POLITICAL IDENTITY IN THE HISTORY OF KILIMANJARO

The fertile, well-watered slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro have for millennia been home to various societies. Ancestors of the present Bantu-speaking populations began to settle the lower slopes of the mountain in successive waves beginning more than 1500 years ago.Footnote ⁹ These migrants likely came from nearby highland areas and settled on the mountain's southern and eastern slopes (at altitudes between 4,000 and 8,000 feet). Settlements tended to be located on ridges, separated by deep valleys formed by the fast-moving rivers and streams headed toward the plains. These peoples developed an agrarian economy based upon intensive cultivation of yams, bananas, finger millet, and other crops in small homesteads called kihamba. Over several centuries, each ridge of the mountain developed into an autonomous political space comprised of several different clans, each led by ranking headmen and ritual specialists.Footnote ¹⁰ Though politically independent, clans on the same ridge often forged alliances for purposes such as defense, and also had regular contact with those on neighboring ridges through both warfare and markets.Footnote ¹¹ As a result, though politically distinct, people across the mountain came to share common agricultural techniques and cultural practices. In terms of language, Derek Nurse asserts that numerous minor dialects of a single language are spoken on the mountain, the dialects falling into three major groups defined geographically from west to east: West Kilimanjaro, East Kilimanjaro, and Rombo.Footnote ¹² These comprise a dialect continuum, meaning that people in neighboring areas could understand one another well while those at the far reaches would have found much of one another's speech unintelligible.

One of the more revealing similarities among the mountain's disparate communities is how they defined themselves and others according to the physical spaces they inhabited. Ludger Wimmelbücker, in his book Kilimanjaro: A Regional History, discusses this through the observations of early European explorers.Footnote ¹³ For example, Johannes Rebmann, in his diaries and letters to Johann Krapf and the Church Missionary Society, claims that people referred to themselves as Wakirima, meaning ‘mountain people’, and in turn referred to people living beyond the mountain as Wanyika or ‘people of the plains’.Footnote ¹⁴ Another term of classification, one noted by Moritz Merker, was wandu wa mndeny or ‘people of the banana groves’.Footnote ¹⁵ People used this to contrast themselves from the wasi or hunter-gatherers, and humba and kuavi, meaning pastoralists. These terms indicate the extent to which landscape influenced how people thought of themselves and others. Wakirima and Wanyika imply the importance of the mountain in juxtaposition to the plains. The people living on the mountain believed themselves to be the beneficiaries of divine benevolence, living in a lush, well-watered landscape, in contrast to the peoples living in the semiarid steppe, such as the Maasai. Wandu wa mdneny, wasi, humba, and kuavi, meanwhile, indicate the importance of subsistence. Bananas were not only the staple crop of the mountain, but also were the defining feature of the kihamba and of everyday life. They implied a certain form of political and social order, which was in turn perceived as absent from the peoples of the plains. In spite of the existence of terms such as Wakirima, people tended not to emphasize a shared mountain identity, and a sense of shared political identity was entirely absent. Rather, they identified with more local entities such as families, clans, and age-sets.

In the nineteenth century, chiefdoms became increasingly important as units of social and political organization, and in turn chiefdom names became a common means of identification. Chiefdoms were confederations of the clans on a given ridge, led by a mangi, who was usually the leader of the dominant clan. Over the century, the overall number of independent polities decreased as clans consolidated into chiefdoms, and many smaller chiefdoms joined into larger ones. According to August Widenmann, a German physician stationed at Moshi in the 1890s, there were 37 chiefdoms on the mountain as of 1899.Footnote ¹⁶ The increasing importance of chiefdoms, and in turn chiefdom identities, can be linked to two factors, both of which were tied to the control of resources. The first was the need of people to secure access to resources not located within their confines. As the clans grew in size over time, they encompassed the free space between them and their neighbors, in the process blocking free access to vital resources lying uphill, such as wood and honey, or downhill, including salt, iron, and trade goods from the plains.Footnote ¹⁷ By the nineteenth century, virtually no settlement had unfettered access to both uphill and downhill goods. This necessitated cooperation, which over time led to tighter political integration and a sense of common identity for people living on the same ridge.

Perhaps the best example of uphill/downhill cooperation was the development of an extensive system of water furrows, the mifongo. Though the mountain was lush in comparison with the neighboring plains, possessing a wealth of streams and rivers, these sources tended to pass by areas of settlement in deep valleys, often 150 feet or more beneath the homesteads. As a means of compensating for the difficulties of the topography, and to make water more readily available for both domestic use and irrigation, mountain farmers developed canals that would channel water away from the valleys and directly into areas of settlement.Footnote ¹⁸ These marvels of engineering, often several miles in length, had become a defining feature of life on Kilimanjaro by the nineteenth century, and remain important to the present day. Due to the need to tap rivers and streams at points where they were at close elevation with surrounding land, the furrows frequently originated well above areas of settlement and passed through the lands of multiple clans. The desire for furrows, the need to secure access through neighboring lands, and the benefits of distributing the labor burden of construction and maintenance, gave clans strong incentive to collaborate. The relationships established through water sharing, in turn, set the foundation for their unification into chiefdoms.

