coast (Koponen 1994, 593). The military administration’s efforts in restoring food supplies exhibited strong preference for the towns where Europeans (and Swahili authors) were living (Raimbault 2010, 55). Modest prosperity returned to the town-dwellers in the form of clothes and basic foodstuffs, as the poet of Utenzi wa Bwana Guverni (“Poem for the Governor”) observed:

Table

7.O/87	tangu nzige kungia	From the time when the locust came
	michele tawitumia,	we use rice in plenty.
	…	…
7.O/88	…	…
	ni eziyo na ulua	It’s your rule and power,
	ndipo tukafanyikiwa.	which enabled us to achieve this.

Another frequent motif in the poems is the improvement of urban infrastructure. The administrative and economic resources of the colony were concentrated at and directed to the coast and its immediate hinterland, especially until 1905. The colonial state’s efforts of rearranging and regulating towns, of “putting them in order”, were most intensively implemented in the larger coastal towns of Bagamoyo (the colony’s capital between 1886 and 1891), Dar es Salaam (the capital from 1891 onwards) and Tanga (Speitkamp 2005, 111; Becher 1997; Pesek 2005, 20; Middleton 1992, 80). As a central site of the coastal war in 1888, Bagamoyo had particularly suffered from the German attacks (Pike 1986, 204). A few years later, poets evoked an image of Dar es Salaam, Tanga, and Bagamoyo, occasionally also Pangani or Saadani, as built “in a style you’ll see them always shining” (wamejenga kwa launi waiona kunawiri) with “very beautiful houses” (majumba ahiyari), especially Dar es Salaam “that looks European” (Daressalama Ulaya; 1.G/36-38; cf. 3.A/15).

In many ways, however, the poets envisioned the colonial interventions as restoring or reconstructing a previous state, rather than bringing about something new. A verb frequently used to describe the improvement of the towns as a whole was -tengene(z)a (e.g. 1.D/33, 3.A/16, 7.F/8, 7.F/57), which may be translated as “prepare”, “repair”, or “fix”. Considering the intensity of the battles between German troops and East Africans during which hundreds of people had been killed, severely damaged the structures of the towns and rocked social hierarchies, these interventions were related directly or indirectly to previous instances of war, destruction and instability, and the assertion of colonial authority personified by military rulers. In the same vein, the verb -tulia (e.g. 1.D/37, 1.E/610, 7.F/57, 7.O/91), meaning “calm down” or “come to peace”, is also used by several authors to describe the German presence in towns. The causative verb extension -eza (or -iza) was employed in cases where reconstruction and the bringing of “peace” – “pacification”, as the Germans’ militarised colonial vocabulary had it – was ascribed to a certain person. Swahili poets credited a German district officer (1.D/33), Governor von Schele (7.F/57, 7.F/128) or Governor von Wissmann (3.A/16), for “calmed” and re-constructed or improved towns; the verb -tuliza thus referred to both (infrastructural) restoration and (political and social) subjection.

The poets’ emphasis on German influence may also reflect the fact that most of the visible changes in infrastructure and buildings at the time were the result of state-led interventions rather than (foreign or local) capital investment (Brennan and Burton 2007, 21). Yet, to observe all these state-driven projects such as road construction or water and sanitation schemes along the coast did not imply one also profited from it, as only very few positive effects reached the towns’ non-European quarters (Speitkamp 2005, 11; Becher 1997, 41, 71). Germans were credited with positive developments only in poems of eulogistic character, yet even in these, poets framed the praise in subversive or ironic ways. Mwalimu Mbaraka bin Shomari, for instance, lauded the German colonial officer von Strantz, nicknamed Kazimoto, for “repairing” or “fixing” the town (mji anautengeneza), yet also mentioned complaints about how Kazimoto frequently insulted his “subjects” (raia; 7.K/3).

