Electricity as a “tool of empire”?
As most industrial technologies, electricity arrived at the African continent with colonial administrators, serving European interests. As Daniel R. Headrick has demonstrated in The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century technology interacted with colonial motives, providing fresh means to a “new imperialism” for a (cost-)effective expansion. Consequently, industrial technology profoundly influenced the timing, location and nature of imperialism. [1] But different from steamboats, machine guns, transport and telecommunications networks, electricity served neither the quest of penetration, conquest and consolidation of new territories, but one which is hardly addressed by Headrick: Rather than being a “tool of empire” in his sense, electricity mainly served the development and exploitation of the colonies, predominantly in the extractive industries and in providing basic technological infrastructures. Besides providing amenities for non-African settlers, the arrival and spread of electricity was mainly associated with commercial interests. For instance, the reason for the construction of Tanzanias first hydroelectric plant at Hale’s Falls on the Pangani River was the supply of the local sisal industry.[2]
Though not serving as a “tool of empire”, electricity fits in the concept of Headricks later book on failed attempts of technology transfer in an imperial contest, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940, even if the book does not explicitly treat electricity. [3] In the same tradition stands Jan af Geijerstams more recent Landscapes of Technology, Transfer. Swedish Ironmakers in India 1860-1864, describing how centre-periphery conflicts between the British homeland and the colonial possessions prevented a successful transfer of modern ironmaking technology to India.[4] As for the technologies described in the two books, the geographical relocation of electricity was not accompanied by a transfer of the corresponding culture and the technological knowledge. Even after its independence, the “Africanisation” of Tanzania’s national electricity utility Tanesco was delayed due international pressure by Great Britain and the World Bank, its general management remained British until 1971.[5] Universalist explanations of failed technology transfer being the main cause for growth without development in the former colonies, as Headrick has stated them, need to be treated with care.
Symbolic meanings of electricity in the colonial context
Beyond its instrumental character for the colonial ventures, technology and science has been look at in its role a as a self-affirmation of the colonial subjects. One of the central works on this theme is Michael Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance.[6] His key argument is that those involved in the colonies came to view scientific thought and technological achievements not only as the key attributes of European – and hence their own – superiority but also as the most meaningful measures by which non-Western societies might be evaluated, classified and ranked. In this ideological construction Adas sees the root for modernization theory’s claim that Western ideas on rationalizing production and management and application of modern technologies will bring economic development to “third world” countries.
The growth of electricity networks in the European motherlands around the turn of the 20th century might well have provided arguments to colonial subjects for this ideology of Western superiority through science and technology. At the time, when first generators were installed in German East Africa, the energetic thinking that shaped the electricity systems in the German Reich reflected the rationality, which progressive intellectuals and critics saw as integral part of Western capitalist societies.[7] A study of colonial electrification therefore needs to take into account planners, engineers and users perceptions of electricity symbols and the related discourses in industrial Europe and North America that produced them. Fortunately these aspects have received much attention in historical research on electricity in the last two decades. In their study of discourses and interpretative contexts of electricity in Germany from 1880 to 1930, Barbara Binder concludes that the equation of electricity with progressiveness and modernity formed a consistent societal image. [8] These symbols paved the way for electricity and electrical appliances into the everyday life of users. In a recent study Greame Gooday has described the huge efforts of companies and proponents of electricity to demonstrate that electricity could be “domesticated”, that is used in the household without insecurities or aesthetic concerns. According to Gooday was only this medial production which rendered electricity an alternative to the long established technology of gas lighting. [9]
Urban electricity services as “political infrastructures”
In most colonial cities in Africa, domestic electricity and municipal lighting was an amenity and a symbol of modernity for non-African settlers. It was not seen as important for African city-dwellers. Electricity was one of services which were highly racialized in colonial urban planning. Dar es Salaam, which had just ascended from a bureaucratic city to the principal city of German East Africa at the time of its electrification, was no exeption in this regard. Its urban development was built around a three-tiered system that segregated Europeans, Asians (Indian) and Africans. Recent works on the history of Dar es Salaam has emphasized, how “deeply racialized structure of colonial urban society” prevented African city-dwellers from enjoying the “privileged access to resources and infrastructure” available to Europeans and Indians.[10]
In recent years, scholars in urban history and geography have investigated the role of technical infrastructures in materializing the “rule of difference”, which Steinmetz sees as “the defining characteristics of modern colonialism.”[11] A number of studies have demonstrated how discourses, e.g. on hygiene, which developed in tandem with new scientific approaches to urban development in the cities of Europe and North America were refashioned in a colonial context to produce a cultural dualism between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ so that investment in urban infrastructure was disproportionately concentrated in wealthy enclaves.[12] In these studies however, electricity has not received the needed attention yet.
This seems surprising as historians of technology have highlighted electricity’s role in the formation of modern cities in Europe, not only as a tool for urban planning and development but also as an instrument for the “mental production” of the modern city. At the example of three German cities, Dieter Schott looks at factual electrification processes and their underlying “images” – ideas about the nature and functions of the city as well as self-images and self-perception of the city and its inhabitants.[13] Electricity’s role ranged from being a „prestige-investment” (Darmstadt), an indispensable part of the systematic and highly successful advancement of the commercial town an industrial city and port (Mannheim), to an instrument of urban expansion beyond the city walls and establishment of new industries (Mainz). A similar study for Tanzanian cities remains to be undertaken. In fact, in the historiography of Dar es Salaam electricity is hardly ever mentioned. This gap however might be filled by Patrick Hege from the Center for Metropolitan Study in Berlin in the next years. In his dissertation on German “Städtebau” in colonial Dar es Salaam to electricity he plans to dedicate one chapter to electricity.
