Gossip, Markets, and Gender: How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro

Introduction

Tanzania, like many other African countries, has moved into a neoliberal era. In Tanzania, the shift began in the mid-1980s, after two decades of socialist rule and heavy centralization of its economy and administration. The reforms led the International Monetary Fund to declare that “the [Tanzanian ] authorities are transforming perhaps one of the most regularized economies in Africa into one of the most liberalized”(IMF 1995, 1). The national liberalization policies changed the rules of the game in political and economic life by giving individual actors more room to maneuver .1 With liberalization, the boundaries shifted between the official and unofficial, or the legitimate and illegitimate. This book looks at how these boundaries ultimately are negotiated at the local level in everyday life. It focuses on moral dialogue concerning the changing economy and social structure among the Chagga people in Kilimanjaro in the mid-1990s. The Chagga are not newcomers to economic and political enterprise. Indeed, the Chagga are reputed to be especially ambitious, entrepreneurial, 3 Introduction and modern people in Tanzania and wider East Africa. Their ready acceptance of missionary education, coffee cultivation, and a cash economy in the early twentieth century made the region stand out as more prosperous than other areas in the nation when independence came in the early 1960s. The newly independent regime took various measures to even out regional disparities and to combat the likely opposition to its socialist policies at the same time. For the Chagga, educational possibilities were restricted, and important local power bases such as chieftaincies, cooperative unions, and the Chagga Council were abolished. Consequently, the Chagga were not avid supporters of the post-independence regime’s socialist policies. Yet they were not simply antagonistic toward or excluded from state structure, either. Thanks to early exposure to education, Chagga men held many jobs in the public sector throughout the colonial and independence periods. Nonetheless, the era of liberalization was largely accepted among the Chagga with celebration as a time of freedom regained for material and political pursuits. This became evident in the first multiparty elections in 1995, when Kilimanjaro stood out as the strongest area of opposition in the country (Pietilä et al., 2002). Both the most important rival to the governing party’s presidential candidate, as well as one of the most prominent opposition parties, originated in Kilimanjaro.2 Different forms of marketing and trading have been part of Chagga life for a long time. Chagga chiefs already had connections with the export trade of Mombasa by the early nineteenth century (S. F. Moore 1986, 30, 63; Stahl 1974, 36 –7). Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both chiefs and ordinary Chagga people were involved in year-round exchanges with caravans from Zanzibar that stopped at the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro (Koponen 1988, 83; Von der Decken 1869 –71, 272; quoted in S. F. Moore 1986, 31). In these situations Chagga women simply extended their usual food exchanging activities in the local markets to barter with the caravans. Indeed, Kilimanjaro is one of the few places in Tanzania and greater East Africa with a long history of regularly held markets, where women have traditionally gathered to exchange and market produce. The old system in which neighboring marketplaces form a rotating market ring continues today on the mountain, and is comparable to the better-known and old pattern of market cycles in different areas of West Africa (Hill 1963, 448). Some Chagga men had been dealing in regional markets earlier, exchanging , for instance, milk, hides, and other animal products with the Maasai (Koponen 1988, 103 –4). For several decades in the twentieth century , however, coffee cultivation and salaried employment were an important source of income for many Chagga men. As in many other parts of the country, the importance of trade in the informal sector began to increase 4 Introduction among the Chagga at the end of the 1970s, when many men and women used it as a strategy to augment their earnings in an ever-tightening economic situation. Trade and business only continued to expand after economic liberalization. This was not merely due to new official legitimacy, but also to the increasing availability of consumer goods as well as rising school fees and health care expenditures, which increased households’ need for ready cash. In Kilimanjaro, the shrinking of the vihamba, inherited land plots, has contributed to an increased need for...