Taifa — 2012 ·

Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

By James R. Brennan

“Taifa is the first urban history to tackle nationalist politics in towns, an achievement made possible by Brennan's grounding in two separate sets of secondary literature which gives his work a breadth that is rare in today's monographs.”

Luise White — author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi

“Taifa is distinctive in discussing Africans together with ‘Indians‘ (most are also Africans now)…. (Brennan) skillfully dissects stereotypes, notably the stigma of unscrupulous merchants unfairly borne by Africa’s Indian communities…. Indian Ocean studies has grown as a discrete field, usually through broader surveys. This work on a specific port city makes the subject more concrete.”

Choice

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

James R. Brennan is an assistant professor in history at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is the author of numerous book chapters and journal articles.