Another important factor contributing to the rising power of chiefdoms was the expansion of the long-distance caravan trade between the coast and the Great Lakes in the early decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Consisting of as many as 500 to 1,000 people and passing through hundreds of miles of arid steppe, these caravans needed provisions that the mountain, with its abundant surface water and intensive cultivation system, was in a unique position to provide.Footnote ²⁰ Clans drew upon their networks with other clans to mobilize resources to provide the food, water, ivory, and slaves desired by the traders. Over time, the dominant members of the dominant clans in these partnerships emerged as mangis. They not only served as trade negotiators on behalf of the clans, but also organized the male age-sets for conducting raids of neighboring ridges in an effort to monopolize trade and procure slaves, as well as in defense against such raids. By the 1890s, mangis had become the central political figures of the mountain, and the chiefdom a crucial political unit.

Why did people come to identify themselves as part of chiefdoms? Aside from evident cultural and linguistic affinities, it is clear that membership conferred privileges. Through chiefdom membership, one could share in its spoils as well as its protection. Chiefdom identity became a way of determining who had rights to certain resources, and who did not. This did not replace other forms of identity, but rather augmented them, with people leveraging different identities at different points toward different ends. Thus we see that before the colonial period, people on Kilimanjaro utilized several means of self-identification related to the landscape and resource control. They considered themselves to be people of the mountain, and people who grew bananas, terms that distinguished them from people outside the mountain. It is accurate to say that people possessed a shared sense of belonging to the mountain, and they acknowledged the common culture and practices and similar language of other mountain dwellers. But they did not acknowledge a common political identity, and the term Chagga had little resonance. Rather, political identities centered on the clan and the chiefdom, reflecting the importance of both familial ties and the mobilizing and protecting of resources.

COLONIALISM AND THE CONCEPT OF THE CHAGGA

The term Chagga, as a reference to the region of Kilimanjaro and the people living on its slopes, does not actually derive from the mountain. Linguists have yet to trace an exact origin for the term, but some speculate that it might be the term used by speakers of the zone G Bantu languages (which includes Swahili) to describe the mountain's inhabitants.Footnote ²¹ This fits with the emergence of the term in the early nineteenth century, following the increased presence of coastal caravan traders in the region. For the Swahili traders, the term was likely used in a similar fashion to Wakirima, as a means of referring to the physical space of the mountain and its residents, but not as an indication of a political or social unity among them. Among the people of the mountain, however, the term Chagga had no significance.

European explorers, arriving on the mountain in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, adopted the term from their Swahili guides. Johannes Rebmann was among the first to do so. In his letters and journal entries, he referred to both the place and the people as ‘Jagga’.Footnote ²² Though he did make reference to the individual chiefdoms, he clearly considered the mountain to be a singular social and cultural space. Those who followed him, explorers such as Karl Von der Decken (in 1869), Charles New (1871), Harry Johnston (1886–7), Hans Meyer (1887), and William Abbott (1888), came to refer to the mountain itself as Kilimanjaro and the people living there as Chagga.Footnote ²³ The most vivid example came from Johnston, who established a homestead on the mountain and lived there for nearly six months. In his writings, he referred to the chiefdom in which he resided, Moshi, as one of numerous ‘Chagga states’ on the mountainside.Footnote ²⁴ In spite of the disunity and hostility present on the mountain, he speaks of the peoples of the mountain as if they are a single group, destined in the natural course of events to become politically unified.

From an outsider's perspective, the use of a single term to describe all the people of Kilimanjaro seemed to make sense. After all, the people lived in the same region on the slopes of the mountain, practiced the same forms of agriculture and animal husbandry, had very similar cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and social structures, and spoke what were considered to be dialects of the same language. Yet it also reflected a profound misunderstanding of Africa based upon the assumption that people could and should be categorized into tribes, irrespective of their own histories and conceptualizations of difference.

This misunderstanding soon became a cornerstone of colonial rule. In 1892, German expeditionary forces established military control over the chiefdoms of Kilimanjaro, making them a part of German East Africa. In succeeding years, German rule radically altered governance in the region. Mangis became local administrators working under the jurisdiction of a government officer in the newly created town of Moshi, and were charged with maintaining the peace, distributing land, organizing corvée labor, and collecting taxes. Their wealth no longer came from trade and warfare, but rather from extracting money and labor from their subjects. The Germans also began to consolidate many of the smaller chiefdoms into larger ones. This reduced the overall number to 28 by 1916.Footnote ²⁵ Christian missionaries also had a strong impact on the mountain. The Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers and the Leipzig Lutheran Mission followed the Germans into Kilimanjaro in the mid-1890s and quickly spread across the mountain, establishing churches, schools, and dispensaries. By 1915, every chiefdom on the mountain had at least one resident European missionary.

