Rewriting Chagga History: Focus on Ethno-Anthropological Distortions and Misconceptions

Abstract

The paper aimed at displaying the necessity of rewriting Chagga history (one of the numerous African microhistories) with reference to ethno-anthropological distortions and misconceptions made over the centuries. Amid this objective history recorders are called upon to rewrite African history, a bigger entity formed by local and regional African histories. After the definition of keywords (Chagga, Chaggaland, history, microhistory, historicism, historiography, anthropology, and ethnology), the paper's relevance was embedded in the realization that rewriting history is a never-ending exercise and due to that fact, history (microhistories in particular) should be rewritten continuously. The towering finding of the paper was that it is imperative to rewrite Chagga history because, as it is the case with African history, for quite a long time Chagga culture has been misunderstood and as a result distorted by least informed foreign historians, anthropologists and ethnologists. Using an historical-linguistic and ethnoanthropological methodology, the paper came up with the conclusion that there can only be correct African history if there are correct African microhistories, Chagga history being one of them.