ABSTRACT
Thus, throughout the 19th century, there was a political arena at a higher level than the chiefdom, in which one chiefdom and then another achieved temporary but significant domination of wide areas. There were at the same time many small chiefdoms that were permanently unimportant. The instability of the positions of political pre-eminence was probably due both to factors of internal organisation (i.e. the prevalence of tribute payment to a dominant chiefdom by otherwise autonomous chiefdoms, rather than their administrative and political integration into the dominant one) and to factors of external political relations. There were wars with people from Usambara, with the Maasai, with the Pare and the Warush. There were shifts in political balance resulting from political events on the coast: the end of Mazrui control of Mombasa, the subsequent dominance of the East Coast by Zanzibar, the opening up of direct trade routes from the coast to the interior, and the political consequences of the elimination of certain African tribes as middlemen. Many political reorganisations and upheavals resulted directly and indirectly from the coastal trade. Others were probably caused by movements of peoples, such as the southward migration of the Maasai. It is a serious error to think of the Chagga chiefdoms as fighting among themselves for no more reason than the competitiveness of their ambitious chiefs, though this is the way they are sometimes depicted. Instead there were fundamental political-e~onomic issues at stake into which the ambitions of individuals played.
