Book description
What did it mean to be an African subject living in remote areas of
Tanganyika at the end of the colonial era? For the Kaguru of
Tanganyika, it meant daily confrontation with the black and white
governmental officials tasked with bringing this rural people into the
mainstream of colonial African life. T. O. Beidelman's detailed
narrative links this administrative world to the Kaguru's wider
social, cultural, and geographical milieu, and to the political
history, ideas of indirect rule, and the white institutions that
loomed just beyond their world. Beidelman unveils the colonial
system's problems as it extended its authority into rural areas and
shows how these problems persisted even after African independence.
"Personal and engaged while trying to make sense of a
contradictory and exclusionary world." -Ivan Karp, Emory University
T. O. Beidelman is Professor of Anthropology at New York
University. He is author of Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-historical
Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots (IUP, 1982); The
Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (IUP, 1986); and The Cool
Knife: Metaphors of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Education in Kaguru
Initiation Ritual.
