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Writing the Nation from the Margins: Bloke Modisane, the Maji Maji War, and the Politics of Nation-Building in Postcolonial Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2026

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Siyabonga Njica*
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Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, UK
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Abstract

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and a means of constructing a “usable past.” Using the South African writer Bloke Modisane’s research on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of historical production in the early postindependence period. Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian and remained on the margins of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History. His uneasy reception in Tanzania not only underscores the tension between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives, but the challenges faced by intellectuals working outside official or institutional structures. While he never completed his research to the point of publication, revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past.

Keywords

East AfricaTanzaniaMaji Maji Warnation-buildingCold Warhistoriographyresearch

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Research Article
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The Journal of African History , Volume 67 , 2026 , e17
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press.

On the morning of 2 July 1965, the South African writer and exile Bloke Modisane found himself seated across from Tanzanian minister Erasto A. M. Mang’enya in his office in Dar es Salaam . Their conversation quickly escalated into a heated exchange about research regulations in Tanzania, the Maji Maji War, and the responsibilities of those tasked with writing African history.Footnote 1 Six months prior to this meeting, Modisane had arrived in Dar es Salaam to undertake field research for a historical monograph on the Maji Maji War as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in African History. To his dismay, he was reprimanded by Mang’enya for failing to seek official permission from the Tanzanian government to study a subject so deeply embedded in the country’s national consciousness. This encounter between a South African exile and a Tanzanian official encapsulated a broader shift in the production of African historical research. As the imperatives of nation-building intensified, newly independent states increasingly exercised control over who could access, record, and interpret their national past, while also seeking to cultivate forms of political memory that could sustain their authority over time.Footnote 2

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and was part of a wider effort to recover African agency and anticolonial resistance to counter the epistemic legacies of colonialism. What emerged during this period was a form of nationalist historiography committed to restoring dignity to African history and constructing a “usable past” that could serve the ideological and educational needs of new nation-states.Footnote 3 In Tanzania, these imperatives were particularly pronounced, as the Tanganyika African National Union’s (TANU) emphasis on national unity and African socialism called for a carefully curated historical narrative.Footnote 4 The establishment of history departments across the continent, most notably at the University College, Dar es Salaam, was part of this larger initiative to produce African-centred histories that aligned with the goals of political independence. At Dar es Salaam, the history department encouraged research which foregrounded anticolonial resistance and national consciousness, with archival work and, later, oral-history methods gaining prominence as tools to recover grassroots experiences of colonial violence and resistance.Footnote 5 In this context, the Maji Maji War became more than a historical subject but also a foundational national story.

Using Modisane’s abortive research experience in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of history-writing in the early postindependence period. It situates Modisane’s story within the broader context of postcolonial knowledge production, state power, and the tensions between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives.Footnote 6 The article argues that Modisane’s field research experience in Tanzania reveals the practical and political challenges involved in producing a usable past while offering a lens through which to reconsider the role of non-professional and marginal historians in shaping African historical knowledge.

Writing History After Independence

In the 1960s, Africanist scholars increasingly understood the complexities of fieldwork and acquiring research clearance not simply as administrative obstacles, but as reflections of broader geopolitical and intellectual transformations unfolding across the continent. These challenges were shaped by a variety of internal and external factors, including the rise of nationalist sentiment across decolonising Africa, the desire of African states to avoid political and diplomatic entanglements with global power blocs, anxieties about leaks of confidential information to foreign researchers, and concerns over national security.Footnote 7 Such concerns not only made it virtually impossible for individual researchers to keep abreast of the rapidly changing circumstances of the research climate, but led some African countries to impose tighter controls on research conducted by foreign scholars.Footnote 8 Across the continent, research regulation became increasingly entangled with questions of who could write national history, how the past should be framed, and whether historical research served or undermined the objectives of the postcolonial state.

Nowhere were these dynamics more pronounced than in Dar es Salaam. In the 1960s, Tanzania positioned itself as a frontline state in the liberation struggle and a centre of revolutionary activity in sub-Saharan Africa. The capital was a meeting point for the region’s political movements, including exiled Southern African liberation movements. President Julius Nyerere permitted these organisations to establish military training camps in the country from which they could canvass for external support.Footnote 9 These liberation movements were backed by the Organization of African Unity’s African Liberation Committee, an organisation headquartered in Dar es Salaam that supported anticolonial struggles across the African continent.Footnote 10 In this context, mobility and the circulation of information became pressing concerns.

As George Roberts has observed, Dar es Salaam was “paranoid about…rumour-spreading, information leaks, and espionage,” with the TANU-led government fearing that “agents working for the Portuguese, Rhodesians, and South Africans had infiltrated guerrilla movements and were working to destabilise Tanzania.”Footnote 11 These concerns shaped not only how the state approached security, but also how it regulated historical research. Modisane’s status as an American-sponsored freelance Black South African exile conducting field research in Tanzania without formal official government approval attracted suspicion and made him appear less credible to Tanzanian officials. Furthermore, his chosen subject—a topic of national significance which TANU viewed as a national epic worthy of emulating in its nationalist struggle—attracted scrutiny amongst Tanzania’s nationalists.Footnote 12 Modisane’s experience illustrates how research regulation in postindependence Africa became deeply intertwined with the politics of nation-building and the struggle to construct a usable past.

According to John Iliffe, it was already well known by the mid-1960s that the Tanzanian government did not encourage expatriates to undertake oral research on the Maji Maji War.Footnote 13 This position reflected not only security concerns, but also a growing conviction that the writing of national histories should be done under Tanzanian supervision. It is for this reason that historians involved in the Maji Maji Research Project at the University College, Dar es Salaam encouraged Tanzanian students from the south to do oral research in the southern regions, where outsiders were barred.Footnote 14 In this way, history writing became part of a wider effort to assert and reclaim local control over the national past. TANU’s cautious attitude towards research on Maji Maji in the 1960s became increasingly restrictive due to Frelimo’s presence in the southern regions of Tanzania during their ongoing war against Portuguese forces along the Mozambican border.Footnote 15

However, Tanzania’s cautious approach to research access in the 1960s was not unique. Across Africa, independent states confronted similar dilemmas regarding the control of historical inquiry and politically sensitive research. Malawi’s response to the “Rotberg Affair”—the dramatic fallout between American historian Robert Rotberg and the Malawian state over the former’s comments on Hastings Banda’s 1964 cabinet crisis—not only led to state-imposed research restrictions on all foreign researchers, but also illustrated how independent African states sought to control politically sensitive scholarly research to consolidate their political legitimacy.Footnote 16 Similarly, in Zambia and Kenya, research by foreign scholars on the two countries’ nationalist parties and liberation struggles was explicitly banned or discouraged.Footnote 17 In Nigeria, both the Biafran and Nigerian governments deliberately destroyed Biafra-related documents following the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) in a state-driven attempt to erase sensitive historical material.Footnote 18 In Uganda, meanwhile, foreign researchers seeking to study Africanisation and the recruitment of personnel in the civil service were denied clearance.Footnote 19 Taken together, these cases reveal how the regulation of research became a defining element of statecraft across Africa. Historical research was not simply a matter of security, but was also bound up with political legitimacy, national memory, and the construction of a meaningful past.

