Taifa

Taifais a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race-both translatable as taifain Swahili-were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifashows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city. Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifatransforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifagives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

James R. Brennan is an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois; at Urbana-Champaign and a research associate at SOAS. He is the author of numerous book chapters and journal articles. In 2012, he was awarded a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship for 2012-2015 by the American Council of Learned Societies.