Colonial officials and missionaries approached Kilimanjaro in much the same way the explorers had: as one mountain, one group of people. German colonial officers frequently spoke of people as coming from their respective chiefdoms, but concluded that regardless of their political divisions, they were essentially one people. For example, Widenman concluded in his late nineteenth-century writings about health on the mountain that certain practices were characteristic of the ‘Chagga’ people.Footnote ²⁶ Missionaries likewise considered the people to be all of a single ‘tribe’, one that had merely been fractured by a century of inter-chiefdom warfare. One of the most egregious examples of this perceived ethnic unity comes from Leipzig missionary Bruno Gutmann. A prolific writer, he composed more than thirty books and articles about the people of the mountain between 1907 and 1950.Footnote ²⁷ He not only accepted the idea that they were all members of a common tribe, with a common identity, but he also documented what he saw as their common laws and cultural practices. While he does acknowledge that the majority of his observations come from a single chiefdom and that variation exists, the overall picture he paints is of a homogeneous Kilimanjaro.Footnote ²⁸ Though both the Catholic and Protestant missionaries assumed the mountain to be comprised of one people, they did acknowledge the presence of lingering antagonisms between the various chiefdoms. In response, they promoted messages of cultural and social unity in their religious teachings, school curricula, and even through sporting competitions between various parishes.

The onset of British rule following the First World War introduced another series of political and economic changes to Kilimanjaro. The British, like the Germans, accepted the premise of one mountain, one people, and they took a number of steps to transform this cultural ‘reality’ into a political one as well. In 1919, the district office in Moshi Town grouped the mangis together into a single administrative structure called the Chagga Native Authority, and transformed them into salaried employees.Footnote ²⁹ These steps were intended to consolidate authority and reduce corruption. The office also created a set of three regional Chagga councils, each comprised of the mangis in the respective areas, as well as treasuries for each. In 1928, the district office reorganized again, creating a single Council of Chagga Chiefs, comprised of those deemed most influential, and a single treasury for the whole mountain.Footnote ³⁰ These institutions greatly increased the frequency of communication among the mangis, and led on the whole to greater unity in governance structures. They also imbued the term Chagga with new meaning. It came to denote new political bodies and policies (including the Chagga Council), created along so-called ‘traditional’ lines that were managed by the chiefs as part of indirect rule. Often these usurped authority that had previously rested in the hands of clan heads. For example, in 1931, the Native Authority issued a Chagga Ordinance called ‘Fifty Paces Tangazo’, prohibiting the clearing of trees or planting of crops within fifty paces of a watercourse.Footnote ³¹ Using this political instrument, the Native Authority usurped power from local clan heads and chiefs, and created a policy that stretched across the mountain.

The most significant economic change to occur in the British period was the rise of coffee. Catholic missionaries had introduced Arabica coffee to the mountain as early as 1900. During the 1920s, however, coffee production proliferated, largely through the actions of Charles Dundas. Assigned as the Moshi district officer in 1920, he believed that coffee was the ‘sine qua non’ for the development of the native economy, and he began to offer mountain farmers direct governmental support in cultivating the crop.Footnote ³² He instructed his agricultural assistants to provide seed, saplings, and technical assistance to interested farmers, and he provided assistance in marketing the product. The results were nothing short of phenomenal. By 1923, an estimated 4,400 men were growing coffee, with just under a million trees among them.Footnote ³³ Seven years later, the number of farmers had risen to nearly 10,000, with the total number of trees reaching six million.Footnote ³⁴ The crop became immensely popular due to its high price and relatively low labor input compared to other marketable crops. Revenues from the crop enabled families to pay their taxes and school fees, purchase goods such as tea and rice, and construct larger, more elaborate homes with tin roofs, concrete floors, and block walls. It also facilitated larger-scale projects, such as school and church construction, as well as, according to Sally Falk Moore and Paul Puritt, the completion of a ‘motor road high on the mountain linking the various chiefdoms and facilitating the transportation of the coffee to Moshi Town’.Footnote ³⁵ The embracing of coffee cultivation and the market economy by the people of the mountain, and their use of coffee revenues for everything from paying taxes to building hospitals, pleased the administration. By the 1930s, the government in Dar es Salaam considered the peoples of Kilimanjaro to be economically ‘progressive’.