Just a decade earlier, American writer Richard Wright travelled to the then Gold Coast (Ghana) on an assignment to record the unfolding nationalist revolution spearheaded by Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), work which later became Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos.Footnote 20 Like Modisane, Wright’s motives were viewed with suspicion, and he became disillusioned by the CPP’s lack of cooperation and the opaque political environment he found himself in.Footnote 21 The South African exile Ezekiel Mphahlele had a similar experience during a visit to Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1962 in his capacity as the head of African programmes for the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom. Mphahlele was on a fact-finding mission concerning the state of culture with the goal of funding cultural initiatives and sought an audience with Hastings Banda. Not only did Mphahlele fail to meet Banda, but his research into the territory’s cultural affairs was shut down, with one cabinet minister implying that he was a spy.Footnote 22 These episodes underscore the extent to which foreign researchers and writers, including those of African descent, were often met with suspicion, especially when they worked independently. Viewed in this way, Modisane’s fieldwork experience in Tanzania reflected a larger pattern of state-sanctioned oversight over knowledge production, and an increasing awareness of foreign-led research projects’ propensity for ideological subversion during the Cold War in Africa.

Yet the research climate in Africa was by no means entirely restrictive. Writing in the 1960s, Frank E. Bernard and Bobbie J. Walter noted that African governments were “not attempting to place restrictions on field scholars and their activities without reason. In general, they recognise that investigations often help to illuminate social and economic problems and that research contributes to the formulation of future policy.”Footnote 23 Elsewhere, Brooks Marmon has observed that accounts from foreign scholars during this period were not only “usually sympathetic to the nationalist cause” in Africa, but also betrayed their cordial relations with and access to senior political leaders who supported their research projects.Footnote 24 Historians engaged in archival and oral research in Tanzania in the 1960s, however, reported a complex and uneven research climate. These developments must be understood not only in terms of shifting research regulations in Tanzania, but as part of the broader nation-building agenda that sought to assert control over postcolonial knowledge production.

Marcia Wright, who was instrumental in the founding of the National Archives of Tanzania, recalls that there were no restrictions on documentary or oral research in the early 1960s once a researcher had received a visa.Footnote 25 Henry Bienen, who conducted field research in Tanzania between 1963 and 1965 for his landmark book, Tanzania: Party Transformation and Economic Development, does not recall applying or being asked for research clearance and states that Nyerere and TANU officials were welcoming to foreign researchers.Footnote 26 Göran Hydén received his research clearance three weeks after his arrival in Tanzania in October 1964. This swift clearance process was arranged between the Head of the Department of Political Science at the University College, Dar es Salaam, David Kimble, and the Tanzanian government, ultimately leading to the publication of Political Development in Rural Tanzania: TANU Yajenga Nchi.Footnote 27

By 1965, the research climate had begun to change as Frelimo’s first major training camp was set up in Kongwa, part of an intensifying military operation against Portuguese forces in the Nachingwea camp in southern Tanzania.Footnote 28 This coincided with escalating tensions and factional killings among Frelimo members, a crisis which not only transformed the south into a militarised zone, but also forced the government to restrict movement and research access to strategic southern border regions due to security concerns.Footnote 29 By the late 1960s, TANU had grown increasingly cautious about research access in Tanzania, fearing political sabotage and espionage. These security anxieties began to shape the terms under which historical research was permitted. This, in part, explains why Steven Feierman “waited endlessly for permission” before the head of the history department at the University College, Dar es Salaam, Terence Ranger, “pried out the necessary permissions” from the President’s Office. Feierman was eventually able to undertake field research in northeastern Tanzania between 1966 and 1968 for the book The Shambaa Kingdom: A History. Feierman recalls that local TANU officials carefully followed his research and Ranger timeously intervened when the President’s Office was misleadingly tipped off that his research aimed to exoticise Tanzanian life and portray it as primitive.Footnote 30

It also explains why Patrick Redmond’s research clearance to study the Ngoni in Songea district in 1969 was rejected, and why August H. Nimtz was advised to frame his politically charged research proposal on Muslim brotherhoods as a historical project in order to gain research clearance that same year.Footnote 31 Despite these constraints and the increasing politicisation of research in Tanzania, the Tanzanian historian Gilbert C. K. Gwassa was granted access and government support to conduct oral research on the Maji Maji War in the southern regions from 1966 to 1969 for his doctoral thesis at the University College, Dar es Salaam. Gwassa’s case reveals more than an uneven and evolving research approval process in Tanzania. It illustrates the state’s growing preference for local scholars, particularly those affiliated with national institutions, in narrating Tanzania’s past in terms that aligned with the ideological project of nation-building.

The Road to Tanzania

Bloke Modisane was a South African intellectual who began his career as a fiction writer and cultural editor for Drum and Golden City Post, before venturing into film script writing and acting. From an early age, Modisane developed a critical interest in African history. He viewed the dominant narratives of his early South African history education with scepticism and argued that they were biased towards their portrayals of the African past. This orientation later encouraged him to research and write about African histories from an African perspective.Footnote 32 In 1959, he escaped South Africa and settled in London where he worked as a freelance writer, stage actor, and radio broadcaster for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1962, he participated in the landmark Mbari African Writers Conference at Makerere University College in Kampala, where he offered an appraisal of East African short-story writing and helped set the standards for its critical evaluation.Footnote 33 It was in Kampala that he made an impression on the African American writer Langston Hughes, an encounter that led to an invitation to deliver a series of lectures under the auspices of the United Negro College Fund and the American Society of African Culture during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States.Footnote 34

Modisane’s first and only published book, Blame Me on History, was published in London in 1963 and opened new markets for his burgeoning intellectual career. Following its publication, he applied for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to pursue research on the Maji Maji War against the German occupation of Tanganyika between 1905 and 1907. This was one of two ongoing historical research projects that examined millennial movements and their impact on race relations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African history.Footnote 35 Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian. His background as a writer, actor, and broadcaster placed him outside the scholarly networks that were beginning to shape historical research in East Africa during the 1960s. At the University College, Dar es Salaam, scholars associated with what became known as the Dar es Salaam School of History were actively producing African-centred narratives that linked the African past to the political imperatives of nation-building under TANU.Footnote 36 By contrast, Modisane remained at the margins of this emerging scholarly community, working independently and without affiliation with the institutional and governmental networks that shaped historical research in Tanzania.

