Economic and Social Development
The perspective of the Colonial Office having been rejected, the territory's colonial authorities embarked on a series of related policies, which political scientist Margaret Bates has summed up as "one of social engineering, in which changes were to he brought about by a paternal Tanganyika government, working in general alliance with sympathetic settlers. businessmen, missionaries and members of the small westernized African community." The involvement of the latter was predicated on their acceptance of policies in the formulation of which neither they nor the population at large had been consulted.
In 1946 the Ten-Year Development and Welfare Plan for Tanganyika Territory was issued (revised in 1950) as the guide In a only for efforts at economic development but also to provide the basis for ancillary plans, such as the one for education issued in 1947. Perhaps the greatest emphasis was put on agriculture, transportation, and education. Little attention was paid to the development of industry, a consequence in part of Kenya's head start and the tendency to see it as the major locus of' industry in an increasingly interrelated East Africa,
In the government's view, improvements in the educational system were essential to economic development, and a fair amount of money was devoted to it. The education plan itself and the government's perspective on Tanganyika's needs were, however, limited, perhaps because there was no sense of urgency about preparing Tanganyikans to rule themselves.
The plan stressed primary schooling; some attention was to he given to secondary education but very little to education at university or advanced technical levels. The number of Tanganyika Africans entering Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, the sole East African college in the plan period. was much smaller than the numbers from Kenya or Uganda, although Tanganyika's population was roughly the same as that of Kenya and exceeded Uganda's. This was in part a consequence of the very slow progress (if primary and secondary education in Tanganyika before the war. hut it also reflected the government's doubts ahont the desirabilih of having large numbers of Africans with higher education in the territory, at least in the early 1950s,
In 1947 about 7.5 percent of Tanganyikan children were in schools, and it was hoped to have all eligible children in primary school at the end of the plan period. This was not achieved; moreover only one child in ten went to school beyond the fourth year. In part this failure to meet the goal was a consequence of lack of money and trained teachers. There were ethnic groups, such as the Chaga, who did better but at their own expense. Minor additions to the existing railroad system were made in response to specific needs, but these needs were short-lived, and the additions had no long-run value.
The development plan placed the greatest emphasis on road construction, a decision then and subsequently supported by a number of analysts. For most of the period between 1946 and independence, however, the government stressed the construction of first-class asphalted roads in the face of great increases in cost, leading to an extraordinary drain on Tanganyika's limited resources. The standards were lowered in 1955, and as Tanganyika neared independence greater emphasis was put on building graveled feeder roads, still expensive because many areas had to import the materials but perhaps more useful in the long run to African peasants who had to get their produce to the market.
Cyril Ehrlich, writing on Tanganyika's economy in the period from 1945 to independence puts it plainly: "In 1945 Tanganyika was desperately poor." He attributes this in small part to the exigencies of war, but the basic problems in his view were other: a harsh environment and an ill-educated population; "an infrastructure whose sparseness and inadequacy was remarkable even by the standards of tropical Africa;" a negative administrative policy toward economic development; and an uncertain international status that was a barrier to investment and entrepreneurial activity. These obstacles were not overcome. Again in Ehrlich's words, -Tanganyika entered the 1960s as one of the poorest and least developed of African countries."
Part of the problem, before the war and after, was the lack of money; in the 1930s because of the depression, later because Great Britain itself took a long time to recover from the effects of the war and in some instances extracted wealth that might have remained in Tanganyika. Initially the single largest source of grant aid was Great Britain's Colonial Development and Welfare Scheme; a little came from the United States as Marshall Aid. There were also some internal resources, and a substantial amount was borrowed. An export boom in the late 1940s and early 1950s (of sisal and other cash crops) also generated a good deal of revenue, although governmental policies precluded its generating even more.
The government tended to be very reluctant to anticipate such revenue and to plan for its spending, however, in part because the one extraordinary expenditure of money, the Groundnuts Scheme, had turned out so badly. It must he noted further that shortages of men and materials in the plan period outside the government's control would have set limits on a more imaginative and aggressive program.