Historiographical poems written during the 1880s and early 1890s evoke a state of persistent chaos and disorientation caused by the invasion (1.A/18-50, 1.C/14-17). In these works, Germans were blamed for devastation, death and destruction in the towns when the preceding invasion and conquest were described (1.C/8, 1.D/32, 1.E/347). The “founding violence” of colonialism (Mbembe 2001, 25) was not forgotten. During the coastal wars, many inhabitants of towns had taken refuge in the countryside. Having to “leave the towns” was a figure of speech used to illustrate cases of invasion and rebellion that constituted a fundamental threat to urban civilisation. In the perspective of urbanites, being forced to leave town was associated with a state of disorder, an aggravating rupture from normal life (1.A/43; 1.E/599, 6.C/12). In sum, the poems speak of urban grandeur, misery, and reconstruction in ways that overlap with European discourses of development. However, while the changes were associated with concrete historical events, they were not couched in a language that relied on abstract notions of linear development along different stages on a temporal axis. Also, despite numerous allusions to economic and urban recovery in the years after the invasion, most poems do not tell a story of universal uplift. They rather suggest that the sense of self-esteem and cultural superiority was deeply shaken by the advent of European colonial rule.

“No More Respect for the Coastal People”: From Superiority to Subjection

Following German conquest, Swahili poets had to come to terms with an experience of subjection and unknown feelings of inferiority. In poems written after 1890, i.e. after the defeat of military resistance along the coast, all non-Europeans – even “Arabs”, who were often perceived as the apex of sociocultural hierarchies – were portrayed as subjected and humiliated by German military superiority and ruthlessness in the new colonial situation (Miehe et al. 2002, 47). The coming of the “era of the Europeans” (ezi ya Wazungu, 3.D/77) was accompanied by a mixture of admiration for military power, nostalgic idealisation of past Omani (Arab) rule along the coast and a sense of unsettled social hierarchies. In a poem by Mwalimu Mbakara bin Shomari, a close associate of Carl Velten, the transformation of political-cum-cultural hierarchies along the coast through European colonialism was expressed in terms of a genuine identity crisis. The author had personally contributed to the condemnation of the merchant Hassan bin Omari, also called Makunganya, who had led staunch resistance against German colonialism until 1895. Together with several supporters, Hassan bin Omari was finally captured and publicly hanged while adjacent villages involved in the rebellion were burnt down by colonial troops. Given the author’s close relations to colonial authorities, Saavedra Casco (2007, 193–194) has interpreted the poem in line with the “bootlicker” paradigm. It also expresses, however, a critique of German oppression and vividly conveys a sense of historical rupture and identity crisis that must have been widely felt among the Swahili gentry.

Table

3.D/77	Nawahubiri wenzangu	I’m telling you, my friends,
	Hii ezi ya Wazungu	this is the era of the Europeans.
	Shikeni maneno yangu:	Hold to my words:
	Wepukane na hatari.	Try to avoid trouble.
…	…	…
3.D/80	yamekwisha na wahibu	The time of our beloved has gone,
	wafalme wa kiarabu,	the Arab sultans.
	tukilitaka jawabu	If we were in need of something,
	si wenyi kutukasiri.	they never refused.
3.D/81	zimeondoka heshima	No more respect
	kwa watu wa kimrima.	for the coastal people.
	hatunalo la kusema	We have nothing to say
	kwa kuchelea hatari.	for fear of repercussions.
3.D/82	kunena hatusubutu	We don’t dare to speak,
	vifungo vyao vizito,	their imprisonment is too hard.
	tokea asili zetu	Since the time of our ancestors
	hayakupata kujiri.	such things never occurred.
3.D/83	sasa wanatuzurubu,	They now beat us –
	majumbe hata Waarabu,	the Jumbes and even the Arabs.
	na tuzishike adabu	We should behave ourselves
	tuifuate amri.	and obey orders.
…	…	…
3.D/87	babu zetu madiwani	Our grandfathers were madiwani.
	kwanza ni masultani;	They were the real Sultans.
	sasa atujue nani	But who knows us now,
	kwa mato kutubusuri!	who takes notice of us!

