The Contempt of Public Property: the Datooga Salt Fracas and the Resistance against Colonial Definition of Property in Central Tanzania (1923-1927)

Abstract This paper discusses the Datooga resistance to the British land law as announced by the Land Ordinance in 1923. The discussion centres itself in the provocation that the law implied and commanded on the local Datooga’s ownership and control of the natural resources within the jurisdiction of the chief. The Datooga as shown in the paper were probably the first to openly resist the public ownership of resources as announced by the Ordinance, because for the Datooga the land resources, particularly the salt deposits from Balangida Lalu or any other that fell within the reach and borders of their chief’s power were completely Datooga. The pinnacle of this contradiction is whether local chiefs in colonial Tanganyika understood the limits of what the British had claimed to offer to the local chiefs or they sometimes needed to resist what they considered undesirable situation. The salt fracas in Mbulu district that the paper discusses is an indicator of the irony of colonialism that offered local chiefs political power which the recipients could not use beyond the colonial framework.