Becoming Heroes: Hunting and Porterage as Heroic Labor in Tanzania, c. 1750–1850

In the course of a century men from Unyamwezi (western Tanzania) built trading links with the East African coast, until by about 1850 each year thousands of Nyamwezi men worked as porters or traders carrying ivory and other goods hundreds of miles. This paper argues that during this formative century Nyamwezi men forged cultural connections between elephant hunting and long-distance porterage, and in doing so made porterage first a celebrated and then a necessary part of men’s labor histories. Earlier historical work has focused on the ways in which the goods available through participation in the caravan trade became important for status and access to marriage. I build on this to trace how changing economic conditions made it possible for adventurous young men to pursue risky, but potentially highly rewarding forms of labor, such as long-distance porterage, particularly ivory porterage. In doing so, they and their communities drew on ideas about heroic masculinity associated with other forms of mobile, high-risk, high-reward labour, particularly elephant hunting. Men were attracted both by material rewards and by social recognition of their bravery and success. The success of these pioneering porters in gaining social recognition of their right to respect and renown, combined with continuously increasing opportunities for Nyamwezi men to participate in long-distance trade quickly led to social judgement of those men who did not ever work as long-distance porters. Nyamwezi men’s deployment and transformation of earlier understandings of high-status labor in developing new profitable and respected professions illustrates how our understanding of the traditional subjects of economic history, including transformations in labor and in the structure of economies, can be enhanced through a close focus on the shifting cultural meanings of labor and value.