On the morning of August 9, 1944, Saleh Juma set off for the Zanzibar harbor to begin an epic journey to help build the African nation. As he wound his way through the alleys, passing the plastered coral ragstone buildings and intricately carved doors of Stone Town, he eventually came to the waterfront in the shadow of the Sultan’s palace. The beautiful three-story building with onion-shaped archways, large verandahs, and crested with white merlons and Mangalore red-clay roof tiles was inhabited by the Busaidi family, originally from Oman. Omani Arabs had expelled the Portuguese from the town on the western-most tip of the island of Unguja for the final time in 1729. After a regime change in Muscat in the 1740s, the new Busaidi Dynasty would eventually come to rule over the entire Swahili coast of East Africa, and Sultan Seyyid Said al-Busaidi even relocated the capital of his vast empire to Zanzibar Town in 1832. The economic fortunes of the sultans continued to rise in the second half of the 1800s, but the installation of a British Resident in Zanzibar in 1890 and the creation of a British Protectorate that same year clearly marked the erosion of the political power of the Busaidis that would continue to the point that by the morning of Juma’s journey, the Sultan’s power was limited to the domestic control of a group of islands just off the East African coast (Map 0.1).Footnote ¹

Map 0.1 Political Map of East Africa, c. 1924

Map 0.1Long description

The map shows marked regions such as Portuguese East Africa, Nyasaland, British, Northern Rhodesia, British, Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Belgian, Uganda Protectorate, British, Kenya Colony Protectorate, British, Somaliland, Italian, and Tanganyika, British. The islands marked on the right of Tanganyika are Pemba, Unguja, Zanzibar Town, and Mafia Island, Tanganyika. The first three are collectively marked as the Zanzibar Protectorate, British. Zanzibar Channel is also marked between the Tanganyika and the islands of the Zanzibar Protectorate.

As Juma stepped onto the dhow that morning, luggage packed with clothes and personal papers, he began a two-month-long political mission that would take him over 1,500 miles with stops in six towns where he was scheduled to give speeches and hold meetings. The first leg was the shortest, though, as Bagamoyo lay just twenty-seven miles across the choppy waters of the Zanzibar Channel. However, Bagamoyo was in a whole new country. Once a major terminus of the East African slave and ivory trade, Bagamoyo had also been the former capital of German East Africa that had been formally acquired from the Sultan in the Heligoland Treaty of 1890 (though the Sultan was not invited to the negotiations).Footnote ² But after the First World War, the League of Nations acquired the territory and granted Great Britain administrative control of the territory to rule as trustees on behalf of the League. The British renamed the country Tanganyika Territory and installed a governor in 1920.Footnote ³ From the boat Juma would have seen the twin half-timbered towers of the German-built Customs House rising from the sand as porters scrambled about readying to unload cargo. Upon disembarking from the government-operated ferry, Juma would have likely submitted his cheti cha njia, or travel permit, which would have allowed the Zanzibari subject legal entry into Tanganyika. After passing through customs, he was likely greeted by a welcoming committee of members of the African Association (AA), a politically minded group that promoted African unity. As the “Honorable General Secretary” of the Zanzibar Town chapter, Saleh Juma was a distinguished leader in the Association. At this point, the AA had multiple chapters in both Tanganyika Territory and the Zanzibar Protectorate, and one each in Kenya, Nyasaland, and the Uganda Protectorate. Over the preceding decade, the organization had established a wide political network that helped facilitate the mobility of its activists and enabled the movement of its ideas. After spending the night with either a member of the Association or in the government rest camp for traveling Africans built at the request of the AA, Juma left the next morning for the two-and-a-half-hour lorry ride down to Dar es Salaam, the burgeoning new capital of the territory.Footnote ⁴

Juma next made his way to the Central Railway Station, another German-built edifice with a red-tiled roof and large hipped dormer that looked out over Railway Street, to board the overnight train for his twenty-one-hour, 300-mile journey to the Tanganyikan interior.Footnote ⁵ Juma would have likely awoken to the conical and verdant Uluguru Mountains passing outside his window before eventually making his way to the dusty city of Dodoma, the provincial capital of Central Province and his home base for the next five weeks. As Juma pulled into the station, he must have been struck by the difference between his destination and his hometown. The red soil, open expanses, and occasional rock outcroppings of the area around Dodoma are reminiscent of the American Southwest and would have contrasted sharply with cosmopolitan Zanzibar’s tropical beaches, swaying palm trees, and ornate stone architecture. But Dodoma was home to one of the fastest growing chapters in the organization and Juma was there to shore up the momentum of the AA’s leaders, and to help establish new branches in the region. During Juma’s time in Central Province, he traveled to Bahi, Kondoa-Irangi, and Mpwapwa where he met with chiefs, AA leaders, and British administrators. He even watched a soccer match and shared the Ramadan predawn daku meal with Shaaban Robert, the most famous Kiswahili poet of the twentieth century and a member of the African Association.Footnote ⁶ In his final week in Dodoma, he would also give a speech at a general meeting of the AA to a crowd of over 200 men and women when he oversaw the installation of four new women officers in the chapter.Footnote ⁷ Upon his return to Zanzibar, he would write to one of them, Martha Chunga, the Women’s Secretary, congratulating the women for being “the Guardians of our Nation” and wishing them luck as they helped bring unity to Africans and nurtured the Association.Footnote ⁸

But only a day after his arrival, he would be off again with Hassan Suleiman, Chief Adviser of the Dodoma chapter and his guide and companion for all his political stops. The destination was Iringa, a district capital in the neighboring Southern Highlands Province, and Juma and Suleiman left early on the morning of August 12 to make the 162-mile journey on the newly opened road service operated by the British government.Footnote ⁹ That evening Juma would make two speeches, the first was at the formal opening of the new AA chapter in Iringa, which was attended by the British District Officer, S. A. Walden, and Chief Adam Sapi Mkwawa, the paramount chief of the Hehe and future ally of the African Association.Footnote ¹⁰ Juma had words of praise for both Chief Adam Sapi and King George VI and he prayed that “God would continue to bless” the British monarch, and “grant him good health, strength, so that his flag to continue to fly everywhere.” He recognized that the Africans of the district were the trustees of the British and he hoped the British would continue to work with Africans to create justice and peace.Footnote ¹¹ These messages of loyalty to the British and a desire of partnership were quite common in the first two decades of the organization’s existence.