The Groundnuts Scheme, begun in 1947, was formulated not in Tanganyika but by the Ministry of Food in Great Britian and later turned over to its representative, the Overseas Food Corporation. It was a disaster. Great Britain, suffering from balance-of-payments problems and hoping to earn dollars as well as provide peanut oil to relieve shortages at home, poured millions of pounds into the project in the hope of turning 5,000 square miles of Tanganyika into a major producer of groundnuts (peanuts). The emphasis was on large-scale mechanized agriculture. A virtually uninhabited tract of land east of Dodoma was chosen. Preliminary investigation was superficial, and no experimentation was carried out before men, money, and machines were poured into the area.
The soil was poor and unsuited to the use of heavy machinery. Lack of rain in 1947 and 1948 contributed to the failure of the first harvest. By 1949 there was a second bad harvest, and in 1951 the scheme was abandoned. The local people knew the territory as the land of perpetual dryness, but they hadn't been asked, nor for that matter had local colonial agricultural officers.
The scheme had no major direct impact on the Tanganyikan economy, but it may be argued that the same amount of money invested in a number of better planned and less grandiose projects might have had a positive effect. That kind of investment was not forthcoming because the scheme was conceived not as a contribution to the development of Tanganyika but as a contribution to the British economy.
The income of Tanganyikans and of the Tanganyika government was also affected by British policy. For example, the territory's sisal industry dominated the world market from 1942 until the mid-1950s, but it did not reap all the benefits it might have nor did the government derive as much revenue as it could have because from 1941 to 1948 the British government had an agreement to buy at prices substantially below those available elsewhere.
Prices were increased in 1946 and again until the end of the agreement, but it has been estimated that the industry lost about ell million in that period, and whatever revenues the government might have derived from that sum were also lost Sisal was almost exclusively plantation grown, and the loss was felt directly by its non-African owners. It is possible, however, that some revenue could have been reinvested in replacement of sisal plants and development of capacity with implications for the comparatively large African labor force on the plantations.
A similar British policy also affected some of the peasant producers of coffee. For example, from 1946 to 1952 the British government was the sole purchaser, at a fixed price, of coffee grown by the Chaga and marketed by the KNCU. At the insistence of the Chaga who were aware of world market prices, the agreement was ended in 1952. It may he argued, as indeed it was, that the original contract provided a guaranteed base price for the peasant producers, permitting them to get under way after the war without the risk of fluctuating prices. Nevertheless the British were not quick to take the initiative to change the policy.
Although in principle government plans emphasized measures that would show a quick return, in practice, as Ehrlich points out, a great deal of money was spent on transport, particularly on first-class roads, which were not only costly but inadequate for developing areas and hardly used in backward ones. Much less money went into communication, and the expenditures on roads were much greater than total expenditures on agricultural and veterinary services. Perhaps more important was the tendency of the government to distort the idea of self-sufficiency in food production, at least in the first half of the period (to 1953 and sometimes later).
Self-sufficiency came to he seen not as a territorial matter but as a provincial or district one, each such unit being expected to provide for itself. In practice such a policy tended to entrench subsistence farming. A territorial perspective would have emphasized market exchange of different products cultivated in different parts of the country. It is perhaps ironic that the burgeoning (and sometimes fully flowered) African participation in a partial market economy in the nineteenth century should have been, in effect, smothered in the twentieth.
Efforts to increase production in specific areas took the form of improving agricultural techniques and land usage imposed by fiat through and enforced by the Native Authorities. The rules governing cultivation and animal husbandry varied from place to place and in their degree of complexity, but their violation was treated as a criminal matter, and many of the so-called criminal cases heard in the courts of the Native Authorities dealt with these matters.
Although some of the practices enforced may have been desirable from a purely technical point of view, others were of doubtful value. In any case widespread resentment of these rules and the way in which they were enforced provided TANU with a degree of support in the rural areas that might not have been otherwise forthcoming, at least so soon.
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