The Bearers of News: Print and Power in German East Africa

Abstract

Historians have drawn on newspapers to illuminate the origins of modern nationalism and cultures of literacy. The case of Kiongozi (The Guide or The Leader) relates this scholarship to Tanzania's colonial past. Published between 1904 and 1916 by the government of what was then German East Africa, the paper played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, by promoting the shift from Swahili written in Arabic script (ajami) to Latinized Swahili, it became the mouthpiece of an African elite trained in government schools. By reading and writing for Kiongozi, these waletaji wa habari (bearers of news) spread Swahili inland and transformed coastal culture. On the other hand, the paper served the power of the colonial state by mediating between German colonizers and their indigenous subordinates. Beyond cooptation, Kiongozi highlights the warped nature of African voices in the colonial archive, questioning claims about print's impact on nationalism and new forms of selfhood.

Brewing Tensions: The Colonial Gaze of the German–Namibian Publishing Industry

“…In terms of novels, scholars have critiqued settler literature that has popularized a romanticized and exotic image of Africa (Lewis, 2000). A fruitful area of research is the role of print culture in colonial Africa and in particular the relationship between newspapers and nationalism (Krautwald, 2021;Marsh, 2017). Another perspective is the burgeoning interest in the rise of patriotic history by postindependence governments, whose legitimacy is derived from a specific narrative of the liberation struggle.…”