Later that evening, possibly after some of the dignitaries had left, Juma delivered a more consequential speech that more fully laid out the purpose and aims of the African Association. Speaking to a crowd of potential members and curious onlookers, Juma’s appearance undoubtedly made an impression that night. This speaker from a foreign country wearing Zanzibari finery with a billowing white kanzu gown and a finely embroidered kofia hat would have cut quite the image for the audience in Iringa that day, many of whom would have been dressed in a mix of Western and traditional attire. But it was the content of the message that was probably most remarkable for his listeners. Speaking in Kiswahili, long the lingua franca of the region, Juma used the theme of a rope to tie his message together by explaining that the:

Indeed, throughout his time in Tanganyika, this Zanzibari repurposed the Swahili concept of indigeneity (uwenyeji) to convince black Africans that they belonged to an African nation of people no matter where they went. For instance, in Kondoa-Irangi where the chapter’s Vice-President, Khalfan Mayagilo, had resigned because he felt “the indigenous (wenyeji) of this city” did not want him and other “foreigners (wageni)” leading the chapter. Juma rebuked all the members by retorting that he was “surprised to hear that the locals here in Kondoa say that you, Mwalimu Khalfan, are a foreigner in this Africa. I came from Unguja today, [and] I say that I am an indigenous person (mweyeji) here and anywhere else in this Africa (Afrika hii).”Footnote ¹³ In fact, he began his speech in Iringa by stating emphatically that the African Association was “the Fellowship of the indigenous of Africa.”Footnote ¹⁴

To the gathered Africans in Iringa, he promoted the continental and global vision of the organization – to bring together all people of African origin – by bragging that a leader of the AA had gone to the West Indies “where there are millions of Africans” to spread the Association there and that they also hoped to start chapters in Asia where members were stationed during the war. On the continent, he said the Association would bring back together all Africans “from North to South, from East to West of Africa.”Footnote ¹⁵ The purpose of uniting Africans across the continent was to reclaim a shared past and to claim, and build, a shared civilization as a great people; but that was not possible unless they first unified under the direction of the AA. Even though a grand future was envisioned where Africans would play a more prominent role on the global stage, Juma made clear that the first steps were intimately local as the members of the Association were to help out other Africans with their practical everyday needs.Footnote ¹⁶

Towards the end of the Iringa speech, Juma returned to and reemphasized the importance of promoting an African identity above all others and the concept of belonging to an African nation. “The African Association stands because of the building of the African nation (kulijenga ya taifa la wa Africa) which has been divided into different pieces.” He went on to try and subvert ethnic thinking by claiming that “the African Association is not looking for any one tribe, or the best tribe, but it teaches people that their tribe is African.” He pleaded with his audience to respect and love the people of Africa and to be proud of the color of their skin, and closed by exhorting them, “people of Iringa take the rope to Malangali, Mahenge, Songea, Mbeya, Chunya, Tukuyu, Nyasaland, and Northern Rhodesia with all your strength.”Footnote ¹⁷

The most noteworthy aspect of Juma’s Iringa speech, and his trans-territorial political journey more generally, was the way in which he intentionally tried to inculcate and spread an African identity, an identity that was to be given greater loyalty above and beyond any other identity – ethnic, territorial, or religious. Not only does this challenge the way histories of the African Association have been written but it also complicates the historical narrative of the rise of African identity in East Africa, which has tended to see the African identity as a reaction to colonial administrators’ racial categories and the negative ramifications of being “African” in colonial East Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, the story of the African Association demonstrates how a group of Africans, which was connected to global circuits of pan-African thinking, proactively endeavored to create an African identity by touting the benefits of racial association and by inspiring would-be Africans of a promising future together as a great civilization of people. The African Association aimed to invite all black people (watu weusi), or the indigenous people of Africa, to use Juma’s phrase, to help them build the African nation.

One of the central questions driving Building the African Nation is how did an African identity come to have personal or political purchase in East Africa? As a study at the crossroads of intellectual, political, and social history, I trace how these East African activists, political thinkers, and entrepreneurs encountered racial ideas, grappled with them, embraced them, reconfigured them, and then promoted them in their particular contexts – the cities, towns, and rural areas where the organization worked. In the end, the appeal of joining the African Association and embracing an African identity to one degree or another was either due to a desire to obtain the practical benefits of belonging in order to navigate life in colonial East Africa or by being inspired by the redemptive message of an African nation. Oftentimes it was a combination of the two.

Using the lens of intellectual history to tell the story of the African Association enables a prioritization of the thoughts and ideas of the historical actors themselves and not what later politicians and scholars assumed were their motivations.Footnote ¹⁹ In doing so, it becomes clear that the political imaginations of these East Africans were both larger and smaller than the colonial territories in which they lived.Footnote ²⁰ In fact, for over two decades these activists consistently eschewed territorial thinking. Their vision was both continental, as they sought to create a great civilization of African people, and local, as they believed a central outcome of African unity was to help individuals and local communities in their everyday affairs. But the leaders of the AA also sought to work with allies, including the British, in order to help build the African nation. Thus, the tale of these pan-Africanists challenges and complicates the political histories of twentieth-century East Africa, which have assumed that the only political stories were ones of anti-colonial territorial nationalism and anti-imperialist pan-Africanism.

The African Association and Nationalist Histories of Tanganyika and Zanzibar

For generations the political histories of Africa have been dominated by the narratives of resistance, the stories of rebellion, and the tales of black power movements defeating, or attempting to defeat, the colonial and postcolonial imperial threats to Africans. The overarching story that tied these histories together was explaining the triumph of nation building. The need was to tell national and international histories of how anti-colonial territorial nationalist movements, armed with the ideology of Pan-Africanism and aided by the solidarity of partners willing to fight in the name of African unity, defeated imperial regimes and created new nation-states that were sovereign and independent. These histories stood in sharp contrast to earlier histories of Africa that focused on European agency in the continent, and these scholars’ contributions have been immense as many of their insights remain remarkably valuable today.

Nonetheless, in the last two decades several scholars have demonstrated that those histories were not the only movements and struggles that inspired the political imaginations of Africans during the age of empire and the postcolonial period. Philip Zachernuk, looking at West African intellectuals, lamented that virtually all African intellectual thought was treated as part of the inevitable growth of nationalist consciousness and was judged according to the nationalist paradigm. Any ideas that did not fit that mold were ignored or cut from the record.Footnote ²¹ By carefully combing through vernacular sources, a number of East African scholars such as Derek Peterson, Emma Hunter, Jonathon Earle, James Brennan, and Jonathon Glassman have more recently demonstrated how Africans cared about and worked within different political registers than territorially focused anti-colonial politics. Whether it was East African revivalists elaborating ethnic moral patriotism, Kichagga newspaper consumers grappling with local and global discourses about progress and citizenship, dissenting intellectuals reworking histories to contest the ideational kingdom of Buganda, or coastal elites arguing over the inclusionary limits of race and civilization in the Indian Ocean, they all revealed that political interests were not always focused on defeating imperialists and establishing sovereign states over the territories the Europeans had largely drawn up.Footnote ²²

