economic changes in tanganyika after world war 2
Answers
'war', says Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, ‘is capitalism with the gloves off’. During the Second World War Tanganyika experienced colonialism with the gloves off.1 A sleepy imperial backwater, acquired late and held somewhat ambiguously under a Mandate, was transformed into an indispensible economic asset to Britain’s war effort. For Africans it was a reminder of their subordination to a distant ruler and distant events. ‘It is a fact that Imperialism has brought Africans face to face with the European war of Nationalism’, declared the Swahili newspaper Kwetu.2 Many Africans in Tanganyika, remembering their past, were ready and willing to fight against the Germans; but they did not miss the point, as they were so often told, that they were fighting not just for the King but for ‘freedom’. The economic hardship and government intervention that accompanied the war effort precipitated a change in African attitudes towards colonial rule that brought its end within immediate view.