The Resurrection of the Warrior Tradition in African Political Culture

Increased attention has recently been paid to the phase of ‘primary resistance’ when Africa first had to confront western intrusion. The arguments of scholars like Terence Ranger for Eastern Africa and Michael Crowder for Western Africa identify those early armed challenges by Africans against colonial rule as the very origins of modern nationalism in the continent. By this argument, Tanzania's ruling party and its function as a liberating force has for its ancestry both the Maji Maji and earlier rebellions against German rule from the 1880s onwards. African struggles against colonial rule did not begin with modern political parties and western trained intellectuals, but originated in those early ‘primary resisters’ with their spears poised against western military technology. 1