The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru

T. O. Beidelman

Jun 2012 · Indiana University Press

About this ebook

What did it mean to be an African subject living in remote areas of Tanganyika at the end of the colonial era? For the Kaguru of Tanganyika, it meant daily confrontation with the black and white governmental officials tasked with bringing this rural people into the mainstream of colonial African life. T. O. Beidelman's detailed narrative links this administrative world to the Kaguru's wider social, cultural, and geographical milieu, and to the political history, ideas of indirect rule, and the white institutions that loomed just beyond their world. Beidelman unveils the colonial system's problems as it extended its authority into rural areas and shows how these problems persisted even after African independence.

About the author

T. O. Beidelman is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is author of Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots (IUP, 1982); The Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (IUP, 1986); and The Cool Knife: Metaphors of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Education in Kaguru Initiation Ritual.