Description
This paper analyses the workings of settler logics in non-settler colonies. Few would contest that Tanzania was not a settler colony. However, settlers constituted a powerful sector of European colonizing society both under German and British colonial rule in German East Africa and Tanganyika, respectively. From the very first expeditions of conquest by Carl Peters at the end of the 19th century, until the sizable European planter associations of the mid-20th century, settler desires for land translated into sustained pressures on the colonial government. This entailed formulating and advancing racialized arguments about the need of a settler presence to civilize the Native, and the Native’s propensity to destroy East Africa’s fertile ecologies. As such, settlers profoundly shaped colonialism in Tanzania. Beyond this historical analysis, the paper also examines the extent to which these settler visions continue to structure relations between Tanzanians and ecologies today, and how they are mirrored in contemporary conservationist efforts to grab land for wildlife and biodiversity preservation. In doing so, this paper brings together settler colonial, Indigenous, and decolonial studies to think through what it means for settler colonial projects to coalesce and shape relations of power in a formally independent country subjected to (global) coloniality. Politically, this raises questions about the possibilities for trans-continental struggle for collective, internationalist liberation among differently-colonized peoples.
