Browsing by Author "Ndomba, Herbert Harald"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A history of peasant tobacco production in Ruvuma Region, Southern Tanzania, c.1930-2016
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Ndomba, Herbert Harald; Swart, Sandra; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is a contribution to the broader East African historiography of environmental and agrarian change and more specifically the tobacco industry in Tanzania. This thesis joins an existing academic conversation between historians (and, more inter-disciplinarily, others like agro-economists and ecologists) on the conceptualisation of African peasants, the rise of peasant protests, the tension and accommodations between state and peasants, the marketing of peasant commodities and the ecological impact of one crop-‘flue-cured tobacco’ farming in both central and western Tanzania. This thesis focuses on the establishment, control, and resultant socio-environmental and political impacts of ‘fire-cured tobacco’ peasant production in the Ungoni and Undendeuli areas of Ruvuma in southern Tanzania. It examines the rise of a peasantry tied to tobacco production in three phases. First, it examines the role of the state in the establishment and control of African commercial tobacco production between the 1930s and 1950s. Secondly, it traces the changing fortunes of local peasant cooperatives in the control of tobacco production between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s. Finally, it assesses the postcolonial socio-economic and environmental impact of tobacco production in Ruvuma between the 1970s and the mid-2010s. This study draws on archival materials, oral testimonies, and geographic information systems (GIS) to provide an historical analysis of the complex relationships among the key tobacco actors including the state, cooperatives, tobacco companies and the local tobacco-growing peasants. It demonstrates that tobacco production was started in Ruvuma during the 1930s ‘Plant More Crops’ campaign as an attempt to rehabilitate the British economy and to improve rural livelihoods after the Great Depression. Over time, the tobacco industry became an important source of permanent cash income for the Wangoni and Wandendeuli men and women of Ruvuma – as well as a means of generating state revenue and of profit accumulation by the tobacco companies. The thesis extends James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ and Elinor Ostrom’s ‘governing the commons’ approaches to demonstrate that this apparently short-lived ‘success story’ of peasant tobacco production towards the mid-2010s came at a terrible cost: the impoverishment of rural peasants, a decline in the tobacco industry, and deforestation in parts of southern Tanzania.