A History of the Excluded — 2005 ·

Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania

By James L. Giblin

“A History of the Excluded is part of a recent trend in Africanist writing that does not celebrate the nation-state and nationalism, as an earlier optimistic historiography did, but rather sees them as a threatening presence that, connected to a global economy, brings poverty and insecurity.”

International Journal of African Historical Studies

“By charting the history of family dynamics among the Wabena from World War I through early independence, A History of the Excluded shines a particularly powerful light on how individuals experienced the demands of migrant labor and plantation conditions, the introduction of new farming technologies and business opportunities, and the policies of TANU national settlement and market controls—all within family, not state, parameters.”

African Studies Review

The twentieth-century history of Njombe, the Southern Highlands district of Tanzania, can aptly be summed up as exclusion within incorporation. Njombe was marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy. Njombe’s people came to see themselves as excluded from agricultural markets, access to medical services, schooling—in short, from all opportunity to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labor.

James L. Giblin is an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa.