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Coming of Age in an African Colony, 1922–53
The green hills overlooking the eastern shore of Lake Victoria are covered in massive granite boulders. Climbing to the top of one, you can see the shimmering blue of the lake through the misty air. Looking the other way, the dry plains of the Serengeti vanish into the distance.
People have lived on the shores of this lake since time immemorial. Two thousand years ago they cleared entire forests to make charcoal for smelting iron into steel hoes and spears.1 Certain families held the honor of guarding sacred forests atop the highest hills. A well-regarded man could act as a leader. He consulted with the local elders and made decisions about what to do if the rains were late, the cattle were dying, or villages came under attack. For hundreds of years, young teenagers were initiated in the wild hills beyond the village to face their fears, learn the rules of adult life, and prepare for parenthood. When their household chores were done, young people socialized at village dances. Once every twenty years or so a new generation of elder men would walk the territory occupied by their people, mapping it out, laying claim to it, and assuring its fertility.2
The people of these hills came to be known as the Zanaki, a small group whose politics were built around a council of elders, prominent family men with a knack for oral argument.3 They had nothing like the royal house of Buganda on the other side of the great lake, with its king and council of representatives. In the 1800s Maasai cattle herders invaded, stealing Zanaki cattle and grazing their herds on Zanaki farms. While their parents were cowed by Maasai military might, Zanaki youth admired the Maasai warriors and tried to copy their styles and their age-graded fraternities. Fashionable young men wore their hair in long elaborate braids, and young women collected colorful beaded jewelry.4 Zanaki elders cooperated with Maasai demands, but proudly held to their own traditions of ensuring the fertility of the land.5
German missionaries, and soon German armies, arrived in East Africa in the late 1800s. They bought off some chiefs, conquered others, and assigned coastal Muslim agents to administer where there were no chiefs. They established a handful of colonies in Africa, the largest of them being a land known as Tanganyika, bounded by the Indian Ocean in the east and the Great Lakes in the west, Mount Kilimanjaro in the north, and the Ruvuma River to the south. German rule could be harsh, but it was spread thin, and they paid little heed to Zanaki lands. In the south the Hehe people under their king Mkwawa were battle hardened from decades of war with Ngoni and other southern people. They fought a guerrilla war with the Germans for five years.
Ten years later, the whole southern part of the territory broke into a violent uprising against German rule known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. Its leader claimed to have a medicine (maji maji, meaning “magical water”) supposed to render the German bullets harmless. The medicine may not have had much effect on German bullets, but it did organize a diverse rebellion across the south, where German labor demands had disrupted the local agrarian economy. Another ten years later, in a distant battlefield of the Great War in Europe, African troops under German and British officers fought battles across the territory.6 Very little of this touched Zanaki people, whose biggest security worry was still cattle rustling.
In 1922, Tanganyika was taken from Germany, together with its other colonies, and given over to the League of Nations as a mandate territory. The League handed Tanganyika to the British, who already governed in neighboring Kenya and Uganda. This horse trading was all done with European maps, and only a few literate people in Tanganyika knew much about why one set of European rulers had been replaced with another speaking a different language. Zanaki country was a backwater just beyond the newly opened diamond mines on the southern side of the lake. The British focused their attention on the fertile slopes of Kilimanjaro, where coffee grew well; the southern highlands, where tea and lumber seemed like promising products; and the hot plains stretching in from the coast, where top-quality sisal could provide ropes for British ships. These industries were desperate for workers. Young men from landless families traveled to these areas for work, hoping to bring home enough cash for a respectable marriage, or at least help their families pay the colonial “hut tax” that was designed to push them into wage labor.
The British set themselves to the task of governing the territory, and they looked for people who could serve in a more official manner as “chiefs” administering colonial policy. In Zanaki land the closest thing to a chief had been a respected rainmaker, which really meant a charismatic religious leader. The British preferred more innocuous men and found a few congenial elders to serve as chiefs, among them Nyerere Burito. British officials described him as “a gentleman of the old school . . . who dearly loves to chat about old times.”7 They put him on the colonial payroll and depended on him to ensure that people in his area remained cooperative, just as they did with similar “chiefs” across the territory.
The British called this setup Indirect Rule, and spent no little time congratulating themselves for how well they knew their subjects. It was an effective, if exploitative, mode of government. Its deeper impact was to use ethnicity as the basic organizational principle of governance. The policy in effect established “tribes” as political units, and left a divisive legacy that created conflict in many countries. The British felt themselves to be more civilized than everyone else and granted themselves all the privileges of overlords. But, at least officially, they did not see Africans as innately inferior. They believed their African subjects could benefit from education, especially the sons of chiefs, who could be expected to provide loyal leadership if they got a little British education under their belts. They educated the sons of chiefs for free.
An African Child
Chief Nyerere Burito had numerous wives, as was typical for men who had a bit of status in a culture that valued family, farming, and fertility. Burito sent more than one of his sons to school, but it was not immediately apparent that the second son of his fifth wife would be worth educating. The boy was born on April 13, 1922, in the midst of the long rainy season. Mugaya Nyang’ombe, his mother, named the baby Kambarage after a mythical ancestor who brought rain. The name was an auspicious one for a chief’s son, as rain was a sign that he should take on his father’s role. For the British, however, such local beliefs were less important than that he become a pliant administrator of the colonial order. Pliancy was the one trait they would not find in young Kambarage Nyerere.
Kambarage grew up on his father’s hilltop homestead at the heart of the chiefdom known as Butiama. Running a homestead was a shared labor, under the nominal direction of a patriarch. Adults produced food and gradually incorporated children into productive tasks. Girls worked with their mothers, who grew and prepared almost all the food the home needed. Boys were generally given a few head of cattle to care for, and groups of boys from various families would wander up into the hills to pasture their little herds. Thus engaged, they could spend much time scrambling among the rocks, playing and roughhousing. Kambarage had a close friend in his age-mate, Bugozi Msuguri, who later took a Christian name, David. With bows and arrows, they hunted pimbi (rock hyrax), rabbit-sized rodents that lived under the rocks.8
All the cultures on the eastern side of Lake Victoria initiated children into age-sets of one form or another. When a group of children reached the age of initiation, their parents sponsored their participation in a camp where they were taught how to function in adult society, how to