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Living along the Railway By the end of 1973, the TAZARA railway was nearing completion on the Tanzanian side, and construction was proceeding westwards into Zambia. For the thousands of Tanzanian workers who had been working on the project, it was a time of dispersal —around a third of them would stay on to continue working into Zambia, but for the majority it was the end of their employment.1 Many of these former workers decided to stay and settle as farmers in the railway corridor, becoming a founding population for the settlements that would grow up around the railway stations over the next decades. Meanwhile, Tanzania’s political leaders had already begun to discuss the question of rural development along TAZARA. One party report expressed concern that TAZARA’s construction was “proceeding faster than the country’s ability to generate the wealth that the railway will carry.”2 Now that the Freedom Railway was almost finished, they asked, what form of economic development should be created to sustain it? Part of the answer lay in large-scale projects and in the extension of transportation linkages to existing enterprises. Among the projects already under way were a prison farm at Idete, the sawmill and machine workshop at Mang’ula, and an expansion of the Kilombero Sugar Company. But there was also a need for rural communities to play a role in the economic success and long-term security of TAZARA. It so happened that the construction of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania coincided with one of the largest population relocation projects in East African hisc h a p t e r 4 72   Freedom Railway tory: ujamaa, or rural villagization. Thus when questions were raised about rural development in the TAZARA corridor, the solution seemed perfectly clear: ujamaa villages should be launched as quickly as possible all along the line, from Mbeya region to the coast. This policy was announced to delegates attending the fifteenth biennial TANU conference in September of 1971, when Waziri Juma (TANU’s political coordinator for TAZARA) revealed that all TAZARA railway stations within Tanzania would be incorporated into ujamaa villages. This would ensure that the railway would become a foundation for socialist rather than capitalist development, he explained, warning the delegates that capitalists had already begun to take advantage of the young TAZARA workers who earned cash wages at the Mang’ula workshops.3 The news of planned villagization along the railway line had already reached TAZARA stations in Morogoro region three months earlier, when party secretary Major Hashim Mbita paid a visit in mid-June to encourage the creation of ujamaa villages there. Addressing a public gathering in Ifakara, Major Mbita urged the local citizens to stay alert, literally to “keep their eyes open,” to be sure that outside enemies did not thwart the progress of TAZARA’s construction. According to the party leadership, the ujamaa villagers living along TAZARA would serve as a first line of defense against potential enemy sabotage.4 At the time of Major Mbita’s visit to Morogoro, there were already a few established ujamaa villages located near TAZARA. Among them was the village of Idete, which was selected that month as the best ujamaa village in the region, earning it a cash prize of 16,000 shillings.5 For most rural residents along the railway line, however, relocation to planned villages took place between 1973 and 1976, and was carried out by force. Villagization along TAZARA eventually came to involve four provinces (Mbeya, Iringa, Morogoro, and Coast) and seven districts. In Ulanga District, seventeen ujamaa villages were planned along the railway. All families living up to ten miles from TAZARA were moved to newly designated plots located near railway stations. The project was called “Operation Kando Kando ya Reli,” or “Operation Alongside the Railway.”6 The ujamaa villages that were established throughout Tanzania at this time were, in anthropologist James Scott’s view, part of a state effort to modernize and thereby “make legible” rural economies that were disorderly, inefficient, and poorly linked to state political and economic controls.7 The national villagization project was based on the same principles of modernization that had prevailed in the colonial period: scientific agriculture, mechanization, and bureaucratic centralization. The image of the ideal rural landscape in the ujamaa era was one of orderliness and efficiency. Rural villages with individual and collective farms would be laid out in neat blocks and rows. [18.218.184.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 08...

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