CHAPTER 3 - Policy and Administration of Government, 1887–1945

Abstract

Throughout the colonial period from 1887 to 1945, the changing policies of government and the changing administrative patterns colored the development of education in Tanganyika, while at the same time, but less perceptibly, the changing pattern of education itself affected the way in which government was able to act and indeed had to act. Between government policy and its administration, on the one hand, and the educational system, on the other, there was continuous interaction. When Britain took over from the German administration in 1919, it was as a Mandatory Power under the Charter of the League of Nations. By the specific Mandate of the League of Nations as formulated in 1922, Britain was enjoined to promote the material and moral well-being and social progress of the inhabitants. Later, Germans adopted the Sultan of Zanzibar's system of using akidas as subordinate local agents. These akidas, who were responsible to the district commissioners above them and who worked through the village headmen or jumbes beneath, were coastal Swahili-speaking Africans and Muslims by religion. Thus, from the power and wealth of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar moved into a decline. No longer the center of trade and diplomatic activity, it lay in the doldrums, dependent almost entirely upon the vagaries of the clove crop to provide the means of development in a period when colonial policy insisted upon each dependent country being self-supporting.