Dzumbe Mamfulla of Gombelo is known from two short passages in a German travel book of 1891. They matter because they record a turning point. Before him the Digo villages behind Tanga had no chiefs. With him, colonial rule placed one man over all of them. Soon afterwards, the country around his village rose against the Germans.
German sources spell his name "Jumbe Mamfulla". Jumbe is a title, the coastal word for a headman or chief, not part of his own name. This article uses the Digo form, Dzumbe.
Rule by the Elders
The Austrian geographer Oscar Baumann travelled through Digo country in 1890. Even well-known villages such as Gombelo and Zirihini, he found, had only about forty huts. Gombelo held one of the most important weekly markets in Digo country, and coastal traders came to it regularly. Baumann describes how these villages were governed:
The villages of the Wadigo are not under chiefs but are governed by a few "elders".
Sometimes one elder rose above the others, like the blind headman of Zirihini or the feared leader Jambia, but none ruled the whole people.
A Chief Made by the Germans
Baumann goes on:
A real chief was installed only by the German authority, in the person of Jumbe Mamfulla of Gombelo, to whom all Wadigo are now, at least nominally, subject.
Elsewhere he lists the "black akidas (deputies)" through whom the Germans governed Bondei and Digo country, where no European official was yet stationed. Of these, he writes, "Abdallah of Sega near Magila and Mamfulla of Gombelo are the most important."
So Mamfulla was an appointee. His authority came from the German administration on the coast, not from the village elders, and even Baumann added "at least nominally". He marks the shift from rule by councils of elders to a colonial system of appointed chiefs.
We do not know for certain that Mamfulla was a Digo. Baumann never says so. On the same page he sneers that the African "governor" "remains a Swahili even under the German flag" and is a Muslim. The remark comes in a passage about the English mission at Magila, so it most likely refers to Abdallah of Sega, not to Mamfulla. It does suggest that the Germans' akidas were Muslims from coastal society. Mamfulla may have been a Gombelo man or an outsider placed there; the sources do not say. Nothing is recorded of his family, his clan, or when he was born or died.
The Rising of 1891–92
At the end of 1891 the Digo country around Gombelo rose. Baumann came back in January 1892 with a new expedition and heard what had happened a few weeks before. The Wadigo, "who had always been quite good subjects, suddenly tore down the German flag and declared themselves independent". A German officer came with a few soldiers to bring them back into line. The Wadigo met him with heavy fire, forced him to retreat, chased him as far as Amboni and burned the barns of the plantation company.
The response was severe. Troops came by steamer from Dar es Salaam, and Freiherr von Bülow was sent to "pacify" the Wadigo. Baumann calls what followed "the usual punitive procedure of burning villages and driving off livestock". He blames the rising on palm wine, a prejudice he had already set out at length in his earlier book. His own account shows that the Wadigo pulled down a flag, declared their independence and fought.
Three days after von Bülow left, Baumann's caravan of 200 armed men camped under a great tree outside Gombelo. The village was empty: its people had fled to the bush, and some of his straggling porters were shot at with arrows. His men took cassava and chickens from the abandoned fields.
The Wadigo answered with the colonial government's own procedure. They lodged a formal complaint at the district office. It went on to Dar es Salaam and Berlin, and the Anti-Slavery Committee, which had paid for Baumann's expedition, was made to pay compensation. Baumann mocks this too. The record says nothing of compensation for the villages burned by von Bülow.
No source says what Mamfulla did during the rising. Gombelo lay in the country that rose, but the German accounts read so far do not name him or any other Digo leader.
Legacy
Mamfulla is a figure of a transition, not a hero in the record. He is the first person known to have held authority over all the Tanzanian Digo, and that authority was given by a colonial power. Within two years the Wadigo tore down the flag under which he had been appointed. A file of German newspaper cuttings on the rising, and the memories of Gombelo's elders, may one day tell us more about him.