The poem conveys not only a profound sense of nostalgia but also a feeling of acute humiliation. Other poets also portrayed discipline and submission in the German colonial context as a result of physical violence. Tropes of authority through coercion – respect based “on fear, not love” (Mulokozi 1975, 139) – had figured in discourses prior to German rule. What was described as radically new was that severe punishments in public also befell persons of high social standing. While corporal punishment was generally held as an appropriate tool to “produce” obedience, peace and security in the public sphere, the constant threat of the kiboko (whip) combined with the arbitrariness of judgement was said to cause fear and confusion even among those who accepted German authority. Even in poems of (seemingly) eulogistic character such as Utenzi wa Bwana Guverni (“The Governor’s Poem”), anxiety figured prominently:

Table

7.O/81	Hatufanyi kwa taadi,	We don’t misbehave out of disobedience.
	ni ujinga kutuzidi,	We are just too foolish.
	tasema, ndio mradi,	We think, this is correct,
	kumbe vile twapoeta.	while we go astray.
	…	…
7.O/99	na mimi hivi handika,	And while I’m writing,
	roho yanitetemeka	my soul is shaking
	nna hofu kughazibika	I fear that I may be punished,
	bana, ukaja tukiwa.	Bana, when you become angry.

While this poet dared to express his discontent, albeit in a cautious and seemingly submissive way, another author found that not knowing what one was still allowed to say, “[n]obody dares to speak out” (1.E/238; cf. 3.D/82). The result was speechlessness (Bromber 2003b, 83). The calm of the towns, which seemed like a positive aspect of a re-established urban security, was thus inherently ambivalent as peace and security rested on fear of punishment rather than consent. Yet the evaluation of these acts of “punishment” depended on who was targeted. German colonial practices of punitive violence were evaluated negatively or ambivalently in the case of coastal towns, but more positively when the military subjection of inland societies was discussed. Through military expeditions and wars, inland societies like the Hehe and the Mafiti were said to have “become disciplined” (adabu zimewingia, 7.I/6). An anonymous poet noted that the trade routes towards the interior had been secured so that the access to “profit and wealth / which will benefit us” was restored (7.N/8).

This difference between approval and rejection goes back to what Tanzanian historian Gilbert Gwassa has called the “mwungwana-shenzi-complex” (quoted in Saavedra Casco 2007, 259). Some translations of the poems emphasise the religious aspects of these terms and translate washenzi as “infidels” (e.g. 2.C/23, 5.A/10). Alternative translations as “vulgar people” (5.A/54) or “barbarians” (Glassman 1995, xvi) highlight a lack of refinement or civilisation; interpreting washenzi as “bumpkins” (Glassman 1995, 62) draws attention to the rural-urban divide and self-ascribed educational nobility of the speaker.

As a derogatory term, washenzi was usually an ascription, not a self-definition, even if some authors seem to imply this through direct speech (for example Sleman bin Mwenyi Tshande 1901, 17; for a notable exception see also Wimmelbücker 2005, 187). For the poets, the perceived cultural and civilisational gap was large enough to always write about, but never for inland societies in general or washenzi in particular. Interpellating elements defining the audience included group-identifiers such as Swahili, raia (citizen), wenzangu (my friends), wandani (my followers), nduu [sic] zangu (my friends), majirani (neighbours), jamaa (kinsmen) and walimwengu (people) (Miehe et al. 2002, 36; 7.O). Since washenzi were deemed ignorant, illiterate and inexperienced in crafted, poetic Swahili language, they were never explicitly addressed. This is a striking contrast to the Swahili press of the time: the authors writing for the government newspaper Kiongozi, for instance, directly addressed washenzi with the didactic intention of educating them (Krautwald 2021).

