Mastering the Landscape? Sisal Plantations, Land, and Labor in Tanga Region, 1893-1980s

Nobody who would have visited German East Africa right before the war and had familiarized himself with its life, which visibly carries the imprints of production, would have ever imagined that 22 years earlier no agave nor any other fibrous agave existed in German East Africa.... It is my strong conviction that in no long a time East Africa will be the most important producing area in the world (Richard Hindorf, 1925).1 Hindorf's conviction came true, and sisal's rise to prominence in German East Africa (GEA) continued unabated for almost three-quarters of a century. The signs of this ascendancy were already visible during the 22 years mentioned by Hindorf. The number of plantations rose from 1 in 1893 to 54 by 1913, and production jumped from a mere 0.6 tons in 1898 to 20,835 tons in 1913, comprising almost 30 percent of the total value of GEA exports.2 Under the British Mandate, Tanganyika became the leading producer of sisal, contributing more than a quarter of world output. Until the late 1960s, sisal was the gold of Tanzania.3 The first few years after independence die mastery of over the landscape, as Hindrof once noted, was still evident. In fact the year 1963-1964 marked the peak of the industry, when production reached 233,500 tons, contributing 35.6 percent of Tanzania's export earnings, employing 30-35 percent of wage labor, and covering 25.5 percent of total area under cultivation in the Republic. With 35 percent of total world output of and 25 percent of world production of hard fibers, Tanzania was internationally acclaimed as the prime producer of hard fibers in the world. However, if the beginning of the twentieth century marked the undisputed rise of plantations in Tanzania, the end of the century witnessed their demise, or in the language of the industry's participants, their slow death (kukufa baridi).4 When I joined the industry in the late 1960s people used to say that I am joining a dying industry.5 From the late 1960s and over three short decades, the dying industry became the dead industry for many of its participants as well as outsiders. By the 1990s production plummeted to 26,000 tons, contributing a mere 9 percent of total world output of sisal, 1 percent of total exports of Tanzania, and less than 3 percent of the total employed in the country. How could sisal-a foreign floral species from the Yucatan variably described as the tree of wonder and an ugly but precious plant6-master the regional landscape of Tanga in a few years and become the mainstay of the national economy for almost a century? Equally surprising, how could such a powerful industry be brought to its heels in a decade? I argue that the making and un-making of the plantations in Tanzania was shaped by the multiple, and oft contradictory, agendas and actions of planters, workers, villagers and the state. In this paper I focus on the nexus of labor and land dynamics in Tanga Region. I argue that the colonial (German and British) attempts to establish European plantations as economic and sociocultural enclaves visibly marked off from the mass of nearby villages (i.e., markers of the divide between the so-called native and nonnative domains), were challenged by the actions of workers and villagers who merged the village and plantation in numerous ways to retain control over land and labor resources. By the 1960s, and despite the institution of a radically different regime of governance after independence, workers' and villagers' challenges to private and state plantations continued unabated. Attempts to stabilize the plantation labor force in the wake of nationalization were met with increased casualization of labor as well as intensified use of state-run plantation lands claimed by indigenous communities and workers as rights to public resources. Access to land and labor on the regional level shaped the very making of plantations, with reverberations on the national economy and international markets. …

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