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Land in East Africa bears a diverse discourse of social organization in its signification. Focusing on the allocation of land as an attribute of political authority helps pinpoint a particular aspect of its social meaning. In the Haya areas of northwestern Tanganyika, and the Chagga areas around Mount Kilimanjaro, the language and practice of land allocation carried with it a text of local authority, rooted in oral tradition and social practice that continued to shape local governance even under foreign rule. The particular meanings that inhered in the landscape confounded the attempt to invent a script for establishing freehold tenure. The British state adapted to local land tenure patterns in their system of indirect rule, realizing authority over land was a key to governance. In doing so, as Thomas Spear has argued, colonial administrators had to acknowledge historical precedent and subject themselves to the local discourse of tradition.1 While the postcolonial state did away with the paid traditional authorities of indirect rule, a similar negotiation continued after independence as the new government drew liberally on culturally embedded practice to institute its authority at the local level.Despite the plentitude of land in East Africa, political control over people in many areas was accounted in discourses of control over territory and the mutual obligations engendered in its allocation.2 Wealth in people was regularly articulated through the act of allocating land to them.3 Areas where a central allocating authority had been created became key points of reference for the development of and postcolonial land tenure policies because land and its allocation defined relations between client and patron and therefore constituted a language to debate the relation of citizen and state.4 These official referents constituted strategic links between what Peter Ekeh termed the publics of African politics, the discontiguous primordial and civic cultural inheritances created by the interposition of the state.5 The term primordial is perhaps anachronistic, but his point is well taken: that a constitutional moral cement is lacking in the civic public of inheritance, while emotional bonds to indigenous cultural inheritances operate as parallel transcripts apposite the official civil realm. This disjuncture, he argues, fuels the crisis of the modem African nation-state.By analyzing links between oral traditions, policy, and popular discourse, the argument here illuminates the strategic interventions in land policy by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's first president. This is not an essay about land law or tenure regimes, but an exploration of the discursive underpinnings shaping local debates about land policies. The essay begins with a survey of the politics of land allocation across the territory that is now mainland Tanzania, known as Tanganyika in times. Tanganyika had been a German territory, and was inherited by the British as a Mandate Territory under the League of Nations and later as a Trusteeship under the United Nations. The essay then focuses on two areas that had particular influence in late land policy. The concluding section demonstrates the influence these practices around land had on a postcolonial policy, which sought to create a new national society partly through the co-optation of landed discourse.Evaluating East African politics requires us to understand the discursive use of land as much as its economic use. This is not a functionalist analysis that seeks to identify elements of an artificially integrated social construct. It instead identifies a trope of habitus. The allocation of land, contested in various iterations, constitutes the sort of institutionalization of memory hypothesized in Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice.6 The practice of land allocation emerges from people's conceptions of a discrete political act within the mutually constitutive linkages that Sara Berry identifies among culture, power, and material resources. …