Colonial Performances: Remaking Nyakyusa Tradition and Identity in Twentieth Century Eastern Africa

FAIN: FT-51781-03

James Ellison
CSU, Long Beach (Long Beach, CA 90840-0004)

This project offers an ethnographic and historical study of colonial-era changes in popular rural dances that led to the Nyakyusa becoming one of the largest ethnic groups in Tanzania, East Africa. Research at the Public Records Office in London and the London School of Economics will add important information to that already gained from fieldwork in Tanzania and archives in Tanzania, South Africa, and the US. A resulting book manuscript will argue that returning labor migrants in the early twentieth century formed dance associations that established reciprocal relationships among people who did not previously share a named cultural identity.