I started writing this entry in my head when
I was sitting in the bank at noon on September 3, watching the Branch Manager
try to figure out what was happening with the account I was trying to open
there. Except for me, it was an all-African scene – bank manager, tellers,
customers. It was something so ordinary and it was also something that
absolutely would not have been observed 40 years ago. So should the theme of
this blog be how much less racialized Tanzanian society now is, or should it be
how abnormal the post-colonial Africa I knew 40 years ago was, or should it be
the end of Tanzanian difference?
When I came to Tanzania in 1968, it was
seven years after Independence in 1961, but the marks of colonialism were deep
and were everywhere to be seen. For a naïve kid from the racially and
economically homogeneous suburbs of Canada, where everyone looked (and was)
much the same, it was a shock to encounter extreme racial stratification and
blatant inequality – the colour-coded layers of privilege that sat on top of
the shocking poverty of most people. In post-colonial Africa, whites were on
the top, browns were in the middle and blacks were on the bottom. Although
Independence had meant that top politicians and the heads of the major bureaucracies
were African, few of the faces just below them were black.
The reason was simple. If you want doctors,
city planners, electrical engineers, school teachers, or economists or any of
the other specialized occupations that make modern societies function, they
have to go to school first. During the 1950s, the British built four high
schools for Africans in Tanganyika, each with 2 classes of 30 students per
grade. This meant that a country of
(then) 14 million graduated 240 local people from high school each year,
not all of whom would go on to university – so it is easy to understand why
professional and technical jobs could not be filled with Africans in the 1960s.
Africanization was a priority for Tanzania, as it was for all the new
governments, but it could not happen right away.
But it was not until I moved to Tanga and
started work in the sisal industry that I really discovered racism. On the
sisal plantations, the managers were Europeans, the accountants and office
clerks were Asians, and the field labourers were one hundred percent black
African. The managers lived in palatial houses on the tops of the hills and
were paid salaries measured in thousands of shillings per month (plus home
leave and perks). The clerks got bungalows part way down the hill and wages
which were counted in hundreds. The workers lived in rows of shacks in the
valleys and were paid piece rate – they were lucky if they made eighty or
ninety shillings in a month.
The sisal estates recruited their managers
from England on three year contracts. Sisal is not a crop that can be grown in
the UK, so on arrival all new managers initially had to be shown (by the
African lead hands who had been on the plantations for decades) what it
actually was and how it was grown and processed. Many managers quickly learned
to depend heavily on a few trusted older African workers for advice on
virtually everything and for supervision of the estates when they weren’t
there.
With large houses, many servants and little
direct supervision from Head Office, life was easy for most estate managers.
Most of them probably did not start in the plantations with much more than the
general level of class snobbery, casual racism and xenophobia typical of lower
middle class Brits at the time – but their objective situation soon turned it
to something much deeper. Racism was an easy way to explain away the
recalcitrance of their workforce, to justify their own privileges and to
insulate themselves psychologically from the poverty of the people that worked
for them. Like anybody else, anywhere, they needed some sort of explanation to
rationalize their lives. Racism was an easily available ideology, and it was
pervasive – labour productivity statistics were, for example, reported in “boy
days” per ton of production, despite the fact that all the workers on the
estates were clearly adult men.
Although many sisal estate managers
initially came thinking they would only stay for a few years, they soon
realized that the luxuries and the indolence that they enjoyed on the sisal
plantations would be beyond their wildest dreams back in the UK. Being white,
at the right time and in the right place, had an enormous economic value. For
many managers, their choice was between a cold council flat in England and a
mansion with many servants in Tanganyika, between being just another
insignificant face in the English crowd and being the Big Man – the “Bwana Mkubwa” who ruled over hundreds
of workers and thousands of hectares – so it’s not surprising that most stayed.
African workers got wages that were kept
artificially low by collusion among all the estates through a common hiring
agency (SILABU). The estates paid their workers partly in maize (to maintain
their nutrition and labour productivity, because if wages were paid entirely in
cash, workers would send the money home to their families) and alternative
crops were discouraged in the region, so that the estates could buy their maize
rations more cheaply. But the
profits remitted to share-holders in Europe, although huge in the boom years,
did not fully reflect these subsidies to the estates, because the managers sat
between the workers and the owners.
In the sisal industry in colonial days,
nothing could be allowed to threaten the cash value of the racial privilege of
the estate managers. Sisal had been grown for over 70 years in Tanga region by
the time I arrived but no African was ever promoted to manager before
nationalization. It would have been far cheaper to promote local people to
Estate Manager than to import people from England who had no clue about
tropical agriculture, but to do so would have been to allow Africans to
demonstrate competence – and then what would happen to the jobs and the
privileges of the expatriates?. Racism was the binding glue of the social cohesion
of the cartel of white estate managers, and it quickly became a deep part of
their self-conception and identity.