Yet while his position and outsider status were notable, they were not unusual within the broader landscape of postcolonial historical production in Africa. As Cassandra Mark-Thiesen has shown in the case of Ghana, early postindependence historical societies and journals often welcomed participation from contributors beyond the university, including those without formal training whose perspectives offered valuable insights into local histories.Footnote 37 Similarly, Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola have shown that African historical writing during this period was a popular endeavour undertaken by a broad range of African brokers without formal university connections. These “home-spun historians’” work was multigeneric in character and betrayed their rejection of academic patterns and conventions.Footnote 38 Modisane’s interest in oral history and African resistance placed him within this broader tradition, although his position outside key institutional structures heightened the political scrutiny around his work in Tanzania. It was from this peripheral position that he set his sights on the Maji Maji War.

Considered one of the most famous expressions of anticolonial resistance in African history, the Maji Maji War was an armed African uprising against German colonial rule in the southeastern region of the German East Africa colony (modern-day Tanzania). It began in July 1905 and spread very quickly throughout the central and southern regions of the colony, before German forces suppressed the uprising and inflicted devastating casualties which were followed by famine.Footnote 39 Although the Maji Maji War belonged to an earlier era of anticolonial resistance, its memory took on new significance in the postcolonial moment, functioning both as a present political reference and a guide for newly independent states, even as international attention to Africa’s shifting political and cultural landscape intensified.Footnote 40 With the rise of anticolonial and nationalist movements, which coincided with the wave of independence in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Humanities and Social Science Divisions strengthened their efforts to understand nations that were emerging from colonial rule. It encouraged and funded a wide array of initiatives aimed at nurturing African scholarship and artistic expression in the decolonisation era.Footnote 41 As Edward H. Berman and others have shown, the foundation was among the major American philanthropic organisations that collaborated with US government agencies and international donors during the Cold War to shape the trajectory of development in the Global South in ways that aligned with American foreign policy objectives.Footnote 42 In Africa and elsewhere, the foundation sought to cultivate elite cadres of African intellectuals and leaders who would embrace perspectives on development which aligned with liberal capitalism and modernisation theory.Footnote 43 Fellowship awards were central to this strategy. Selected African scholars and cultural figures were offered the opportunity to study at American universities, often with the aim of enabling them to return home equipped to steer their nations toward a non-aligned stance favourable to the Western Bloc.Footnote 44 In East Africa, this strategy was further evident in the foundation’s support for the Africanisation of the University of East Africa’s staff in the early 1960s.Footnote 45

Equally significant was the Rockefeller Foundation’s key role in strengthening Africanist scholarship. Among the initiatives it supported were the International African Institute (1926), Roland Oliver’s lectureship in African history at SOAS (1948), an oral history research project at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1958), and a grant to launch The Journal of African History (1960).Footnote 46 Its commitment also extended to individual African scholars and cultural practitioners such as Bethwell Allan Ogot, J. H. Kwabena Nkeita, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, Wole Soyinka, Fela Sowande, and Claude Ake, among others. These Rockefeller Foundation fellows spanned fields from history and political science to literature and the performing arts—highlighting the foundation’s expansive approach to knowledge-making in Africa beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. As Roland Oliver later recalled, the Rockefeller Foundation’s broader ambition in Africa was to assist newly independent nations in developing “a sense of national identity” that balanced the recovery of traditional culture with critical engagement with the colonial past.Footnote 47 It is within this institutional and intellectual context that Bloke Modisane’s Rockefeller-supported project on the Maji Maji War should be situated.

At the time Modisane applied for the fellowship the historiography of the Maji Maji War was still in its infancy. Historians placed the origins of the rebellion in German oppression and largely relied on colonial documents to construct a historical narrative.Footnote 48 Modisane identified this gap in the historiography and attempted to address it by seeing the war through the eyes of the East Africans whose interpretations had largely gone undocumented. He understood the historical significance of his proposed research as a reaction to colonial historians’ neglect and distortion of African histories and positioned his contribution as not only an attempt at historical revisionism, but also as an effort geared towards identity formation, decolonisation, and the recovery of the African past to provide newly independent nations with firm foundations on which to build. Modisane’s emphasis on oral testimony, African resistance, and anticolonial histories thus aligned with the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission to promote independent, African-centred histories at mid-century.

In Search of the Maji Maji Past

Before he began his fieldwork, Modisane advised the Rockefeller Foundation of his ambitious research plans in Tanzania. “The nature of my work will require me to interview several persons, particularly those who survived the rebellion during the German occupation of East Africa,” he noted. “I would like to record the personal accounts in the actual words of the people, to study the territory and photograph the actual areas where the battles of the Maji-maji rebellion were fought.”Footnote 49 Shortly after his arrival in January 1965, he went to see the Commissioner for Culture, Harold Chopeta, to discuss his research plans on the Maji Maji War. The meeting ended with a “polite brash-off” and portended the challenges that lay ahead in his search for the Maji Maji story, underscoring that Rockefeller Foundation support did not shield scholars from national research regulations, especially when working on politically sensitive topics such as the Maji Maji War.Footnote 50 In fact, the growing volatility across the continent prompted the African Studies Association to propose the establishment of a research liaison committee in the summer of 1965 to help researchers navigate the shifting research climate in Africa.Footnote 51

With no government support or affiliation with the history department, Modisane leveraged his personal networks in Dar es Salaam to circumvent his early bureaucratic challenges and gain legitimacy as a bona fide independent researcher. He lived for a short while with the African American Pan-Africanist and founding member of the American Committee on Africa, Bill Sutherland, whose home in Dar es Salaam became a meeting place for exiled liberation leaders from across Southern Africa.Footnote 52 Sutherland had been working intermittently for the Tanzanian government, was well known by TANU officials, and was a confidant of Second Vice President Rashidi Kawawa.Footnote 53 His support provided Modisane with a measure of informal legitimacy, even though it did not resolve the problem of formal research approval.

Yet it was not only fellow activists who came to Modisane’s aid in Tanzania. When he was struggling to make ends meet on his fellowship stipend and told the Rockefeller Foundation that he was feeling “depressed” at the state of his affairs in Dar es Salaam, the extent of his desperation and tacit plea for an increased fellowship stipend was corroborated by the American Embassy Consul in Dar es Salaam, Jack H. Mower.Footnote 54 Mower was an expert in African affairs and had previously served as an intelligence officer in Kenya and South Africa before being assigned to Tanzania.Footnote 55 That Modisane’s plea for better funding was corroborated by a US diplomatic official is a testament not only to the close relationships he cultivated within the American diplomatic community in Tanzania, but also to how he drew on these connections to sustain his research project. This episode highlights how the Rockefeller Foundation was entangled in the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. Scholars have claimed that the foundation often acted in concert with US government interests to consolidate and promote Western liberal modernity in competition with socialist approaches to modernisation.Footnote 56

In this light, the intimate association between a private American organisation and the US government, coupled with their support for a foreign researcher in a country beset by fears of political subterfuge, likely fed suspicions about Modisane’s presence in Tanzania. His predicament mirrored that of other African exiles based in Dar es Salaam, such as Frelimo President Eduardo Mondlane and Pan African Congress (PAC) leader David Sibeko, whose cordial relations with the US government throughout the 1960s and 1970s were viewed with suspicion.Footnote 57 Though Modisane’s connections were less overtly political and less consequential, they nonetheless placed him at the intersection of national, continental, and global tensions over who could write African history and to what ends it could be used.

