Rizzo.pdf

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4 No. 1 and 2, January and April 2004, pp. 00–00.

What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? 205

What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme?

Development Disaster and Labour Market

in Southern Tanganyika 1946–1952

MATTEO RIZZO

The East African Groundnut Scheme in Tanganyika is probably the most

dramatic and most cited failure of the ambitions of British late colonial

developmentalism. Issues of labour supply in the scheme’s short history, and

the relationship of labour supply with the peasant economy of Southern

Province, have received almost no attention, a gap which this article aims to

begin to ﬁll. It suggests that the implementation of the scheme gave rise to

a political battle over labour market control between the colonial state in

Tanganyika and scheme managers. The paper documents how, without any

support from the colonial administration, the scheme attempted to recruit

the large numbers of workers it required, and its frustrations in doing so. It

investigates the factors that prevented labour supply satisfying demand, how

peasants in the area engaged with the labour market (and were able to adjust

their participation in it), and the impact of labour market growth on the

household farm economy.

Keywords: colonialism, groundnut scheme, labour markets, Tanzania

THE CONTEXT

As Liebenow (1971) put it, Tanganyika was the Cinderella of Britain’s colonial

empire and its Southern Province was Cinderella’s Cinderella. 1 Agriculture there

was constrained by an environment of uncertain rainfall and poor, mostly

sandy soils. The lack of agricultural potential inﬂuenced the unwillingness of

Matteo Rizzo, Development Studies Department, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street,

Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. e-mail: teorizzo@yahoo.com

This article draws on my PhD thesis (Rizzo 2004), based on 15 months of archival work (in Dar es

Salaam and at the Public Record Ofﬁce in Kew) and ﬁeldwork in Southeastern Tanzania. I would

like to thank ‘L’Orientale’ and the ESRC for funding my doctoral studies. Fieldwork was sponsored

by the Central Research Fund, University of London, SOAS, the British Institute in Eastern Africa,

and the Royal Historical Society. The ﬁnal year of writing the thesis was funded by a Tawney

Fellowship of the Economic History Society and the University of London’s Institute of Historical

Research. In Tanzania I worked under the auspices of the Commission for Science and Technology.

I have beneﬁted from the advice of my supervisor David Anderson and my examiner Gareth Austin,

and from Henry Bernstein’s extensive comments on previous drafts. All translations from KiSwahili

are my own.

1 For a synopsis of the late pre-colonial and early post-colonial history of the Southern Province see

Rizzo (2004, 9 –20).

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 205–238.

206 Matteo Rizzo

the colonial state, ﬁrst German and then British, to invest in the area and its

infrastructure, most notably its road system. Transport by lorry became possible

only in the late 1920s, and even then there was but one major road connecting the

coast with the interior. The appalling state of roads strongly inﬂuenced the con-

ditions of the agrarian economy, and constrained the expansion of agricultural

commodity production. For example, in 1945 peasants in the area could proﬁtably

produce grain only within eight miles of the ports (Kilwa, Lindi and Mikindani).

While sesame and groundnuts were produced for sale up to 150 miles from the

ports, 2 the high costs of transport and their deduction from the prices received

by producers were a major barrier to the growth of commodity production.

In 1945 the agricultural production of the Southern Province was estimated at

£634,673, of which 45 per cent (£290,040) was generated by peasant farmers

whose most important crops were grains and sesame. Considering that the popu-

lation of the Province at that time was almost entirely rural, and estimated at

about 800,000 people, the low level of development of peasant commodity pro-

duction is evident. 3 The most important commercial activity in the agriculture of

the Southern Province was the production of sisal, which had begun on settlers’

estates during the period of German rule. British settlers took over the estates

once Tanganyika became a British Mandate in 1922. The estates were the major

source of demand for wage labour in the Province. In 1939, 7500 workers were

employed in sisal cultivation. In 1947 this ﬁgure had reached 17,000. 4 Wages in

the Southern Province were lower than in other sisal estates in the Central and

Tanga provinces, but estate owners succeeded in securing an adequate labour

supply of mostly migrant labour, drawn from the neighbouring northern zones

of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and the upcountry (interior) districts of

the Southern Province (Masasi and Tunduru) rather than the coastal areas where

the estates were located.