Yet in spite of these developments, the colonial administration remained frustrated with what it saw as the backwards political and social state of the mountain. This topic was the subject of a report entitled ‘The Political Tendencies of the Wachagga’, submitted by the Moshi district office to the secretariat in 1931.Footnote ³⁶ The report describes a Kilimanjaro that had emerged as a critical part of the colonial economy, but that remained crippled by a lack of unity. As an example, it cited the fact that the people of the mountain still declined to identify themselves as Chagga. It noted, ‘if a Chagga, about to give evidence in Court, is asked his tribe he invariably replies “Mkibosho” or “Mkilema” or whatsoever the name be by which the people in his particular area are called: if he adds “Mchagga” it is as an afterthought’.Footnote ³⁷ It also references frequent bickering and divisiveness among the chiefdoms, necessitating intervention by the district officer. It concludes that if the onset of German colonial rule had not halted inter-chiefdom warfare, a single Chagga polity and common identity would have been inevitable. It was therefore incumbent upon the British administration to use political techniques to encourage the development of political and social unity on the mountain.

COFFEE, LAND, AND WATER

More than thirty years after the establishment of colonial rule, the people of Kilimanjaro had for the most part not embraced a Chagga political or cultural identity. This is striking, considering the extent to which the concept pervaded colonial and missionary thinking, and the manner in which the mangis leveraged the term to bolster their own powers.Footnote ³⁸ In the 1930s and 1940s, however, the term came into increasing use by the populace. This was certainly not inevitable. Nor was it merely the culmination of thirty years of colonial influence, though that power cannot be denied. Rather, the increasing prevalence of Chagga as a term invoking a collective identity can be attributed to the work of grassroots organizations that were striving to preserve and expand access to resources. This becomes clear by looking at three areas of conflict that dominated politics on Kilimanjaro from the 1930s onward.

The first area of conflict concerned coffee. The phenomenal success of African coffee cultivation pleased the government and yielded tremendous wealth for farmers, but it also created anxiety among the region's European settlers, most of whom were also heavily involved in the growing of coffee.Footnote ³⁹ Settlers became fierce opponents of African coffee cultivation in the 1920s. They feared that a thriving African coffee industry would not only depress prices, but would also diminish their access to the cheap agricultural labor necessary for running their estates. In 1923, a group of settlers formed the Kilimanjaro Planters Association (KPA), an organization that actively lobbied the government to place a ban on all African cultivation of coffee on Kilimanjaro, as had been done in Kenya.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Association provided several reasons justifying its request: African coffee provided a haven for insects and fungal diseases; African cultivation encouraged theft of saplings, seeds, and fertilizer from European farms; and the inferior quality of African coffee would depress the value and tarnish the reputation of settler-grown Kilimanjaro Arabica. Some members even went as far as to start rumors that a rebellion was brewing on the mountain.Footnote ⁴¹ Though the government tended to see the claims of settlers for what they were, their accusations and lobbying efforts heightened tensions throughout the whole region. Conflicts between European and African farmers over land, water, and labor issues became increasingly frequent. Moreover, there was fear among Africans that the lucrative coffee industry, which had in many ways transformed life on the mountain, would be stripped from them, leaving them no choice but to become wage laborers.

The second area of conflict concerned the availability of land. From the 1920s, land pressure became a dominant concern of people living on the mountain, stemming largely from the swiftly growing population. In 1900, government officials estimated the African population of Kilimanjaro to be around 80,000. By 1945, it had reached 192,000.Footnote ⁴² As young men strove to create homesteads of their own, they increasingly found good land hard to come by. The colonial government and the mangis responded by encouraging men to settle in the drier lands near the foot of the mountain. However, this land was generally too dry for the banana, yam, and coffee economy that characterized the mountain, and was therefore undesirable. Families with no recourse ended up dividing existing homesteads among male heirs, which in turn led to a dramatic decrease in the average size of mountain farms, from an average of ten acres at the beginning of the century, to less than two by the 1940s.Footnote ⁴³ Given the value of coffee and the desire of people to increase production, the scarcity of land and the shrinking of kihamba generated resentment. Furthermore, people feared that the government, the mangis, and the settlers were conspiring to take even more land away from them.

For mountain farmers, the most frustrating aspect of land pressure was the fact that European settlers and the missions held several thousand acres of prime land interspersed among the chiefdoms. At the beginning of the century, the German government had encouraged or outright forced many of the mangis to cede land, which the government then in turn sold to settlers or the missions. In some cases, the mangis even sold off land themselves as a way of generating income. In chiefdoms such as Kibosho, nearly one-third of land had been transferred to European control. Furthermore, on settler farms and mission estates, it was common practice for much of the land to be left fallow. By the 1930s, many land-hungry farmers had resorted either to squatting on these lands illegally or to working as tenant farmers.

