Synopses & Reviews
The twentieth-century history of Njombe, the Southern Highlands district of Tanzania, can aptly be summed up as exclusion within incorporation. Njombe was marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy. Njombes people came to see themselves as excluded from agricultural markets, access to medical services, schooling—in short, from all opportunity to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labor.
Review
A History of the Excluded is part of a recent trend in Africanist writing that does not celebrate the nation-state and nationalism, as an earlier optimistic historiography did, but rather sees them as a threatening presence that, connected to a global economy, brings poverty and insecurity.”
International Journal of African Historical Studies
Review
By charting the history of family dynamics among the Wabena from World War I through early independence, A History of the Excluded shines a particularly powerful light on how individuals experienced the demands of migrant labor and plantation conditions, the introduction of new farming technologies and business opportunities, and the policies of TANU national settlement and market controlsall within family, not state, parameters.”
African Studies Review
Synopsis
This is an intimate view of change in a rural Tanzanian society during the twentieth century. It focuses on individual women and men and is told largely in their own words. It traces their efforts both to defy and benefit from the most important event in the modern history of Africa-the imposition of authority.
About the Author
James L. Giblin is an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa.