KINJIKITILE

KINJIKITILE (d. 1905) was a religious leader in southeastern Tanganyika (now Tanzania) who provided inspiration for the anticolonial struggles known as the Maji Maji Wars. In 1904, Kinjikitile became famous as a medium in a place called Ngarambe in Matumbi country, where the oppressions of the German colonial system were severe. He was possessed by Hongo, a deity subordinate to the supreme being, Bokero, whose primary ritual center was at Kibesa on the Rufiji River. At Ngarambe, Kinjikitile blended the spiritual authority of Bokero and Hongo with more local elements of ancestor veneration at a shrine center where he received offerings from pilgrims seeking intercession with the spiritual world and relief from the adversities they faced, both natural and political. In the later part of 1904 and early 1905, Kinjikitile advised the pilgrims to prepare themselves to resist the Germans and dispensed a medicine that he promised would turn the enemy's bullets into water when combat commenced. The rebellion broke out in late July 1905 without the order coming from Kinjikitile, but the ideological preparation provided by his message and the system of emissaries that spread the word and the medicine have been viewed as critical in the struggles called the Maji Maji Wars.

The Maji Maji Wars continued from July 1905 to August 1907, extending over more than 100,000 square miles and causing terrible loss of life, estimated officially at 75,000 by the Germans and at over 250,000 by modern scholars. Out of this struggle, Kinjikitile emerged as a figure of epic proportions; he is said to be a religious innovator who devised a spiritual appeal that transcended particularism and allowed the people to unite against German rule.

By 1904, resentment of colonial rule and the desire to overthrow it had become widespread in southeastern Tanganyika. The times were especially troubled in Matumbi country, which experienced a succession of adversities that went beyond the capacity of political agents to handle. In 1903 there was a severe drought, and from 1903 to 1905 the Germans increasingly insisted that the people of Matumbi engage in communal cotton growing, promising payment for the crop once it had been marketed and the administration's overhead covered. Much to the anger of the people, the payments did not materialize.

Of Kinjikitile the person very little is known. The most certain event in his biography was his death by hanging on August 4, 1905, when, together with an assistant, he became the first opposition leader to be summarily executed by the German military forces. He had lived in Ngarambe for some four years prior to this time and had emerged as an influential person; the recipient of many gifts, he had become an object of jealousy on the part of local political leaders.

Kinjikitile was a synthesizer of many religious elements. There had long been a territorial shrine to Bokero on the Rufiji to which the people had recourse in times of drought. The drought of 1903 had activated this shrine and extended its range of influence as pilgrims came from greater and greater distances. Kinjikitile's teachings drew upon this long-standing religious institution, joining the territorial authority of Bokero with local beliefs in divine possession. His use of maji as a new war medicine, which helped to convince people to join the rebellion, combined Bokero's preeminent association with water with traditional beliefs concerning the efficacy of sacred medicines in protecting hunters. At Ngarambe, he also built a huge kijumba-nungu ("house of God") for the ancestors; drawing on a resurrectionist theme, he announced that the ancestors were all at Ngarambe, ready to help their descendants defeat the Germans and restore the earthly realm. Furthermore, Kinjikitile's teachings contained elements of witch cleansing, whereby the evil within society was to be eliminated and the community morally purified. By drawing upon these traditional beliefs and using them to create an innovative ideology, Kinjikitile provided a regional and polyethnic basis for the spread of his message of resistance.

Maji Maji warriors knew that their weapons were inferior to those of the colonial forces, but the German presence was not so strong as to overawe them. They hoped for a political restoration, not of indigenous rulers, but of the Sultan of Zanzibar, whose regime became idealized because of the relatively benign form of commercial hegemony with which it was associated. Hence there was room for the Germans to investigate the possibility that Islamic propaganda or belief had played a role in the mobilization of resistance. Their conclusions were negative. Indeed, although Kinjikitile wore the traditional garb of Muslims, a long white robe called the kanzu, his message and idiom were decidedly drawn from traditional sources. Whether he really forged a universalistic traditional religion, as the Tanzanian historian G. C. K. Gwassa has claimed, demands closer scrutiny. Certainly his career obliges students of religion to pay well-merited attention to the structures and functions of territorial cults, ancestor veneration, and concepts of personal spiritual power and charisma. The context of the Maji Maji Wars must also be carefully weighed to refine notions of thresholds of moral outrage, recourse to religious leaders, and willingness to subscribe to a common ideology of resistance.

Bibliography

Gwassa, G. C. K. "The German Intervention and African Resistance in Tanzania." In A History of Tanzania, edited by Isaria N. Kimambo and A. J. Temu, pp. 85–122. Nairobi, 1969.

Gwassa, G. C. K. "Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji." In The Historical Study of African Religion, edited by T. O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, pp. 202–217. Berkeley, Calif., 1972.

Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge, 1979.

Marcia Wright (1987)