As tension over the land issue mounted, the government initially responded by placing more authority over land issues in the hands of the mangis. In the 1930s, for example, they gained the ability to supervise the transfer of lands between farmers on the mountain, a measure intended to facilitate the sale of land, especially between people from neighboring clans.Footnote ⁴⁴ As noted by Sally Falk Moore, however, such changes had the effect of further enhancing the power of the mangis at the expense of the clans.Footnote ⁴⁵ Clan heads, who had for centuries held power over land matters, accused the chiefs of usurping their powers. Rather than alleviating the land crunch, the mangis actually intensified it, often using their power to increase their own holdings or to pass land on to their supporters. The increasing power of the mangis and the lingering problem of insufficient land alienated two groups in particular, the clan headmen whose powers were being undermined, and an emerging class of educated, Christian coffee farmers who found themselves denied the very resource so crucial to their future prosperity.

The third area of conflict centered on the water supply of the mountain. In the 1920s, the control, use, and management of water resources emerged as a concern of both the colonial administration and the mountain population. Several factors lay behind this, the first being a series of severe droughts that afflicted the region. In the first half of the century, significant shortages of rainfall in highland East Africa occurred in at least six periods: 1888–90, 1898–1900, 1907–8, 1913–15, 1922–4, and 1929–30.Footnote ⁴⁶ For the colonial administration, however, these droughts sparked fear that East Africa was becoming progressively more arid. Another factor was increasing concern over soil erosion, which emerged at the forefront of environmental preoccupation in the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁷ Due to the steeply sloping contours of the mountain, its fast running rivers, the widespread use of flood irrigation on both settler and African farms, and the nature of rainfall – usually much in short spans of time – the region seemed especially susceptible to erosion caused by water.Footnote ⁴⁸ A third concern was increasing demand for the resource from all sectors of society: the swiftly growing chiefdoms, the settlers at the foot of the mountain, and industrial users throughout the Pangani Valley.

These concerns led the British administration to step up its involvement in the management of water supplies on the mountain. Initially, it took three steps. One, it created a new legal foundation for water control in the 1923 Natural Water Supply Ordinance, which for the first time placed controls on the construction of irrigation canals, such as those on Kilimanjaro.Footnote ⁴⁹ It also created Water Boards that were responsible for the settling of water disputes and the allocation of water. Lastly, it hired several scientists, including Clement Gillman and Francis Kanthack, to conduct research on the water ‘situation’ on the mountain that would help the government maximize the resource and stop the evils of soil erosion.

These water control initiatives sparked a tremendous amount of concern and anxiety in the chiefdoms. For one, the primary focus of government concern over water was the mifongo. Government officials, especially Kanthack, considered the mountainside system of water furrows to be ‘primitive, wasteful, and inefficient’.Footnote ⁵⁰ He especially criticized the use of furrows to irrigate finger millet and coffee, a practice he felt contributed to soil erosion. Kanthack concluded that the government should allow existing furrows to remain, but that under no circumstances should it allow the construction of additional ones. This generated much resistance on the mountain, as the furrows had for generations been central to local agriculture.

Conflicts over land, water, and coffee cultivation did not arise in a vacuum, but rather in the context of a rapidly changing society, one marked by an increase in educational opportunity and conversions to Christianity. As people looked to address their grievances, they went first to their mangis. The mangis, however, had come to occupy a precarious position. They ostensibly served the interests of their people, yet they were salaried agents of the colonial state. In addition, they had managed to alienate three important power players on the mountain: clan headmen, coffee farmers, and a new generation of educated elites. Seeing the mangis as ineffective, aloof, corrupt, and the combination of old guard and colonial bureaucrat, these individuals went in a different direction to redress their grievances: creating grassroots organizations whose membership would stretch beyond the boundaries of the chiefdoms and across the mountain.

The first of these organizations was the Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association (KNPA). It was created in 1924 by Joseph Merinyo and Natheniel Mtui (the former an assistant of Charles Dundas, the latter a protégé of Bruno Gutmann).Footnote ⁵¹ At first a cooperative society aimed at the purchasing and sharing of spray equipment, it quickly grew into a marketing agency for African coffee and the political arm of the mountain's growers. The KNPA actively lobbied the Moshi district office to preserve their coffee rights, to provide more land for the creation of homesteads, and to preserve water rights, while also refuting the claims made by the settlers.Footnote ⁵² Within one year, the organization claimed over 7,000 members from all across the mountain. By the next, it had nearly tripled.

