BEING ‘CHAGGA’: NATURAL RESOURCES, POLITICAL ACTIVISM, AND IDENTITY ON KILIMANJARO

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew V. Bender

AbstractThis article argues that the emergence of Chagga political identity on Mount Kilimanjaro in the 1940s and 1950s can best be understood as a product of intensive debates over the control of natural resources and the nature of chiefly authority. As a result of perceived threats to the land and water resources of the mountain and resentment of the role of the chiefs in these issues, grassroots activists adopted a language of unity using the ethnic term ‘Chagga’ – a moniker long used by the colonial state but eschewed by the general population. With the rise of a paramount chieftaincy in 1951, the term shifted from being a symbol of colonial rule to one of common identity and resistance against the encroachment of the colonial state in local affairs.

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY LYNN OSBORN

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Antonio J. Mendoza-Fernández ◽  
Araceli Peña-Fernández ◽  
Luis Molina ◽  
Pedro A. Aguilera

Campo de Dalías, located in southeastern Spain, is the greatest European exponent of greenhouse agriculture. The development of this type of agriculture has led to an exponential economic development of one of the poorest areas of Spain, in a short period of time. Simultaneously, it has brought about a serious alteration of natural resources. This article will study the temporal evolution of changes in land use, and the exploitation of groundwater. Likewise, this study will delve into the technological development in greenhouses (irrigation techniques, new water resources, greenhouse structures or improvement in cultivation techniques) seeking a sustainable intensification of agriculture under plastic. This sustainable intensification also implies the conservation of existing natural areas.


Author(s):  
V Shinju ◽  
Aswathi Prasad

The natural resources are repository for the survival of all of us, so they must be used efficiently to meet the present needs while conserving them for future generations. An action to develop capacities from global to household levels for their sustainable management and regulation is required henceforth. Of these natural resources, water resources are most precious. If there is no water; there would be no life on earth. Since ‘water is the elixir of life’, water resource management has been considered as one of the most relevant areas of intervention. Understanding the gender dimensions of water resource management is a starting point for reversing the degradation of water resources. Women play an important role here since they have to access the water resources for almost all the activities on a daily basis. As the women are the strong social agents, effective and improved water preservation techniques could be achieved through their empowerment that may eventually lead to the well-being of the households in particular and of the community in general. Therefore, the major research question posed in this study is to analyze the role of women in the preservation and management of water, an inevitable, precious but diminishing natural resource. The study also intends to describe the relationship between the three ‘W's-Women, Water & Well-being. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are essential here as it is a contingent issue in the present scenario. Psychological dimensions were also explored since the issue is affecting the routine life of the community. The case study of women belonging to the Kuttadampadam region was done to explain the role of women in preserving water resources in the areas affecting severe water scarcity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state


1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Ambler

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.


Author(s):  
Keith Schoppa

The twentieth century was studded with extraordinary achievements in medicine, science, technology, and space. Yet, this century was the most violent in history, killing an estimated 30 million people in cold-blooded genocides and, in wars, an estimated 187 million. There was not a single year in the hundred-year span when there were no significant wars. In each chapter I have chosen several men and women, many not well-known, on whom I focus a bit more than other historical actors. They reflect the spirit of their times, though their approaches and contributions are distinctively nuanced. Existing in a climate primed for war and violence, they, like everyone else, had to decide where their source of political identity lay and, when a decision was necessary, where their political allegiance would fall: To their own lives as individuals in a specific locality? Or to a particular nation? Or to the larger global community? Given that this allegiance has been much discussed during the last half of the century up through today, to what geographical level do we see world citizens committing their allegiance? That answer will be a key determinant of the future. This chronological narrative also traces other crucial twentieth-century developments: women and their professional and social roles, goals, successes, and setbacks; the powerful forces of race and ethnicity; the role of identity; environmental issues, including atomic energy and the sustainability of natural resources; the causes and changing nature of wars around the world; and the historical roles of contingency and memory.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Deana Heath

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (S22) ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Gam Nkwi ◽  
Mirjam de Bruijn

AbstractThe flag post mail relay runners, a communications system established in Cameroon during British colonial rule, laid the foundations for the communications structure of this colonial state. They were a remnant of a pre-colonial communications system and, with the advancement of “modern” communications structures such as roads, telephone lines, and post houses, the flag post runner gradually disappeared. This article explores the role of the runners for the colonial administration in Cameroon and is based mostly on archival research. It describes the runners’ system and how it influenced the colonial communications landscape. In addition, the questions of how these runners were involved in the colonial state and what forms of resistance emerged among runners are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the degree to which the subsequent construction of roads, telegraphic communications, and postal networks reflected the role played by mail runners in the British colonial period up to the 1950s.


JURNAL RUPA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bayyinah Nurrul Haq

Editor in the publishing world has function to keep the consistency of story line and point of view. “Tanah Air Kita” is a book published by N.V. W. van Hoeve-Bandung that contain the work of local and foreign photographers since Dutch colonial rule until Indonesia’s independence. The research aims to discuss how the role of editor in producing a book that fits his vision about how Indonesia is supposed to be in a photo and how observers interpret.Using semiotic analysis based on the model spectator – operator–spectrum. Analysis is done by categorizing photo illustration in 4 parts, which are :nature beauty,technology-natural resources, how people work, political change, then cross-checked upon their stadium- punctum. Selected photos shows the vision of N.A. Douwes Dekker about his expectation towards Indonesia, as the new nation that wants to be reckoned in the world, according to the presences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Sneha Jha

This article, through the use of several surveys, grammar books and articles on language written by colonial officials, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has explored how language became an instrument in the exercise of colonial power in Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the case of a particular language Maithili, spoken in the Mithila region of Bihar, the paper has engaged with the suggestion by Bernard S. Cohn that the history of language can help us understand the mechanism of power in a colonial context. The aspirations of the rulers, as well as the intended and unintended implications caused by such experiments, are worth examining. They would help us answer many general questions about colonial policies and power – not just on the theme of language – such as the following: How does one situate the understanding of the rulers while writing a history of colonialism? How do different debates among the colonial administrators shape the policies of the government, and what does that tell us about the nature of colonial rule? How does one see the role of the ‘native’, both as an informant as well as the subject of study? How does one read the native agency?


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