Building and expanding on this body of literature, I use the story of the African Association and its complex relationship to nationalism to promote a more nuanced way to understand the phenomenon of nationalism in Africa. Embedded into my narrative are several subtle critiques of aspects of the nationalist historiography of African history. Instead of judging the success of the organization by the yardstick of contributions to a future anti-colonialist nationalist cause, I investigate the accomplishments and failures of the various actors based on their own intentions and aims.Footnote ²³ With this, I avoid the tendency to assume that all early twentieth-century political history was anti-colonial nationalist history. This assumption has elsewhere resulted in the practice of shoehorning all political actors and movements into nationalist stories and teleologies, and labeling them as pre- or proto-nationalists. But the figures of the AA do not comfortably fit into this mold. Similarly, I avoid the common binaries found in much of the literature between metropole and colony, and resistors and collaborators. The labels of resistor or collaborator discount African conceptualizations of social reality as well as flatten the complexities of African political enterprises.Footnote ²⁴ Again, the figures of the AA do not fit comfortably into these molds. Meanwhile, a focus on the vertical relationship between metropole and colony has the tendency to reduce African political thought to mere reactions to colonial policies and initiative. Alternatively, I investigate the more creative aspects of African political thinking and its multiple sources from both inside and outside of the colonial borders.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, scholars of African political history have traditionally limited themselves to the periodization of colonialism or post-colonialism and restricted their analysis to incidents and explanations found within the territorial borders set up by colonial authorities. This study, therefore, intentionally seeks to put the African Association into their regional and global contexts, while simultaneously looking for deep antecedents in the precolonial period, and then tracing the effects of their ideas into the postcolonial period.

Building the African Nation also endeavors to use clarity and consistency in the use of terminology, which has been frustratingly inconsistent in much nationalist historiography. The terms “nation,” “nation-state,” and “nationalism” often get conflated and confused by scholars. A nation most simply is a grouping of people, an imagined community with a perceived shared past and future, and deserving of loyalty and commitment, while nationalism comes in many stripes – political, territorial, cultural, economic, and religious, among others. The aim of political nationalism is to create a politically sovereign state ruled by the people (the nation), while territorial nationalism more narrowly describes the desire for that state to control the demarcated homeland of the nation. Cultural nationalism, however, is not necessarily interested in institutions of statehood, but emphasizes cultural achievements and aspirations in hopes of encouraging national pride and loyalty and a sense of belonging to a great nation.Footnote ²⁶ What most scholars of nationalism in twentieth-century Africa have been interested in then is what should properly be labeled as anti-colonial territorial nationalism, as they highlighted the desires of colonial subjects to liberate themselves from colonial rule and create nation-states within demarcated territorial boundaries, most of which aligned with the colonial political boundaries. However, not all nationalists in Africa were anti-colonial nor did they promote the territorial identities or geographic spaces largely created by imperial governments.Footnote ²⁷

When looking at the histories written about the AA since the end of empire, it is clear that they have been consistently swept up into the nationalist narratives of nation building. In the literature on Tanganyika, they have been seen as the forefathers of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the anti-colonial territorial nationalist group that came to power in 1961, while scholars of Zanzibari nationalism have seen the AA as the foundation of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) that came to power in Zanzibar after the Revolution of 1964. Indeed, the African Association has often been paraded as the proto-nationalist group par excellence in the historical literature.Footnote ²⁸ And yet, for many years the members of the AA were interested in a different kind of nation building. Their founders and leaders were not interested in building up a Tanganyikan nation, or Zanzibari nation, or Kenyan or Ugandan; indeed like Saleh Juma, they implored East Africans to ignore, and in some cases reject, those identities. For over two decades the nation they wished to build was an African nation. At the same time, they lacked any discussion of desires for statehood or political sovereignty. Instead, theirs was a racial and continental vision that was moral and civilizational, but also intimately useful. Thus, even though “African nationalism” has been shorthand for political and territorial nationalism in colonial Africa, the African Association constitutes a group for which “African nationalism” had a very different meaning. Strictly speaking, they were African nationalists, even though this is not a story of anti-colonial territorial nationalism.

For too long scholars looking at the political histories of either Tanganyika or Zanzibar have overlooked the fact that the organization had chapters in another territory, and in some cases have explicitly ignored this reality in an attempt to show the unique contribution of the nationalist party they were studying. Further complicating the story was that the two independent states of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged in 1964 to create the United Republic of Tanzania. Despite the creation of a single new nation-state and the fact that the two nationalist political parties – TANU and the ASP – merged to become the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), which still rules today, most of the scholarship was written as if an imaginary wall was erected down the Zanzibar Channel and authors were only concerned with the development of politics within either the mainland or the islands. The problem is that one cannot fully understand the intentions of a trans-territorial organization without examining the cross-fertilization of thought that goes on between members in various locales, and how the movement of ideas affected the outlook and aims of its constituents’ various agendas.

Part of the limitations of previous histories of the African Association stems from the territorial nature in which historians approached their archival work and the translation of their sources. Even the best histories on the AA have only looked at material housed in either the mainland or the islands and did not read the sources from both locales comparatively together, perpetuating the shortcomings of understanding a trans-territorial organization through territorial lenses.Footnote ²⁹ One problem this manifested was the tendency to assume that words like “nation” in English were referring to a single colonial territory. However, statements made by AA leaders that they did not want “to bring shame to the nation,” or that the Association promoted advancement for “the whole nation,” need to be read in light of the fact that they were uttered by both Tanganyikans and Zanzibaris simultaneously and in the presence of one another, and thus the authors may not have been referring to a particular colony or nation-state.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, by looking carefully at the context and the uses of the Kiswahili term “taifa” (which is often translated into English as nation), Building the African Nation will show that most often during the 1930s and 1940s, the Association’s leaders used the term in reference to an imagined African racial nation, and not the particular territories of Tanganyika or Zanzibar.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, by not reading the materials from across the Zanzibar Channel in tandem, one is more likely to see the intellectual growth of these African intellectuals as mere reactions to other groups’ ideas or territorial issues, missing out on the opportunity to understand the rich history of the cross-fertilization of thought across the region, and indeed the globe, that this book explores.Footnote ³²

