Abstract
‘War’, says Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, ‘is capitalism with the gloves off’. During the Second World War Tanganyika experienced colonialism with the gloves off.1 A sleepy imperial backwater, acquired late and held somewhat ambiguously under a Mandate, was transformed into an indispensible economic asset to Britain’s war effort. For Africans it was a reminder of their subordination to a distant ruler and distant events. ‘It is a fact that Imperialism has brought Africans face to face with the European war of Nationalism’, declared the Swahili newspaper Kwetu.2 Many Africans in Tanganyika, remembering their past, were ready and willing to fight against the Germans; but they did not miss the point, as they were so often told, that they were fighting not just for the King but for ‘freedom’. The economic hardship and government intervention that accompanied the war effort precipitated a change in African attitudes towards colonial rule that brought its end within immediate view.
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Notes
Tom Stoppard, Travesties (London, 1975), p. 39;
a point already noted (as so many others) by Professor J. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982), p. 145.
J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979).
Tanganyika, Trade Reports, 1939–1948.
J. F.R. Hill and J. P. Moffett, Tanganyika: A review of its resources and their development (Dar es Salaam, 1955), pp. 739–43. (The picture is distorted by massive imports after 1947 for the Groundnut Scheme.)
Information gathered from Tanganyika files in CO 852 and Tanganyika, Annual Reports of the Agricultural Department, 1939–45.
Tanganyika, Annual Reports of the Labour Department, 1940–6. TNA 30178 and CO 691 / 191 /42374.
The only comparative study is still A. R. Prest, The War Economics of Primary Producing Countries (Cambridge, 1948), which illustrates the contrast with the Middle East. Whether the increase in wage labour contributed to a process of class formation would need more extended discussion.
The analogy is with C. Baker, ‘Colonial Rule and the Internal Economy in Twentieth Century Madras’, Modern Asian Studies, 15:3 (1981), pp. 575–602.
This is discussed at length in N. J. Westcott, ‘The East African Sisal Industry, 1929–49: The marketing of a colonial commodity during depression and war’, J. of African History, 25. 4 (1984).
Coffee: TNA 37200/I—II. Cotton: TNA 34953/III; Tanganyika, The Cotton Industry, 1939–53 (1953).
G. St. J. Orde Brown, Labour Conditions in East Africa, Colonial No. 193 (London 1946). Correspondence in CO 822/ 1 1 7/46748. For events in Buha, see J. J. Tawnev’s Diaries for Oct.—Dec. 1940 (Rhodes House, Oxford).
A number of unsatisfactory accounts exist; the most readable is still A. Wood, The Groundnut Affair (London, 1950), but the most interesting material is in MAF 83/1746 on, and CO 852/603 and 912.
N.J. Westcott, ‘Closer Union and the future of East Africa, 1939–1948’, J. of Imperial and Commonwealth History, X:1 (1981), pp. 67–88. For trusteeship, see CO 968/160–3 and CO 537/1444–58.
I. N. Kimambo, Mbiru, Popular protest in colonial Tanzania (Historical Association of Tanzania, 1971). Korogwe and Lushoto DARs, 1946–50. Japhet papers in TNA, and ‘Reports on the Meru Land Problem’ by M. J. Davies and H. Mason, and by B. George in Rhodes House, Oxford.
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© 1986 David Killingray and Richard Rathbone
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Westcott, N. (1986). The Impact of the Second World War on Tanganyika, 1939–49. In: Killingray, D., Rathbone, R. (eds) Africa and the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18264-0_5
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