In the Shadow of Man

Dr. Goodall’s study took place within the mountainous Gombe Stream National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. This east African nation has a long and colorful history. Throughout the medieval period, East African coastal cities, or Swahili “trading states,” flourished as they traded with other African civilizations and—through the Indian Ocean trade routes—with Middle Eastern and Asian civilizations. During the era of European exploration, however, these connections were disrupted by Portugal’s violent assaults on the East African coast; Portugal successfully captured Zanzibar in the early 16th century. Over the next two centuries, the Portuguese competed with sultans from Oman for control of Tanzania’s coast.

By the mid-19th century, Europeans began to explore more of East Africa, and Germany eventually claimed the region as a colony, calling it “German East Africa.” German colonial authorities built railroads to transport goods and encouraged German missionaries to convert the local people and stigmatize Indigenous beliefs. These developments provoked substantial resistance from the local African peoples, who were especially angered by the German policy of forcing local Africans into slavery on colonial cotton farms. The Matumbi people, in collaboration with many other Indigenous tribes, destroyed German cotton plantations and killed missionaries and other German colonizers in an effort to expel them. This resistance became known as the Maji Maji Rebellion, which lasted from 1905 to 1907, when the German military brutally suppressed it. The German forces killed Indigenous fighters as well as civilians and engineered a famine in the area to weaken their resistance, killing roughly 200 to 300 thousand people in the process.

WW l brought more violent conflict to the region as German and British troops fought for control of German East Africa. At the end of the war, the German government surrendered the colony to the British as a part of the Treaty of Versailles. British colonial authorities practiced “indirect rule” in which they appointed a council of local people who advised them and helped carry out their decisions. Britain undertook some educational and health initiatives, such as fighting malaria and the tsetse fly disease, and developed agricultural projects that served their interests—for example, growing wheat to feed the rationed British population in the war-torn 1940s. In 1947, Tanzania became a United Nations Trust Territory, and in 1961—just a year after Goodall began her study—it finally became an independent country. Julius Nyerere, an anti-colonial activist, became the nation’s first leader and implemented his own brand of African socialism, which prioritized literacy, education, and farming developments. In addition, he emphasized cooperation and harmony among Tanzania’s many ethnic, tribal, and religious groups. In her work, Goodall notes the beauty of the Tanzanian landscape and the friendliness and resourcefulness of the Tanzanian people who inhabit the villages around Gombe. She refers to Tanzania as an “enlightened” country because it passed laws to protect chimps.