The Ghost in the Gun is the Bullet: Ebrahim Hussein, Julius Nyerere and the (Anti-)Politics of the Uncanny
Year: 2016
Type: preprint
Abstract: In 1905, the various tribes of German Tanganyika, united by a shared belief in a prophecy that promised them invulnerability if they were anointed with water from a certain river, rebelled against colonial occupation. This insurgency which failed in 1907, resulting in the deaths of 120,000 men, women and children came to be known as the Maji Maji War, and is of signal importance in the colonial history of East Africa. This paper takes up two subsequent re-articulations of the Maji Maji conflict and its uncanny legacy of morbidity and death: soon-to-be-President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere's political appropriation of the struggle, in a 1956 speech before the United Nations, as the latest manifestation of a long tradition of heroic black revolt; and iconoclastic playwright Ebrahim Hussein's anti-political refusal, in his 1969 play Kinjeketile, to subsume the uncanniness of Maji Maji into a cogent narrative of overcoming. What distinguishes the politics of sacrifice from the anti-politics of ambivalence in the nascent postcolony? What does this tell us about the work that the uncanny does, in and through and on time? And how does memory and memorial performance intervene in the ghostly work of re-centering Africa and the violence inflicted upon it?
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Joshua Williams
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3185963692