To conduct his fieldwork effectively, he enrolled in language courses in Swahili and German to carry out interviews and pored over official documents at the National Archives and National Museum in Dar es Salaam. In a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, he expressed that he was moved by the warm reception from the people he had interviewed, characterising the response to his research as a form of patriotism akin to how Americans felt about the American War of Independence.Footnote 58 Once he completed his work in Dar es Salaam in June, Modisane planned to travel to the southern regions to interview people living in the areas where the rebellion had been fought. Attempts to interest TANU officials on the significance of his project continued to fall short. “I am utterly disillusioned,” he wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation. “The ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture and Community Development have shown no interest in my work, and it doesn’t seem as if I am going to receive any cooperation from them. I am beginning to feel like a glorified boy scout doing something that nobody is interested in anyway.”Footnote 59

Modisane had expected the Tanzanian government, especially its leader Julius Nyerere, to be interested in supporting his research project on the Maji Maji War. As Tanganyikan nationalists committed to independence from British rule in the 1950s, Nyerere and TANU had heralded the distinctly African character of the Maji Maji War because of its opposition to European colonisation, invoking it as an example of the heroic defence of African liberation and as a source of legitimacy for Tanganyika’s burgeoning nationalist politics.Footnote 60 What Modisane did not appreciate at the time, however, was the extent to which relationships between foreigners and government officials were viewed as potentially dangerous in Tanzania, especially following rumours about a US government plot to overthrow Nyerere’s government and the dismissal of two American diplomats.Footnote 61 Furthermore, ongoing Frelimo insurgencies against the Portuguese in southern Tanzania rendered the southern regions politically sensitive and a no-go zone for foreign researchers.

Notwithstanding his frustrations and setbacks, Modisane recommitted himself to his project on the Maji Maji War. He secured a German translator, collated all the necessary information about where the battles took place, and made a list of more people to interview in Dar es Salaam upon his return from the southern regions.Footnote 62 In July, however, he ran into further trouble with TANU officials when he discovered that he needed official permission to travel around the villages, interview people, or take photographs of national monuments. Desperate to find help, he claimed to have “spent time and money entertaining people who knew people in the right places, and equally a lot of time was spent going to those interminable sundowners where people met without really meeting, and talked without listening.”Footnote 63 As a last resort, he sought the help of Tanzanian Minister of Commerce and Cooperatives Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu.

Babu was a globally renowned anticolonial thinker, revolutionary, and Pan-Africanist politician who led the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964.Footnote 64 The two had met at a Christmas party in London in 1964, only a few weeks before Modisane left for Tanzania. At the party, Babu had encouraged Modisane to call on him in Dar es Salaam should he require any assistance. In Dar es Salaam, Babu became an important ally and supporter of Modisane’s efforts to document the Maji Maji War from an African point of view. He arranged for Modisane to meet with Second Vice President Kawawa, who in turn arranged for him to meet the Minister of Culture and Community Development, Erasto A. M. Mang’enya. Modisane had been advised by Babu to carry a copy of his book, Blame Me on History, to his meetings with TANU ministers, likely in the hope that it would enhance his credibility as a published author and secure official support for his research on the Maji Maji War. This calculation terribly misfired. Mang’enya pressed Modisane on his motive for researching the Maji Maji War and questioned why he was not writing a book on the history of South Africa’s colonial wars instead. He took him to task for his apparent disregard for research regulations in Tanzania and ultimately barred him from travelling to the southern regions without ministerial permits. Mang’enya’s reaction reflected TANU officials’ sensibilities about Maji Maji history and their general attitude towards outsiders working on the national history of Tanzania. While Mang’enya and TANU officials were strong proponents of the idea that African history should be written “from the point of view of the Africans themselves,” there appeared to be an implicit political desire for these “Africans” to be of Tanzanian origin.Footnote 65 Mang’enya’s suggestion that Modisane should focus on South African history reflected an underlying politics of belonging—one that revealed how postcolonial states sought to assert control over the telling of their own past, especially foundational national histories such as the Maji Maji War.

As Emma Hunter has shown, TANU officials deliberately encouraged and fostered nationalist histories written by Tanzanians themselves, often privileging accounts produced by party loyalists and political figures who aligned with the party’s ideologies and policies.Footnote 66 In this context, as a Black South African exiled writer funded by a private American organisation, Modisane was an unreliable ally in this nation-building effort. Despite his personal ties to influential figures such as Sutherland and Babu, Modisane boasted no political credentials, was not a rank-and-file member of any of the liberation movements, and was virtually a persona non grata in the eyes of TANU nationalists. As Benjamin N. Lawrance and Vusumuzi R. Kumalo note, those who worked outside formal liberation networks were often met with suspicion in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 67 For Modisane, these suspicions came from the highest levels of the Tanzanian government.

Frustrated by the lack of official support, Modisane ultimately resolved that he was going to write the book with or without the Tanzanian view of the Maji Maji War, and committed himself to seeing “that a society gets the history it deserves.”Footnote 68 He made plans to travel to Germany, applied to conduct archival research in Potsdam, East Germany, and enrolled in a German language course with the Goethe-Institut in Munich, West Germany. The cooperation he received from German officials stood in sharp contrast to his treatment in Tanzania, which he wryly described as “ironic” given Germany’s violent role in the Maji Maji War.Footnote 69 Just as he was preparing to leave, the political tide appeared to shift. According to Babu, Mang’enya was now not only enthusiastic about Modisane’s project but had informed all the authorities of the southern districts to avail facilities for his work. Whether this reversal signalled a genuine reconsideration or strategic accommodation remains unclear, but it marked the moment when Modisane finally secured the official research clearance he sought. “The great drama with the Tanzanian government has finally been resolved,” he wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation. “I seem to have been cleared by the President’s Office, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the University College. I had no idea the project was this important.”Footnote 70

Several factors likely contributed to this reversal. First, Modisane’s ability to leverage local contacts within Tanzania’s state and university bureaucracy may have enhanced his credibility in the eyes of TANU and facilitated his approval. Second, because he framed his Maji Maji War research project in terms that highlighted African resistance and unity—an orientation that not only accorded with the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History but also aligned with TANU’s nationalist narrative—may have persuaded TANU officials to see it as contributing to the nascent nationalist historiography and nation-building rather than as threatening it. Finally, unlike contentious and contemporaneous political research, an oral history of the Maji Maji War may have been viewed as a “safe” research topic as it was not inherently linked to contemporary political anxieties and Cold War tensions.