Some authors of poems or travelogues indicated in their own writings that they originated from inland societies and were descended from different ethnicities, but they usually distanced themselves from their upcountry past (Mtoro bin Mwenyi Bakari 1901; Wimmelbücker 2009, 11–12). A German visitor to Dar es Salaam, curious to know the “tribe” of some Africans he met, was disappointed to hear that so many answered ambiguously: “I am a Swahili, but in former times, I used to be a Makonde or a Hehe” (Eckenbrecher, as quoted in Becher 1997, 122). While established Swahili townsmen did often try to safeguard their economic privileges against newcomers, urban ways of life opened up possibilities for migrants to acquire cultural, social, political and economic capital and to integrate into coastal society (Glassman 1988, 356, 362; Glassman 1995, 117). Slaves and freed slaves seeing themselves as parts of coastal society also appropriated the term washenzi to refer to inlanders and prided themselves as waungwana. With the decline of slavery in the 1890s, “the former oppositional distinction between the waungwana and the washenzi became less pronounced, and in certain respects even vanished, between coastal people and those living in the interior as well as between the different social strata within coastal society” (Deutsch 2006, 231).

Coastal culture was potentially inclusive but given that Swahili identity very much rested on the constructed difference between washenzi and waungwana, the adaptations of people from the interior were often described as superficial. In a statement of the people of Pangani against the German invasion, the authors distrusted their own troops because these came from further inland: “we feared the actions of our upcountry warriors”, since “mimicry does not make proper manners” (cited in Glassman 1988, 655; see also 3.C/7). There is no evidence in the poems that the authors envisioned anything such as a civilising mission, nor did they expect that civilisational standards would converge in future through internal transformations or external interventions.

Conclusion

For a global history of development, Swahili poems from the German colonial period are a valuable resource. The interpretation above has suggested that these poems help to historicise the thinking on development and to question a simple diffusionist view. The texts examined here were themselves products of a colonial “contact zone” emerging in the context of German state-led interventions in the name of a civilising mission in the region. The transformations and new hierarchies were not only reflected in the content of poems, travelogues and historiographical writings. They also had an impact on the way these genres operated. The preferences and interests of German colonial scholars, but also the strategies of subaltern Swahili authors, spurred the further secularisation and prosaic character of text composition and the selection of texts.

Going beyond an understanding of these texts along political lines as either “bootlicking” or “resistance” poetry, one can discern the shared, yet also changing grammar of civilisation and hierarchies that informed these works. Some themes remained strikingly stable. As proud residents of cosmopolitan urban spaces, poets had applied their ideals to both the Sultan’s capital of Zanzibar and the Kaiser’s town, Berlin. Many authors penned laudatory, yet frequently ambiguous, works that also pointed out various forms of colonial violence. This violence was more likely to be endorsed if it was seen as “disciplining” inland societies. Although some authors affirmed the image of the colonial state as a benevolent interventionist force, the poems under scrutiny here do not contain any evidence for a perceived need for a civilising mission from the coast vis-à-vis the interior – that is, the explicit intention to civilise the Other, the washenzi. While some authors indicated how they profited from German punitive violence in “disciplining” the washenzi and other writers noted changes in societies of the interior, the general sense seems to have been that washenzi were, and would remain, barbarians. To them, it was enough that these societies were “disciplined”.

Taken together, these texts constitute an intermediate and transitional space in Swahili discourses on civilisation and “development”. Only in the 1920s was the term ustaarabu used as civilisation in the sense of progress and a European civilising mission. The authors were mostly Africans originating from inland societies who had gone through missionary or government schools and wrote in Swahili, but hardly saw themselves as Swahili in an ethnic sense (Bromber 2006; cf. Mambo Leo No. 1, Jan 1923, 9–10). This included authors who had already published Swahili-language texts in the government newspaper Kiongozi during German colonial times. Connotations of Arabness faded from ustaarabu’s semantics. The discourse of coastal civilisation, with its many references to Islam (and Arab traits) was both marginalised and incorporated, albeit never fully replaced, by the discourse of secular maendeleo (development). Since colonial times, maendeleo has remained an important register of state authority and also a frequent topic of poems submitted to newspapers, which continue to play an important part in popular political discourses (Askew 2014; Mhina 2014). Current development discourses – both in content and form – grew from multiple roots.