Africa: Identity, Race, and Nation

Building the African Nation also contributes new insights and points of discussion for historical debates surrounding African identity, the idea of Africa, and the African nation. Here too, the scholarship on these topics share a lack of clarity of terms, emphasize structuralist and reactionist arguments, and are conceptually limited by territorial focuses. The idea of “Africa” originated in the Greco-Roman world when the Romans called one of their provinces by that name, but at some point began referring to any person coming from south of the Mediterranean, regardless of skin color, Afer or African.Footnote ³³ However, according to Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe, as the idea of Africa developed over the centuries in the West it came to be understood more and more through the paradigm of difference and otherness, as the civilizational foil to Europe and encompassing the entire continent. By the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment period, the “dark continent” of Africa came to be seen as barbaric and backward and its inhabitants placed at the bottom of new racial hierarchies.Footnote ³⁴ It was at this time in the late 1700s and 1800s, however, that an African identity came to be embraced by people whose descendants came from the continent. Most of the scholarship that has looked at this construction of an African identity has focused primarily on how it developed in reaction to the negative shared experiences among Africans of the diaspora who were drawn together by the violent encounter of slavery, oppression, bondage, and suffering. For Achille Mbembe, the desire for a racial community and identity among people of African descent was born from a memory of loss and a feeling of separation.Footnote ³⁵ Studies looking at the formation of an African identity within the continent in the twentieth century have similarly focused on it as reactionist or oppositional, either as an outgrowth of colonial racial structures, the struggle against the colonial system, or in comparing one’s group to other racial or continentally defined groups.Footnote ³⁶ Kadiatu Kanneh’s survey of the twentieth-century literary works on the topic posits that “African-ness” only achieves “coherence in opposition to the (White) West.”Footnote ³⁷ Many of these arguments are compelling as undoubtedly these horrible circumstances served to create bonds and connections among those who saw themselves connected to Africa.

However, not all African identities were born out of a negative shared past, as some were forged by uplifting visions of its future and potential. In James Sidbury’s book, Becoming African in America, he sets out to understand how writers, preachers, and poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reclaimed an “African” identity from whites who usually used the term in a derogatory way. In looking at the earliest proponents of this identity in late-colonial America, he similarly argued that the identity took much of its meaning from the Middle Passage and the common experience of slavery. However, he moves on to show how in choosing an African identity (and not the more widely used “negroes” or “blacks”) that it could be fashioned as a badge of pride and unity, and entailed a positive vision of the role for the people of Africa in the future of the world. Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, along with abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano, as well as leaders of the African Church Movement helped to construct a filiative identity for African people around the world by drawing on biblical history and promises. Not only had African peoples achieved great things in the biblical narrative but verses such as Psalm 68:31b, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God,” also inspired them that God promised to use the people of Ethiopia (which they equated with all Africa) to once again do great things as soon as they unified and sought God’s guidance.Footnote ³⁸ St. Claire Drake referred to this mode of thought as Ethiopianism, which produced an intense desire for the redemption of Africa through African unity and the creation of a new Africa. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, the Ethiopianist tradition would gain adherents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well, and those attracted to this message came from both within and outside the Christian Church. These thinkers, writers, and activists expanded on the greatness of Africa’s past or future to bind people to an African identity and the cause of regeneration and redemption of its people.Footnote ³⁹

Building the African Nation takes this scholarship in two new directions. First, I show how the construction of an African identity, and calls for African unity, were sometimes built on inspiring and positive views of Africa’s past and future, and were not just in reaction to negative circumstances. Second, I demonstrate how the specific ideas of Ethiopianism, and especially its vision of redemption, influenced the political thought of twentieth-century East Africans. While it is tempting to see the idea of Africa as solely a European creation, it has been pointed out that African intellectuals also “invented” Africa.Footnote ⁴⁰ By coming to very different conclusions about history, these Africans envisioned a positive position for their place in the world and a novel imagining of Africa’s future. Prominent East African author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has similarly talked about how Africans appropriated the idea of Africa for their own ends. Even though Africa was originally the product of the West’s system of self-representation, he writes, “I prefer to think of the idea of Africa – or, more appropriately, the ‘African idea,’ as African self-representation. To distinguish it from the Mudimbeist formula according to which Europe is finding itself through its invention of Africa, I see the African idea as that which was forged in the diaspora and traveled back to the continent.”Footnote ⁴¹

But once the African idea was brought to Africa, often through black intellectuals, one still has to answer George Shepperson’s question of how did the indigenous people of Africa adopt this concept and make it their own?Footnote ⁴² Even though the meaning of Africa as a concept and a place may have been shaped more by diasporic Africans,Footnote ⁴³ we also need to recognize that much of this reimagining happened within the continent by continental Africans themselves who intentionally tried to shape and reshape spaces and identities. In this vein, we have to understand the local debates about theories of race and nation if we want to understand how African identities were contested and became meaningful.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ultimately, I am interested in the ways in which the transformative power of an African identity in East Africa led to new ideas and action, as it did elsewhere in the continent and the diaspora.Footnote ⁴⁵

It needs to be pointed out that the construction of an African identity in East Africa is very much a twentieth-century tale. Simply put, before this time there were no “Africans” in the region, at least none that identified as such. Works that touched on identity in precolonial nineteenth-century East Africa, such as Thomas McDow’s, have displayed a whole range of terms used to identify some of those who would later see themselves as Africans. The Arab traders and landed elite would sometimes refer to indigenous up-country Africans as Nyamwezi (a catchall phrase for non-Arabs near the central trading town of Kazeh), washenzi (barbarians), wanyika (from the up-country scrubland), or makhádim (serviles); in turn many of these people rejected these terms and preferred to identify as waungwana (gentlemen), waSwahili, or watu wa mrima (the people of the coast), whether they actually came from the more urbane and cosmopolitan coast or not. During this period, many of the indigenous Kiswahili speakers of the coast preferred to identify with their town or clan names such as WaAmu or WaPate.Footnote ⁴⁶ There were certainly many ethnic, tribal, or clan identities used before the arrival of the Europeans, but the self-identification of waAfrika (Africans) or watu wa Afrika (people of Africa) does not appear in the record until the twentieth century,Footnote ⁴⁷ and thus when groups like the African Association began to use these terms along with watu weusi, it was quite new.Footnote ⁴⁸

The use of an African identity is also related to the concepts of race and an African nation. James Brennan’s work has been foundational for understanding the relationship between the concepts. Brennan demonstrates how in colonial Dar es Salaam the use of the term “taifa” captured and conflated the notions of an African race and nation and he therefore translates it as “racio-nation.” The flourishing of this discursive term and mode of thought was historically contingent, and Brennan sees its rise as a mix of local intellectual production and instrumental response to the colonial administrative system, which had a clear racial hierarchical order. While the preferred term “African” eventually replaced “native,” and it paid to speak the language of government, Brennan emphasized the relational ties created by shifting debates about natives and newcomers as well as socioeconomic experiences in colonial Dar, which had implications for access to property, employment, and respect. Brennan has acknowledged the importance of the Gold Coast educator, James Aggrey, in promoting the commonsensical view that anyone who had black skin or originated from the African continent belonged to the African nation of people, which was interchangeable with the idea of the African race. Aggrey’s contribution in the 1920s was key as his ideas could be traced to later debates in the Swahiliphone press. Brennan has also pointed to two leaders of the Dar es Salaam Chapter of the African Association whom he believed also contributed to conversations about the civilizational aspirations of the African people in the capital in the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁹

