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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Living in 'cold storage': an interior history of Tanzania's sleeping sickness concentrations, 1933-1946 |
| Author: | Weiskopf, Julie M. |
| Year: | 2016 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies (ISSN 0361-7882) |
| Volume: | 49 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 1-22 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Tanzania |
| Subjects: | Ha trypanosomiasis resettlement spirits social change |
| Abstract: | Between 1933 and 1946 approximately 65,000 members of the Ha cultural and language group were forced by the British authorities to leave their home area because of its conduciveness to the tsetse fly. The forced resettlement, which usually involved the burning down of homes and farms, aimed at gaining control over the feared sleeping sickness, spread by the tsetse fly. While the colonial authorities perceived the areas where people were concentrated in order to fight the disease as areas of little change, Ha oral histories testify to a dynamic period, one in which men and women replicated, adjusted, or revolutionized their lives and livelihoods in the midst of drastically changed circumstances. Drawing on extensive oral interviews, work songs, colonial documents, and colonial officials' personal papers, this essay demonstrates how Ha categories of thought enabled community members to analyze the problems they faced and seek their redress. It shows that over the early decades of living in the resettlement areas, it was not colonial policy but Ha agency - economic practices and spiritual beliefs - that directed the transformations that occurred. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
