African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on December 22, 2005
African Affairs 2006 105(419):265-283; doi:10.1093/afraf/adi089
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State, law, and vigilantism in northern Tanzania
Suzette Heald is a professor of social anthropology at Brunel University.
The spontaneous development of community-based policing in central Tanzania in the early 1980s in the sungusungu movement and the subsequent incorporation of such groups into administrative structures over wide areas of Tanzania poses problems for how to conceive of the state in East Africa. This article deals with the circumstances which prompted the emergence of the movement and its late development among the Kuria of Mara Region in the 1990s. It argues that in ceding significant powers to local communities a ‘quiet revolution’ has taken place, reversing the centralism that was a noted aspect of the Tanzanian post-colonial state. In so doing, it has opened up a divide between the different branches of government, with the political and administrative wings supporting the groups and the institutional innovation they represent in the face of opposition by the police and judiciary. In the praxis of government in the rural areas, the anomalous legality of sungusungu groups is by no means to the disadvantage of the administration but raises the issue of how one can harmonize national and local systems of law and justice.
This article draws upon long-term anthropological fieldwork among the Kuria of Kenya in a series of visits since 1984. In 2002, as part of the Crisis States Development Research Centre of the LSE, this work was extended to Tanzania, with the specific aim of tracing the origin of the sungusungu movement.
1. J.-F. Bayart, S. Ellis, and B. Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (International African Institute and James Currey, London, 1999).
2. In 2000, Transparency International Canada put Tanzania near the top of its rankings of 90 countries in terms of levels of perceived corruption with Tanzania ranked 72 and Kenya 82 (www.transparency/cpi/2000/cpi2000.html, November 22, 2004). A survey by Transparency Kenya reported in the Daily Nation, 19 January, 2002, put the police at the top of the graft league and the judiciary sixth in terms of the frequency of bribes demanded. However, the average amount paid to the police in bribes was only 631 Ksh, compared with 10,334 Ksh for the judiciary. The situation in Tanzania is similar and fully detailed in the ‘Warioba Report’, Presidential Commission of Inquiry Against Corruption: Report of the commission on corruption, Vols 1 & 2 (1996).
3. See further, M. Ruteere and M.-E. Pommerolle, ‘Democratizing security or decentralising repression? The ambiguities of community policing in Kenya’, African Affairs 102, 4 (2003), pp. 587–604.
4. A detailed comparison of the movement among the Sukuma and Kuria can be found in S. Heald, "Domesticating Leviathan: Sungusungu groups in Tanzania" Crisis States Programme Working Paper 16, Series 1 (http://www.crisisstates.com/Publications/wp16.htm, November 7, 2005).
5. M. Ruel, The social organisation of the Kuria: a fieldwork report (Unpublished manuscript, 1959); K. Kjerland, Cattle Breed, Shillings Don’t: The belated incorporation of the abaKuria into modern Kenya (University of Bergen, doctoral dissertation, 1995).
6. E. Tobisson, Family Dynamics Among the Kuria (Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Gothenburg, doctoral dissertation, 1986), p. 95.
7. S. Heald, ‘Tolerating the intolerable: cattle raiding among the Kuria’, in G. Aijmer and J. Abbink (eds), Meanings of Violence (Berg, Oxford, 2000), pp. 101–21; S. Heald ‘Agricultural intensification and the decline of pastoralism: a Kenyan case study’, Africa 69, 2 (1969), pp. 213–37; Kjerland, ‘Cattle breed’.
8. M. Fleisher, Kuria Cattle Raiding: A case study in the capitalist transformation of an East African sociocultural institution (University of Michigan, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1997); ‘Sungusungu: state-sponsored village vigilante groups among the Kuria of Tanzania’, Africa 70, 2 (2000), pp. 209–28; Kuria Cattle Raiders: Violence and vigilantism on the Tanzania/Kenya frontier (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000); ‘ "War is good for thieving!;" The symbiosis of crime and warfare among the Kuria of Tanzania’, Africa 72, 1 (2002), pp. 131–49.
9. Fleisher, Kuria Cattle Raiders, p. 82. While this is probably an overestimate, it gives some idea of the disproportionate number of recruits that came from Kuria, a group who represent less than 1% of the national population. Fleisher also reports that there were in 1995 more Kuria army officers in the Tanzanian army than from any other tribe and more retired officers living in Mara than any other region of Tanzania.