While I agree with many of Brennan’s conclusions and his overall interpretation, (especially the importance of Aggrey), Building the African Nation employs a different lens to understand the growth of African identity in the region and emphasizes different aspects of the story of “kujenga taifa,” or building the nation. First and foremost Brennan is primarily concerned with “the story of how a particular African racial identity formed and came to provide the guiding assumptions of nationalism in Tanzania.” Indeed, these debates later shaped the racial recruitment of TANU and he correctly credits these ideas for helping Tanzania to create one of the most durable and successful national identities in the continent.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the end of the day, though, his focus is on “how intellectual convictions to realize the African taifa (race/nation) shaped the political history of Tanganyikan nationalism, both within the urban space of Dar es Salaam and the legal space of the country’s national citizenship laws.”Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, Brennan is still very much working within the same framework of previous nationalist historians, and though his work is novel for integrating Indians into the story, he is still primarily working within the colonial boundaries of Tanganyika, and even more narrowly Dar es Salaam.Footnote ⁵²

Like Brennan, Building the African Nation is interested in intellectual production at the local level but it is also interested in how local ideas interfaced with global intellectual production by focusing on the intellectual history of a globally minded, trans-territorial organization. Even though this lens has its own limitations, it can simultaneously show how there was an organizational intention to systematically spread ideas about race and African identity, and expand the field of vision more widely to understand the currents of these concepts more deeply. By more comprehensively exploring the role that the AA played in expanding racial thinking in East Africa, it also reinforces the importance of looking beyond mere structuralist approaches that see racial identity as solely a reaction to the colonial system, and understanding how Africans constructed their ideas on race and why it mattered to them.Footnote ⁵³ More than mere reactions to colonial administrators or economic experiences, leaders of the African Association were influenced by global black thought and were proactively trying to build a sense of unity based on a novel “African” identity that they found inspiring. Certainly, civilizational notions about the future of an African nation of people held more meaning for AA leaders than European conceptions of race. Like other East Africans, they were less interested in genetic traits or the biological aspects of race Europeans seemed to care about. Indeed, the term “race” is essentially unused between the members of the AA in the 1920s–1940s. Even though there are around a dozen instances when the correspondence of the AA explicitly used the term “race,” and they did use the idea of an African race interchangeably with an African nation, the majority of these were letters sent to European administrators and were always written in English.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Kiswahili term for race “mbegu” is wholly lacking in the Kiswahili correspondence between AA members, while at the same time there are dozens of references in both English and Kiswahili to the concepts that seemed to inspire them more – the nation of Africa and the unity of black people around the world.Footnote ⁵⁵

The African Association and New Directions in Pan-African History

The historiography of pan-Africanism shares many traits with the writing on nationalism in Africa. There are disagreements over definitions and periodization. There is a lack of consensus over which stories and actors should be included in the cannon, and these decisions are often driven by various teleologies that try to place actors neatly onto straight narrative trajectories. There are also arguments over the nature of pan-Africanism. Was/is it primarily political or cultural? A movement or a practice? A philosophy or a religion? An idea or reality? Lastly, like histories of African politics, themes of liberation, resistance, and anti-imperialism have dominated academic discourse. This began with the influential writing of C. L. R. James in the late 1930s and has continued right up to the present.Footnote ⁵⁶ Building the African Nation locates these early-twentieth-century East African pan-Africanists within these debates, but more importantly it argues for the need to create more inclusive and clear ways to talk about pan-Africanism that can more nimbly move between geographical and temporal spaces.

One of the earliest scholars to try and systematically understand pan-Africanism, Imanuel Geiss, argued that “it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in modern history, but also one of the hardest to pin down.” Indeed, his own definition included three different forms that played out on six different planes.Footnote ⁵⁷ Writing many years later, Peter Olisanwuche Esedebe listed at least seven components of pan-Africanism.Footnote ⁵⁸ The most recent comprehensive history of Pan-Africanism by Hakim Adi narrows it down to two main strands or periods – one during the trans-Atlantic slave era and one during the anti-colonial struggle – and he argues that what tied both strands together was the desire for the social, economic, cultural, and political emancipation and liberation of all African peoples, including those of the diaspora.Footnote ⁵⁹ But as will be demonstrated, more narrow definitions like Adi’s exclude individuals and groups that were most certainly pan-Africanists. Therefore, I promote using the most simple and inclusive definition and then discussing the many expressions of pan-Africanism. Drawing on Esedebe, I see pan-Africanism as a belief and a desire. It is the belief that all Africans and peoples of African descent share a common bond, and that this imagined communion should inculcate a desire to create unity among all Africans. These feelings of solidarity and a desire to unify have had many expressions throughout history and have taken many forms – political, cultural, and economic. It has led to movements and ideologies, as well as informed cultural practices and values. Pan-Africanism has also shaped, and been shaped by, religious beliefs and has led to new interpretations about the past and the future.

The expression of pan-Africanism that has garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention is the movement for the political emancipation and unification of the continent. This is sometimes referred to as Pan-Africanism with a capital P and was considered a coordinated unification movement seeking to overthrow political structures that subjugated people of African descent.Footnote ⁶⁰ Just as scholars have been engrossed by narratives of political nationalism, the historians of pan-Africanism too have been preoccupied with the anti-colonial elements. Most scholars have utilized a chronology that looks at the unfolding of pan-Africanism in either “phases” or “stages” moving towards a climax of anti-colonial radicalism and nationalism. Scholars such as Geiss, Crowder, Moses, and Adi have thus referred to those figures like Olaudah Equiano, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and J. E. Casely Hayford who were not trying to overcome imperial systems as “forerunners” and “proto-Pan-Africanists,” suggesting that the “pre-history of Pan-Africanism” ended only with the formation of the Pan-African Congresses in the 1900s (especially the Manchester Congress of 1945) or in 1958 with the All-Africa’s Peoples Conference in Accra if they saw territorial nationalism as the first step towards the political unification of the whole continent.Footnote ⁶¹ For instance, writing on Tanganyika, Joseph Nye Jr. argued that Julius Nyerere only became interested in pan-Africanism after the foundation of TANU in the mid-1950s and that it was not a social force in the territory until after the independence of Ghana in 1957.Footnote ⁶² But this fixation on anti-colonialism and the push for African statehood has sometimes distorted our understanding of the history of pan-Africanism and has produced several blind spots in the literature. It has also meant that some individuals and groups who were pan-Africanists have either fit awkwardly in these narratives or been left out altogether.