Primary Sources

Poems

Unless otherwise noted, all poems are quoted as reproduced and translated in

Miehe et al. (2002).

1.A “Vita vya Bagamoyo”

Author: Makanda bin Mwenyi Mkuu

1.C “Vita vya Kwanza”

Author: Unknown

1.D “Utungo wa Habari ya Mrima”

Author: unknown; poem given to Bagamoyo Bezirksamt in 1894; poet probably from Bagamoyo

1.E “Utenzi wa Vita vya Wadachi Kutalamaki Mrima 1307 A.H.”

Author: Hemedi bin Abdallah bin Said bin Abdalla bin Masudi al Buriy.

1.G “Utenzi wa Habari za Mrima na za Bara”

Author: Makanda bin Mwenyi Mkuu bin Wangi Wapi

2.A “Vita vya Kondoa”

Author: Mwenyi Shomari bin Mwinyi Kambi

2.C “Vita vya Uhehe”

Author: Ali bin Rajabu bin Said Elmardjebi

2.D “Kufa kwa Mkwawa”

Author: Mwenyi Shomari bin Mwenyi Kambi

3.A “Shairi la Makunganya”

Author: Mwalimu Mzee bin Ali bin Kidigo bin Il-Qadiri

3.C “Sifa za Wazungu”

Author: unknown

3.D “Vita na Hassan bin Omari”

Author: Mwalim Mbaraka bin Shomari

5. “Utenzi wa Vita vya Maji-Maji”

Author: Abdul Karim bin Jamaldini

6.A “Shairi la Dola Jermani”

Author: Abdelkerimu bin Jemali Eddini Elmalindi

6.C “Shairi kwa Wazungu”

Author: unknown, from Bagamoyo

7.F “Shairi la Bwana Mkubwa”

Author: Mwalimu Mbaraka bin Shomari

7.I “Shairi la Bana Prinzi”

Author: Mwalimu Mbaraka bin Shomari

7.L “Shairi la Bana Torotha”

Author: Mwalimu Mbaraka bin Shomari

7.N “Shairi la Guverni”

Author: unknown, from Mtangata

7.O “Utenzi wa Bwana Guverni”

Author: unknown

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I would like to thank Martina Kopf, Fabian Krautwald, the participants of the workshop “Encountering Development in Postcolonial Fiction” (University of Vienna, 17–18 May 2018), and the anonymous readers for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article.

2 This article does not deal with Swahili authors from other parts of the East African coast. While discourses of the Lamu archipelago on uungwana and ushenzi, for instance, shared certain characteristics, they also differed in important respects from what is investigated here (Morton 2018, 182–185).

3 For more details on the form of mashairi, see Saavedra Casco 2007, 21–22; Miehe et al. 2002, 34.

4 The shorthand designations – 3.A/21 etc. – refer to the poems and lines in Miehe et al. 2002.

5 The first major Christian Swahili poet in Tanzania is said to be Mathias Mnyampala (Mulokozi and Sengo 1995, 47). He was born in 1919, when Tanganyika had already ceased to be a German protectorate.

6 A known exception is Hemedi bin Abdallah el-Buhry; there might of course be more among anonymous authors.

7 This has been documented for Abdel Karim bin Jamalidini, Hemedi bin Abdallah el-Buhry and Mkanda bin Mwenyi Mkuu (Miehe et al. 2002, 89–94).

8 Reported speech is used by Swahili poets as a rhetorical device to increase credibility (in their role of historians) and add vitality to their works (Bromber 2003b, 82; Biersteker 1996, 174).