The entry tells the Groundnut Scheme from London and from Kongwa. This piece tells it from the Southern Province of Tanganyika, where the plan meant to put most of its acres and where, for five years, it put most of its money instead. The record comes from the provincial and district reports in the Tanzania National Archives and the Colonial Office files at Kew, read by the historian Matteo Rizzo for an article of 2006, and from the memoir of a colonial officer and the scheme’s own last reports as summarised by Stefan Esselborn.

Cinderella’s Cinderella

Tanganyika was the poorest of Britain’s East African territories, and its Southern Province was the poorest part of it. There was one road from the coast to the interior and it was passable by lorry only from the late 1920s. In 1945 a peasant could sell grain at a profit only within eight miles of the three small ports, Kilwa, Lindi and Mikindani. The whole agricultural output of the province that year was valued at £634,673, less than half of it grown by the 800,000 or so Africans who lived there; the rest was sisal, grown on estates the Germans had laid out and British settlers had taken over after 1922. The estates were the only employers of any size. In 1939 they had 7,500 workers and in 1947 17,000, most of them migrants from Mozambique and the inland districts, paid less than sisal workers were paid anywhere else in the territory. The provincial labour officer wrote that the local Makonde, Machinga and Mwera were thought by the planters, “quite rightly” in his view, to suffer from “coastal inertia,” and so supplied only second-class workers. That was the labour market the scheme walked into.

The first anyone in the province knew of it was an order, in June 1946, forbidding the burning of bush. A field assistant on one of the scheme’s farms, Mr Makwinja, explained it in 1952 in the first number of the Swahili newspaper at Nachingwea: the British “wanted to survey the land from an aeroplane in order to assess whether it was suitable for cultivation,” and did not want smoke in the way. The aeroplane was the Wakefield mission’s. “There were rumours about White men coming to cultivate large farms of groundnuts,” he wrote, “and that people would get the chance to go and offer themselves for work and be paid very good salaries. That was about mid 1947 and the rumour turned out to be true.”

The labour the plan assumed

The plan allowed for up to 57,100 African workers on clearing and farming alone, 32,000 of them permanent, and said nothing about the men who would be needed to build the port, the railway, the roads and the towns. The Governor of Tanganyika, Sir William Battershill, had seen the difficulty in April 1946, before the mission arrived. His Director of Agriculture thought labour would be no great problem; “I am not myself as optimistic as he is,” the Governor minuted. “In any case I feel certain that we must never guarantee the Company a plentiful supply of labour.” The Colonial Office’s authority on African labour, Major Orde Browne, warned that the plan’s figures “do not show the ancillary needs, and these will be serious. Just as the man in the fighting line requires several others on communications behind him to keep him there, so a great body of subsidiary workers are needed indirectly by any large construction.”

The Tanganyika administration did not recruit for the scheme, and the scheme had to find its own men against the sisal estates. In 1947 the first work was the railway from the coast towards Nachingwea, and 4,600 men were taken on. It was a good harvest year. Well-spaced rains had given, the provincial report said, “plentiful harvests,” and with food in the villages and nothing to spend money on, men stayed home. Even that first small demand was hard to fill. From 1948 the demand was not small. The provincial figures are rough, and when two offices counted the same year they disagreed, but the shape is plain:

• 1947: 17,000 on sisal, 4,600 on the scheme and its works, 21,600 in all.
• 1948: 15,153 on sisal, 17,000 on the scheme, 32,153.
• 1949: 12,218 on sisal, 23,257 on the scheme, 35,475.
• 1950: between 32,800 and 40,000 in all.
• 1951: between 40,000 and 58,154 in all, most of them with the scheme.
• 1952: 18,593 on sisal, 16,158 on what was left of the scheme, between 34,751 and 41,050.

In five years the number of people in paid work in the province at least doubled and perhaps nearly tripled. On May 30, 1951, 39 percent of the Corporation’s workforce in the province was classed as skilled, and only 41 percent of the whole was doing agricultural work; the rest were on supply and transport, administration, the engineering trades, the sawmills and the pipeline. The men came from Kilwa in the north, from Tunduru in the west and from across the Mozambique border in the south. Turnover ran, by one estimate, above 60 percent a month: a man worked until he had what he wanted, or until his own fields needed him, and went home.

