Publicaties

This article traces the history of slavery and of post-slavery struggles for livelihood and status in the layout, the physical structures, and the social lives of three towns on the southern Swahili Coast: Kilwa, Mikindani, and Lindi. These towns were long surrounded by plantations that relied on the labor of enslaved people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, slave populations dissipated quickly. In towns, the colonial cash crop ...

This paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government's aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era 'traditional' chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains a rare flashpoint over which rural people are willing to ...