Down South

“Iringa is the first stop of a trip which will take me on a thousand-mile safari, and will include a hike up two mountains, the Uluguru and the Matumbi, armed with pocket knife, permagenate [sic] of potash and a snake-bite serum,” Modisane wrote to Langston Hughes in a private letter. “I’m beginning to feel like Stanley in search of Dr. Livingstone, with this striking exemption—I haven’t got a train of native porters.”Footnote 71 His tone was characteristically sardonic, but the scope of his journey ahead was no less ambitious. His first interview was with Pancras Mkwawa, son of Hehe leader Chief Mkwawa. Pancras Mkwawa was one of a few surviving eyewitnesses of the Maji Maji War and his testimony would have been a valuable addition to Modisane’s oral history research.Footnote 72 Modisane later made the acquaintance of Peter K. Palangyo, a secondary school teacher at Mkwawa High School and a would-be novelist, lecturer, and diplomat who became his trusted driver and interpreter in the southern districts.Footnote 73 Together, they made three consecutive visits to Tosamanga, where Modisane interviewed one “Father Musaa…the priest who had done some impressive oral work among the Wahehe.”Footnote 74 This was to be followed by four trips to Kalenga, the resting place of Wahehe leader Chief Mkwawa’s skull. “Yesterday I photographed that skull about fifteen times,” he told Langston Hughes, “and depending on the quality of the prints I intend to have this skull on the jacket of my book on the Maji Maji Resistance which I am researching into.”Footnote 75 Mkwawa led one of the bravest resistances against the Germans, ordering an ambush which led to the killing of 290 German troops. He later committed suicide after a German patrol located his whereabouts and approached his camp.Footnote 76

Following his work in Kalenga, Modisane travelled to Songea, where he arrived right in the middle of an election campaign. These were the third general and second presidential elections in Tanzania.Footnote 77 From there, he travelled to the International Congress of African Historians which was held between 26 September and 2 October 1965 at the University College, Dar es Salaam. Modisane had been personally invited by leading Africanists of the history department, John Lonsdale and Terence Ranger.Footnote 78 Though not a trained historian, he understood the significance of the gathering and the opportunity to situate himself, however marginally, within Africa’s emerging historical field.

The congress marked a turning point in the development of African historical studies in Tanzania and beyond. By bringing together historians from across the continent, as well as eminent specialists in African history from around the world and representatives from international organisations, the congress sought to institutionalise and assert the centrality of African scholarship to the development of African history.Footnote 79 However, as Modisane’s field research in the first half of 1965 demonstrated, this vision was often complicated by state-sponsored research restrictions that highlighted the tensions between the celebration of Africanist historiography as a tool for nation-building and the exigencies of nationalist political control. On 30 September, Modisane chaired a session entitled “The Significance of African Resistance and Rebellion,” which included contributions from Apollon B. Davidson and Ranger.Footnote 80 His presence at the congress signalled a moment of provisional recognition, situating him within the very scholarly community that had largely remained out of reach during his fieldwork in Tanzania.

Upon returning to Songea, Modisane resumed his fieldwork and uncovered first-hand the personal and emotional scars of the Maji Maji War. “I began to realise the first tragic victims of a resistance sixty years old,” he noted. In interviews, he encountered survivors and relatives of those who had died during the war. One man, “A Mr. Gama, age 76, recorded memories of the fighting and the reprisals as he saw them,” Modisane recalled, “and at one point I had to discreetly shut off the tape because the man had, under the remembrance, broken down and couldn’t continue.” Another interviewee related how he was forced to watch the public executions when he was sixteen, while another identified themselves as an “African Askari”—one of many local soldiers who had fought on the side of colonial powers such as Germany.Footnote 81 Modisane was struck by the askari’s unapologetic defence of German rule, recalling how he insisted that Africans were “stupid” to have fought the Germans “who had brought good Government, roads and schools.”Footnote 82 These exchanges unsettled the dominant nationalist narratives of unified resistance. As Michelle R. Moyd has argued, the “askari took advantage of Maji Maji to better themselves materially and monetarily,” yet have not been sufficiently analysed as key actors and “intermediaries” in the development of the colonial state of German East Africa.Footnote 83 Modisane’s field research and interactions with askari—who at the time had been ignored as “African agents of colonialism” in the nationalist histories of the 1960s—was beginning to reveal the extent to which there were not only divisions and disunity among Africans in the war, but also how Africans felt differently about the German presence in East Africa.Footnote 84 The rest of his fieldwork generally followed the same pattern. He conducted more interviews in Liwale and Lindi, before travelling to Kilwa, Rufiji, and the Matumbi mountains—sites where the actual fighting took place.Footnote 85

By the time his work in Tanzania concluded, Modisane had grown to love the country and developed a close friendship with Babu. Babu had assisted him in securing an East German visa and, following Modisane’s request that he speak to Nyerere about the possibility of the president writing the foreword to his book on the Maji Maji War, arranged an appointment between Nyerere and Modisane. Nyerere’s vision for the role of African history and African historians resonated with Modisane, and he hoped that the president might endorse his project.Footnote 86 Modisane delayed his departure to Germany by two days in the hope of securing an audience with Nyerere at the State House. Though the meeting was postponed due to Nyerere’s government commitments, Modisane’s efforts to secure an audience with the president, including delaying his departure to Germany, underscored how deeply he had come to view his work as part of a wider postcolonial effort to reclaim African history, even as he remained on the margins of its institutional and political structures.

Conclusion

Bloke Modisane left Tanzania for the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in November 1965. During his stay in East and West Germany, he not only underwent further language training and conducted archival research, but visited several institutes, organisations, and universities where he met leading Africanist historians who assisted him with his research on the Maji Maji War. He returned to London in June 1966 to write up the book but was living precariously with no fixed address and without sufficient research support to continue the project. He admitted that the amount of work which remained to be done was “staggering” and “formidable,” not least because of the outstanding translations and transcriptions of Swahili taped interviews he conducted in Tanzania.Footnote 87 Modisane estimated he had covered 1,500 miles across more than a dozen districts and assembled more than twenty-five hours of taped interviews which offered rich and varied oral history accounts from more than twenty interviewees.Footnote 88 Yet the tapes of his interviews, photographs of the sites where the rebellion unfolded, and the manuscript of the intended book do not survive. Some of his field notes and impressions recorded in letters are preserved in the Rockefeller Foundation Records in New York, including a notebook with handwritten copies of documents he consulted during his archival research in Potsdam, East Germany, which is held at Bayreuth University. The disappearance of these materials represents more than a gap in Modisane’s intellectual legacy; it constitutes a significant loss for African historiography as a whole. It underscores the fragility and ephemerality of archives, particularly those shaped by conditions of exile, precarity, and transnational research.

