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7 The Struggle over Erosion Control: Women's Farming and the Politics of Subsistence The fight against the Usambara Scheme was a battle to preserve the social safety net for poor peasants and to retard the emergence of a fully capitalist agriculture. The defeat of the Usambara Scheme therefore shaped crucial elements in the local economy for the remainder of the twentieth century. Acceptance of the scheme would have left prosperous farmers free to expand land holdings and to charge rent for subsistence land which, always until then, the poor had been able to borrow without payment. The poorest farmers, many of whom would have been driven off the land under scheme rules, fought successfully to preserve the right of every resident of Shambaai to the free use of land for subsistence. The right to land carried with it the benefit of participating in a network of kinsfolk who helped one another through the daily crises of rural life. The Consequences of Erosion Control The requirements of the erosion-control scheme seem modest when measured against the present claim that they would have brought revolutionary change to Shambaai. The scheme did not claim to be changing the rules of land tenure. The most significant aspect of the scheme was the requirement that moderately steep land on mountain slopes be put under tie ridges running along the hillsides. The ridges were about a meter apart from ridge-top to ridge-top, with similarly spaced ridges running down the hill face. The ridges were called matuta, a word which even now can evoke memories of struggle among those who lived through the period. The overall pattern of matuta was a grid of raised squares. Rainwater filled the depressed center of each square and then sank slowly into the earth instead of streaming off the hillside. In a sense the matuta were an alternative or a supplement to the work of rain chiefs who were 181 182 The Struggle over Erosion Control expected to bring gentle rains which would slowly soak the hillsides. If the regime of matuta had survived, it would have brought some benefits to the wealthier of the men, who would now receive rents or labor for subsistence land. We shall see that the burden of constructing matuta did not fall most heavily on these men, for they could afford to build tie ridges using hired labor or collective work parties. The regime of matuta threatened people who were poor in land, in cash, and in social support, especially women. It struck with special danger at women whose husbands were away (most of them on sisal plantations) working for wages. l The central danger of erosion control was that it would deprive the poor of their rights to land in Shambaai. It was this real threat which gave force to the bitter complaint that the British had drawn a plan to drive the Shambaa out of their mountains. The regime of matuta was bound to convert land freely available to the poor into a category of land used only by cash-cropping men. At the heart of the matter was the division of the gardens of Shambaai between two categories. There was land with permanent crops or permanent improvements: coffee farms on which the trees were a long-term investment, or vegetable farms on which peasants invested money or labor in terracing. These were almost always reserved for men's use, and rights in use were guarded carefully. The owner who made an investment in trees or in terracing expected to reap its profits. He did not intend to lend out this land. Coffee was often planted in the banana garden which, we have seen, was the masculine garden, and which would in some cases have been saleable even in the nineteenth century. The second type of garden was treated very differently. This was the garden which was sometimes left fallow and sometimes planted in maize. Even in the nineteenth century many such plots were allocated to women by their husbands. Maize was planted on land without permanent improvements , land whose first purpose was to win subsistence, even if harvests beyond subsistence needs were sold for cash. Putting in matuta on this land converted it to land of the other type. The peasant farmers of Shambaai were not conservative in technical matters: local men voluntarily and spontaneously terraced vegetable plots. Peasants resisted building ridges on subsistence land because this would convert it into men's cash-crop land unavailable for...

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