They do not differentiate between a seniority system of rulers
imposed by the colonial freezing of political dynamics and the
pre-colonial competitive, shifting, fluid imbalance of power and
influence. 79
Similarly, nineteenth-century Africa was not characterized by lack
of internal social and economic competition, by the unchallenged
authority of the elders, by an acceptance of custom which gave every
person - young and old, male and female - a place in society which
was defined and protected. Competition, movement, fluidity were as
much features of small-scale communities as they were of larger
groupings. Thus Marcia Wright has shown, in a stimulating account
of the realities of late nineteenth-century society in the Lake Tanganyika
corridor, that economic and political competition overrode
the' customary securities' offered to women by marriage or extended
kinship relations. Women constantly found themselves being shaken
out of the niches in which they had sought security, and constantly
tried to find new niches for themselves. Later on, of course, and in the
twentieth century, the dogmas of customary security and immutably
fixed relationships grew up in these same societies, which came to
have an appearance of ujamaa style solidarity; the nineteenth-century
time of' rapid change', in which 'formal structural factors' became
relatively less important than 'personal resilience and powers of
decision', gave way to stabilization. As Marcia Wright remarks:
the terms of the reconstruction were dictated by the colonial
authorities in the years after 1895, when pacification came to mean
immobilization of populations, re-inforcement of ethnicity and
greater rigidity of social definition.80
Hence 'custom' in the Tanganyika corridor was much more of an
invention than it was a restoration. In other places, where the
competitive dynamic of the nineteenth century had given many
opportunities for young men to establish independent bases of
economic, social and political influence, colonialism saw an establishment
of control by elders ofland allocation, marriage transactions
and political office. Small-scale gerontocracies were a defining
feature of the twentieth rather than of the nineteenth century.
Some part of these twentieth-century processes of' immobilization
of populations, re-inforcement of ethnicity and greater rigidity of
social definition' were the necessary and unplanned consequences of
colonial economic and political change- of the break up of internal
patterns of trade and communication, the defining of territorial
boundaries, the alienation ofland, the establishment of Reserves. But
some part of them were the result of a conscious determination on
the part of the colonial authorities to' re-establish' order and security
and a sense of community by means of defining and enforcing
'tradition'. Administrators who had begun by proclaiming their
support for exploited commoners against rapacious chiefs ended by
backing 'traditional' chiefly authority in the interests of social
control. 81 Missionaries who had begun by taking converts right out
of their societies so as to transfonn their consciousness in 'Christian
villages' ended by proclaiming the virtues of' traditional' small-scale
community. Everyone sought to tidy up and make more comprehensible
the infinitely complex situation which they held to be a result
ofthe 'untraditional' chaos of the nineteenth century. People were to
be 'returned' to their tribal identities; ethnicity was to be 'restored'
as the basis of association and organization.82 The new rigidities,
immobilizations and ethnic identifications, while serving very immediate
European interests, could nevertheless be seen by the whites as
fully 'traditional' and hence as legitimated. The most far-reaching
inventions of tradition in colonial Africa took place when the
Europeans believed themselves to be respecting age-old African
custom. What were called customary law, customary land-rights,
·'( custo~ary P?litic~l structure and so on, were in fact all invented by
· colomal codtficatwn.
There is a growing anthropological and historical literature on
these processes which it is not possible to summarize here. But a few
striking statements will give an indication of the argument. Thus
John Iliffe describes the 'creation of tribes' in colonial Tanganyika:
The notion of the tribe lay at the heart of indirect rule in
Tanganyika. Refining the racial thinking common in German
times, administrators believed that every African belonged to a
tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea
doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar,
to academic distinctions between tribal societies based on status
and modern societies based on co~tract, and to the post-war
anthropologists who preferred' tribal' to the more pejorative word
'savage'. Tribes were seen as cultural units 'possessing a common
language, a single social system, and an established common law'.
Their political and social systems rested on kinship. Tribal
membership was hereditary. Different tribes were related
genealogically ... As unusually well-informed officials knew, this
stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika's kaleidoscopic history,
but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his
disciples erected indirect rule by 'taking the tribal unit'. They had
the power and they created the political geography.83
Elizabeth Colson describes the evolution of' customary land law'
in much the same way:
The newly created system was described as resting on tradition and
presumably derived its legitimacy from immemorial custom. The
degree to which it was a reflection of the contemporary situation
and the joint creation of · colonial officials and African
leaders ... was unlikely to be recognized.
The point is not merely that so-called custom in fact concealed new
balances of power and wealth, since this was precisely what custom
in the past had always been able to do, but that these particular
constructs of customary law became codified and rigid and unable
so readily to reflect change in the future. Colson remarks that
colonial officers expected the courts to enforce long-established
custom rather than current opinion. Common stereotypes about
African customary law thus came to be used by colonial officials
in assessing the legality of current decisions, and so came to be
incorporated in 'customary' systems of tenure.84
Similarly, Wyatt MacGaffey has shown how the Bakongo peoples
moved from a pre-colonial situation of 'processes of dispersal and
assimilation'; of' the shunting of subordinate populations of slaves
and pawns'; of 'a confusion of debts, assets, scandals and
grievances', into a colonial situation of much more precise and static
definition of community and of land rights.
In the evolution of tradition, the touchstone of merit was very
often the presiding judge's concept of customary society, derived
ultimately from ... a lingering European image of the African
kingdom of Prester John ... Court records contain evidence of the
evolution for forensic purposes away from the magical in the
direction of the evidential and refutable ... Those whose traditions
lost a case came back a year or two later with better traditions.
Once again, my point is not so much that 'traditions' changed to
accommodate new circumstances but that at a certain point they had
to stop changing; once the 'traditions' relating to community
identity and land right were writen down in court records and
exposed to the criteria of the invented customary model, a new ahd
unchanging body of tradition had been created.
Eventually there resulted a synthesis of the new and the old, which
is now called 'custom'. The main features of customary society,
responding to the conditions that developed between 1908 and
1921, assumed their present form in the 1920s.85
Around the same time Europeans began to be more interested in
and sympathetic towards the 'irrational' and ritualistic aspects of
'tradition'. In 1917 an Anglican mission theologian suggested that
for the first time missionaries in the field should 'collect information
with regard to the religious ideas of the black man', so that their
relationship to traditional society could be understood. 'In the
twentieth century we are no longer contented to cut the knot, as the
nineteenth century did, and say: Science has put an end to these
superstitions'.86 After the first world war, Anglicans in East Africa,
faced with the need to reconstruct rural society after the ravages of
the fighting and the subsequent impact of the depression, began to
make anthropological analyses of those aspects of' traditional' ritual
which had contributed towards social stability. Out of such inquiry
came the well-known policy of missionary 'adaptation', which
produced its most developed example in the Christianized initiation
ceremonies of the Masasi diocese in south-eastern Tanganyika.87
More generally, there emerged from this kind of thought and
practice- withitsemphasisuponritualsofcontinuityandstability- a
concept of immemorial' African Traditional Religion' which did less
than justice to the variety and vitality of pre-colonial African
religious forms.
AFRICAN MANIPULATION OF INVENTED CUSTOM
All this could not have been achieved, of course, without a good deal
of African participation. As John Iliffe writes:
The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to
tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial
framework ... [The] new political geography ... would have been
transient had it not co-incided with similar trends among Africans.
They too had to live amidst bewildering social complexity, which
they ordered in kinship terms and buttressed with invented history.
Moreover, Africans wanted effective units of action just as officials
wanted effective units of government ... Europeans believed Africans
belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.88
We have already seen in the