Violence and Vulnerability in East Africa before 1800 CE: An Agenda for Research

Abstract

Little is known about the history of violence and vulnerability in east Africa before 1800 CE despite its obvious importance to virtually any larger theme in the region's history. This essay suggests that although the fraught moral valences of violence and vulnerability – especially with respect to their importance in modern African history – may explain this state of affairs, historians must meet the challenge of studying the earlier histories of violence and vulnerability as part of a full‐fleshed sense of the African past. With a focus on east Africa before the nineteenth century, the essay considers some of the particular transitions which a regional history of violence and vulnerability might cause us to rethink. It closes with a broad definition of violence crafted in the light of the value of a long‐term regional history of such fraught categories.

Introduction Control and Excess: Histories of Violence in Africa

“…David Schoenbrun recalled recently that, with the important exception of slavery and the slave trades, historians’ ‘work on precolonial violence has been scanty and unsystematic’, including research on ‘the theories of action that frame imaginary violence, the ever-present double of “real” violence’ (2006a; 2006b; but see Reid 2011). Without these early moral imaginations, it is hardly possible to write histories of Africa in people's own terms, or to track the enduring relevance of such frameworks of action over time (Schmidt 2013).…”

MUKOMBOZI AND THE MONGANGA: THE VIOLENCE OF HEALING IN THE 1944 KITAWALIST UPRISING

“…But if we are going to tether violence in the colonial era to the present, then we must also consider the ways in which much older imaginaries of violence and power can be tethered both to the colonial context and to the present. Of course, one must not give currency to ‘essentializing notions of Africa's past as one soaked in blood’ by suggesting that Central Africa has a ‘culture of violence’ (Schoenbrun 2006: 742). But nor did Central Africa have a history devoid of violence before colonialism.…”

“… 30 I borrow the terms ‘theories of power’ and ‘theories of action’ from David Schoenbrun (2006: 743).…”

“…However, this rewrite must not be simply about tethering to the present, but also about tethering to the past, to the imaginaries and modalities of violence that preceded the uprising in the region. Arguing for attention to the deep histories of violence and vulnerability in Central and Eastern Africa, David Schoenbrun writes that ‘histories of violence in Africa that take seriously the challenge of specifying the contexts for potential acts of violence must depict the theories of action that frame imaginary violence, the ever-present double of “real” violence’ (2006: 743). The centrality of witchcraft discourse in the uprising – discourse related to the moral and immoral use of spiritual power ( puissance / force / nguvu ) – and the imaginaries and choreographies of violence that accompanied that discourse must be understood not as tangential to the larger anti-colonial political struggle of Bushiri and his followers, but central to that struggle and the way in which it manifested in that historical moment.…”