Initially, the KNPA had the unconditional support of the government, which was happy to see coffee production and its tax revenues, on the rise. It soon came to fear, however, that the organization was becoming too political, and that it might undermine the authority of the mangis. In 1928, District Commissioner F. C. Hallier proposed what he saw as a compromise between the growers, the mangis, and the settlers. His Coffee Industry Ordinance called for the registration of all African coffee farms for the purpose of controlling disease (an attempt to appease the settlers) as well as the abolition of the KNPA and the consolidation of its powers into the Chagga Council.Footnote ⁵³ This generated a tremendous outcry, partly because of the registration clause, but mainly because most people had no interest in seeing the KNPA dissolved. The organization had become a rallying point of sorts, not just against the settlers but also against the mangis, to the extent that people were willing to defy them to save it. The organization remained standing, signaling that for the first time, people on the mountain were identifying politically with an entity that crossed chiefdom boundaries. The KNPA remained a powerful force on Kilimanjaro for another few years, until an accounting scandal in 1932 led to its demise. By this point, the government had made a firm commitment to supporting African coffee cultivation (which had become extremely lucrative), but desired to rid the organization of its ‘radical’ elements. The scandal allowed the district office to oust the existing leadership, dissolve the organization, and replace it with a successor, the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU).Footnote ⁵⁴ The new co-op served as less of a political space than its predecessor, but it did remain outside the authority of the chiefs.

Both the KNPA and the KNCU succeeded in mobilizing people to protect their coffee growing interests. Doing so gave them access to a wider forum for voicing their concerns and creating relationships extending beyond the chiefdom. In these organizations, people came together to defend themselves not from one another, but rather from outsiders beyond the mountain and their own mangis. In looking for a way in which to identify themselves against these outsiders, people adopted the term that had long been used to describe them, yet in doing so they imbued it with new meaning. In the KNCU, the term Chagga came to be used to refer to members and their families in juxtaposition to non-members on the mountain, Europeans, and newly arriving African migrants from other parts of the colony.Footnote ⁵⁵ It also emerged as a tool for distinguishing their coffee from that grown by settlers. ‘Chagga’ coffee came to embody a sense of pride, and also a sense of obligation among growers to produce at high quality.Footnote ⁵⁶

REDEFINING ‘CHAGGA’: THE ELECTION OF 1952 AND PARAMOUNT CHIEFTAINCY

While the KNPA and the KNCU successfully addressed concerns about coffee, they were not as effective in dealing with land and water resources. Land, in particular, proved to be the most problematic issue, since authority to distribute unclaimed or abandoned mountainside acreage rested in the hands of the mangis. In the years following the Second World War, tensions again began to flare between the chiefs and various discontented groups, with two issues in particular generating new concern. One was an announcement of plans by the Arusha-Moshi Lands Commission to redistribute lands and water furrows that had been seized from German settlers. Though less contentious than on nearby Mount Meru (where the dispute over land reallocation would eventually make its way to the United Nations Trusteeship Council), the decision generated controversy on Kilimanjaro because it placed power over redistribution in the hands of the chiefs.Footnote ⁵⁷ The other issue was a set of reforms made to Chagga Native Authority governance.Footnote ⁵⁸ The district office chose to consolidate several of the chiefdoms into neighboring ones, leaving only 14. The chiefdoms were then grouped into three divisions: Hai (West Kilimanjaro), Vunjo (South Kilimanjaro), and Rombo (East Kilimanjaro). Each received its own divisional chief (mangi mwitori) and its own council. The existing Chagga Council remained in place, but came to be dominated by the new divisional chiefs. These reforms, though allowing for some popular representation by the masses, centralized power in the hands of the divisional chiefs and further eroded the authority of the clan heads. Most notably, they placed power over land distribution solely in the hands of the divisional chiefs with little check on their powers.

Fearful of these changes, a group of concerned coffee farmers led by former activists Merinyo and Njau banded together in early 1945, calling themselves the Chagga Association. Their group became interested in questions of governance, in particular the preservation of land and water rights for the populace. In a letter written to the district commissioner, the association's leadership indicted what they saw as haphazard and inconsistent laws among the chiefdoms, completely at the whim of the given mangi. They called for government to provide a ‘decent law to govern Wachagga’, one that would both foster unity among rulers and involve young, educated people to a greater extent.Footnote ⁵⁹ In particular, Merinyo and Njau advocated the election of a paramount chief to preside over the existing mangis. They felt this would reduce the powers of the local chiefs and, through the power of the ballot box, lead to greater say by the local population and greater fairness in land and water issues.

What is perhaps most profound about the Chagga Association is how it challenged the way in which the mangis used the term Chagga. In the political context, the term had come to refer to colonial governance through ‘traditional’ authorities. This new organization, however, used the term to describe the unity of the people as a whole, and their struggle against the oppressive use of power by the mangis. Note the words of Merinyo in a letter to the divisional chiefs.Footnote ⁶⁰

In essence, the way in which leaders such as Merinyo and Njau used the word Chagga transformed it from a term of exploitation into one of potential liberation. The key to freedom from the oppressive use of chiefly power lay in the unity of the people. As a means of building this unified front, they leveraged the term long used by the administration – but eschewed by the people – to refer to those living on the mountain.