Sometime in June 1946 the government in the Southern Province issued an

order to prevent, until further notice, the burning of forest, which was done to

clear land for cultivation. The rationale behind this order, according to a remark-

able early account from Mr Makwinja, African Field Assistant at Farm 2, in his

article on the scheme in the pages of Habari za Nachingwea katika Kiswahili

(Nachingwea News in Swahili) was that the British ‘wanted to survey the land

from an aeroplane in order to assess whether it was suitable for cultivation’ and

did not want their aerial survey obstructed by the smoke of bush ﬁres. 5 Here Mr

2 Provincial Agricultural Ofﬁcer, Southern Province Annual Report, 1945, TNA 16/15/44 Vol. 2.

The acronym AR will be used to identify Annual Report from here on.

3 I do not have information on the population of the Southern Province in 1945. The Southern

Province Annual Report for 1948 states the total provincial population at 789,000. See

Southern Province AR, 1948, TNA 16/11/260. Information on the composition of exports from the

Southern Province prior to World War II can be found in Becker (2001, 155–6).

4 Information on the number of people in employment on sisal estates in 1939 has been

gathered from Becker (2001, 181). On 1947 see Labour Ofﬁcer, Southern Province AR, 1947, TNA

16/11/260.

5 ‘Habari za Nachingwea katika Kiswahili’ (Nachingwea News in Swahili), No. 1, date received 4

June 1952, TNA 16/32/35 Vol. 2.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 205–238.

What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? 207

Makwinja referred to the Wakeﬁeld Mission (named after its leader) charged

with evaluating the feasibility of the large-scale cultivation of groundnuts, and

which, after just nine weeks mostly spent ﬂying over the bush of Tanganyika,

gave its approval to one of the biggest investment schemes in post-war colonial

Africa. As Mr Makwinja later recalled:

There were rumours about White men coming to cultivate large farms

of groundnuts 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 . (Emphasis added)

Within a relatively short time, however, the groundnut scheme and its spectacular

failure was to become emblematic of the fallacies (or fantasies) of late colonial

developmentalism, above all as applied to transforming agriculture in environ-

mentally inhospitable tropical conditions. What was the process by which

the groundnut scheme was established in colonial Tanganyika’s ‘Cinderella’

province (as well as several other areas of the territory)?

The Groundnut Scheme: From Conception to End

The groundnut scheme was part of an attempt by the British government to

address the worst economic crisis Britain had faced since the Great Depression

from 1929. 6 After the end of World War II, the USA announced the end of its

ﬁnancial aid to its allies. Britain’s need to address its balance of payments deﬁcit

was intensiﬁed by an acute shortage of vegetable oils and fats. Britain depended

heavily on imports of these commodities for its own consumption, and they

were both in short supply and very expensive in international markets.

In this context, the groundnut scheme was conceived as a way to address the

world shortage of vegetable oils and fats through large-scale agricultural opera-

tions on African soil. A key player was Frank Samuel, managing director of the

United Africa Company (UAC). UAC was a subsidiary of Unilever, a multina-

tional colossus that supplied about three-quarters of the margarine consumed in

Western Europe and two-thirds of the soaps utilized in the UK and its colonies.

After a tour of Africa in search of new areas for the production of vegetable oils,

Samuel was impressed by the contrast between land scarcity in Nigeria and land

abundance in Tanganyika. When he approached Tanganyika’s Director of Agri-

culture to investigate the possibility of investing in a plantation of oil-producing

plants, he was advised that Unilever could have approximately 100,000 acres of

land to farm. The Director of Agriculture also made clear that the Tanganyika

administration had no funds to ﬁnance the undertaking. He suggested that Samuel

approach the Ministry of Food in London for support, as the British government

was about to be forced to cut vegetable oil and fat rations due to the shortage of

6 Unless otherwise stated, this summary account of the East African groundnut scheme is based on

Havinden and Meredith (1993, 276–83); Morgan (1980, Vol. 2, 285–319, Vol. 4, 54–91); and Wood

(1950). On the role played by the colonies in Britain’s economy during and immediately after World

War II, see Havinden and Meredith (1993, 206 –75).