10. D. Ndagala, ‘The unmaking of the Datoga: decreasing resources and increasing conflict’, Nomadic Peoples 28 (1991), pp. 71–82. For current issues surrounding small-arms in pastoralist areas, see K. Mkutu, Pastoralist Conflict, Governance and Small Arms in the North Rift, Northeast Africa (University of Bradford, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 2005).
11. Daily News, 28 January 1985.
12. Daily News, October 1986, cited by Kjerland, Cattle Breed, p. 255. Some caution is necessary in dealing with these figures, I was told by the Divisional Administrative Officer in Serengeti as, at the time, a common practice was for police to exaggerate the number of cattle reported stolen to justify inflated confiscations in the event that such cattle were traced.
13. Interview, 13 February 2002.
14. A hill village, some 15 km to the northwest of Mugumu town, the headquarters of Serengeti District.
15. A group in the southeastern area of Mara Region speaking a language closely related to Kikuria.
16. The first figure was given by the District Commissioner, Serengeti, Ole Sabaya and the second by the Divisional Administrative Officer, Paulo Wambura Shanyangi, Mugumu, Serengeti, 8–10 February 2002.
17. Fleisher, Kuria Cattle Raiders, p. 92 gives 1990 as the date of that event.
18. Interview with Paulo Wambura Shanyangi, 9 February 2002.
19. Fleisher, Kuria Cattle Raiders, and sungusungu give graphic descriptions of these.
20. R.G. Abrahams, ‘Sungusungu: village vigilante groups in Tanzania’, African Affairs 86 (1987), pp. 179–90.
21. P. Masanja ‘Some notes on the sungusungu movement’ in P. Forster and S. Maghimbi (eds), The Tanzanian Peasantry: Economy in crisis (Avebury, Aldershot, UK, 1992), p. 204.
22. The exception here was in Kuria where the People’s Militia was abolished as early as 1985 after evidence that they were actively participating in the raiding.
23. Fleisher, ‘Sungusungu’, p. 216.
25. Ibid and Kuria Cattle Raiders.
26. Heald, ‘Tolerating the intolerable’.
27. The following discussion draws upon R.G. Abrahams, ‘Law and order and the state in the Nyamwesi and Sukuma area of Tanzania’, Africa 59, 3 (1989), pp. 354–68; R.G. Abrahams and S. Bukurura, ‘Party, bureaucracy and grass-roots initiatives in a socialist state: the case of Sungusungu vigilantes in Tanzania’, in C. Hann (ed.), Socialism: Ideals, ideologies and local practices (Routledge, London, 1993), pp. 92–101; Masanja, ‘Some notes’; S. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and history in Tanzania (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1990); C. Ingle, From Village to State in Tanzania: The politics of rural development (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1972); J. Nellis, A Theory of Ideology: The Tanzanian example (Oxford University Press, Nairobi, 1972); B. Heilman, N. Kamata and L. Ndumbaro ‘Corruption, politics and societal values in Tanzania’, Journal of Social Philosophy 31, 4 (2000), pp. 497–506.
28. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, p. 239.
29. Masanja, ‘Some notes’, p. 207.
30. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals.
31. A notable feature of a sungusungu committee that I interviewed in Shinyanga in 2002, after witnessing a trial, was that it was dominated by elders, most of whom had had no formal education and did not speak Kiswahili. The leader of the guards was, however, a much younger man and undertook the job of translating back and forth between Swahili and Sukuma.
32. M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996).
34. Unfortunately, little of the literature on the early years of the sungusungu movement in Sukuma gives much detail on this. There is, for example, no indication of the role (or lack of such) of local ten-cell leaders or low level administrators in the initial organization.
36. S. Bukurura, ‘Combating crime among the Sukuma and Nyamwezi of West-Central Tanzania’, Crime, Law and Social Change 24 (1996), ftn. 10.
37. R.G. Abrahams, ‘Sungusungu’, p. 190.
38. See also Tim Kelsall, ‘Rituals of verification: imported and indigenous accountability in Northern Tanzania’, Africa 73, 2 (2003), pp. 174–202.