Initially, their voices went unheard. In 1947, the government handed over several hundred acres of prime ex-German land to the divisional chiefs. As predicted by the Chagga Association, the lands remained in their hands and were never redistributed. In response to the lack of progress being made, Merinyo and Njau organized a new political organization, the Kilimanjaro Chagga Citizens Union (KCCU).Footnote ⁶¹ It had two aims: to reform the distribution of land and to make governance across the mountain more unified by having an elected mangi mkuu.Footnote ⁶² John Iliffe notes that the organization became extremely popular among a wide range of politically alienated people, including ‘dispossessed chiefs, ambitious traders and farmers, old KNPA activists, unprivileged Muslims, [headmen] who resented chiefly authority, and young educated men impatient with the old order’.Footnote ⁶³ It quickly grew, sporting as many as 12,000 members in 1951, and established itself as a major thorn in the side of the Chagga Council.Footnote ⁶⁴

The colonial administration viewed the KCCU with a great deal of anxiety, as it feared that this popular resistance to government policies could undermine the local implementation of indirect rule. However, it shared the desire to bring central leadership to the mountain as a means of making governance more efficient and reducing costs. In 1951, the administration struck an agreement with the Chagga Council and the KCCU to implement a paramount chieftaincy, and even to allow the mangi mkuu to be chosen by popular vote. By the summer, four candidates had emerged to run in the 8 October election, three of whom were the sitting divisional chiefs: Petro Itosi Marealle of Vunjo, Abdiel Shangali of Hai, and John Maruma of Rombo.Footnote ⁶⁵

The fourth, Thomas Marealle, was to some extent an outsider. Like the other candidates, he came from a chiefly clan, a requirement for participating in the election. He was, in fact, nephew of fellow candidate Petro Marealle. But unlike his opponents, Thomas Marealle had not spent all of his life involved in local politics. After completing his secondary schooling on the mountain, he studied abroad at both the London School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge. He then returned to Tanganyika, working for a time as a government clerk, and later as the manager of the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote ⁶⁶ His chiefly heritage, combined with his high level of education and disconnect from local politics, made him attractive in the eyes of the KCCU. As a candidate, Marealle distanced himself from the divisional chiefs by selling himself not as representing a particular chiefdom or division, but rather as representing all the mountain's people. Though few materials survive documenting the actual campaigning, Rogers notes that the KCCU devised powerful propaganda for Marealle.Footnote ⁶⁷ It claimed that as mangi mkuu, he would ‘abolish the Waitori system, do away with the coffee cess, and lead the Chagga to greatness as an independent sovereign’. Further, ‘he would restore respect to the clans and clan leaders and abolish corruption in the administration, and speak authoritatively to Government, and they would be forced to listen.’ Most importantly, he promised that ‘Chagga vihamba would be safe forever, and more land provided’.Footnote ⁶⁸ His language emphasized not only his desire to secure land for the people, but also that unity of the people was essential to winning it.

Voters responded favorably to Thomas Marealle's candidacy. In the election, nearly 50 per cent of the electorate (24,002 people in total) turned out to vote.Footnote ⁶⁹ Marealle claimed 15,661 votes, winning every chiefdom with the exception of one. Marealle's victory represented an important moment in the history of Kilimanjaro. He not only became the first paramount chief for all of Kilimanjaro, but also he did so with popular support from across the chiefdoms. Marealle's appeal lay in a number of factors, including his charisma, his outsider status, and his high level of education. Nonetheless, people's ongoing struggle to secure access to the mountain's resources, and their belief that Marealle would be most successful in championing their interests, contributed first and foremost to his victory. As John Tawney, a writer for the journal Corona noted in a 1952 article summarizing the election, ‘land is life to the Chagga and their feeling for it was a main cause of the election’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Thomas Marealle took office as paramount chief of Kilimanjaro on 17 January 1952. The installation ceremony, led by Governor Twining, featured a blend of so-called ‘traditional’ rites and rituals alongside modern ones.Footnote ⁷¹ Marealle himself dressed in a white Western-style suit with a black tie. After speeches by the governor, members of the Chagga Council came forward, dressed him in a ceremonial robe and hat made with the skins of a leopard and a colobus monkey, and declared him to be Mshumbue, the anointed one. The ceremony ended with speeches by Marealle and the three divisional chiefs, and an evening of dancing and sundowners. In the coming weeks, many of the chiefdoms also held parties in his honor. Among the people, hopes ran high that the new paramount chief would solve many of the region's problems, and help to preserve and expand access to its vital resources. In truth, the newly created office offered Marealle little power with which to make change. As noted by Rogers, ‘he was to be, in fact, a Chief in Council – more than a simple executive officer, but far less than the independent ruler [KCCU] leaders and followers had envisioned and hoped for’.Footnote ⁷² For the next several years, Marealle worked with local leaders on critical issues including water supplies, road construction, and school and dispensary construction, benefiting from tax revenues from the thriving coffee industry. However, he had little real power as regards the issue of greatest concern.

