Abstract
This paper is about the politics of indigenizing tobacco farming and the challenges associated with it during the post-colonial era. It examines the initiatives of government in facilitating the process, and how the bodies entrusted to ensure its implementation failed to achieve the intended goal. Tobacco farming in Africa and Tanzania has a complex history. Since this crop is essentially labour- and capital intensive, its beginning in colonial Tanganyika, and Iringa in particular, was dominated by settler farmers. The paper progressively narrates this history, especially on how it became a popular crop among indigenous smallholders in Iringa from 1961. It traces the practice during the colonial time when policies allowed only Greek settlers in Iringa to be involved in tobacco farming, while the indigenous were prohibited from growing it on some grounds, including the fear of competition. The article describes the transformation: how Africans indigenized the crop, while also battling the turbulence of prices, labour issues and changing times in colonial and post-colonial Tanganyika. Based on archival, oral accounts, and documentary sources the paper unravels the institutions that supported the production and marketing of tobacco in Iringa. By engaging the question of the indigenization of tobacco in Iringa, it interrogates the nexus between the processes of Africanizing tobacco growing within the complex capitalist economy of pricing and national economic priorities. The paper concludes by asserting that although the government supported and financed indigenous smallholders in Iringa in tobacco farming, the bodies entrusted to foresee its operation failed to fulfil the goal as anticipated by farmers.
Recommended Citation
Kihongo, Emmanuel
(2024)
"The Indigenization of Tobacco Farming and Its Challenges in Iringa District: 1960s–1980s,"
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences: Vol. 13:
No.
1, Article 9.
DOI: 10.56279.13.1.3
Available at:
https://commons.udsm.ac.tz/jhss/vol13/iss1/9