Negotiating cultural icons: Sukuma art, history and colonial encounter in Tanzania

This dissertation examines the ways that individuals navigate memory, history and formations of identity through the visual arts. In Usukuma, the area inhabited by the Sukuma culture in northwestern Tanzania, visual culture engenders generations of responses to such pressures as colonialism, religious conversion and ujamaa socialism, and serves as a model for current constructions of history and identity. Indigenous constructions of history in relation to the arts of Sukuma royal, religious and performance traditions are addressed in the first section of the thesis (Chapters One through Three). These chapters examine the negotiation of the royal body in sacred and juridico-political realms through regalia, the construction of sacred meaning through architectural enclosures and object containers in the work of bafumu (Sukuma medical and religious practitioners) and the navigation of boundaries to transgress social mores in the space of Sukuma performance. Chapters Four and Five analyze negotiations of Sukuma history and culture in the context of colonial interventions, most importantly, those of a French Canadian missionary, Father David Clement, who utilized Sukuma arts and icons to teach the Catholic liturgy in the Bujora Church at the same time constructing his own version of Sukuma history in the Sukuma Museum. In the chapters of this dissertation, meaning is mapped in relation to objects from both insider and outsider perspectives.;As modes of remembering the past and family ancestors, shitongelejo , or objects of ancestral remembrance inherited by Sukuma rulers, medical practitioners and dance society leaders, have been significant to constructions of Sukuma identity throughout the generations of change of colonialism, independence and current post-independence politics. While objects may reveal, through the memories they recall, moments of the cultural and historical past, so too do individuals have the power to suppress, reevaluate, or even rewrite those memories. It is these stories of constructed identities, definitions of historical pasts, and traditions of remembering and forgetting that this dissertation tells through the lens of Sukuma objects.