Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally. Gwassa was adamant that the Majimaji ideology owed nothing to outside influences.Gwassa's contention has been largely unchallenged despite obvious paradoxes. Majimaji emerged in a region widely permeated with Islamic influences by 1905, the time of the rebellion. Moreover, the Christian colonial power structure had been present in the outbreak region for some twenty years by 1905, while Christian missionaries had been active in Tanzania for almost forty years. By the time the Majimaji historical tradition was being written in Tanzania in the 1960s, the nation included many Muslims and Christians, including many of Gwassa's research informants, who helped shape his interpretation of Majimaji. Aside from these circumstantial suggestions of the possibility of an externally-influenced Majimaji tradition, a close reading of archival sources from the German period, including several documents which have not been considered in the historiographical tradition, suggest that Christian and Islamic influences helped to shape the writing of Majimaji, if not the resistance movement itself. This paper will examine some of these “Abrahamic” sources of the Majimaji tradition, and consider how they might have been used to formulate a Majimaji epic which has become a standard icon of early African colonial history.
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