One major stumbling block to being inducted into the pantheon of pan-African heroes has been positive views of aspects of the British Empire. With the reverence for anti-imperialism among most scholars of pan-Africanism, crucial figures such as Blyden, Henry Sylvester Williams, Aggrey, and others, have been faulted or were left out of these stories for long periods of time. But the complicated reality was that “the Father of Pan-Africanism” (Blyden), the person who arguably coined the term pan-Africanism and established the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 (Williams), and the first continental celebrity and most prominent proponent of African unity in the continent in the 1920s (Aggrey), all appreciated and promoted certain elements of British imperialism in Africa.Footnote ⁶³ Therefore, we need frameworks that can account for elements of both imperial appreciation and pan-African promotion, which is otherwise denied by a scholarship that sees the anti-imperial expression of African unity as the only true form of pan-Africanism. For many pan-Africanists around the turn of the twentieth century, their project was to transform empire and not to escape it, and we need to examine what they actually said, wrote, and did, and not what postcolonial logics of the twenty-first century would have presumed they should have said.Footnote ⁶⁴

Building the African Nation explores two understudied expressions of pan-Africanism that are not tied to anti-imperialism – practical pan-Africanism and redemptive pan-Africanism. Practical pan-Africanism refers to the way in which Africans and people of African descent sought to build unity in order to help each other out in their everyday lives.Footnote ⁶⁵ This could be financial assistance during times of distress or to fund economic endeavors; or it could be aiding in disputes with landlords or other legal cases. Sometimes it might be unifying voices when making appeals to local governments to pass laws that would benefit African communities. In fact, pan-African visions have almost always been accompanied by helping to fulfill the practical needs of people involved in pan-African associations and their communities. This form of African assistance goes back to the trans-Atlantic commercial enterprises of Paul Cuffee in the early 1800s and the endeavors of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1900s to provide economic outlets for people of color such as laundry services, grocery stores, or a millinery shop.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even those known for more radical forms of pan-Africanism also promoted the practical elements of African unity. For instance, the influential Guyanese T. Ras Makonnen who lived in England during the 1930s and 1940s and helped found the Pan-African Federation and organize the Fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester invested in African-run restaurants and clubs, and the Federation used its money to support the legal fees of Nigerian and Somali sailors. They also set up the Pan-African Publishing Company, helped fund a children’s home for children of color, and worked with black migrants. Makonnen reflected that “all of it was to show that as people of African origin we were determined to stand by each other. This was as important an aspect of pan-Africanism as the formal conference which was held now and then.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The African Association of East Africa also saw practical pan-Africanism as a central platform of their attempts to create African unity. Assisting in land disputes, improving local hospitals, increasing educational opportunities for Africans, serving as the voice of Africans to local governments, and mediating disputes were all forms of African unity that attracted members to the organization and was a central vision of many of its leaders.Footnote ⁶⁸

The second expression of pan-Africanism explored in this book is what I am calling “redemptive pan-Africanism” based on forms of Ethiopianist thought mentioned briefly earlier and examined more fully in Chapter 1. Like many storylines in African history, Ethiopianism has been swept up into the anti-colonial nationalist narrative as Africanists have been most interested in Ethiopianism as a separatist church movement, and not as a form of thought, because African denominational separatism in the late 1890s and early 1900s in Africa seemed like the foreshocks of the later earthquakes of anti-colonial nationalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ But when looking at the ideas of Ethiopianism, a central element is a belief in a better future, that Africa and its people will one day be regenerated or redeemed and do great things on the world stage. These ideas can be traced back to the precolonial period and throughout the period of European imperialism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Elements of Ethiopianist thought can also be found in the discussions over the “African Renaissance” declared by Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki at the close of the twentieth century, which continue to be debated by Africans well into the twenty-first.Footnote ⁷¹ Building the African Nation focuses on how elements of Ethiopianism and redemptive pan-Africanism inspired East Africans in the early twentieth century – well before Manchester or the anti-colonial pan-Africanism of the 1950s – and how they grappled with and refashioned these ideas, and ultimately how such ideas continued to influence the postcolonial thinking of Julius Nyerere, the most famous member of the African Association.

African Intellectual History and the Boundaries of Time and Space

As discussed earlier, there have been significant drawbacks to traditional political histories that have restricted their scope of analysis to the colonial boundaries of time and space – limiting their studies to either the colonial or postcolonial periods and narrowly focusing on one territory or the other. Building the African Nation is built on the belief in the need to use frameworks that are not hindered by such boundaries, and has therefore taken a global intellectual history approach that best enables us to follow ideas and their impact in various contexts. Even though intellectual history is often associated with studies of the towering figures of Western European thought such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, or J. S. Mill, African intellectual history as a subdiscipline has been around for several decades and is growing in new directions. In his overview, Jonathon Earle defines the subfield of the intellectual history of Africa as being “concerned with understanding how communities in the past understood and debated the spaces they inhabited, and how discourses circulated and changed over time.”Footnote ⁷² Early on in the postcolonial period, scholars interested in African intellectual history felt hamstrung by a perceived lack of sources, and focused on how the African educated elites translated European thought among Africans. But new sources and new approaches have opened up new avenues and eventually four areas of African intellectual history have emerged: histories of precolonial knowledge, studies on ethnicity and moral economies, explorations of gender discourse and domesticity in Africa, and, most recently, the growth of global intellectual history among scholars interested in the exchange of ideas between continental Africans and the rest of the world.

Growing out of its roots in social history, scholars of African intellectual history have long been committed to fighting the Eurocentric currents that dominated histories of Africa during the age of imperialism. This inclination can also be found among the twenty-first-century scholars interested in applying global intellectual history approaches to African history. There is also a related desire for the need to further understand Africa’s role in world history and how connections outside the continent shaped African history. In this vein, Sir Christopher Bayly called for the further development of global, or at least transnational, intellectual histories as intellectual historians in America and Europe had rarely ventured beyond the Western world, and historians of Asia and Africa tended to only work on national or regional issues.Footnote ⁷³ In their 2013 edited volume, Global Intellectual History, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori tried to give structure to the emerging field and to delineate some of its advantages and limitations and they arrived at a simple inclusive definition of the subdiscipline as any “intellectual history extending across geographical parameters far larger than usual.” Important to this endeavor is that any global intellectual history model must be tailored to the temporal or geographical spaces across which concepts or ideas appeared. Building the African Nation largely follows the model of looking at intermediaries, translations, and networks, and is concerned with tracing the conceptual connections between different locales and understanding the circulation of ideas and the material mechanisms by which they moved from place to place. By focusing on these networks, and their “far-flung knowledge brokers,” we can better understand how concepts or ideologies develop, move, and get reshaped when they encounter local ideas and realities.Footnote ⁷⁴

