Abstract
AbstractThis article analyses a Muslim missive, which was circulated in German East Africa in 1908. Erroneously dubbed the “Mecca letter”, it called believers to repentance and sparked a religious revival, which alarmed the German administration. Their primarily political interpretation of the letter was retained in subsequent scholarship, which has overlooked two important textual resources for a better understanding of the missive: the presence of similar letters elsewhere and the fourteen copies still available in the Tanzanian National Archive. Presenting the first text-critical edition of the letter, together with a historical introduction of the extant specimens and a textual comparison to similar missives elsewhere, the article argues that the East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 was nothing more than a local circulation of a global chain letter. As such, its rapid transmission was not connected to a single political agency, but was likely prompted by a large variety of motivations.
Highlights
The content of the letter itself gave little rise to such suspicions
Presenting the first text-critical edition of the letter, together with a historical introduction of the extant specimens and a textual comparison to similar missives elsewhere, the article argues that the East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 was nothing more than a local circulation of a global chain letter
Governor Albrecht Rechenberg, appointed in 1906 to rebuild the colony in the wake of the Maji Maji war and various economic failures, pursued a new strategy of promoting indigenous production and trade for the stimulation of tax revenues. This brought him into regular conflict with the interests of settlers, who essentially strove for a statesubsidised plantation economy on the back of African wage labour (Iliffe 1969)
Summary
The German records in the TNA contain 14 Arabic versions of the letter. They were collected between mid-1908 and early 1909. Tanga versions (Tnα and Tnβ) The last two version of the “Mecca letter” in the archive were submitted by the district officer of Tanga, Max Nötzl, on 30 October 1908.31 In his brief report, he mentioned that the imām of a mosque in the nearby town of Korogwe, Muḥammad bin Sultāni, had requested a copy while visiting Zanzibar in August, which he received by way of a šayḫAmir.. The second letter in the archive (Tnβ, folio 110) carries the file number 2855 and is marked in pencil as “Copy brought by Mohamed bin Sultani from Korogwe” It is written in black ink and a very uneven hand, with the first four lines being considerably larger than the remainder of the letter and the handwriting differing between both sections.
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