Founder: Kinjitihile Country: Tanzania
Though shortlived (1905-7) Maji Maji (in Swahili Maji means water) was the most widespread primary resistance movement in the history of East Africa and it resulted in the largest number of deaths. An explosion of hatred against white rule, like Mau Mau it has been enlisted for the cause of African nationalism, but this would be to ignore its religious elements.
Setting
The causes have been contested from the beginning. Maji Maji, a sacred battle cry, arose suddenly in the context of resentment to German rule that had taken two decades to impose by force, and was taken up across 100,000 square miles of the south and east of what is now Tanzania. Hut tax, seen by the Matumbi as an offering that the strangers should give to propitiate the gods, was vigorously imposed from 1897 and forced labour of at least 25,000 men was required to cultivate cash crops.
The Bantu peoples of east-central Tanzania were not culturally separate and shared a belief in the Kolelo divinity. During the nineteenth century it had expanded cross-culturally with the spirit of Kolelo possessing ordinary people who then exorcized it, thus giving a sense of control over change. In particular the cult of Bokero’s shrine on the upper Rufiji River had spread to other places. Maji was taken to sprinkle on the land during the drought of 1903-5 and as a panacea. The Zaramo, for instance, who were angry with cotton planting, also acknowledged the Kolelo shrine in Uluguru.
Prophets and meaning
Another shrine was at Ngarambe where the prophet-medium Kinjitikile received the Hongo (messenger) of God, a riversnake spirit, and sent out his own hongo far afield. Having themselves been ‘baptized’ by drinking the maji medicine, they carried it to peoples for their unity and invulnerability. Hongo were believed because they operated within the known parameters of religious tradition necessary for a mass movement. As people came to hear of the shrine and its hopes, so local leaders sent emissaries to meet the ancestors there in the huge spirit-hut (Kijumba-Nungu), where clients offered them rice, millet, salt, and money to find out just what was happening. He combined preexisting knowledge about divinity, possession, and medicine for the current exigency. Like the Bokero prophets he gained his knowledge under water (maji), anointed followers with a medicine of water, maize, and sorghum, which would turn the bullets of the enemies into water, protect the women and children, and multiply their grain. It was this religious belief that persuaded people to join and fight despite the previous failures of armed resistance. Among the Ngindo, who knew little of Kinjikitile or the Bokero cult, the hongo spread a millennial message of an epoch of peace and prosperity without white rule. Anti-witchcraft messages helped the cause.
Kinjikitile prophesied the Germans would leave after a war, but for the time-being Africans should work, while a whispering campaign was mounted. Anti-colonial defiance broke out prematurely for him. Matumbi warriors wearing blue American calico and millet heads around their forehead marched to the coast to uproot cotton and burn an Asian trading centre on 31 July 1903. Bokero and Kinjitikile were hanged by the Germans three days later. However the maji medicine had already been spread far and wide and there were many to distribute it.
Military outcomes
Though fighting occurred over a very broad area, so that it was felt on the farthest borders of what was at the time German East Africa, it was organized on a tribal basis with no massing of forces. Indeed there could be internal rivalries in stateless societies or between aspiring chiefs. A few mission stations and small posts were taken, but only fifteen Europeans died. Wherever German forces could bring to bear volleys of fire or machine-guns, the rebels soon suffered many casualties. Since the maji medicine was shown to be ineffective, morale and organization were diminished, though lack of immunity to bullets could be attributed to the failure of the fighters to keep to the tabus against sex, sesame, and pigeon peas. Those who had trusted their lives to Kinjitikile’s maji or holy water dubbed him a traitor, and others named the movement Hongo-Hongo (hongo in English means blackmail), or Pahongo as in Uzungwa.
It was not very difficult for Germans to regain control. In rebel areas a scorched earth policy induced dreadful famines that reduced human capacity to keep the elephant and the tsetse-fly at bay. Some 250,000-300,000 Africans died in all, a third of the affected areas and about 7 per cent of the colony’s total population. Without diminishing hatred of the colonialists, all plans for further resistance were shelved and means sought for appropriating opportunities brought by a reforming colonial power. Many flocked to the Christian churches and Islam. Yet Maji Maji was remembered by the nationalists of the 1950s, though there had been no concept of nation, just a common aspiration to drive out the Europeans.