When Britain assumed administration in Dar es Salaam 1920, urban growth patterns did not change significantly. Even though British colonial policy formally disallowed racially-based policy, African property development was discouraged by keeping tenure conditions informal and illegible to the administration. It continued the former German zoning ordinances and even extended existing policies. After Tanganyika territory was mandated to London by the League of Nations in 1923, British administators deliberately assessed the confiscated German colonial files in Dar es Salaam and implemented unfulfilled schemes for separating the African population from the rest of the City with a 400 meter-wide cordon sanitaire.[14] African requests for urban service improvements were routinely turned down. “They have no hope of getting electric light”, was the colonial response to a petition of African residents in 1932.[15]
The gradual expansion of services to upcountry towns – to Kigoma, Tabora and Dodoma before 1931, to Tanga, Mwanza and Moshi in the 1930ies to five other major towns in the 1940ies and 50ies – brought little change for African residents. An overview created by Rebecca Ghanadan clearly indicates the colonial economic interests, settlements, and social-racial-economic patterns that came to define the landscape of electricities and are still visible today.[16] The electricity networks, as it seems, offer still a lot of empirical material for studies in the context of postcolonialism, claiming that today’s society is still marked by the colonial era economically, politically and socially. [17]
[1] Daniel R. Headrick,, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the 19. Century. New York 1981.
[2] R. V. Richards, Report on the hydro-electric resources of East Africa, January 1947, Report to Chief Secretary, East African Governor’s Conference, Nairobi, Kenya. HMSO, London 1947. Quoted in Showers, Electrifying Africa, 197.
[3] Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940. Oxford 1988.
[4] Jan af Geijerstam, Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Swedish Ironmakers in India 1860-1864. Stockholm 2004.
[5] May-Britt Öhman, Taming Exotic Beauties: Swedish Hydropower Constructions in Tanzania in the Era of Development Assistance, 1960s – 1990s. Unpubl. Diss, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 2007, 196-197.
[6] Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. New York [et al] 1990.
[7] Bernhard Stier, Staat und Strom: die politische Steuerung des Elektrizitätssystems in Deutschland 1890 – 1950. Ubstadt-Weiher 1999, 49.
[8] Beate Binder, Elektrifizierung als Vision. Zur Symbolgeschichte einer Technik im Alltag, Tübingen 1999, 25-26.
[9] Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880 – 1914. London 2008, 219, 17. Goodays study also criticizes the perspective of earlier studies which assume the demand for electricity as given, for example Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore 1993.
[10] James R Brennan, Andrew Burton, The emerging metropolis: a history of Dar es Salaam, circa 1862-2000, in: James R Brennan, Andrew Burton, Yusufu Qwaray Lawi (ed.), Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis. Dar es Salaam 2007, 13-?, here 77; See also: Becher, Jürgen, Dar es Salaam, Tanga und Tabora: Stadtentwicklung in Tansania unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (1885-1914). Berlin 1997. Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884 – 1914. Helsinki 1995.
[11] George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago 2007, 36; see also Eckert, Andreas, Urbanisierung und Apartheid: Stadt, Segregation und Kontrolle in Südafrika im 20. Jahrhundert, in: Lenger, Friedrich; Tenfelde, Klaus (ed.), Die europäische Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert. Wahrnehmung – Entwicklung – Erosion, Köln 2006.
[12] Colin McFarlane, Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 2 (2008), 415–435. Michelle Kooy/Karen Bakker, Technologies of Government: Constituting Subjectivities, Spaces, and Infrastructures in Colonial and Contemporary Jakarta, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32,2 (2008), 375–391; Matthew Gandy, Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos, in: Urban Studies, 43, 2 (2006), 371–396.
[13] Schott, Dieter, Die Vernetzung der Stadt: kommunale Energiepolitik, öffentlicher Nahverkehr und die „Produktion“ der modernen Stadt; Darmstadt – Mannheim – Mainz 1880-1918. Darmstadt 1995.
[14] Patrick Hege, The German Variation. A Sketch of Colonial Städtebau in Africa, 1884-1919, in review 2014; J. M. Lusugga Kironde, Race, class and housing in Dar es Salaam, in: James R Brennan, Andrew Burton, Yusufu Qwaray Lawi (ed.), Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis. Dar es Salaam 2007, 97-11; James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania. Athens 2012.
[15] Archive reproduced in J. M. Lusugga Kironde, The Evolution of the Land Use Structure of Dar es Salaam 1890-1990, Nairobi 1995, 590, cited in: Ghanadan, Public Service, 50.
[16] Overview by created by Rebecca Ghanadan from existing railway maps and electricity in Ghanadan, Public Service, 53 based on dates from J.P. Moffett, Tanganyika: A review of its resources and their development. Norwich 1955.
[17] Edward Said, Orientalism. London 1978; Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington 1988.
History of Electricity in Tanzania 