Resilience and vulnerability to drought in Unyanyembe (west-central Tanzania) in the 1830s and 1870s–90s

This article inserts climatic and environmental factors into the history of Unyanyembe, a kingdom located in present-day west-central Tanzania.Widely recognised as one of the most influential and important nineteenth-century kingdoms in equatorial eastern Africa, Unyanyembe's prominence has up to now been understood largely in political and economic terms.By contrast, this article argues that its shifting fortunes can partly be understood in terms of resilience and vulnerability to the effects of drought.This article does so firstly by using historical-climatological methods to reconstruct two protracted dry periods in equatorial eastern Africa's history, respectively in the 1830s and the 1870s-90s.Second, it examines several factors that contributed to Unyanyembe's resilience to the effects of drought in the 1830s, and those circumstances that led to heightened levels of vulnerability in the 1870s-90s.The choice of crops, labour regimes, population pressure, political stability and instability, economic change and migration, all of which were tied to the global spread of capitalism, played vital roles in both historical periods.In concluding, this history adds further contextual information related to the kingdom's initial encounter with German imperialists from the 1890s.Rather than just creating new vulnerabilities to the effects of drought, it argues, German colonial policies exacerbated existing trends that began to develop through the region's gradual integration with the world economy from the mid-nineteenth century.