Kinjeketile Ngwale

Who is Kinjeketile Ngwale?

Kinjeketile Ngwale was a spiritual medium from the Rufiji River area of German East Africa, now mainland Tanzania, who became the inspirational figure behind the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905 to 1907, one of the largest armed uprisings against European colonial rule in African history. According to oral and documented tradition, Kinjeketile experienced a possession at Ngarambe by a spirit known as Hongo and began distributing "maji," a sacred water believed to protect fighters and turn German bullets to water. His message helped unite dozens of previously separate ethnic groups across southern Tanganyika in common resistance to forced cotton cultivation and colonial taxation. German colonial forces captured and hanged him in August 1905, but the rebellion he set in motion continued for two more years and was crushed only after a scorched-earth campaign that caused widespread famine and an estimated hundreds of thousands of deaths. In the independence era, Kinjeketile was reclaimed as an early symbol of pan-ethnic Tanzanian resistance and nationalism, and his story was dramatized in Ebrahim Hussein's influential 1969 Swahili play "Kinjeketile."

Sources: John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, Cambridge University Press, 1979 · Gilbert Gwassa, "Kinjikitile and the Ideology of Maji Maji," in T.O. Ranger & I. Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion, University of California Press, 1972 · Ebrahim Hussein, Kinjeketile (play), Oxford University Press, 1969