In some respects, Modisane’s research anticipated later developments in Maji Maji historiography. His decision to cover the entire territory where the battles of the Maji Maji War took place instead of relying on one district demonstrated an understanding of the multiple local circumstances and influences of the war. These questions would later become central to the next generation of historians.Footnote 89 But ultimately, the scope of his ambition exceeded his resources. Without formal institutional support, disciplinary training, and a scholarly community, Modisane was unable to realise the full potential of his project. This challenge was later pursued more authoritatively by Gwassa in his landmark doctoral thesis “The Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907.”Footnote 90 Three years after Modisane’s departure from Tanzania, the first published collection of oral histories on the Maji Maji War appeared, based on interviews conducted by students under the Maji Maji Research Project.Footnote 91 That he knew key figures of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History yet never worked with them during or after his time in Dar es Salaam is a testament to his isolation and status as an outsider in Tanzania during the rapid advancement of African historical studies in the 1960s.

By the late 1960s, Tanzania’s research environment became more restrictive due to escalating tensions and factional killings amongst Frelimo members in Dar es Salaam and along the southern border.Footnote 92 The establishment of the Tanzania National Scientific Research Council in 1968 and the Research Clearance Committee in 1973 formalised state oversight.Footnote 93 While scholars like Gwassa were welcomed into this new system, many foreign researchers faced mounting bureaucratic hurdles. Modisane’s case sits somewhere in between. As a Black South African exile with Rockefeller Foundation support, he occupied a liminal space between insider and outsider, and between state suspicion and Pan-Africanist solidarity. While he never completed his research on the Maji Maji War to the point of publication, he was one of the earliest African intellectuals to collect eyewitness testimony of the war. His abortive attempt at historical writing in the 1960s would later give way to experiments with historical fiction in the latter half of his life. From the late 1960s until his death in Dortmund, West Germany, in 1986, he tried his hand at writing an unpublished set of novels, became a film and stage actor, and worked as a radio dramatist for the BBC. Modisane’s unfinished Maji Maji project tells a larger story about the entanglements of historical knowledge production, postcolonial state-making, and Cold War politics in Africa. Revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by the incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past. It also serves as a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of historical sources and the unevenness of historical memory. His experience further underscores the extent to which participation in the production of African history in the postindependence period depended on not only intellectual commitment, but also access to institutional networks and scholarly communities from which he remained largely excluded, both as an outsider to Tanzania and to the emerging historical profession itself.

References

1 Rockefeller Archives Center, New York, Rockefeller Foundation Records (RFR), Fellowships, Fellowship Files: SG 10.1 (FA244), Box 229, Folder 3587, Bloke Modisane to Robert W. Crawford, 7 Aug. 1965.

2 João Paulo Borges Coelho, “Memory, History, Fiction: A Note on the Politics of the Past in Mozambique,” paper presented at the international conference Il était une fois les indépendances africaines… La fin des empires?, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, 21–22 Oct. 2010, 3.

3 Immanuel R. Harisch, “The Dar es Salaam Schools of History, c. 1960s–1980s,” in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial African Historiography, eds. Thula Simpson and Immanuel R. Harisch (London: Routledge, 2025), 90; Toyin Falola, “Nationalism and African Historiography,” in Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, eds. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 210; Casper Andersen, “A ‘Quest for Relevance’: The Memory Politics of UNESCO’s General History of Africa,” in The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa: Essays in Honour of Jan-Georg Deutsch, eds. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch, and Michelle Sikes (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2022), 51–52.

4 Harisch, “The Dar es Salaam Schools of History,” 89.

5 Harisch, “The Dar es Salaam Schools of History,” 88, 90, 93; George H. Maddox, “The Dar es Salaam of African History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, ed. Thomas Spear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 181.

6 Carlos Fernandes, “History Writing and State Legitimisation in Postcolonial Mozambique: The Case of the History Workshop, Centre for African Studies, 1980–1986,” Kronos 39, no. 1 (2013): 131, 136–37; Carlos Fernandes, “Intellectual Legacies, Political Morality, and Disillusionment: Connections Between Two Mozambique Research Institutions, 1976–2017,” The Journal of African History 64, no. 1 (2023): 112–14; Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 223–24.

7 Frank E. Bernard and Bobbie J. Walter, “Clearance Problems in African Research,” The Professional Geographer 20, no. 1 (1968): 28–32; Vernon McKay, “The Research Climate in Eastern Africa (Report on a Mission for the Research Liaison Committee of the African Studies Association, July–September 1967),” African Studies Bulletin 11, no. 1 (1968): 2, 7.

8 Bernard and Walter, “Clearance Problems,” 7, 28; Philip D. Curtin, On the Fringes of History: A Memoir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 151.

9 George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1, 6; George Roberts, “The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the Politics of Exile in Dar es Salaam,” Cold War History 17, no. 1 (2017): 3; Pallo Z. Jordan and Mac Maharaj, “South Africa and the Turn to Armed Resistance,” South African Historical Journal 70, no. 1 (2018): 22–23.

10 Eric Burton, “Frontline Citizens: Liberation Movements, Transnational Solidarity, and the Making of Anti-Imperialist Citizenship in Tanzania,” International Review of Social History 69, no. S32 (2024): 202; Hilmi S. Yousuf, “The OAU and the African Liberation Movement,” Pakistan Horizon 38, no. 4 (1985): 55–56; Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40.

11 Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making, 61–63.

12 Gilbert C. K. Gwassa, The Outbreak and Development of the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907 (Cologne: Köppe Verlag, 2005), 237.

13 Author interview with John Iliffe, 9 Jan. 2025, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

14 Isaria N. Kimambo, “Historical Research in Mainland Tanzania,” in Expanding Horizons in African Studies, eds. Gwendolen M. Carter and Ann Paden (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 85; Lorne Larson, “Mgeni or Mwenyeji? The Cultural Progress of a Rural Canadian Innocent Into the Heart of Tanzania,” Paper presented at the 12th Annual International Ethnography Symposium “Politics and Ethnography in an Age of Uncertainty,” 29 Aug.–1 Sep. 2017, 22, Academia.edu, accessed 1 Dec. 2024, https://www.academia.edu/34463963/Mgeni_or_mwenyeji_The_cultural_progress_of_a_rural_Canadian_innocent_into_the_heart_of_Tanzania; Maji Maji Research Project, 1968: Collected Papers (University College, Dar es Salaam Department of History, 1968); Maji Maji Research Project, 1969: Collected Papers (University College, Dar es Salaam Department of History, 1969); Gilbert C. K. Gwassa and John Iliffe, eds. Records of the Maji Maji Rising: Part One (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967).

