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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Karibu stranger, come heal thy host: hospitality as historical subject in southwestern Tanzania, 1600-1900
Author:Fourshey, Catherine CymoneISNI
Year:2012
Periodical:African historical review (ISSN 1753-2531)
Volume:44
Issue:2
Pages:18-54
Language:English
Geographic term:Tanzania
Subjects:hospitality
social history
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17532523.2012.739747
Abstract:This study focuses on hospitality in Tanzania, as a topic of historical importance. Although there are many references to hospitality within both primary and secondary sources and anecdotal accounts, hospitality is effectively unexplored in the historical scholarship for any part of sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at southwestern Tanzania between 1600 and 1900 as a case study, this work aims to make hospitality, for the first time, a primary focus of historical study rather than a peripheral and passing allusion. Towards that end, the author examines why and when some societies chose to extend hospitality to outsiders and strangers. In southwestern Tanzania between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, extending hospitality to guests, strangers, and 'foreign residents' was a paramount value and social expectation, which could result in inclusion of outsiders. Hospitality towards newcomers became a cultural norm. The author contends that direct, immediate, and personal gain was far less important than a circulation of hospitality. In the long term social and political institutions were buoyed by this moral expectation. In order to demonstrate these claims, she employs proverbs, oral traditions, and explorers' accounts as historical evidence for hospitality's enduring salience in shifting contexts in southwestern Tanzania from precolonial times into the twentieth century. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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