Beyond Borders: A History of Mobility, Labor, and Imperialism in Southern Tanzania

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2016-12

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Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the gradual transformation of southern Tanzania from a thriving precolonial frontier into an impoverished, peripheral borderland during the twentieth century by examining the region’s history of mobility– from long-distance caravan networks to the expansion of motorized road transportation. It argues that southern Tanzania’s real and perceived peripheralization began as a consequence of colonial warfare in the early 20th century, particularly the First World War. Poverty and famine defined the Ruvuma borderland of southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique in the aftermath of the war due to the wide-spread use of modern weaponry, scorched earth tactics, forced conscription, and raiding by colonial armies. The Portuguese and British colonial administrations neglected the Ruvuma borderland during the interwar era because the region lacked adequate manpower, environmental conditions, and transportation infrastructure to produce and export large quantities of cash crops that imperial markets prioritized. The failure of colonial development schemes attempted in southern Tanzania after the Second World War, particularly the East African Groundnut Scheme, propagated and engrained negative stereotypes of the region as being incapable of “development.” Southern Tanzania’s dilapidated transportation infrastructure served as a persistent symbol, symptom, and justification for the region’s isolation and impoverishment throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras. While examining the reasons behind and adverse consequences of the colonial and national states’ failures to construct all-weather roads in southern Tanzania, this dissertation argues that the region’s road transportation history provides an alternative narrative of local initiative and prosperity. Since the second millennium C.E., inhabitants of the Ruvuma borderland utilized their mobility to improve their lives and relocate in response to famines, droughts, warfare, and exploitative authority. The introduction and expansion of motor vehicle transport during the 1920s and 1930s offered a valuable avenue for local populations to pursue socioeconomic opportunities within and beyond the peripheral borderland. Although colonists intended for automobiles to serve as “civilizing” and “modernizing” technologies, African producers and migrant laborers living in proximity to the main and district roads in southern Tanzania appropriated motor vehicles to pursue advantageous labor and commercial markets. While some Africans associated roads and automobiles with forced labor practices and the loss of migrant laborers’ autonomy, others perceived them as pathways and tools for socioeconomic advancement. Rather than examining automobility from the standard perspective of African-European relations, this dissertation also explores Asian contributions. It argues that Indian entrepreneurs, wholesalers, and retailers were the driving force behind the expansion and success of road transportation in southern Tanzania between the 1920s and 1960s. One road transportation firm, in particular, spearheaded the growth of an Indian-dominated transportation sector in the south during the late colonial era – the Tanganyika Transport Company Ltd. or Teeteeko. In the postcolonial period, automobiles became important tools that Indian businessmen utilized to contest anti-Asian national discourse portraying them as exploitative parasites. The Indian community in southern Tanzania tried to prove its value and allegiance to the nation by offering their vehicles in support of neighboring anticolonial struggles, humanitarian relief, and nation-building operations. Although their efforts ultimately failed, the Indian transportation sector left a lasting impact on southern Tanzania’s socioeconomic landscape. African drivers and mechanics, meanwhile, utilized their technological knowledge and social networks to find and retain high-paying, high-status jobs during the economically turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s. In the end, this dissertation argues that southern Tanzania remained a dynamic region whose multiethnic population utilized their mobility to pursue socioeconomic opportunities locally, regionally, and internationally. Southern Tanzania’s roads became physical manifestations and symbolic representations of the region’s impoverishment and peripheralization, as well as its vitality and innovation in the face of neglectful or exploitative state authority.

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Keywords

Tanzania, Modern Britain and Empire, Mobility, Roads, Motor Vehicles, Development

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