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

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.