15 Bertha Koda, “Changing Land Tenure Systems in the Contemporary Matrilineal Social System: The Gendered Dimension,” in The Making of a Periphery: Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania, eds. Pekka Seppala and Bertha Koda (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitute, 1998), 206; James Giblin and Jamie Monson, “Introduction,” in Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, eds. James Giblin and Jamie Monson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 2; Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 66.

16 Brooks Marmon, “Transgressing Kamuzu Banda: The Rotberg Affair and the Suppression of Historical Research in Newly Independent Malawi,” The Global Sixties 17, no. 2 (2024): 95–99, 106–9; McKay, “The Research Climate,” 4.

17 McKay, “The Research Climate,” 1, 6, 9, 11–13; Ryan Sheely, “Regimes and Randomization: Authoritarianism and Field Research in Contemporary Kenya,” Social Science Quarterly 97, no. 4 (2016): 942; Gretha Kershaw, “Mau Mau from Below: Fieldwork and Experience, 1955–57 and 1962,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 289–90; E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, “The Production of History in Kenya: The Mau Mau Debate,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 303–4.

18 Samuel Fury Childs Daly, “Archival Research in Africa,” African Affairs 116, no. 463 (2017): 311–12, 315.

19 McKay, “The Research Climate,” 13.

20 Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).

21 Sostene Massimo Zangari, “Straightjacketed Into the Future: Richard Wright and the Ambiguities of Decolonization,” The Black Scholar 39, no. 1–2 (2009): 78–79; Hazel Rowley, “Richard Wright’s Africa,” The Antioch Review 58, no. 4 (2000): 406–21; Kevin Kelly Gaines, “Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 2 (2001): 87.

22 Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music: An Autobiography 1957–1983 (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1986), 46–50.

23 Bernard and Walter, “Clearance Problems in African Research,” 32.

24 Marmon, “Transgressing Kamuzu Banda,” 102.

25 Author’s personal communication with Marcia Wright, 17 Nov. 2024; Marcia Wright, Report on the Government Records and Public Archives of Tanganyika with Recommendations for a National Archives (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Government Printer, 1962); Marcia Wright, “The Tanganyika Archives,” The American Archivist 28, no. 4 (1965): 511–20.

26 Author’s personal communication with Henry Bienen, 7 Nov. 2024.

27 Göran Hydén, Political Development in Rural Tanzania: TANU Yajenga Nchi (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 258.

28 Michael G. Panzer, “Building a Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-State, 1964–1968,” Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 5–8; John A. Marcum, Conceiving Mozambique (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 89; John S. Saul, “Socialism and Southern Africa,” in Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle, eds. Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013), 208; Barry Munslow, Mozambique: The Revolution and its Origins (London: Longman, 1983), 87–89; João M. Cabrita, Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 47.

29 Barry Munslow, Mozambique, 47–58; Lorne Larson, “The Making of African History: Tanzania in the Twentieth Century,” 13, Academia.edu, accessed 13 Dec. 2024, https://www.academia.edu/45085768/The_Making_of_African_History_Tanzania_in_the_Twentieth_Century.

30 Author’s personal communication with Steven Feierman, 16 Jan. 2025; see Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

31 Larson, “Mgeni or Mwenyeji?”, 22; Patrick M. Redmond, “A Political History of the Songea Ngoni from the mid-nineteenth century to the rise of the Tanganyika African National Union,” (PhD diss., SOAS University of London, 1972), 18–19; Patrick M. Redmond, The Politics of Power in Songea Ngoni Society, 1860–1962 (Chicago: Adams Press, 1985), 206; August H. Nimtz, Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), xv.

32 Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 41.

33 Bloke Modisane, “The East African Short Story,” The New African 1, no. 10 (1962): 5.

34 Siyabonga Njica, “Anti-Apartheid Transatlantic Networks in the Age of the Civil Rights Struggle: Bloke Modisane in the United States,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 24, no. 4 (2023): 195–213.

35 The first research project was the Xhosa cattle killings of 1856–57, which he titled “National Suicide of the Ama-Xhosa,” RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Helmut Loetzke, 9 Aug. 1965.

36 Maddox, “The Dar es Salaam of African History,” 2; Harisch, “The Dar es Salaam Schools of History,” 88–90, 104.

37 Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, “Written in Water: the Legon School of History and the Publication of the Past,” in Knowing-Unknowing: African Studies at the Crossroads, eds. Katharina Schramm and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 124–26; Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, “Neglected Historiography from Africa: The Case for Postindependence Journals,” The Journal of African History 64, no. 1 (2023): 5–12.

38 Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, “Homespun Historiography and the Academic Profession,” in Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa, eds. Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 5–15.

39 John Iliffe, “Tanzania Under German and British Rule,” in Zamani: A Survey of East African History, eds. Bethwell A. Ogot and J. A. Kieran (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 295; Giblin and Monson, “Introduction,” 1; Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918,” The Journal of African History 39, no. 1 (1998): 97.

40 Coelho, “Memory, History, Fiction,” 2.

41 David Rockefeller Jr., “The Role of Foundations: Rockefeller Foundation,” Public Health Reviews 37, no. 1 (2016): 32; Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 153; Barbara Shubinski and Teresa Iacobelli, “Building Global Understanding: Area Studies, Language, and History,” Re: Source, accessed 7 Mar. 2022, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/philanthropy-birth-of-area-studies-field-building/.

42 Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 5; Inderjeet Parmar, “American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks,” Global Networks 2, no. 2 (2002): 13–14; Tim B. Mueller, “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 3 (2013): 119; Donal Fisher, “The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences,” Sociology 17, no. 2 (1983): 206.

43 Berman, The Influence, 6, 8, 77; Edward H. Berman, “Foundations, United States Foreign Policy, and African Education, 1945–1975,” Harvard Educational Review 49, no. 2 (1979): 146, 155, 157, 170.

44 Berman, The Influence, 67.

45 Ibid., 77–78.

46 Frank A. Salamone, “The International African Institute: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Development of British Social Anthropology in Africa,” Transforming Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2000): 19–21; Roland Oliver, In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997), 168–69, 220.

47 Oliver, In the Realms of Gold, 263.

48 R. M. Bell, “The Maji-Maji Rebellion in the Liwale District,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 28 (1950): 38–57; Margaret Bates, “Historical Introduction,” East African Swahili Committee Journal, Supplement no. 27 (1957): 7–18; A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott, “The Origin of the Majimaji Revolt,” Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 60 (1960): 71–73; John Iliffe, “The German Administration in Tanganyika, 1906-1911: The Governorship of Freiherr von Rechenberg” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1965), 3, 13; Thaddeus Sunseri, “The Maji Maji War, 1905–1907,” in Spear, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2022), 28; Patrick M. Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiography,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 3 (1975): 419.

49 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Jesse P. Perry, 16 Dec. 1964.

50 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 7 Aug. 1965.