This study recognizes the limitations of certain elements of global intellectual history, and it is not searching for ideas that fit a truly “global” framework, nor is it interested in understanding the growth and movement of ideas in the abstract. However, Building the African Nation is written with the assumption that historical actors worked in multiple frameworks – ethnic, gender, religious, national, regional, and global – and thus we have to seek to understand the interplay between these dimensions and how historical actors mediated between the trans-regional and the local, or other frameworks.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is crucial to explore not only how the circulation of ideas shaped thought but also how those new political ideas inspired action and shaped social or political realities on the ground.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this sense, all good intellectual history that is concerned with cause and effect relationships, and not just the philosophy of ideas, should be sociocultural and/or political history at the same time, because when historical actors seek a deeper understanding of their changing place in the world, it almost always affects their be-ing in the world.Footnote ⁷⁷

Intellectual history is also well suited to address the dilemma of trying to analyze historical actors who had scant regard for political borders and did not fit neatly into national modes of historical writing.Footnote ⁷⁸ It also helps address the challenge of reconstructing the history of the AA, whose members disparaged colonial borders for many years and had political imaginations that were global in scope, but whose own material and intellectual reach was actually much smaller. Thus, a global intellectual history approach focused on a network of ideas and how those ideas led to action is best equipped to study the African Association and the phenomenon of the growth of African identity in East Africa more widely. I try to follow the various circuits of ideas throughout by focusing the lens wider or narrower as necessary, being sure to pay attention to shifts in language and changes over time due to developments in local, territorial, regional, or global contexts. In following the trail of ideas, it has led me to archival research in nine countries in four regions, substantiating Christopher Hill’s remark that “the boundaries of a given topic in global intellectual history will not always be clear at the beginning of the project and will have to be refined during research.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But I have also tried to not treat ideas of “Africa” as a singular package that has just been passed around the globe, but have attempted to be mindful about how its parameters shifted to fit changing needs, and how even within a group like the AA there were differences over the implications of such ideas between members, and between leaders and the rank and file. It is best to see the organization as an arena of discursive dialogue.Footnote ⁸⁰ For instance, while men and women worked together in the AA, members of the two genders were sometimes at odds with each other as to what belonging to an African union entailed and what initiatives should be pursued. This made meetings contested spaces where there were differences over what being African should entail.

As Chapter 6 shows most poignantly, ideas also morph with changing times and as new individuals with their own disparate intellectual backgrounds engage with the ideas. Moreover, ideas that have political implications, such as African identity, are partly formulated through the very process of political action. The logistics of political organization forces leaders of groups to put their theories into practice, and, as a result, ideas are occasionally reformulated in medias res, while at other times underlying ideologies are reinforced or come into sharper focus through the achievements or challenges of political practice.Footnote ⁸¹ Thus, to comprehend how the political imaginations of the leaders of the African Association developed throughout the organization’s three-decade-long existence, and the growth and movement of political thought in Africa more generally, it is necessary to understand the many intellectual currents that leaders drew from, as well as how such ideas were molded by the various, and at times variant, views of its many individual members. Moreover, one also has to take into consideration how the process, the very mechanics of political organization, reinforced and refashioned leaders’ ideas and led to ever-changing structures and initiatives.

There are other limitations and benefits of a larger-frame African intellectual history that affect the treatment of sources and methods used in writing this book. First, unlike literary scholars interested in African identity who settle for “implicit dialogue between dispersed times and places,”Footnote ⁸² every attempt has been made to find evidence that actually ties individuals to certain ideas – sometimes more successfully than others – and not just assume that similarities or analogous ideas across time and space have a direct connection. This involves finding evidence for what historical actors actually read, or linking them to people or events where particular ideas were shared, or maybe even finding an acknowledgment of influence. Tracing specific connections has been the aim.Footnote ⁸³ Second, because intellectual history is concerned with how people made sense of the world, it is not limited to just elites or writers but includes subalterns or everyday people as well. In recent years, though, there has been a tendency in African intellectual history to shy away from the major authors who are seen as detached and focus on peasant intellectuals or more localized debates.Footnote ⁸⁴ The issue of African identity, however, cut across social classes in East Africa and Building the African Nation seeks to transcend the elite–subaltern divide by doing both in-depth textual analysis and intellectual biographies of the major thinkers connected to the African Association – James Aggrey, Paul Sindi Seme, and Julius Nyerere – while also trying to comprehend how the rank and file understood, contested, and used these ideas.Footnote ⁸⁵ To do this, I have relied heavily on the Kiswahili material of the Hassan Suleiman Papers housed in the Tanzanian National Archives. Unlike the largely Anglophone correspondence with the colonial secretariat, which is what most scholars have relied on when writing about the AA, the Suleiman Papers were the records the AA kept for themselves and are filled with correspondence between members, meeting minutes, and membership application forms. These materials, though with their own limitations, give insights into what everyday members complained about to leaders, or what illiterate members spoke up about in meetings captured by branch secretaries, or insights into who was joining and why. As Jonathon Glassman reminds us, “indigenous intellectuals spoke to one another more than they addressed the colonial state or responded to its demands.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This study is attuned to these internal dialogues.

Lastly, a final advantage of an intellectual history approach is that it is not limited by the boundaries created by more traditional movement-focused histories. Studies of nationalism, pan-Africanism, and Ethiopianism have often focused on these phenomena as movements, with their own beginning and end points and with emphases on the factors of their rise and fall. However, the ideas that influenced these movements often outlasted the movements themselves and continued to have influence even if the formal movements failed. As noted earlier, Ethiopianist thought contributed more than just inspiration to the “proto-nationalist” movement in Western and Southern Africa, but its ideas also shaped African identity in East Africa and beyond. Similarly, movement-focused histories of pan-Africanism have tended to only care about how it succeeded in or failed to achieve certain goals or contributed to other movements. Attention was more on official timelines and major events and less on how it affected individuals and their communities.Footnote ⁸⁷ By following the twists and turns of particular ideas of pan-Africanism, it allows me to move more freely across the boundaries of periodization and better understand how ideas influenced social realities, before, during, and after a movement (however defined), ran its course.

Building the African Nation aims to move African intellectual history forward in two ways. First, it has been noted that almost all studies of trans-regional interaction between Africans and outsiders, especially members of the African diaspora, have focused on Western or Southern Africa.Footnote ⁸⁸ This book hopes to help bring East Africa more prominently into these conversations. Even though East Africans’ interactions with the West and diasporic Africans were far fewer in number during the mid twentieth century, they still had a significant impact on the region’s history, and we are learning more about the way East Africans shaped the outside world.Footnote ⁸⁹ Second, while global intellectual historians have demonstrated “how Africans re-worked European political ideas into local vernacular debates about the past, and how Africans have shaped the modern world,”Footnote ⁹⁰ far fewer major studies have looked at how global black political ideas have been reworked by Africans. While there is no such thing as pure black thought, as all modern political ideas are a mix of local and global discourses,Footnote ⁹¹ and the sources of the AAs’ political thought were many, the case study in this book traces how colonial East Africans, previously believed to have been largely closed off from non-European ideas from the outside, were actually intricately tied into circuits of black thinkers and writers who had shaped an oral and literary tradition on African identity since the 1700s.

