This article analyses the popular story of the two 'social bandits' Osale and Paulo who caused insecurity and fear in Tanganyika's Usambara Mountains during the 1950s. By comparing various oral accounts of the story and supplementing the sparse archival material available, the paper reveals a narrative of multiple anxieties haboured by the residents of Shambaai during a time of rapid transformation under late colonial rule. As they reworked the racialized colonial hierarchy through their narratives, African storytellers dealt with anxieties concerning settler colonialism, Mau Mau, land scarcity and the colonial administration's disastrous soil conservation policy. The article demonstrates the importance of taking seriously oral histories for our understanding of African responses to the anxieties of the late colonial period. Furthermore, it sheds new light on the relations between white settlers and Africans in the Usambara Mountains in the light of the administration's rigorous intervention into African agriculture.
The rich and nuanced literature on African intermediaries has shed new light on the colonial encounter from the perspective of African interlocutors, but has often neglected to study failed acts of communication between colonial administrators and non-elite African intermediaries. This article fills in some gaps by focusing on non-successful communications. Analysing rumours and non-conformist modes of petitioning, the article explores misunderstandings between Tanzanians and representatives of the late-colonial state. While the British could afford to ignore idiosyncratic messages when they did not clash with their own operational interests, they had to act upon others, and their responses were not always those desired by the Tanzanian senders. Despite communicating in relative proximity, the close distance between Tanzanians who were not fluent in the bureaucratic idiom of the colonial state and British administrators could not always be bridged.
Sugar daddy stories abound in many places; they are not specific to eastern and central Africa.However, they have a distinct (moral) history in this region. Sugar daddies, blessers, sponsors, ATMs, fatakidifferent terms are used to describe intimate relationships between wealthy older men and young women, indeed often schoolgirls, in which money and other goods change hands. The Swahili word fataki means explosion, a term that mirrors the ambiguity of sugar relations. Sexual relations, love talk, and gifts can be excitingly explosive, but fataki also connotes a ticking time bomb, an explosion that will eventually damage or kill, a reference to the possibility of the transmission of HIV. 2 In a 2018 BBC documentary series, Zimbabwean journalist Nyasha Kadandara argues that the boom of sugar relationships in Kenya is no longer driven by poverty, but by a form of vanity fuelled by socialites. She establishes a link between the recent explosion of sugar relationships on the African continent and the coming of age of millennials and their use of social media. 3 Kadandara's work is important because it paints a complex picture that defies easy explanation. She does not treat these women as victims of sexualised violence or other kinds of exploitation, although she does highlight what she sees as the dangers associated with sugar relationships: Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), violence, as well as the stigma of sex work. But most importantly, her documentary invites us to think also of the glamorous side of such relationships, a side which is rooted in the material but at the same time transcends it, entering the imaginary − dreams and fantasies. *I would like to thank Sarah Bellows-Blakely for her generous advice and Lena Dasch for her help with this piece of research.This article sets out to interrogate such dreams and fantasies; specifically, the fantasies held by people who think, talk, and write about sugar daddies and sugar babies. I focus on the fluid feelings sugar relations produce in observers, writers, and readers of the Zambian youth magazine "Speak Out!" from the 1980s to the 2000s, which range from shame and jealousy to fury and anxiety. I use the lens of emotions to understand how these stories of censure that target women, stories which also produce uneasy arousal, can be fertile terrain through which we are able to understand larger anxieties. The sugar daddy script expresses a desire for order; an order disturbed by the people involved in sugar relationships, particularly the women. The feminine figure, at once unsettling and glamourous, intimidating and innocent, provides a foil for anxieties of social decline, general disorder and corruption that are closely tied to an urban environment perceived as tainted, morally and otherwise. Sugar stories also give insight into the global crisis of masculinities on the African continent. 4 The Zambian copper mines are a site where such anxieties thrived for decades. Africanist scholarship has long discussed the central African Copperbelt as a model for ...
Sugar daddy stories abound in many places; they are not specific to eastern and central Africa.However, they have a distinct (moral) history in this region. Sugar daddies, blessers, sponsors, ATMs, fatakidifferent terms are used to describe intimate relationships between wealthy older men and young women, indeed often schoolgirls, in which money and other goods change hands. The Swahili word fataki means explosion, a term that mirrors the ambiguity of sugar relations. Sexual relations, love talk, and gifts can be excitingly explosive, but fataki also connotes a ticking time bomb, an explosion that will eventually damage or kill, a reference to the possibility of the transmission of HIV. 2 In a 2018 BBC documentary series, Zimbabwean journalist Nyasha Kadandara argues that the boom of sugar relationships in Kenya is no longer driven by poverty, but by a form of vanity fuelled by socialites. She establishes a link between the recent explosion of sugar relationships on the African continent and the coming of age of millennials and their use of social media. 3 Kadandara's work is important because it paints a complex picture that defies easy explanation. She does not treat these women as victims of sexualised violence or other kinds of exploitation, although she does highlight what she sees as the dangers associated with sugar relationships: Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), violence, as well as the stigma of sex work. But most importantly, her documentary invites us to think also of the glamorous side of such relationships, a side which is rooted in the material but at the same time transcends it, entering the imaginary − dreams and fantasies. *I would like to thank Sarah Bellows-Blakely for her generous advice and Lena Dasch for her help with this piece of research.This article sets out to interrogate such dreams and fantasies; specifically, the fantasies held by people who think, talk, and write about sugar daddies and sugar babies. I focus on the fluid feelings sugar relations produce in observers, writers, and readers of the Zambian youth magazine "Speak Out!" from the 1980s to the 2000s, which range from shame and jealousy to fury and anxiety. I use the lens of emotions to understand how these stories of censure that target women, stories which also produce uneasy arousal, can be fertile terrain through which we are able to understand larger anxieties. The sugar daddy script expresses a desire for order; an order disturbed by the people involved in sugar relationships, particularly the women. The feminine figure, at once unsettling and glamourous, intimidating and innocent, provides a foil for anxieties of social decline, general disorder and corruption that are closely tied to an urban environment perceived as tainted, morally and otherwise. Sugar stories also give insight into the global crisis of masculinities on the African continent. 4 The Zambian copper mines are a site where such anxieties thrived for decades. Africanist scholarship has long discussed the central African Copperbelt as a model for ...
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