Hospitality as a Political Strategy: Strangers, Immigrants, and the Established in Southwest Tanzania, 300–1900

This paper examines the societal commitment, in precolonial Southwestern Tanzania, to an idea rooted in hosting outsiders, providing generosity towards strangers, and accumulating honor through acts of beneficence. Through an examination of specific language, sayings, oral traditions, and social behaviors and institutions this discussion considers the importance of hospitality not merely in personal social encounters, but more specifically in shaping the political and economic institutions that people in the communities of southwestern Tanzania built over a long historical span, from the early first millennium to the nineteenth century.  Despite the wealth of benevolent acts, sharing, and cordiality in Africa towards guests, both known and unknown, how individuals and communities practice and employ hospitality on the continent has yet to be explored in any historical work. This paper complements previous historical work by interrogating the role of hospitality in one region of eastern Africa, but rather than limiting hospitality to a social practice in the realm of the domus and personal encounters (Heal 1990), this paper examines welcoming and generosity as political tools utilized by various agents concerned with the wider social and political order (Gustavo and Prakash 1998).  The analysis revolves around defining and understanding the political function and meaning, in the history of southwestern Tanzania, of acts, practices, institutions, and values, which I refer to collectively as hospitality.