Sugar, the plantation, and the state in Tanzania

The Journal of Peasant Studies · 2025-06-28 · 1 citations

This essay examines the relationship between sugar, the plantation, and state-building in modern Tanzania. Whereas scholars have emphasised plantations' export orientation, our analysis highlights their historical role in ensuring staple security for the state. This focus on import substitution, dating back to the colonial period, stemmed from export limitations the international sugar regime imposed on Tanzania and government efforts to promote both sugar and the plantation as symbols and engines of development. Large-scale sugarcane production expanded rapidly especially in the postwar era, profoundly reshaping social relations of land, labour, and livelihoods in ways that deepened gender, race, and class inequalities.

6. Of Privilege, Lawfare, and Perverse Resistance

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024-02-15

“Go Back To Where You Came From!”: Moral Economy of Land and the Politics of Belonging in Coastal Tanzania^☆

Rural Sociology · 2024-02-07 · 3 citations

Abstract This article examines how the threat of eviction by a transnational land deal in coastal Tanzania shaped competing narratives with which longtime residents and migrants defended and legitimated the moral economy of land: a widely shared customary norm that land belonged to those who cleared, occupied, and used it continuously for their daily provisioning, with or without title deeds. To counter the state's claim that all villagers were “invaders,” long‐term residents appealed to their ethnic and ancestral connections to the land, while migrants invoked a broader idiom of agrarian citizenship that placed land entitlements at the heart of rural people's relationship with the state. Despite this divergence, nervousness similarly pervaded both group's narratives, due in part to the instability of the notion of ethnicity and autochthony in coastal Tanzania and people's historically informed sense of foreboding about state‐sanctioned dispossession. The article draws on the analytic of assemblage to advance a more relational and dynamic understanding of the co‐construction and performance of moral economy and rural identity. Analyzing how villagers imagine and articulate their identities, and how discourses of exclusion and belonging get deployed in conjunctures of displacement is critical to understanding the socio‐material realities of rural life in Tanzania today.

4. Governing Liminality: The Bio-necropolitics of Gender

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024-02-15

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024 · 3 citations

• Art
• Geography

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape brings us to the mid-2000s, when the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert more than 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land to establish a sugarcane plantation . Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified this project another in a line of failed modern resource grabs. Youjin B. Chung argues such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender, history, and culture shaped the project's trajectory, but also how, even in its stalled state, the deal upended social life on the land by setting in motion incomplete processes of development and dispossession. With rich ethnographic detail and visual storytelling, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape traces the lived experiences of diverse rural women and men as they struggled for survival under a seemingly endless condition of liminality. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the directions and stakes of postcolonial development and nation-building in Tanzania, and the shifting meanings of identity and belonging for those on the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.

5. Negotiating Liminality: Everyday Resistance and the Moral Economies of Difference

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024-02-15

Historicising sustainable livestock intensification and animal genetic improvement in Africa: towards a decolonial multispecies climate justice

The Journal of Peasant Studies · 2023-12-10 · 5 citations

This article examines the discourse and practice of sustainable livestock intensification in Africa, using Tanzania as an analytic case. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I argue the growing interest in animal genetic improvement in the name of efficiency and sustainability mirrors earlier, incomplete colonial cattle crossbreeding experiments. These colonial efforts were justified by the need to improve yields while conserving the environment and ultimately facilitated state control over the bodies of indigenous peoples and animals. These historical legacies have profound implications for advancing climate justice in pastoral settings, where life depends on interspecies relations, knowledges, and practices of care.

Power/knowledge/land: Contested ontologies of land and its governance in Africa. By Laura A.German, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 333. $90.00 (hbk); $39.95 (pbk). ISBN: 9780472075331, 9780472055333

Journal of Agrarian Change · 2023-12-17

Understanding Land Deals in Limbo in Africa: A Focus on Actors, Processes, and Relationships

African Studies Review · 2021 · 21 citations

• Political Science
• Political Science
• Mathematics

Land, as the material and symbolic foundation of agrarian life, is situated at the heart of African studies. 1 Debates over land access and control have grown in salience and urgency in recent years in the context of large-scale land acquisitions. In the wake of the global food, fuel, and financial crises of 2007-2008, an unusual and heterogeneous group of actors-including foreign and national governments, private corporations, as well as individual and institutional investors-joined the rush for land in the global South to produce and/or to speculate on agricultural commodities The speed and scale of this land rush were extraordinary. Prior to 2008, the average rate of agricultural land expansion was less than four million hectares per annum worldwide; in just one year, between 2008 and 2009, foreign investors had expressed interest in approximately 56 million hectares of farmland globally, of which 70 percent was reportedly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa

The Curious Case of Three Male Elders: Land Grabbing, Lawfare, and Intersectional Politics of Exclusion in Tanzania

African Studies Review · 2021-09-01 · 3 citations

Abstract In 2012, three male elders in Tanzania filed a lawsuit against the government and a foreign investor for trespassing, justifying the case as rightful resistance to land grabbing. Based on ethnographic research, however, Chung argues that their action is more appropriately understood as gendered lawfare; the plaintiffs drew on their multiple positions of privilege to exclude a diverse array of legitimate resource users, including their wives. Their lawfare was not only perverse in its design, but also in its effects. It increased the uncertainties surrounding the rights and status of local people and reinforced intersecting inequalities within the “local” itself.