The wage war

With two employers competing for the same men and no help from the government, wages rose, and so did the price of everything a wage could buy. The district reports read like reports from a gold field. At Mikindani in 1947 “full available employment, good crops and good prices” filled the Native Treasury; in 1948 the district “could no longer complain of too little money and too little done: indeed a social and economic revolution was beginning to make itself felt,” with “the arrival of mighty mechanical equipment, the laying of the oil pipe line and the commencement of the oil tank erection work.” A district officer watched an old man of fifty working the controls of a big excavator “as if he had been doing it all his life.” At Newala, on the plateau above the border, 1948 brought the people “further out of their thickets into the harsh light of progress. Money as easy as never before, and a man could sell his crops, his goats, and his labour at prices that would have seemed fantastic a few years ago.” Goats hawked down to the camps in the Lukuledi valley fetched a hundred shillings a head. The district had been “denuded of fundis,” its craftsmen, by the scheme, and at least 5,000 labourers had left the Makonde plateau in the year, because the men who came back “look[ed] fatter, fitter, and better dressed than when they left.” At Lindi the money from trading licences rose from £5,407 in 1947 to £9,539 by November 1948, and the number of cases heard in the courts from 171 in 1946 to 571 in 1948. On the day the post office opened at Kongwa, Alan Wood recorded, African workers deposited £100.

The administration tried to hold wages down by agreement among employers, and did not altogether succeed. By 1950 the provincial commissioner was arguing that his province, which Dar es Salaam still treated as a reservoir of labour for the sisal estates of the north, “should no longer be considered as a reservoir of labour for other parts of the territory.” That was the year the scheme began to shrink. At Lindi, where the contractors pulled out in 1950, the district commissioner wrote of a regression “from the boom town of 1948 into something which, if not nearly the sleepy hollow of pre-war days, is considerable less busy than in the past few years.” Two of the traders who had grown with it moved their shops to Nachingwea, where the money was still being spent. The men laid off went back to their fields, because the lay-offs came with the planting season, and the skilled ones followed the traders inland. In 1951, with Nachingwea alone still clearing, employment in the province reached its peak; “wages rose and so did the cost of living.” In 1952 the labour officer wrote that, unlike “the preceding five years,” employers “generally have been satisfied with the supply.” The scheme was winding down, and the Southern Province was a labour reserve again.

What was left

Rizzo found, in the Nachingwea district, about eighty men who had turned a few years’ wages on the scheme into something lasting: a lorry, a shop, a farm. One of them, Julius Mtenda, began as a labourer, traded in the new towns, and ended as a landowner of some substance. For the Gogo of the Kongwa plateau the historian Gregory Maddox has argued the opposite, that the scheme’s demand for men pulled them off their fields in the famine years of 1947 and 1949 and left the women to farm alone. In the south, by Rizzo’s reading, the villages used the scheme as insurance: they worked for wages when the harvest failed and went home when it did not, which was one reason the Corporation could never keep them.

Where the plan had meant 30,000-acre units there were, after 1951, tenant farms. African volunteers were given ten to fifty acres of cleared land, a house and a garden, ploughing, seed and spraying for a fixed fee, and a cropping programme laid down and inspected by the Corporation. The purpose, the Corporation’s last report said, was to make “African yeoman farmers.” More than half the first tenants at Nachingwea left after a year. The scheme passed to the Tanganyika Agricultural Corporation in 1955 and was largely wound down in the early 1960s, but the model survived its makers: the independent government’s first five-year plan, in 1964, took up the “transformation approach” to settlement on the groundnut pattern, and seven of the twenty-three schemes run by the Village Settlement Agency in 1966 stood on old groundnut land. From those grew the villagisation of the 1970s, which moved between five and nine million people. One colonial officer who served in the south recalled a different relief at the scheme’s end: that the “greedily sought new land” north of Nachingwea called Block B, which the plan would have cleared next, was inhabited, by the Kipule chiefdom among others, and that its people had “complained that the Angoni had destroyed many of them and their homes, that the Germans had then decimated them after the Maji Maji rebellion, and that the British were about to finish them off altogether.” The scheme ran out of money before it reached them.

Sources

• Matteo Rizzo, “What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika 1946–1952,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6 (2), 2006, pp. 205–238: everything above on the province’s economy, the labour figures, the district reports, Battershill, Orde Browne and the wage war, with the archive references (Tanzania National Archives 16/11/260, 16/13/25, 16/32/35; The National Archives CO 822/281, CO 859/195/2, CO 736/31). doi:10.1111/j.1471-0366.2006.00120.x, web.archive.org
• Stefan Esselborn, “Environment, Memory, and the Groundnut Scheme,” Global Environment 11, 2013: the plan’s labour figures, the turnover, the tenant schemes, Maddox on the Gogo, Johnston on Block B, and villagisation. environmentandsociety.org