A Mutual Gaze: Watching and Being Watched in the Unsettled Sociopolitical Landscape of Early Twentieth-Century Southwestern Tanzania

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long considered surveillance as a tool of control—for example, over enslaved or colonized peoples. But what of cases where the gaze goes both ways? The first two decades of the twentieth century were marked by seismic sociopolitical upheavals in what is now southwestern Tanzania: German colonialism and missionization, the anti-colonial Maji Maji War, the slow decline of the regional slave trade, and later British colonial conquest. Rashid bin Masoud, a slave and ivory trader, established Kikole as an entrepôt in the late 1890s. Residents there both negotiated and contributed to a predatory landscape through their participation in the slave trade. Bin Masoud’s followers built a palisade around Kikole, dug wells inside its walls, and used massive termite mounds as reported watchtowers. These features, which enabled defense and surveillance, were also essential in 1905, when local Ngoni leaders attacked twice in retaliation for bin Masoud’s support of German efforts to quash the Maji Maji rebellion. This paper considers mutual surveillance as a framework to understand how Kikole residents simultaneously inhabited the roles of watcher and watched. Such an approach may be of particular use to archaeologists studying surveillance in unstable sociopolitical contexts in which power was contested.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38778.0