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 205–238.

208 Matteo Rizzo

these products noted above. Samuel left for London, with the more ambitious

ﬁgure of 2,500,000 acres in mind. 7

Samuel’s epic plan to address the problem of British vegetable oil supply was

received with strong interest by the government and a mission of three experts

was dispatched to East Africa to assess its feasibility. They were John Wakeﬁeld,

a former Director of Agriculture in Tanganyika and leader of the mission, John

Rosa of the Colonial Ofﬁce and D. L. Martin, head of the plantation department

of the United Africa Company.

After nine weeks in Kenya, Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia, six of which

were spent surveying land from an aeroplane, the mission found Samuel’s

proposal sound and advised the government to invest in a scheme for the

mechanized production of groundnuts on some 3,210,000 acres of land. About

three-quarters of this area was in Tanganyika, where three sites were selected:

Kongwa and Urambo along the central railway, and Nachingwea in the Southern

Province (see Map 1). As labour supply was perceived to be a likely problem,

the scheme envisaged the mechanization of the entire process of production: from

the clearance of bush and the preparation of soil, to the planting and harvesting

of the groundnuts.

The plan was approved by the British government in December 1946. In

February 1947 its implementation began with frantic urgency. UAC was the

managing agency until March 1948, when the Overseas Food Corporation

(hereafter OFC), a body entirely funded by British public money, was set up.

The expected outcome of the scheme was an annual production of 600,000 tons

of peanuts by the ﬁfth year, and eventually an annual output of 800,000 tons.

The planned cost was £24 million against a scheduled annual saving to the British

government’s bill for food imports of £10 million. What happened in practice

was, ﬁrst, that the targets of the scheme were reduced year after year while,

second, its cost was progressively adjusted upwards. 8 When it was ﬁnally shut

down in 1951, over £36 million of British public money had been spent on a

scheme that imported more groundnuts as seed than it actually harvested.

The Reasons for Failure

The main reasons for the failure of the scheme have been summarized usefully

by Coulson (1977, 75–6). First, rainfall at the largest site, Kongwa in Central

Province, was inadequate for the cultivation of groundnuts. In selecting this site,

the scheme planners had relied on rainfall data for the last seven years only.

Furthermore, the data used referred to an area close to Kongwa (named

7 Samuel’s expansion of the acreage in the scheme’s plan was simply an exercise in arithmetic.

Samuel was aware of the shortages of peanuts on the international market. He was given information

on the cost and yields per acre of the mechanized farming of peanuts by the Director of Agriculture

in Tanganyika, and simply expanded the acreage of the scheme so that it could meet the estimated

global shortage of vegetable oil.

8 For a clear and concise reconstruction of the striking contrast between the scheme’s goals and

results see Hogendorn and Scott (1983, 172–4).

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 205–238.

What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? 209

Map 1 The location of the production areas of the Groundnut Scheme

Tanganyika Territory: Proposed Areas for Groundnuts Production Scheme

Map planned by A. E. Kelleway, Historical Section, Cabinet Ofﬁce.

Mpwapwa) that received, on average, more rainfall than the Kongwa site. Local

people in fact referred to Kongwa as ‘the country of perpetual drought’ (Iliffe

1979, 442).

Second, no in-depth analysis of soils was carried out before the implementa-

tion began. The clay content made agricultural operations impossible during the

dry season and therefore considerably slowed the implementation of the plan.

Furthermore, the abrasive nature of the soil resulted in the rapid deterioration of

agricultural machinery.

Third, none of the machines used had been tested in a tropical area and,

fourth, the maintenance of agricultural machines was hampered by the lack of

spare parts and by the inexperience of drivers and mechanics. Furthermore the

supply of new machines and spare parts was complicated by the congestion of

the ports in both Mombasa and Dar es Salaam.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 205–238.

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