Marealle's tenure as paramount chief is best known for his attempts to promote, even exploit, the burgeoning sense of Chagga cultural identity. In his eyes, the destiny of the people of the mountain lay in a fusion of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ practices, and he worked tirelessly to promote cultural symbols reinforcing that vision. For example, he wore his Chagga ceremonial robes atop a white suit for nearly all official functions and visits by dignitaries (see Fig. 1). He also engaged in the creation of new cultural imagery. In 1952, he commissioned the design of a Chagga flag. The flag features Kibo, the great snow-covered peak of the mountain, anchoring the background. Three images emerge in the foreground: a banana tree on the right, a coffee tree on the left, and a masale plant joining the two. The banana tree, as the staple of the mountain, represents tradition and heritage, while the coffee points to the mountain's current and future prosperity. The masale, a common symbol on the mountain for peace, thus bridges the past and present. Lastly, a leopard, representative of power, shrouds the whole scene. The image as a whole symbolized the common heritage of the people, as well as their hopes for the future, and as such served as a symbol for unity throughout the 1950s.

Fig. 1.

The Rt. Hon Alan Lennox-Boyd, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, speaks with Mangi Mkuu Thomas Marealle II during a visit to the Chagga Council, 1957. Photo courtesy of the National Archives of the UK, The Public Record Office. PRO CO 1069-157-27.

Perhaps most interesting is that Marealle promoted Chagga identity and political unity as something that had been bound to develop in the course of time, an idea drawn from the colonial discourse of one mountain, one people. In the introduction he wrote for the Chagga Day 1955 brochure, he referred to the 1951 election as the ‘historic come-together of the whole tribe’. He then referred at length to the writings of Charles Dundas, who asserted in 1924 that if not for the interruption of colonial rule, a singular Chagga kingdom would have arisen in the course of time.Footnote ⁷³ Marealle, in essence, interpreted Chagga Day as a delayed realization of what Dundas and others had predicted, that it was the destiny of the peoples of Kilimanjaro to become a single entity. This starkly ignored the grassroots political processes that had not only shaped the emergence of this identity, but also had led to his very election.

Marealle's ideas regarding Chagga unity can also be seen in a speech he delivered to the United Nations Trusteeship Council in 17 June 1957, regarding his vision of the future of the Tanganyika Territory. He begins by pointing out the shared alpine landscape, the use of land resources, and the challenges facing the people, before moving to a discussion of the region's stunning economic growth and the political advancements being made. Throughout, he refers to the people of the mountain as the Chagga, only once making reference to the diversity of chiefdoms or clans. He also mentions the importance of preserving ‘Chagga History’, and refers to two initiatives being undertaken: the creation of a cultural heritage society and library called the Chagga Trust, and the commissioning of Oxford scholar Kathleen Stahl to write a history of the Chagga people.Footnote ⁷⁴ He also tries to situate this identity in the context of the newly emerging discourse of Tanganyikan identity being promoted by nationalist organizations such as the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU).Footnote ⁷⁵

In spite of his initial popularity, Marealle struggled to maintain broad support. Despite several successes in terms of regional development, he failed to address the core issue leading to his election: the land question. This caused him to lose the support of clan heads and coffee farmers, who felt he had failed to bring needed reforms to fix land distribution policies (such as eliminating the system of divisional chiefs). He also alienated educated youth who questioned not only his dedication to land reform but also his reliance on traditional imagery and autocratic forms of political action to the exclusion of more democratic ones. Most importantly, Marealle's political views placed him into conflict with the nationalists. Kilimanjaro was one of the last regions in the colony to embrace the nationalist movement. TANU leadership – particularly Julius Nyerere, a former friend of Marealle – felt that the overt sense of identity being expressed on the mountain bordered on ethnic nationalism and actually harmed their cause.Footnote ⁷⁶ Amid increasing pressure, Marealle resigned his post in 1958. Two years later, the people voted again for political reform, this time replacing the paramount chieftaincy with an elected presidency.

The year 1960 marked the end of an era in mountain politics, a definitive shift away from chiefly leadership in the concluding days of colonial rule. The Chagga Day celebrations, and the almost nationalistic symbols of Chagga identity that emerged in Marealle's tenure as mangi mkuu, disappeared almost overnight. As the independent Tanzanian state took form over the next several years, a common identity of being Tanzanian began to emerge. However, the sense of Chagga identity forged by decades of political dispute and contestation over resources has remained, especially as people from Kilimanjaro have migrated to other parts of the country. Today, it implies common cultural and political heritage, and a sense that the mountain landscape is home.