Organization

The first two chapters set out to trace the multiple sources of influence on the African Association’s desire to build the African nation. Chapter 1 does this by focusing on the intellectual biography of James Aggrey, whose ideas had the greatest influence on the early leaders of the Association. Aggrey is a remarkable figure who was shaped by his trans-Atlantic life experience: the political milieu of Gold Coast politics at the end of the nineteenth century, his educational and vocational formation in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church in the American South, and his time in New York studying at Columbia and as a member of the influential Negro Society for Historical Research. All of these episodes shaped the man who went on two educational commissions sponsored by the Phelps Stokes Fund in 1920–1921 and 1924 to eighteen different colonial territories in western, central, southern and eastern Africa, and in the process became the first continental-wide African celebrity.Footnote ⁹² He was the very model of a “Black Atlantic” figure, though I prefer the term global black intellectual as he cannot be merely an Atlantic figure when so much of his impact was felt on the shores of the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁹³ Regardless, Aggrey helped directly tie East Africans in the 1920s into a network of black thought that shaped their understanding of African identity and their role in the continent’s past and future.

Chapter 2 traces the many other strands of influence on the nascent African Association, including encounters with South Asians, other East African political figures such as Harry Thuku and Akiki Nyabongo, and a random, but influential, engagement with an African-American named F. Burgess. Attention will also be given to lessons learned by some leaders in missionary schools and some of the local issues in Dar es Salaam that led to the group’s formal incorporation. Chapter 3 shows how the AA attempted to spread those ideas further and deeper into the interior of Africa by “learning the secrets of politics” and building a material circuit of ideas that they wished would expand to all Africans across the globe in whatever continent they lived. Indeed, the practical work of building the African nation came through the mastery of the postal system, the circulation of statute books and membership forms, and the creation of regional conferences. Special attention will be given to Paul Sindi Seme, the chief architect and popularizer of this vision of continental and global expansion. Seme was not only a prolific letter writer but also completed three manuscripts, two of which – the first history of East Africa written in an African language by an African (c. 1937), and a political memoir (1975) – give insight into how ideas of Ethiopianism and redemptive pan-Africanism captured the vision of this little-known pan-African intellectual and organizer in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chapters 4 and 5 seek to explore the lives of those who embraced the practical pan-Africanism of the Association and why they chose to embrace an organizationally based inclusive African identity. The first of these two chapters looks at the big picture of who was joining the AA by utilizing membership lists and application forms from several Tanganyikan chapters, and combining this evidence with biographical information about other known members of the AA. The reconstruction of the group’s demographic makeup provides surprising results. In the past, the AA has uniformly been branded as elitist, and an exclusive group of highbrow Western-educated figures.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, this chapter demonstrates that the inclusive appeal to any black African regardless of ethnicity, religion, education, wealth, gender, or territorial origin, produced a membership from a plethora of professional, educational, and social backgrounds as well as being ethnically and geographically diverse. In fact, the most commonly held trait between the members of the AA was not an educational or a religious one, but that a large percentage of them lived or had traveled outside their “native homeland” according to colonial terminology. By promising to be the sauti ya watu waafrika, the voice of the people of Africa, and creating a space where Africans could come and share their opinions and desires with each other as well as the ruling powers, the Association attracted those seeking solidarity in finding practical solutions to life in Indirect Rule Tanganyika or the culturally stratified Zanzibar Protectorate.Footnote ⁹⁵

The practical pan-Africanism of the African Association and the allure of an African identity proved enticing to the women of the region as well. Despite previous scholars’ claims that there were no women in the AA,Footnote ⁹⁶ from at least the early 1930s a significant percentage of several chapters’ membership was made up of women.Footnote ⁹⁷ While many men like Seme were inspired by the redemptive pan-Africanism of the AA, Chapter 5 argues that many of these entrepreneurial female activists found the AA most useful for their own purposes by helping them meet specific needs or accomplish personal or collective objectives. The most salient factor for women joining the organization was that it gave them access to governing authorities and a voice in the largely male-dominated political sphere. Thus, the practical pan-Africanism strain was often most enticing for the women who embraced an African identity for pragmatic purposes. As the chapter shows, however, this sometimes clashed with the civilizational aspirations of some male leaders who hoped to use the organization to discipline refractory women, protect their modesty, and reform African womanhood in the name of building the African nation. The Association was thus also an arena of contested gendered space, and this chapter unpacks some of the implications of this rare example of a mixed-gendered political organization in colonial Africa.

Chapter 6 demonstrates first how the AAs’ vision of unity and practical pan-Africanism required them to mediate and move between multiple fields of action – local, territorial, regional, and global. It then shows how this project was derailed as there was a territorial split in the organization and a turn towards territorial anti-colonialism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thus, contrary to seeing the African Association’s movement towards territorial political nationalism as a natural progression, I argue that this was simultaneously a rupture in the group’s thinking and a shrinking of vision. In fact, it was not a completely smooth road towards territorial nationalism, as the rejection of certain elements of the AA’s platform and the decisions to move in a new direction were contested and sometimes painful. This bolsters the claim by Frederick Cooper that pan-Africanism was more salient throughout the continent in the 1930s and 1940s than in the 1950s and that the later focus on territorial political units constituted “a narrowing of political imagination and political possibilities.”Footnote ⁹⁸ This chapter looks at the factors that led to the change of course for the AA in both Tanganyika and Zanzibar.

In order to elucidate how the ideas of the African Association were not limited by the colonial boundaries of time, Chapter 7 looks at some of the ways the AA’s ideas were reshaped and reused in the postcolonial period. It does this primarily by looking at the intellectual history of Julius Nyerere, who led the struggle for Uhuru and became prime minister and then president of Tanganyika and, following the merger with Zanzibar, Tanzania (r. 1961–1985). Because of the political stature of Nyerere as a global black intellectual, there have been many scholarly searches into the intellectual origins of his political philosophies and ideas. These histories have either focused on his upbringing in the cultural milieu of the rural Zanaki community in the 1920s and 1930s or have focused on his time studying the Western political cannon at the University of Edinburgh between 1949 and 1952. However, in the 1940s before leaving for Europe, Nyerere became an active member of the African Association when he was exposed to a number of currents of global African political thought. Ethiopianist ideas surrounding the redemption of Africa, as well as the AAs’ interests in practical pan-Africanism and their requirements of umoja, or African unity, shaped elements of Nyerere’s political thinking and can even be traced to postcolonial policies that he promoted. The chapter also explores his ideas surrounding an African identity and Africanness, or Uafrika, and highlights the inherent tension between projects of territorial nationalism and African nationalism.