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Creating Modern Tanzanians State Forestry from Uhuru through Ujamaa, 1961–80
- Ohio University Press
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CH A P T E R 7 Creating Modern Tanzanians State Forestry from Uhuru through Ujamaa, 1961–80 AFTER the African elite who came to control Tanzania set a modernization agenda that was a mixture of late-colonial developmentalism and African nationalism. TANU quickly disempowered the class of chiefs that had served as colonial functionaries and created an ideology of secular nationalism that aimed to modernize Tanzanians.1 In relegating chiefs to the sidelines, the new state devalued symbols of chiefly authority, such as ancestral charters associated with forest shrines. If there was to be an “ax wielder”with authority over forest access, it would be the central state itself. Despite TANU’s critique of colonialism, it shared late-colonial economic goals that aimed to increase export revenues, mechanize the countryside , transform subsistence peasants into surplus-producing farmers, and begin to industrialize. Tanzania’s forests would serve this agenda by providing timber, poles, and fuel for economic growth. The major departure from colonial forestry was that the state initially opened the forests up to greater peasant access. Pitsawyers, taungya forest cultivators, and charcoal burners alike worked, farmed, and exploited the forests in the heady early years of African nationalism. While British foresters remained for much of the s, Tanzanians took over the Forest Division by the middle of the decade, combining Western scientific forestry with African nationalism.2 Although some were initially uneasy with greater peasant access to the forests, Tanzanian foresters participated enthusiastically in the nationalist goal of increasing timber production. The nationalist agenda assumed a high rate of development that would convert backward peasants into modern farmers and workers. Tanzanians would become modern consumers, no longer reliant on poles, saplings, and thatch for their dwellings, but on timber, concrete, and corrugated iron for modern houses that reflected the sedentary lifestyle of the urban worker and intensive farmer. This vision denigrated the dispersed miombo woodlands’ environment that covered half of Tanzania, readily accepting that it would be replaced with cultivated land, tree plantations , and exploitable natural forests interspersed with closed forest reserves that would preserve water catchments and guard against soil erosion. In many respects this agenda was torn from the colonial blueprint, except that now the resources and collective national will seemed to be available to bring it to fruition. Even before the end of the s the development agenda seemed to go awry. Capital-intensive agricultural projects failed, while most peasants resisted becoming the modern farmers that the state envisioned. Although brought to power in large part by a wave of peasant nationalism, the state viewed peasant-initiated projects as a usurpation of its authority , a sign that it was losing control at the local level. The result was an assertion of statism with the Arusha Declaration of , whereby Julius Nyerere mandated the transformation of the countryside through ujamaa villagization,reminiscent of colonial closer settlement,but on a much larger scale. It called on forestry to participate in a campaign that was called socialism and self-reliance through rural restructuring and continued revenue generation. This was seen in vast state-sponsored industrial projects to manufacture charcoal for an export market.Villagization, coinciding with economic crisis, called for cash crop production at any cost, including opening up new land in forest reserves. By the s ujamaa rural restructuring weakened Forest Division oversight, threatening the fundamentals of scientific forestry and forests alike. | Wielding the Ax Restructuring Forest Reserves in Independent Tanzania, 1961–70 Although the late-colonial goal of reserving percent of the landscape as forest reserves had been achieved by , the forest estate did not remain static after independence. Many peasants saw the independence struggle as bringing access to land that was often located in recently declared forest reserves. In this they were sometimes supported by newly elected Tanzanian local officials who sympathized with the peasant need for land, often to the chagrin of British foresters. District officials often granted access to forest lands to villagers who made the case that they could increase cash crops, and they excised some reserves or readjusted their boundaries to make way for peasants. A administrative order informed forest officers, “Some reserves are definitely of no value, either because their original purpose has vanished or because they were acquired during the reservation drive without detailed consideration of their value. These reserves should either be formally revoked or left unattended pending more detailed examination in the future. Pressure on these reserves will not be resisted and encroachment will be dealt with by revocation...