51 William A. Hance and Philip D. Curtin, “African Studies in Africa and the American Scholar,” African Studies Bulletin 9, no. 1 (1966): 29.

52 Desmond Mpilo Tutu, “Foreword,” in Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation, eds. Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), xii; Robert Johnson Jr., ed. Fighting for Africa: The Pan-African Contributions of Ambassador Dudley J. Thompson and Bill Sutherland (New York: University Press of America, 2010), 9.

53 Sutherland and Meyer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa, 63–66; Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in the Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, eds. Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 204.

54 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587: Modisane to Crawford, 9 Feb. 1965; Jack H. Mower to Crawford, 10 Feb. 1965.

55 “Obituaries: Jack H. Mower, CIA Officer,” Washington Post, 6 Dec. 2016.

56 Tim B. Mueller, “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 3 (2013): 119; Berman, The Influence, 3.

57 Richard A. Schroeder, Africa After Apartheid: South Africa, Race, and Nation in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 16; Andrew Ivaska, “Liberation in Transit: Eduardo Mondlane and Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, eds. Chen Jian et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), 30–31; Roberts, “The Assassination,” 1–19; “David M. Sibeko, 49, South African Exile, Murdered in Tanzania,” New York Times, 13 June 1979, 6; Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), 306; Gregory Houston, Thami ka Plaatjie, and Thozama April, “Military Training and Camps of the Pan Africanist Congress of South Africa, 1961–1981,” Historia 60, no. 2 (2015): 49; Kwandiwe K. M. Kondlo, “‘In the Twilight of the Azanian Revolution’: Leadership Diversity and Its Impact on the PAC During the Exile Period (1962–1990),” Southern Journal for Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (2005): 33.

58 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Perry Jr., 27 Jan. 1965.

59 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 18 June 1965.

60 Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity—Uhuru na Moja: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–65 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966), 41; Elijah Greenstein, “Making History: Historical Narratives of the Maji Maji,” Penn History Review 17, no. 2 (2010): 64; Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, eds. David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (London: James Currey, 1995), 125; Gwassa, The Outbreak, 228.

61 Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making, 59, 63.

62 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Perry Jr., 30 June 1965.

63 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 7 Aug. 1965.

64 Lionel Cliffe, “Five Decades of Liberation and Revolution: The Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu,” Review of African Political Economy 28, no. 89 (2001): 470–71; Horace Campbell, “Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu 1924–96—A Personal Memoir,” African Journal of Political Science 1, no. 2 (1996): 240, 243.

65 Erasto A. M. Mang’enya, Discipline and Tears: Reminiscences of an African Civil Servant on Colonial Tanganyika (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1984), ii.

66 Emma Hunter, “‘The History and Affairs of TANU’: Intellectual History, Nationalism, and the Postcolonial State in Tanzania,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 45, no. 3 (2012): 371, 376–82.

67 Benjamin N. Lawrance and Vusumuzi R. Kumalo, “‘A Genius Without Direction’: The Abortive Exile of Dugmore Boetie and the Fate of Southern African Refugees in a Decolonizing Africa,” American Historical Review 126, no. 2 (2021): 586.

68 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 7 Aug. 1965.

69 Ibid.

70 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Perry, 12 Aug. 1965.

71 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, Langston Hughes Papers (LHP), JWJ MSS 26, Box 114, Folder 2161–2162, Modisane to Langston Hughes, 15 Sep. 1965.

72 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane, “Statement of account for the Tanzania Safari,” 31 Jan. 1966; Alison Redmayne, “Mkwawa and the Hehe Wars,” The Journal of African History 9, no. 3 (1968): 429.

73 Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi, eds. The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 137; Ohio State University Archives, The Ohio State University, Imani Malima, “New Professor,” Our Choking Times, 25 Oct. 1978, 4.

74 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane, “Statement,” 31 Jan. 1966.

75 LHP, JWJ MSS 26, Box 114, Folder 2161–2162, Modisane to Hughes, 15 Sep. 1965.

76 Jesse Bucher, “The Skull of Mkwawa and the Politics of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 10, no. 2 (2016): 285–87; Nancy Rushohora, “Desperate Mourning and Atrophied Representation: A Tale of Two Skulls,” African Historical Review 51, no. 1 (2019): 28–29.

77 “One-Party Tanzania Goes Democratic,” The Guardian, 20 Sep. 1965, 9; William Tordoff, “The General Election in Tanzania,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 4, no. 1 (1966): 47–64.

78 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, John Lonsdale and Terence Ranger to Modisane, 15 Jun. 1965.

79 Bakary Kamian, “International Congress of African History,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 4 (1965): 617; T. O. Ranger, ed. Emerging Themes of African History: Proceedings of the International Congress of African Historians held at University College, Dar es Salaam, October 1965 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968), ix; D. H. Jones, “Reviews: Emerging Themes of African History,” The Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 679; Bethwell A. Ogot, My Footprints on the Sands of Time: An Autobiography (Kisumu: Anyange Press, 2003), 156–57.

80 University Library Dar es Salaam (ULDSM), East Africana Collection (EAF) QTO IT19.151, University College Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, “International Congress of African History. September 26th to October 3rd, 1965,” “Final List of Delegates,” 1965, 3. I want to thank Immanuel R. Harisch for sharing this source with me.

81 Michelle Moyd, “‘All People were Barbarians to the Askari…’: Askari Identity and Honor in the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907,” in Giblin and Monson, Maji Maji, 150–51.

82 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane, “Statement of account for the Tanzania Safari,” 31 Jan. 1966.

83 Moyd, “‘All People’”, 158; Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 4.

84 Ibid., 9–10.

85 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane, “Statement of account for the Tanzania Safari,” 31 Jan. 1966.

86 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 18 Dec. 1965.

87 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Perry Jr., 28 June 1966; 21 Sep. 1966.

88 RFR Box 229, Folder 3587, Modisane to Crawford, 29 Nov. 1965.

89 Giblin and Monson, “Introduction,” 3–5.

90 Gwassa, The Outbreak; Jigal Beez, “Gilbert Clement Kamana Gwassa 1939–1982: A Tribute to the Founder of Tanzanian Maji Maji Research,” Habari Infobrief Des Tanzania Network 4, no. 4 (2008): 65.

91 See Maji Maji Research Project, 1968; Maji Maji Research Project, 1969; Gwassa and Iliffe, Records of the Maji Maji Rising.

92 Munslow, Mozambique, 47–58.

93 Tanzania National Scientific Research Council Act, 1968 (No. 52 of 1968), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Parliament, 10 Oct. 1968, accessed 15 Jan. 2025, https://www.parliament.go.tz/polis/uploads/bills/acts/1565854017-The%20Tanzania%20National%20Scientific%20Research%20Council%20Act,%201968.pdf; “Research Regulations in Tanzania,” ASA News 6, no. 6 (1973): 27.