I worked in the sisal industry after its
nationalization, so I came after the most egregiously incompetent and most
overtly racist managers had been fired. But some of the old managers had had to
be retained, of necessity. Although they had to keep their opinions under wraps
while Africans were around, their automatic assumption was that all other
whites shared them. So when, for example, German investors came to visit, and
the English Chief Engineer and I were detailed to show them around, as we were
driven around the estates he would regale them with jokes whose inevitable
punch line was some variant of “Africans as monkeys”. I always wondered if our
driver understood enough English to get the drift, but his face never gave any
indication.
People who grew up in Tanzania in colonial
days were inevitably marked by their experiences of being on the receiving end
of a racist structure. The General Manager of the nationalized estates was a
very capable guy from Moshi who had done Agricultural Economics on a
scholarship in Australia.. Under his administration, many estates had African
managers, and they became significantly more efficient than under their
previous owners. But he told me once how as a teenager he had been called over
at the railway station, told to turn around and have his back used as an
impromptu human desk by some European who wanted to write somebody else a note.
When I worked in Tanzania from 1968 to
1970, there were relatively few cars, but they were overwhelmingly driven by
(or for) Europeans or Asians. Dar es Salaam today has awful traffic jams, and
almost all the drivers are Africans. As in any city of 3 million, there is a
white population – of diplomats, aid workers and business people – and locales
which they frequent. But even at the modern supermarket complexes with the
security guards at the gates of the parking lot, the vast majority of the
shoppers are upper middle class Africans. In the suburb we live in, the monster
homes of the new elite sit beside hovels tacked together out of scrap
corrugated iron, and the air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruisers of the new upper
class accelerate up the hill past sweating water carriers pushing their laden
bicycles – but the inequality of Tanzania today is overwhelmingly among
Africans.
Today, walking in the Kariakoo market of
Dar es Salaam, some shops deal in obscure types of bolts, some specialize in weird types of furniture and some
trade electrical goods or bales of recycled clothes – and all the faces in them
are African. The all-African bank scene that prompted this reflection, fits with much else – capitalism now has an African face in
Tanzania, which is a fundamental difference from 40 years ago.
This did not, of course, just “happen”. The
Asian commercial minorities were pushed out and the expatriate bureaucrats were
replaced. The rhetoric, if not the reality, of the Tanzania of the 1960s was
that the new post-independence society would be egalitarian – that Tanzania
would build on African traditions of community and joint production and produce
a new sort of society, one which avoided both the totalitarianism of Soviet
Communism and the structured inequality of Western Capitalism. In those days,
there was a quite conscious attempt to be different from western capitalism,
there was an emphasis on building the nation in a political sense (for example,
by making Swahili the national language) and there were “codes of conduct” that
tried to ensure that political leaders were not simultaneously building
business empires. Nobody talked about corruption – to my eye, Tanzanian
corruption was not very different from that in Ontario (i.e. there was some,
but it was essentially very rare).There were relatively few police in evidence,
little inequality among Africans and Tanzania aspired to being a different sort
of nation.
But today, although portraits of Kikwete,
the current president, on the walls of public and commercial buildings
(including my bank) are always accompanied by photos of the first president (the “father of the nation”, Julius
Nyerere), there are only traces of “Mwalimu” (Teacher) Nyerere’s principles.
From the new stock market to street vendors, Capitalism has come to Tanzania,
police check-points dot the highways, everyone wears a shirt and tie to the
office and official corruption competes with traffic jams as a subject of
conversation.
The irony is that in the years just after Independence,
Nyerere’s government had to accept the continuation of a racial hierarchy of
inequalty – even while trying to build something new – because there simply
were not enough educated African Tanzanians to staff the positions of the newly
independent nation. Today that is no longer true. There is a cosmopolitan,
educated elite and in 2006-07, there were 75,346 Tanzanians enrolled in
tertiary education – still too few for a country of (now) nearly 40 million,
but light years different from the 1950s. However, while growth in GDP has been strong in recent years (about
7% per year) little or none of it has filtered down to the bottom (about 40% of
children under five are stunted, an indicator of chronic malnutrition) and the
aspiration to building something different seems to be gone.
So if Tanzania was then a racial hierarchy
of post-colonial privilege, whose political leaders aspired nonetheless to
build a new sort of non-exploitive society, and if it is now a largely ‘normal’
capitalist hierarchy of African wealth and power, whose main aspiration is
economic growth, which part of this story matters more?
