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Article ID: CBB000650977

Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874--1915 (2003)

Sunseri, Thaddeus (Author)

Environmental History
Volume: 8
Pages: 430--451

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Socialism Colonialism Forests and forestry Germany, colonies Agriculture 20th century 19th century East Africa

IN 1874, WHEN the British officer Frederic Elton visited the southeast coast of Tanzania around the Rufiji delta, he noted how important the region's forests were to local commerce. Rufiji people obtained a wide variety of forest products, including wax, rubber, ivory, mangroves, and "immense quantities" of copal to trade with Indians and Arabs who settled on the coast. Elton traveled north and south of the delta and crisscrossed the land in between, and thus provided a view of the region ten years before German colonial rule began. Observing how local people guarded access to copal diggings and other forest tracts jealously, Elton wrote "the natives are only too ready to unite against the slightest encroachment on their monopoly."1 In one instance while camped along the Rufiji, Elton's party was surrounded by "about 800 men, more than half of whom were armed with guns, the rest carrying spears and bows." The leader made it clear that they were there to guard local trade against interlopers and "they heard there was to be a fight, and they would join the fight." Thirty years later the German colonial administration made the Rufiji delta and a one hundred mile stretch of coastal mangroves into a forest reserve, severely circumscribing African rights of access. With the advent of German rule, state-regulated forestry had arrived in Tanzania for the first time. In 1905, peoples of the Rufiji basin, wearing the same blue kaniki cloth around their hips as those whom Elton encountered, attacked representatives of German authority, including many involved in the declaration of forest reserves, in what is known as the Maji Maji rebellion

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